Happy New Year to you and yours. Twilight Princess is done and dusted. In a lot of ways, I’m left wishing I had more specific feelings on it as an experience, but what I have on me will have to be enough. I spent a little under 24 hours playing Twilight Princess.
As I trudged through Hyrule Castle, the last dungeon, I realized that I did not particularly enjoy the dungeon-ing of this game. The Ice Temple and the Sky Temple had interesting framings that I particularly enjoyed from visual and narrative perspectives. But I’d say the Temple of Time was the only temple in the game that made me really feel engaged and not like I’m going through motions. I can’t say for sure if that’s me not meshing with the dungeon puzzling as a whole activity or the quality of this particular game’s dungeons.
Despite that, I found the game really lovely in terms of visuals and audio. The cutscene direction is phenomenal and does so much service to this kind of “high fantasy opera” vibe that Twilight Princess is going for. The music get's especially good in the latter half with every track from the Temple of Time going forward being incredibly distinct and exciting. There are these really percussive bass plucks in the Lost Woods theme that I really enjoyed, and they’re panned all the way right which kind of communicates the vibes of The Lost Woods in a really fun way, even if those segments are obnoxious. Speaking of obnoxious, getting around the world map wasn’t very fun. I’d guess people probably hold this game in convo with Wind Waker, which is fair maybe (back to back releases, “childish” vs “mature”) and people love to talk about how empty that game is but the world map of Twilight Princess feels barren, and it’s not even an ocean, there’s no excuse. The tediousness of getting around def contributed to my fatigue and is probably why I didn’t do much side content. I think there’s room for tedium in travel in games, people are way too impatient about that thing, and seeing gameplay of a gamer who overly utilizes quick travel in games makes me sad, but there’s something about Twilight Princess in particular that just felt like pulling teeth. Sorry.
The shape of the story for Twilight Princess is great (mostly) and I found the writing pleasingly airy and overindulgent. Link’s relationship with Ilia and Midna creates a strong feeling which feels like a continuation of Zelda games kind of blindsiding you with something emotionally resonant and a little sad. I’m feeling a little confused on why the story diverts so severely toward something so Zelda and Ganon centric. Zant is such a strong presence in this game and the reveal that’s he just some sort of nobody who stumbled into power works for me. But all of his work being a stepping stone that allows Ganondorf to crash the party is really unsatisfying. I won’t play script doctor on what could have happened but the insistence that these stories have to boil down to Ganon being the big evil just doesn’t seem helpful at all.
Despite that I found the game pretty fun to see through. There were a lot of aspects to it that surprised me. I’m glad to have spent time with this game even if I never got to see the awesome MaloMart and I gave up on finding the 20 cats. I’ve decided it was time well spent.
As for what’s next: I’ve spun the wheel and it has decided I’ll be playing The Experiment (2008) a.k.a. eXperience 112. This is an adventure game played through surveilance cameras(?) developed by Lexis Numérique and I don’t really know what made me put this on the list in the first place. That's what's nice about the wheel I don't need to remember why I can just play it.
Hopefully this game won’t be too long, because there’s a game coming out on January 22nd that I’m really excited to play. More on that later but I’ll post updates on eXperience 112 next week.
