[Wii] The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Discussion Thread

Well, I agree to most things that have been said already (especially the remarks by Prime Blue, except his comments about the music). Anyway here are my two cents.

Spoiler:

Pros:
- Awesome weapons;
- Beautiful graphics;
- Although not original dungeons, their general layout was very nice (the ice dungeon was particularly original). Except for the temple in the sky and the twilight caste, I didn't really like those designs;
- Wolf form link was very fun to play (way better than I expected);
- Character design and design in general was very nice;
- The music was good. I especially liked the fact that the music changed during particularly events (when the boss is down for example);
- Midna was a fun character, also way better than I expected;
- Nearly ten dungeons, although very easy to beat;
- The one to one sword battle and the horseback battle with Ganon was very fun. Definitely the best Ganon battle yet;
- The cave of ordeals. Basically the same as that thing in the wind waker. I actually died on the fiftieth floor (the last one)! I hadn't died since MM, so it was a pleasure to finally have something difficult again in a Zelda game;

Cons:
I thought the game was awesome but it has one fatal flaw. It's way WAY to easy. It took me 54 hour to finish the game, but that takes into account all the side quest. I could have easily beaten the game under 30 hours. I didn't get stuck once (nor did I in the wind waker for that matter), and the boss battles (though excellent design) were just laughable. I mean come one, a boss battle is the accumulation of all the energy you put into the completion of the dungeon. I mean, I only died once! See also my remarks in my pros section.
I also agree to the comments made that the end was either rushed or incomplete. Indeed, why did Ganon kidnap Zelda? Why was there no character development for Zelda, Ganon and hardly any for that Zora prince? Etc.
All this accumulates into one thing: the game is excellent, but very unrewarding. I never felt the urge to save Hyrule. I didn't seem to be in so much trouble after all the twilight clears (except of course for Hyrule Castle). I mean in OoT and MM I really wanted to save their respective lands. I wanted to do this especially in OoT, because all the lands that you grew familiar with during your time as a child were corrupted in adult form. I missed this in TP. I also missed emotion or atmosphere in the game. ALttP, LA, OoT, MM all had a general mood when played. OoT and MM had a lot of character development and cutscene's where emotion was involved. I mean just look at the moments were Saria gives you your ocarina. And where Anju (in MM) sits alone in here chamber, near the end of the third day, waiting for the inevitable destruction. Examples a-plenty. Though, on TP's defence there are some nice scene's with Ilia.

All in all a good game (defiantly better than WW) but still not better than OoT.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Spoiler:

Ganon likely was aiming for Hyrule no matter what due to his past experiences. Zelda just happened to be there in her shell-like state (since she had partially melded with Midna to save her life), and with his twilight power absorbed from that world he could clearly possess her and have more power over the region. Since it was pretty obvious the townspeople had no idea what was going on.

As far as emotion's concerned, a lot of the game wasn't necessarily saving Hyrule, since once you restore the light to the twilight-induced world it's only the 3rd dungeon. From then on, Midna sort of takes front seat with Link helping her take back the realm of twilight. All the experiences with the Ordon kids, Ilia, and Midna were really well-done I thought, but a lot was front-loaded. Once you get past the Gerudo Desert temple and your sort of final mission is set forth, it becomes the equivilant of say forming the triforce to get to Ganon. Except that in this case, you're forming the mirror of twilight to get to Midna's home and liberate it from Zant's power... which in turn grants Midna with the fused shadows that Zant stole after the 3rd temple, which lets you get into Hyrule Castle for the showdown with Ganon.

Not once did I really feel the flow awkward or rushed... It's just that the game for temples 5-7 reverts back to classic Zelda format, whereas 1-4 had a ton of exposition between each major location.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Spoiler:

Beat the game last night. To be honest, it threw some surprises at me. I thought for ages that Zant was actually Ganon in disguise, so it sorta threw me for a loop when it turned out not to be so.

Overall, it's a great game, but... well, it just sorta dropped off after you got the fused shadows. Up until there, you had an EXCELLENT introductory scene, one of the most badass moments in the game with the Kakariko Village horseback scene, the excellent scene where the powers of the shadows are explained, and a ton of other moments I can't remember. But you get the master sword for what appears to be no other reason than "hay guys you're a hero get the master sword kk?" And when that resistance group shows up... ugh. Those guys were the low point of the game. They served literally no purpose other than to show you where you were going. You never got a feeling of what they were doing (you were TOLD they were trying to break the barrier, but then why are they going to places that apparently have no relation at all to the task they said they set themselves out?), and they were just very flat, unappealing characters.

Overall, the game could've been served well with more development time, I think. The latter half of the game just didn't have the polish that the excellent first part of the game did, and it was a little disappointing.

Oh, and the boss battles were way too friggin' easy, and way too friggin' short.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

So basically, almost everyone complained about the game being pushed back for a year, but now that it's out a lot of people think the last half was rushed and should have been developed even longer?

I was speaking idiomatically.

I didn't complain about the game getting pushed back once, just so that you know. =|

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I completely agree. The final places at the end of the game were borderline BORING. And I didn't feel any emotion from beating the game, aside from that part in the credits (you know which part). Sure the end of the game is exhilirating, but.... yeah. Oh, and why did Hyrule field, which is supposed to be HUGE, feel smaller than the one in N64? It's because it was sectioned off and split into paths. It wasn't an actual field. I guess that's more realistic, but... it just doesn't feel big at all.

FELIPE NO

It felt plenty big to me. You should load OOT up and compare; that field is not big at all.

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I just beat the game recently. I enjoyed it over all, but from the Temple of Time onward I didn't really enjoy the dungeons. I was ready for it to be over. I enjoyed playing as wolf link and Midna was a very likeable character.

Spoiler:

I found it strange after you kill Ganon and the ending scene just leaves him standing there, his body doesn't even fall to the ground or anything. Did he die for good when the emblem disappeared from his hand?

A question for people who have played all the other Zelda games.
Is TP's story stand alone or is it connected to any of the other Zelda games?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

How could I forget about one of the biggest flaws in the game?

"But your wallet is full. So lets put it back for now."

Most annoying gameplay mechanic ever.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Prime Blue

"But your wallet is full. So lets put it back for now."

Most annoying gameplay mechanic ever.

What? So you'd rather completely waste all those rupees just so you can say, "Ahhh, another chest down!" Instead of complaining about having to leave the rupees, bitch that there aren't enough places to spend money.

People say the boss battles are too easy, but I think it's more accurate to say they've become WAY too predictable. Before the fight even starts, you've already laid out your strategy:
1. Locate glowing body part.
2. Knock beast down with item found in respective dungeon so glowing part is accessible to sword.
3. Attack with sword.
4. Repeat two more times.

The entire dungeon formula is due for a complete overhaul.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I'm of the opinion that they were indeed predictable, but I noticed something while getting through them... First off, I recall some of the challenging fights from OoT. Most of them had a similar style of "figure out the boss' weak point with the item you just got". However, a lot of the bosses in OoT required more hits to take them out. And they got more challenging as they got dwindled down. This is the case with some of the TP bosses, but they almost all follow the 3 hits rule. Most of the later OoT bosses were something along the lines of 7 hits.

Yet in the end, a lot of the bosses were still enjoyable due to what they involved, to me anyways. The music was constantly keeping me totally enthralled Even the minibosses had their own score, with each phase of the fight getting its own accompaniment. I honestly have never experienced boss fights quite like them aurally, (SotC comes close, but it uses crossfades as opposed to dynamically changing midi-cued pieces) and really hope more games do similar things

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Originally Posted by Cellius

What? So you'd rather completely waste all those rupees just so you can say, "Ahhh, another chest down!"

Errr, yes? I don't give a damn about having rupees but I want to beat every Zelda game at 100% (if possible) which includes opening all chests. And having to put the Magic Armor on everytime you want to open a chest was just tedious and annoying. One simple choice would have solved the issue:
Do you want to keep it anyway?
- Keep it
- Put it back

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Cellius

People say the boss battles are too easy, but I think it's more accurate to say they've become WAY too predictable. Before the fight even starts, you've already laid out your strategy:
1. Locate glowing body part.
2. Knock beast down with item found in respective dungeon so glowing part is accessible to sword.
3. Attack with sword.
4. Repeat two more times.

The entire dungeon formula is due for a complete overhaul.

I agree with you on the part of being predictable. But I think that is also part of us (or at least me) being old Zelda players. I mean, we figure out most of the puzzles, simply because we know how to do them. I wonder what someone who played the game for the first time found of its difficulty. Though I must say that familiar Zelda elements are part of its charm. I don't think the games would quite as fun if they constantly changed the basic game mechanics as (in a small way) the Final Fantasy games have done between games. On top of that, I always found the game boy games (with the exception of TMC) to be pretty challenging.

That said, I don't think the predictability of the bosses is the major issue of being easy (though partly responsible), but the fact that it was very easy to avoid their attacks and even if you got hit you lost minimal hearts. I mean I got sucked up by

Spoiler:

the boss of the water temple, Morpheel

and I lost ONE heart. I mean come on! That should at least have cost me half my life (as it did when Morpha grabbed you in OoT). The music changing part as Cobalt Katze describes it was indeed excellent addition! I hope they keep that in the next installments.

I think I'm going for the three heart challenge the second play through. It makes the game so much harder I think.

On the matter of the dungeons, did you notice that you could only get one small key at a time? That makes it very easy to use them. Just located the door with the key chain and you're done. Most of the times, the small key was in the same room! In all the other Zelda games you at least should check if there weren't any other keys that you might have missed, because you don't want to open a door, walk for 15 minutes and then discover that you had missed at least one small key (Water temple OoT anyone?)

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As I was finishing Link's Awakening just now, I actually found myself stuck in a lot of places and felt the game very challenging at times. I reasoned it was due to a few things.

One, the dungeons in TP, while very entertaining for me, were more or less linear and straightforward. You might run through the same room once or twice, but there was really nothing of the kind of criss-crossing, holy-shit-this-entire-dungeon-is-one-big-puzzle feeling you got from Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time.

Even so, I noticed that in Link's Awakening, the second I got stuck, I started reaching for that advice button that wasn't there. Minish Cap had it. Ocarina of Time had it. Wind Waker had it to a degree and Twilight Princess had it. A friend of mine was complaining how Midna was too helpful at times, appearing with advice and solutions before you even thought you'd need to ask, MGS style.

While I didn't feel like that during my playthrough (I would notice she'd start hailing me if I'd been running around the same room for a while), the fact that she was there, made me rely on her very often. This lowers the "challenge" considerably, and I don't know how many people even realize this.

Yeah, the bosses were pretty easy. That was probably the only real disappointment I had with the game. The dungeons may have lacked the structural brilliance of the best of OoT or Link's Awakening, but the settings and implementation were still magnificent. So yeah, I kinda wished the bosses had been a bit more challenging. They were spectacular and inventive, but lacked proper challenge, making them over quicker than you'd hope.

I'm fairly sure a lot of them felt easy because how used I am to Zelda bosses, but overal, I've felt Wind Waker and TP have tried to make the boss fights less hard. Which I suppose is alright. I'd rather more people finish the game than me getting to lose three more hearts on every boss.

All those aids, the fortune telling lady, Midna, the support characters, the mail system, they're all in there to help those who get stuck or forget where to go, to lower that frustration you feel when you come back to a game after three days and don't remember where to go. Maybe they could have made it even less intruding (the telephone booths in Link's Awakening, for instance), but I'd rather have this system than no system at all, or the way of the Metal Gear, in which you're underestimated constantly with a nagbot you can't turn off.

FELIPE NO

Going to restart the game. Going to go for the 3-heart challenge, myself. Even with the nerfed-to-shit boss damage, it should be a lot harder than the OOT 3-heart challenge if for no other reason than you can't cheese Nayru's Love over and over.

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Heya, bought the gamecube version (since I can't find a Wii anywhere in my local area, and wanted to play the new Zelda game).

I'll admit, I didn't read through the entire thread (which is quite long), and a search didn't bring up what I wanted to ask, so I'll just ask it here.

Does Link move faster on foot by rolling constantly? I mean when you're not mounted, and when you're not in wolf form. It seems to me that he moves slightly faster if you roll constantly (yes, it looks retarded and may wear out your fingers, but I swear he moves faster lol).

This also seemed true on Ocarina of Time (not sure about Majora's Mask and can't recall for Wind Waker though, but I think it's also the case in these games as well).

Watching a couple of Youtube videos of Zelda gameplay (mostly at the glitches, some of which seem game-breaking) seems to confirm my theory as well, as oftentimes Link is seen rolling around. Again, it looks really stupid after a while, but it does seem to make you move faster when you're just on foot. Guess just plain running isn't quick enough for me lol

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Yes, Link has moved faster by rolling constantly since Ocarina of Time. I think his rolling animation looks extra hilarious in TP because you can get the roll timing down even quicker in this game and it makes it seem like he's continuously rolling without standing up. Oh Link you flop over yourself so gracefully. =)

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Yeah.

Oh, and I just thought of something that would make the game so friggin' hard.

No Z-target challenge.

I will admit that there are some areas where you NEED to Z-target, such as the second phase of the last battle, but outside of that, don't do it at all.

I tried it a bit last night, and cripes. Enemies are a challenge with that, and pose an actual threat even with them hitting like wet paper towels.

I think I'll keep track of areas that require Z-targeting through this play-through and see how viable it is as a challenge.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

For a good deal of the game after I got the move... I defeated everything I could with Mortal Strike/Blow/whatever Of course, then they throw armored things at you that can't be taken down with it. But it was rather satisfying

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Another question, sorry if it's been answered or discussed already (and please point me to it. I tried searching, but came up with nothing), I heard that there's some serious glitches/bugs in the Wii version that can really screw up your game if you run into it.

The one I'm referring to is this (I heard this was fixed in the GC version):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkB53h2M5Pw

Are there any other bugs that you've noticed in either version? I'd hate to have to start all over because of a game-stopping bug.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I finished it last night, beautiful game, i smiled so much during the credit sequence (i'm sure it was due to the music). The plot could have used a little more work but i was overly satisfied, it will be hard to ever top ocarina in terms of story but this game came close.

Spoiler:

Best moment for me: Walking through the arch to the Temple of Time. I actually said "Oh fuck yes." when that happened, reminded me of the water temple swamp that fades away into just a plain room from OoT.

Worst moment: Ok i officially suck, i was at the final Ganondorf fight and i got way too into hitting a during the sword lock sequence. Somehow i manged to hold down the power button for long enough (why my finger were up there is beyond me) to turn off the Wii. So i had to do the battle again (which wasn't nearly as long as i knew what to do), but yeesh, what kind of Zelda player am i?!

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by StarmanDX

So basically, almost everyone complained about the game being pushed back for a year, but now that it's out a lot of people think the last half was rushed and should have been developed even longer?

I personally wouldn't have minded if it got pushed back further. It means they're creating something that would be "holy crap this will be the best one yet".

But, sadly... no. They wanted it done in time for the wii launch.

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Originally Posted by PsychoJosh

But, sadly... no. They wanted it done in time for the wii launch.

Then again... I really don't think they would have delayed it for another year.

The real problem is that the last year was not used primarily for tweaking the game but for creating the Wii controls. That's why the game seems rushed in the final dungeons.

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the gamecube version of the game was probably finish and ready to lunch one years ago, but they decided to make a wii version so they push back the release date for the wii.

and to decide to reverse all the game is pretty stupid in my opinion...really if now a left handed can play this game (and I don't think there should be too much trouble) why a right handed wouldn't have been able to do so... and to reverse all the game could have cause some trouble graphic wise, it's not as simple as a clicking on a button to mirror all the thing...

it kind of annoying me that the gamecube version was probably finish a long time ago and yest we got it after the Wii version (I know it's not much but still, it was just to boost the sale of the Wii)

ok so that was it XD on the other hand I finish it last night and what a great adventure it was! I loved every bit of it...oh wait everything beside the city in the sky dungeon (god this thing is even worst than the water temple >.<)

there's a really big Ocarina of Time feeling in this game, I'm almost thinking that this could be a sequel of ocarina of time (like a different future than the one in OoT) because they put every thing in the same place as OoT (well at least in the gamecube version they are at the same place XD well almost)

anyway that's another discussion, but that's maybe why I like it so much, because it remind me a lot of OoT.

I agree with the last dungeon being rushed, hell the last dungeon I didn't even go into I think all the room and I was already at the last boss >.>

The last boss was pretty fun but way too easy >.> and I don,t know it didn't had the "final Boss" feeling XD at least not like in OoT.

and the ending was pretty much all I was expecting ^^

Spoiler:

god Midna is so Beautiful! but it so sad ; ; why did she had to destroy the mirror, everyone could have live with the two kingdom link by one door...I really hope will see it again in another zelda (even if I'm pretty sure it will not happen)

and there's a lot of beautiful music in this game, it's just too bad that they are not orchestrated...oh and I'm a little sad that the "song" wasn't more important than the wolf howl... it was fun in OoT and WW to play song to do different things, it's a feature that should return more often in zelda XD

anyway Twilight princess is sure a great Zelda game, it's sure was almost perfect but it still didn't top Ocarina of Time for me, and it will be hard to do so, but TP is really not far behind ^^

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Inhert

Spoiler:

god Midna is so Beautiful! but it so sad ; ; why did she had to destroy the mirror, everyone could have live with the two kingdom link by one door...I really hope will see it again in another zelda (even if I'm pretty sure it will not happen)

Spoiler:

She couldn't leave the mirror there, it would be irresponsible. Didn't you see how easily it could corrupt people? It happened to that yeti woman and made her into a monster, and it also created horrors like Armogohma and that dragon boss. If she left it there, it would just invariably happen again; some poor fool would stumble upon it, get himself corrupted, turn into a monster and linger somewhere in hyrule terrorizing people. Be it encasing them in ice, or kidnapping their children, or not letting them access their food supplies, there'd just be loads of problems as long as that mirror was around making people into monsters and crap.

I know it's hard to accept but I really don't think we'll ever see Midna again. Get over it, folks. I know it's saddening.

There's nowhere I can't reach.