Spew that uninformed nonsense on IGN, but not here. There are so many advantages to using MIDI - especially in a game like this - that to complain about it only reveals your ignorance.

@Gecko3

Things to worry about in the Wii version that I know of...

DON'T SAVE IN THE CANNON ROOM

and save before going outside into Hyrule Field after a major event to avoid the mailman from glitching out.

That's about it. Just make sure to save every now and then AND NOT IN THE CANNON ROOM.

If you remember those things then you should be just fine. I only ran into the mailman glitch and thankfully I had saved just before it had happened.

Thanks for the info AcerBandit. Even though I hate having to buy 2 copies of a game, I think I'm still going to buy the Wii version when I get a Wii, just to see how cool it is to swing the sword and what not (although it'll take me a little getting used to being a right hander, since I'm a lefty IRL and I like Link as a lefty :D).

I've noticed that I often forget to save, so I usually end up only doing it like right before a dungeon, or right after I finish it. I think it's because now that I have more hearts, dying isn't as common as it was when I was stuck with just three hearts.

I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but I want to say it again. The boss fights in this game (the ones I've seen so far anyway, I'm only up to Snowpeak atm) are very fun. Although it is a tad predictable on what you have to do to beat them after their first few attacks, I like how they're huge and take up a very large room, and also how you have to use the items you find in the dungeons to beat them (the arbiter dungeon boss fight was really awesome). Sure, it's always been like this in every Zelda game, and although they reuse some elements from the past games (like those friggin Redead's that freeze you and then start attacking, or the Poes stealing fires), at least they're a little more creative in how you can deal with them.

Really good Zelda game though, certainly lives up to its reputation.

I played this entire game left-handed, and did perfectly.

Seriously, they could've just kept the game the same as the GCN version and it would've been fine for me.

So don't worry about it. Just go with the flow and play left-handed. =D

Is that so? Name a few.

Orchestral music is extremely inefficient in video games.

One, obviously, the considerable expense of hiring and recording a professional large orchestra. If fans are going to be satisfied with orchestral music, they're not going to settle for a small ensemble to convey Zelda.

Space considerations. Audio takes up space. If you want a full, live orchestral score, you need to allow for it, which means other aspects of the game need to be cut down. Things like, oh I don't know, LENGTH? Not to mention any part of the graphical engine. If you're storing MIDI samples in the system's hardware itself, this isn't an issue (I'm not saying all the MIDI samples are stored in system, but I'd be willing to be some are).

Have you noticed the subtle changes in music depending on Link's actions or environment? When he's on foot in Hyrule Field, the theme is more restrained and less in the forefront, but once you mount your horse, the music glides into a more forceful performance with brass and percussion. When you're standing still, the music is nothing but the background ostinato, and only when you do something does it pick up again. Also, notice how it seamlessly shifts to accommodate attacking enemies. And when a boss is down and you're attacking it with your sword, do you hear the brass fanfare (a variation on one of Hyrule Field's secondary melodies, incidentally)? Depending on your progress in Hyrule Castle, the balance between its own meldoy and Ganondorf's fluctuates. As you ascend, Ganondorf's motif overtakes Hyrule Castle's: an extremely good effect. Even the change from day to night affects the music.

This is precisely why MIDI is ideal for video games, because it dynamically comments on the action and environment. This is impossible with bulky audio files that are fixed and static. As for cinema scenes? Yeah, sure, throw in a real orchestra, but as the quality of MIDI samples continue to improve, the quality difference between sequenced music and recorded music will eventually be indistinguishable, and it just makes sense to sequence in-game music on the fly.

It's not really "cool" at all. Link doesn't follow your movements or anything. All you do is swing the wiimote in any direction and he invariably does a stock animation. It's the same thing as pushing a button to make him attack, except it requires more effort than pushing a button and it feels like there's a slight delay.

You won't even be doing swinging; all you'll be doing is wiggling the thing slightly. He'll do a vertical slash regardless of your actual movements.

Bullshit. The Final Fantasies, as far as I know, have orchestrated music in them and look how long they are.

Not that I like them or anything... :-_-:

Before I start, Cel, I just want to clarify that I'm totally on your side in the battle for more MIDI-sequenced music in games. However, I just wanted to point out a few inaccuracies in your argument.

A bold statement, considering that a large number of AAA titles are using orchestral soundtracks these days.

A large orchestra was hired for a trailer video, so I'm sure if they wanted to they could have recorded the in-game orchestral pieces with one as well. The price is often worth the time when compared to the lengthy process of tweaking a digital mockup of an orchestra to sound as lifelike as possible, when a real one can do so by simply playing well. One consideration though is orchestration. If the composer doesn't know this well, they have to hire an orchestrator which could either A) change the style of composition entirely, or B) Cost more than the budget is willing combined with the Orchestra/recording session itself.

I should also point out that a minority of the TP soundtrack uses a full orchestra :) Most are pretty small ensembles or ambiance-related. It's just the cutscenes and Hyrule Field where it gets really orchestral.

This is a non-issue for most current gen games. A vast majority have used redbook audio with the DVD format (even if it's not live recordings), and with new higher-quantity storage it'll be even more open for experimentation. That's of course not to say that they've all done such amazing adaptive music that TP accomplished.

All these are excellent examples of how exactly TP's music shines and how MIDI programming is the medium of great game soundtracks.

Not true, actually. It can be done, but it hasn't been done with the same amount of grace and fluidity that TP accomplished. Shadow of the Colossus, for example, used dynamic music with a full orchestral score. However, instead of midi triggers, it used dynamic crossfades to go between layers of a piece with no consideration of beat or phrase.

A PC MMO, Vanguard, uses redbook dynamic music to a really interesting degree as well. Instead of having large chunks of music like SotC, all of its pieces are split up into phrases of the piece in each individual instrument. The playback system then chooses which layers to play depending on what's going on. If you're idling around, the ambient parts will play. If you start traveling and adventuring around, the percussion parts will pick up as well as a melody and harmonies and such. If you enter battle, since it's all based on phrases of music, it will go into the battle layers dynamically and transition out with the flow of the music. And this is all done with .ogg files, redbook audio streamed through the playback system. It's on PC, sure, but I don't think it'll be long before disc-based media will be able to use a similar technology allowing for even more creative uses of dynamic music playback.

Nope. None of the FF games have had a full orchestral score to date (they're all midi or sample driven). Only opening and endings, with a few assorted pieces here and there with live recordings.

Cobalt Katze brought up a few interesting things, let me elaborate on them (I wanted to answer earlier but was not at home).

Define "professional large orchestra". Super Smash Bros. Melee was an orchestra formed individually by Nintendo consisting of 44 instruments and I don't know anyone who is unsatisfied with their performance. Additionaly that title was not even from one of Nintendo's most popular franchises (by that time), still they went for an orchestra. Yes, I am aware of the fact that just a quarter of the tracks are orchestrated. But that's still a lot for a Nintendo game.

Nonsense³.
Twilight Princess uses 998 MB of the 1392 MB game-disc. The audio uses up 532 MB, from which 54 MB are sequenced tracks and soundbanks and 380 MB are streamed cutscene music (the rest are SFX).
That totals out to another 448 MB (1392-(998-54)) for orchestrated ingame tracks (the 380 MB don't change because it's streamed music anyway). Orchestrated soundtrack totally possible.

Wrong, yet again. See CRI MW. Dynamic tracks are just as possible for streamed music. The best example for that is Phantasy Star Online. It uses streamed ADX tracks and blends in seamlessly with another file when a battle begins. CRI Middleware also allows various streamed sound tracks (in Twilight Princess they would be used for the Hyrule Castle Tower theme). This system is primarily used for the ambient pieces in Silent Hill 2 (PC).

Then again, I'm not complaining about non-orchestrated music - I just demand non-shitty soundbanks. I'd be ok with a MIDI-based soundtrack if it used high quality samples. The prime example for this is of course Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles which uses such realistic instruments for its MIDIs that they nearly sound like pre-recorded audio. Best MIDI-based soundtrack on GameCube.

Thank you Cobalt for clarifying some of my misconceptions. I appreciate being corrected. Admittedly with the demise of the N64 I have phased out of video gaming, and it seems I underestimated the capability of current hardware.

Prime Blue, where did you get the information regarding data storage on Twilight Princess's disc?

My pet peeve with this issue is people complaining about MIDI as though it damages the music and lessens its emotional/dramatic/atmospheric impact without understanding how MIDI functions. The claim that 'orchestrated' music (an improperly attributed term to begin with) is inherently better merely because it's a live performance - as I interpreted Inhert's post to convey - is an ignorant statement.

ok yes it may be an ignorance because I know that there not a lot of games that have orchestral music, but if you read i never said that the music were bad because they were midi, I did mention that they were beautiful, but I had that it would have been even better to have those music in a more orchestral form.

Man, i havent been on mine for a while. I cant remember how far into the game i am.

Random request - I haven't searched the thread yet so my question might have already been addressed, but I'm looking for a place to download music from Twilight Princess. I found a listing of six tracks from the game through BitTorrent, but none of them are the ones I'm looking for. Sacred Grove was one of them, which I found, but I'm also looking for the music that plays in Hyrule Field at night, in the Snowpeak area (outside, not in the dungeon), and while the Press Start screen is on. Can anyone help me?

That's awesome, T3h Dragon! Tell us more! More! =DDD

LOL AcerBandit

@naturally_tipsy: You can find a lot of ripped music (and links to ripped music threads) of Twilight princess here: http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/au...ncess-ost.html

I just recently beat it also, and I think this nicely sums it up:

Truly, you know what's what.

Those words you imparted... mind shattering.

I know, my deepest, most philisophical thoughts often come late at night :). I'm glad I could depart such wisdom on this earth, it makes my life worth living :p.

Just beat it, and wow, I enjoyed my time playing the game. I might come off as a jerk or something saying this, but man, Shigeru Miyamoto sure knows how to tell the same story in various forms, but still entertain at the same time.

Don't get me wrong though, I really did like this game a lot. The fight with Ganon was really fun, particularly as you get to fight him man to man (whereas earlier versions of Zelda games had you fighting him usually when he turned into a monster. Not that there was anything wrong with that either, just that I like that they're trying to do different things, even if the story is ultimately the same).

I really loved the music in this game too, although the dungeon music kind of sucks (just about everything else was pretty nice though, especially boss music and the daytime Hyrule music). Although some of it was just remixed (like the Zora place), they did a pretty good job overall. I'm still kind of miffed that the "official soundtrack" that came with my Nintendo Power subscription was only 7 songs (I was hoping it was an actual soundtrack, not just a sampler, although at least the tracks they include are nice).

The only thing I really miss from the older Zelda games is the ability to do ranged attacks with your sword. I guess that's something they had to sacrifice with making it 3-D (and making sword battles fun), but there's times I wish I could shoot that far away bird with my sword like in the old games lol (yes, I know about the weapons ingame, just reminiscing :p).

I ripped the game disc and looked through its content with a GCM file explorer.

Exactly my thought. People complain about MIDI 'just because' without knowing a shit about sequenced music. Hell, you can even use MIDI as sort of a "wrapper format" for streamed music. That way you can use dynamic live-recorded music without licensing any external software (that's what I did when adding a few live-recorded tracks to Final Fantasy VII PC).

Finished.

The game starts out great, as you begin to open up the world and peel back the twilight realm. The first few dungeons were alright, nothing special, except maybe the water one: the way you channel the water ways had me thinking there was some nice design there.

It all went a bit wrong for me when you are able to switch to and from wolf form at will, therefore opening up the warp points permanently. The feeling of having one giant expanse of world that you must plot a course through to reach desired areas - thus giving hyrule that sense of enormous scale - is utterly lost. Hyrule becomes a series of disconnected areas, which you can jump to at will, and all the enjoyment of travelling from one place to another and becoming distracted by idle pleasures along the way disappears. Instead I felt forced into a To Do List mentality, as I zipped around from 'someplace where something needs to be done A', to 'someplace where something needs to be done B' instantly via warps. Epona becomes useless.

So with the overworld ruined, the dungeons needed to pick up the pieces. We all know that doesn't happen, but I don't take the view that the dungeones necessarily get progressively worse. The temple of time, #6, was mostly shit, and hyrule castle, #9, was ALL shit, but I had a lot of fun with the sky and twilight dungeons, both dungeons otherwise belonging to the well opined Trinity of the Rushed. As much as I could enjoy the dungeons however, they could never make up for my lovely lovely hyrule overworld still being ruined, my zelda playground forever lost.

Click below for the full review:

But Kolba what is your opinion in how A Link to the Past still stacks up to all these newer Zelda games and was Midna really hot? Furthermore was her right boob bigger than the left? You leave out such important answers to your review! =O

In ascending order of hotness

Midna
Zelda
Zora MILF
That girl that run the fishing place
That resistance girl, yeah?

Yeah, resistance girl was pretty hot. I was mightily amused by standing next to her in the bar, checking her out, and watching her Wind Waker engine eyes follow me doing so in disgust (well what I imagined to be disgust).