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A few enemies require more advanced tactics, like spinning around to get behind them or using one of your items to make them vulnerable. Just about every boss fight in the game requires you to use more than just your sword and shield. Like in every other recent Zelda game, in Twilight Princess you'll find a new item about halfway through a temple, and you can bet that you'll need that item to take on the boss. There are a few tricky parts, but it's certainly feasible that you'll get through the game's 35-to-40-hour story without running out of hearts and dying. That being said, the boss fights make up for some of their ease by being pretty epic. Almost every one pits you against a giant, screen-filling creature that at least looks tough, even if you're just going to grapple your way onto it and stick your sword in its weak spot over and over again, or use your ball and chain to bust it apart, without even breaking a sweat. Even the final confrontation is relatively easy, and if you get stumped going against any boss, you can ask Midna for help and get a fairly good idea about what you're supposed to be doing. If you want to go off the beaten path, you can find a handful of side tasks to take on, like fishing and some other minigames, but aside from the combat-filled Cave of Ordeals, which is a 50 stage area that acts as a sort of survival mode, these aren't too exciting and the rewards you get for completing them aren't especially helpful.
Overall, the game is paced well and it keeps you moving more often than not. At one point you have to move around to various statues that are stashed throughout the world, and this bogs down the action a bit, but it's nowhere near the time sink that the late-game sailing marathon that padded out the back end of Wind Waker was. Your time spent in Twilight Princess involves very little back-tracking, and not too much repetition, keeping the focus squarely on original, interesting stuff.
The Wii was designed with relatively modest graphical capabilities, at least from a technical perspective. So if you spend a lot of time trying to pick apart the visuals of Twilight Princess, you'd notice plenty of low-res textures and jagged edges. But that would be missing the point. Twilight Princess is an excellent-looking game due to some terrific art design. Much has already been said about the art style reverting back to a more mature or realistic look after Wind Waker took the series in a decidedly cartoonlike direction. While there's nothing terribly "mature" about this T-rated game, it looks absolutely great from an artistic perspective. The world itself offers the sort of variety you'd naturally expect from a fantasy game, with everything from lakes to deserts to dungeons, but it's when you start seeing the twilight realm that the game really takes off, visually.
Twilight realm portals that open up do so with an almost Tron-like glowing, computerized look, and when you teleport around or change forms, that same style shows through, breaking your character into cool, tiny black squares and reforming you in a new place or shape. You're also going to fight a lot of crazy-looking dark shadow creatures, and many of the enemies in Twilight Princess look really nice, up to and including those large boss opponents. At the same time, the game gets a lot of little details right, too. You get a lot of close shots of characters' faces in the game's cutscenes, and their faces are often filled with emotion. The eyes, particularly, convey a lot of soul, which really helps make Link's wolf form work, too. It may have its rough edges here and there, but Twilight Princess is the best-looking launch game on the Wii. Like most other Wii games, you can play this one in 480p and widescreen, if you're so equipped. Playing in progressive scan sharpens things up, which makes some objects look better, but it also makes the edges on everything more jagged-looking.
The Legend of Zelda series' symphonic-style music has always been great, dating all the way back to the NES original. That same music keeps getting updated, and more new themes have worked their way into the series and become recurring, as well. You'll hear a lot of classic melodies in Twilight Princess, and those help give the game a nostalgic feel. Much like the graphical portion of the game, the music gets by on the strength of the compositions, but at the same time, all of the music is rendered in the same sort of sample-driven, synthesized style that the series has had since the Nintendo 64 days. While that might also give you a dose of nostalgia, it's also really dated. Given that the Wii is running discs on a greater storage capacity than Nintendo games have had in the past, and advances in standards for video game music, it's disappointing that the series hasn't finally moved to full digital recordings. After all, these songs are worthy of an orchestra. Similarly, it's surprising that the game's story is conveyed through text and text alone. Link has always been that sort of blank-slate character that doesn't speak in games, and he doesn't have any lines in Twilight Princess, either. That's a fine stylistic choice, but there's plenty of dialogue in the game coming from other characters, and in this day and age, for a game whose story is as much a factor as this one's is, it should have all been spoken. At least the dialogue is well-written.
The rest of Twilight Princess' sound is really weird. On one hand, it's using plenty of the same sort of sound effects and battle yelps that the series has relied on, which again will tap into fans' nostalgia for the series. So you'll get the familiar sound of swinging swords, exploding bombs, and all of that. It generally sounds fine, but the game also makes frequent use of the speaker on the Wii Remote, piping a lot of combat noises through it. Unfortunately, this speaker is cheap and tinny, making everything that comes out of it sound distorted and poor. The audio coming through this speaker also chops up fairly frequently, as if it can't maintain a decent connection with the console. Hey, no big deal, right? Just turn the speaker down in the settings menu. That's an option, but some sounds are either only played through the Wii Remote speaker or they're played so quietly on the TV that they lose impact. Having some of the sounds play through this speaker seems like a neat idea, but it doesn't work all that well in practice.
Objectively speaking, it's still a little disappointing that the series hasn't evolved much at all with this latest installment. You'll almost certainly enjoy the game for its terrific puzzles, colorful characters, and compelling story, but at some point the feeling of nostalgia crosses the line and holds this game back from being as unbelievably good as some of its predecessors. So as impressive of a game as it is, Twilight Princess seems like it could have been so much more with a few presentational updates and more effective and interesting uses of the Wii's unique control scheme. But even without those things, Twilight Princess is a great game that stays extremely true to the Zelda franchise's past. That's excellent news for fans of the series, who'll find in Twilight Princess a true-blue Zelda game with updated visuals, some new twists, plenty of challenging puzzles, and a faithful dedication to the series' roots.
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Where to buy
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii):
$47.99 - $49.99
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