Game Beaten

Twilight Princess

djs

• 5 min read
Twilight Princess

I've been meaning to play through Twilight Princess since... well, practically ever since it was released.

Back in 2006 (20 years ago btw...) my brother pre-ordered the game and we had it on release, or very close to release at least. I played it then a little, I made it up to the Lakebed Temple. I still have a little remnant of this in the form of a really bad quality YouTube video. But at some point, being 11 and all, I gave up and didn't play it any further. I remember seeing my brother finish it back then. I remember the last battle and the ending and all that.

And then over the years I've seen bits of the game here and there, being in the speedrunning scene and all, but I never watched a run all the way through (+ they skip the cutscenes) so I never really had a full picture of the game.

Until now that is! For some reason, I decided to finally play through the game myself. Maybe because it's 20 years old? I want to play it while the game is still somewhat new... 2006 is still new... right?

I played the game on and off for about a month. I can say right away that's a good thing with the game: it was easy to take a break from it for a week, and then come back.

You could go to this map (in a bar in town) to see where you should go next. Very nice! Made it easy to pick the game back up.

It took me a while to get through it because, well, it didn't hook me that much. The game definitively isn't bad or anything, but I just wasn't "gaga" about it. It was fine. Typically each session would be playing a dungeon or getting to a dungeon. Getting from a dungeon to the next dungeon, and playing the dungeon, took about the same amount of time, so it was easy to split up the sessions like that.

Okay, I'm not a good writer that can write sentences that flow into each other while going over all the aspects of the game, so lets just go through it like this:

  • Music: fine. Some themes are great (Midnas Lament - a theme I've always loved). Some are awful (City in the Sky).
  • Sound: fine
  • Graphics: I remember they looked amazing back in 2006. But nowadays I don't think they've aged very well. The Wind Waker has aged much better.
  • Controls: about 2/3 in I finally got used to hitting the d-pad to bring up the inventory wheel. Also very annoying you could not put items on the Z button (like you can in Ocarina of Time on GC/Wii VC). I also found the controls quite slippery, as in, it was very easy to have a slightly off angle and jump into the completely wrong direction. I cannot imagine playing this game on the Wii. It was probably super cool back in the day, but today, it's probably hell?
  • Story: fine. Pretty typical corny Zelda stuff.
  • Temples: Some were awesome (Temple of Time, Snowpeak). Some were awful (Lakebed, CitS). The rest were just kind of in the middle. Overall, I'd probably say more of them were good than bad. Temple of Time in particular stands out as one of my favorite Zelda dungeons of all time.
  • Technical: I found it super annoying when traversing how many areas were split up into smaller chunks, and there was a load in-between them, places like the castle town and some of the larger dungeons. It's a small load, but they add up when you need to go back and forth, and got quite annoying.

What is this, Panzer Dragoon?
One of the absolute most annoying things in this game: if your wallet is full, you cannot empty chests with rupees, making you leave ton of chests looking unopened on your map
Huge Elden Ring vibe
I really loved the wolf howling bits. The mini game itself was quite annoying, but the howling itself was very cute. Could also be because my parents just got a new puppy so I've been in a kind of dog mood lately.

Overall, my summarizing thoughts are that the game is fine, maybe even pretty good.

But I found myself very often wishing I was just playing Ocarina of Time instead, just like I did when I was 11.

If I had to rank all the Zelda games right now, I'd probably go something like:

  1. Ocarina of Time
  2. Tears of the Kingdom*
  3. Breath of the Wild*
  4. The Wind Waker
  5. A Link to the Past
  6. Majoras Mask
  7. Twilight Princess
  8. Zelda 1

*I just played (last summer) TotK, and haven't played BotW since launch, so TotK is more fresh in my memory and I really enjoyed it on the Switch 2. But I remember BotW being extremely good too so I probably consider them tied.

As you can see, Skyward Sword and Zelda 2 is missing, because those are the only mainline Zelda games I haven't played! I kind of want to fix that to satisfy my completionist brain, but I really don't look forward to Skyward Sword. That game seems awful. We'll see, maybe in 2031 when it's 20 years old.

Also I really like Zelda 1, so don't think I dislike it just because I put it last. All of these games are in the overall picture really great games.

Just gonna leave this picture here. I'm hoping to move soon, maybe, so nice to have some memories of my apartment. I played the game on my PC and Steam Deck using Dolphin, with a JP White Gamecube controller.