By Justin Calvert, Brad Shoemaker, and Ricardo Torres
Design by Marty Smith

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Preshow Hands-on Feature

Developer Interview

We chat with Nintendo localization producer Bill Trinen about Twilight Princess.

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E3 2005 is upon us, and with it has come our very first opportunity to get hands-on with what's sure to be one of the biggest games of the year, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Nintendo has the game on display at its sizable booth, and we've wasted no time whatsoever in seizing a controller and putting the game through its paces. The first area you'll visit in Twilight Princess is the small village of Toaru, where Link grew up. In his younger days, it would seem that Nintendo's hero was employed as a ranch hand looking after goats, and that's exactly what we had to do when we finally got our hands on the E3 demo version of the game.

Link the Goatherder

Link looked quite differently in his younger days, mostly because he hadn't yet taken to wearing his trademark green outfit.

Specifically, once we'd picked a piece of horse grass and used it as a whistle to summon Link's mount, Epona, we were asked to herd 20 goats that were grazing in a field back into a barn. The task, which we were asked (but not required) to complete within three minutes, gave us a chance to both familiarize ourselves with Epona's handling and try out the first of Link's context-sensitive controls: pressing the A button to whoop "Yee-Haw" and alarm the herd. Epona's handling was realistic in so much as she had a wide turning circle and couldn't be stopped on a dime. However, getting around the field was actually quite simple. The goats reacted in a completely believable manner when we approached and whooped at them, and we were generally only able to manage up to four of them simultaneously.

Our overuse of the whoop button on one occasion resulted in one of the goats flashing red with rage as it turned the tables and chased after us. When the irate goat caught up with us, it charged straight into Epona, sending us to the ground and costing us valuable seconds as we climbed back on. When all the goats were safely inside the barn (our best time was around two minutes), we were thanked by Link's boss, and then the context-sensitive controls were changed so that we were no longer able whoop but were able to have Epona "dash" toward and jump over the fences surrounding the field, affording us a route into town.

Ilia really doesn't approve of Link jumping over fences on Epona, especially when the horse's leg gets hurt as a result.

On our way into town we met the mayor, who explained that Link had been chosen to represent Toaru Village in Hyrule City and that he'd have to ride all the way to deliver a gift to the royal family from the Toaru community. A young girl named Ilia also showed up, and before we could object, she'd yelled at us for injuring Epona's leg as we were jumping fences. She then took the horse away to a healing fountain. The only other thing that happened before we were given the freedom to explore the village was that an escaped goat charged toward Link as he spoke with the mayor. We were given a split second to hit the A button to presumably stop the goat in its tracks. We didn't manage this feat, unfortunately, and we haven't seen anyone else pull it off yet either.

Link the Problem Solver

As we sauntered into town, we found a handful of locals to talk to, and almost all of them were in need of Link's help in some way. The woman that we spoke to first, for example, had somehow managed to drop her baby's cradle into the river. So she asked us if we could retrieve it. We were able to swim in the river, and there was even a canoe nearby that we were able to commandeer, but there didn't appear to be anyway to go underwater. To retrieve the cradle, we simply had to push it toward the riverbank by swimming toward it so we were able to pick it up once we were back on dry land.

Link is able to swim in the river that runs through Toaru Village, but he's not real big on the idea of going underwater.

The other tasks we were able to help Toaru natives with included rescuing a cat from a rooftop and knocking down a bees nest for a young boy who wanted some honey and had already been chased off by a swarm after his first attempt to dislodge the nest with a rock. Both tasks were completed with the help of a trained hawk, which we were able to summon only after we located, picked, and made a whistle out of a clump of hawk grass. The hawk was controlled in much the same way as Link's boomerang in previous games (and in this one), meaning we would target objects that we wanted the hawk to interact with using a first-person camera, and then we would hit a button to release it. Grabbing the bees nest and dropping to the ground was no problem for the hawk, and the cat quickly managed to find its own way down from the rooftop when it saw the bird of prey approaching.

Making our way up the mountain where Ilia was healing Epona's leg meant climbing some vines and jumping across some gaps, both of which we were able to do without the pushing of any buttons. When we got to the healing fountain, we were alarmed to find that Ilia had been joined by a nasty-looking enemy who made short work of us when we tried to intervene. If it weren't for the fact that Link's limp body fell into the healing fountain, Nintendo's hero would surely have been in no fit state to pursue the bad guy as he made off with Ilia and a young baby from the village. And pursue is exactly what he did in the next level we were able to get hands-on with.