GregHowley.com

I finished playing Zelda: Twilight Princess last night. I'd played the original Zelda and its immediate side-scrolling sequel on the NES, and I'd even tried Link to the Past briefly on an emulator, but now that I've tried Twilight Princess, I would solidly place it amongst the best games I've ever played. It's that good. Granted, I can see why the Gamecube version was rated slightly higher - the motion controls, while beautiful for accurately aiming the bow, can be slightly difficult to use at times. But overall I loved the game.

Twilight Princess has more variety in its gameplay than nearly any other game I've ever played, and it does everything so very well. It does horseback riding better than Oblivion, wall-walking better than Prey, and puzzles better than most games. There was even a boss battle worthy of Shadow Of the Colossus.

There are minigames absolutely everywhere. If you're looking for diversions from the main quest, there's certainly no shortage. Everything from goat herding, archery, and snowboarding to boating and flight minigames. You even end up sumo wrestling at one point. And the mechanics of the fishing minigame have been heavily advertised. I didn't do much of it, but with multiple fishing rods, multiple lures, and many different kinds of fish, it gets pretty intricate. There's also a howling rhythm minigame when you're in wolf form that starts easy, and gets quite difficult by the end of the game.

There's also more to collect than any other game I've seen since Psychonauts. You collect poe souls, insects, fish, and of course heart pieces. There's tons of hidden stuff, be it buried underground, hidden in caves, or simply in an out-of-the-way area you can't get to until you've obtained a certain item.

These collections are sometimes for nothing but show, but can at other times net you certain rewards: a new lure for your fishing pole, a quiver that holds more arrows, a bigger bag that will hold more bombs, a larger wallet that will hold more money. There's lots of upgrading. While there aren't the variety of weapons and armor that some games have, you do upgrade your sword, shield, and armor.

A sizeable part of the story is linear, but that part of the game was actually my favorite - railroad storytelling often allows for more story, in my opinion. There is of course a large part of the game that is very open-world. Once you hit a certain point, you can quickly travel anywhere, and are often sent around on gathering quests. The quests in Twilight Princess are very well put together. There's an escort mission, missions where you need to restore provinces that have been subjugated by the twilight, and plenty of messenger missions. Throughout the course of the game, the world changes. Bridges are built and destroyed, shops open and close, and there are plenty of minor changes you might not even notice, such as street musicians that appear in the city. Day and night are handled very smoothly, and the game's music changes gracefully at dawn and at twilight. All in all, it's a beautifully created world.

The game's eight dungeons, often styled as "temples", are as beautiful and varied as can be - there's a dungeon on a snowy mountainpeak, lava-filled mines, one in a desert, a forest, and in a city in the sky. There's even a temple at the bottom of a lake. All of them have different aspects that I loved. The Lakebed Temple's swimming mechanics are fun and the waterway-driven puzzles are amazingly well designed. The Temple of Time had mechanical traps as clever as anything in Prince of Persia. And the Sky City brought platforming to a new level.

The game did have a few issues from time to time. Turning the camera to make Link look in any given direction takes a lot of getting used to, and becomes more of a challenge when enemies are nearby. And while swinging the sword with the motion controls isn't particularly hard, performing a shield bash with the nunchuk can be very difficult.

Other than that, my complaints are few and far between. The mounted combat can be annoyingly difficult, but it only happens 2-3 times during the game. And the puzzles are sometimes difficult to figure out, especially towards the end of the game. Thank goodness for those online walkthroughs to which I hate having to refer.

All in all, the game is fantastic. I'd call it my favorite Zelda game, but that wouldn't mean much. Still, I'm going to go play Ocarina of Time and Phantom Hourglass now.