#zelda in the anime was the one from twighlight princess

[encryptedbread]

I had a dream I finally decided to watch dungeon meshi, and it was just a different show up until the 2nd to last episode.

[gamesdoneslow]

PlayLog - LoZ: Twighlight Princess (2006) #5

So yeah, it’s taking a while to finish this thing.  Last night found me lost in the yard of Hyrule castle, staring down a truly confusing triforce-themed puzzle. But the end is in sight, and I, for one, am ready to put this thing to bed.

An eco-pology - In an earlier post I complained about the game economy, which commits the crime of maxing out your wallet long before it gives you anything to buy. Since then the game economy has leveled out some. There quickly becomes a good number of ammo-based weapons that need re-filling, and a few donation boxes that let you dump your surplus loot towards various side-quests. The end result of one of these quests is Link’s magic armor, which makes you invulnerable at the price of slowly melting away your rupee count. I’m into this, it’s a clever way to keep the currency collecting meaningful in the end game once you’ve bought everything there is to buy. There are also late-game sections that require large sums of money to complete, which I think are intended to drive you towards the mini-dungeons hidden around the world, many of which reward you with big ol’ gemmies. 

Agitha - There’s also a girl who is loaded and will pay you disgustingly well to supplement her bug collection, which makes for a fun ignorable fetch-quest scenario. Seriously though, the way Agatha is written makes me queasy. It’s the kind of revulsion I imagine a girl having for her boyfriend’s body-pillow collection.  I’ll admit, I first came across this character in Tecmo’s “Hyrule Warriors” musou game, and based on that I had assumed she would play a larger role in TP.  I guess I was thinking she’d be a dungeon NPC, along the lines of the strange Yetis that inhabit the accursed Ice Temple. But no. It’s clear to me now that she made it in there on fetish value alone. Whatever she’s doing with those bugs, it’s probably immoral. 

Temple of Time - has been my favorite dungeon so far. It could be that the Dominion Rod is just the best - such a cool item that sadly only gets real good use in this area of the game. I could be wrong, not having the context of playing the early games, but it feels like the enemies in this section are supposed to evoke monsters from earlier Zelda games, in both their function and their visual design. The puzzles were cool and interesting. But it’s probably my favorite because I breezed through, start to finish. Ahhh.

City in the Sky - It’s not that I dislike mechanical design of this temple, but damn. Why’d it have to be Ooccoos. This is the first time I’ve been 100% turned off to a temple’s aesthetics. I guess I was prepping for some kind of ancient, clockwork, bird-peopled contraption. Instead it was more of the freaking nightmare harpies and some kind of UFO/stonework interior design. Points for using the cucco-drifting as a puzzle mechanic, points for double-clawshot, which is a fun evolution of the item. Maybe it should’ve just been a cucco temple, how funny would that have been? In a game where you can talk to animals, I’d love it if the cuccos were actually descended from a race of sky-faring smart-chickens. Maybe they are? Ugh, the Ooccoos’ language sounds like the screams of burning children. Whatever, it’s done.

Games Done Slow is a play log where I record thoughts and criticisms through a game-design lens as I play through videogames new and old. More to come!

[gamesdoneslow]

PlayLog - LoZ: Twighlight Princess (2006) #6

And done. So what I figured would be ~30 hours of game came in at closer to 50 (topping the average complete time by 10 hours, which is where’n I got the name for this here blog). I’ll save my thoughts on the story for the next post, cuz I have a bunch. For now let’s talk about the final hours and some overall feelings.

The game’s greatest strengths - lie in its visuals and its puzzles. I talked about this way back in the first post, but the attention to detail in the world and character design is wonderful. Everything I said then is still true, so I won’t repeat myself too much. I always forget this, but the meat of the 3D Zeldas (at least, in my experience) are the puzzles. The combat is fine, it works, and I’d say the same for the story. The challenge are the puzzles, and overall I was rarely too stuck to get frustrated or too clever to get bored with them.

The greatest weaknesses - There’s a lot of little frustrations I have with the game, but if I boiled it down, many of them have to do with the context controls, actually. I’ll talk in detail about this in the final boss section, but sometimes your entire success or failure depends on whether you can catch the writing on the context button prompt in the 3 frames that it is active on screen. Similarly, it feels like having the Navi/Midna buddy system in place is ideal for providing puzzle hints (a-la codec calls in Metal Gear), but nine out of ten times they have nothing useful to say. And you know what else I’d consider a weakness? The goddamn mounted combat. We’ll get to this in a second.

Clever touches - I like that the goat-catching section at the very beginning of the game is echoed in the Goron mini-games, and then again during the final fight with Beast Ganon. I like that the Beast Ganon fight becomes a beast vs. beast thing. I like that Link’s relationship with animals is part of his defining characteristics this go-around, and that it pops up in interesting ways throughout the game, whether he’s riding them, wrangling them, talking to them or collecting them.

Items and the using thereof - I heard a complaint by a friend of mine that the item interaction in this game isn’t great when compared to other Zelda games. I can see the potential for more interesting applications and interactions of these items, but in general I liked what the game had to offer. Top three for me, in no order, are the Dominion Staff, the Spinner, and the Lamp. Dominion staff would be a clear winner if not for it’s very limited use cases. The Spinner was just dumb fun, I only wish it had more combat applications. The lamp feels very true to the spirit of the franchise, and was one of the few items that had recurring applications from start to finish. Iron boots get honorable mention as well for their many varied use-cases. In terms of worst item, I feel like the slingshot not only doesn’t do much when you have it, but becomes completely obsolete when you get the bow.  It could have hidden applications, but I don’t think I touched it after the third hour of the game.

Biggest boss - I’m conflicted. When I think about the final boss fights conceptually, I really like what they’re doing. Between Zant and Ganon, they recall a majority of the item tricks learned throughout the game, and that’s good. They’re tricky enough to keep things interesting - I didn’t die to either, but if not for a hidden fairy in the very last Ganon bout, I totally would have. These are all good things on paper, AND YET... I found myself gritting my teeth through most of it. The Beast Ganon fight should be great, but it’s one case where Midna has to talk you through the trick to have any shot at figuring it out (see the bad context control argument above). Also, even when you’re doing the right thing, it’s very easy to get stun locked and miss your attack window completely. 

Wild stallions - And you know what? Maybe if horse riding was going to be such a key feature of the game, they could have made it suck slightly less. Legitimately, the horseback sections were terrible for me. Yeah, maybe this is a me problem. But also, I’d like to point out that this particular horse-riding system was introduced in 1998. The gameplay of these sections is about matching speed with mounted enemies, something that is very hard to do when your only control is an awkward turning speed and a “boost” button.  I’ll admit, there’s nothing that gets the heroic juices flowing like seeing Link and Zelda riding tandem on horseback, weapons drawn. Marginally less heroic, however, is slowly crawling back into the saddle for the fifteenth time, only to be side-swiped again by an off-screen Ganon. Over... and over... Someone get the license plate number of that black mustang.  If the mounted combat leading up to this point had done anything to prepare me, then maybe... but no. It’s simple enough to bounce off enemies randomly for most of the game, failing forwards through escort missions and the completely baffling bridge-jousts.

Armchair design moment - Put a throttle on that horse. Some way to slow down without grinding to a halt would make the handling on these sections so much better. Not great, mind you, but I understand that there is a degree of verisimilitude in the controls that you wouldn’t want to give up. Maybe increase the damage on hits received while mounted and decrease the chance of being knocked off - which is something that quickly steps on the neck of the encounter pacing. Whatever, the horse riding is in the past now, where it belongs.

Games Done Slow is a play log where I record thoughts and criticisms through a game-design lens as I play through videogames new and old. More to come!