The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Review

It's good that Twilight Princess' world and puzzle design can carry it, because the combat and boss fights aren't very deep at all. Most enemies just require you to swing your sword at them. You can lock onto enemies with the L trigger and strafe around them, hop back and forth, leap in for a jumping attack, or jump back and out of the way--the same basic moves as past installments. A few enemies require more advanced tactics, like spinning around to get behind them or using one of your items to make them vulnerable. Just about every boss fight in the game requires you to use more than just your sword and shield. Like in every other recent Zelda game, in Twilight Princess you'll find a new item about halfway through a temple, and you can bet that you'll need that item to take on the boss. There are a few tricky parts, but it's certainly feasible that you'll get through the game's 35-to-40-hour story without running out of hearts and dying. That being said, the boss fights make up for some of their ease by being pretty epic. Almost every one pits you against a giant, screen-filling creature that at least looks tough, even if you're just going to grapple your way onto it and stick your sword in its weak spot over and over again, or use your ball and chain to bust it apart, without even breaking a sweat. Even the final confrontation is relatively easy, and if you get stumped going against any boss, you can ask Midna for help and get a fairly good idea about what you're supposed to be doing. If you want to go off the beaten path, you can find a handful of side tasks to take on, like fishing and some other minigames. But aside from the combat-filled Cave of Ordeals, which is a 50-stage area that acts as a survival mode, these aren't too exciting and the rewards you get for completing them aren't especially helpful.

Twilight Princess' tale will take somewhere around 40 hours to complete. That's a long time, especially for an action adventure game.

Overall, the game is paced well and it keeps you moving more often than not. At one point you have to move around to various statues that are stashed throughout the world, and this bogs down the action a bit, but it's nowhere near the time sink that the late-game sailing marathon that padded out the back end of Wind Waker was. Your time spent in Twilight Princess involves very little backtracking, and not too much repetition, keeping the focus squarely on original, interesting stuff.

If you spend a lot of time trying to pick apart the visuals of Twilight Princess, you'd notice plenty of low-res textures and jagged edges. But that would be missing the point. Twilight Princess is an excellent-looking game due to some terrific art design. Much has already been said about the art style reverting back to a more mature or realistic look after Wind Waker took the series in a decidedly cartoonlike direction. While there's nothing terribly "mature" about this T-rated game, it looks absolutely great from an artistic perspective. The world itself offers the sort of variety you'd naturally expect from a fantasy game, with everything from lakes to deserts to dungeons, but it's when you start seeing the twilight realm that the game really takes off, visually.

Twilight realm portals that open up do so with an almost Tron-like glowing, computerized look, and when you teleport around or change forms, that same style shows through, breaking your character into cool, tiny black squares and reforming you in a new place or shape. You're also going to fight a lot of crazy-looking dark shadow creatures, and many of the enemies in Twilight Princess look really nice, up to and including those large boss opponents. At the same time, the game gets a lot of little details right, too. You get a lot of close shots of characters' faces in the game's cutscenes, and their faces are often filled with emotion. The eyes, particularly, convey a lot of soul, which really helps make Link's wolf form work, too. It may have its rough edges here and there, but Twilight Princess is a superb-looking GameCube game.

The Legend of Zelda series' symphonic-style music has always been great, dating all the way back to the NES original. That same music keeps getting updated, and more new themes have worked their way into the series and become recurring, as well. You'll hear a lot of classic melodies in Twilight Princess, and those help give the game a nostalgic feel. Much like the graphical portion of the game, the music gets by on the strength of the compositions, but at the same time, all of the music is rendered in the same sort of sample-driven, synthesized style that the series has had since the Nintendo 64 days. While that might also give you a dose of nostalgia, it's also a little dated. When you consider the storage limitations that are inherent to the GameCube, it's easy to see why the game went this route and also why it relies on text and text alone to convey its epic story. The rest of Twilight Princess' sound is about what you'd expect, and it's using plenty of the same sort of sound effects and battle yelps that the series has relied on, which again will tap into fans' nostalgia for the series. All in all, the game sounds great.

The game's puzzles might stump you from time to time, but they're logical and rewarding to figure out.

Objectively speaking, it's still a little disappointing that the series hasn't evolved much at all with this latest installment. You'll almost certainly enjoy the game for its terrific puzzles, colorful characters, and compelling story, but at some point the feeling of nostalgia crosses the line and holds this game back from being as unbelievably good as some of its predecessors. So as impressive of a game as it is, Twilight Princess seems like it could have been so much more if Nintendo had broken from the formula a little bit more. But even without that, Twilight Princess is a great game that stays extremely true to the Zelda franchise's past. That's excellent news for fans of the series, who'll find in Twilight Princess a true-blue Zelda game with updated visuals, some new twists, plenty of challenging puzzles, and a faithful dedication to the series' roots.

Editor's note 12/15/06: The original version of this review overlooked an alternate method for performing the spin attack. GameSpot regrets the error.