The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap Impressions

If you played the Game Boy Advance port of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and have been clamoring for some original handheld adventuring, clamor no more. Nintendo is collaborating with Capcom to create The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, a totally new Zelda game for the GBA that retains the basic play mechanics from previous 2D Zeldas, but this one brings a whole bunch of neat new abilities into the mix as well. If you're worried that Nintendo has handed the reins of its most hallowed franchise to another company, do not worry because Capcom also developed the last two Game Boy Color Zeldas, Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages. From our brief demo, The Minish Cap looks to be just as Zelda as any other game to bear the name. This is Zelda as you remember it, but on a much smaller scale (literally).

What does that mean? And what, for that matter, is the minish cap? It's a strange hat that Link finds at the beginning of the game that, from what we could tell, is actually sentient and will talk to Link at various times. More importantly, the minish cap allows Link to shrink down to microsize to access new parts of the environment. For instance, in the brief demo we got to play, Link could explore some areas of a forest at his normal size, but only by becoming tiny could Link navigate a stream (by riding on leaves), travel through some giant blades of grass, and enter the area's dungeon, which was itself very tiny. Some of the dungeon elements were endearingly related to Link's miniature stature, such as mushrooms that we used like slingshots to cross large gaps. Nintendo didn't say if all of The Minish Cap's dungeons will be tiny like this, but it's a safe bet that at least some of them will be.

Like every Zelda game since the beginning of time, The Minish Cap has a neat little side occupation that you can get into if you feel like being distracted. Here, you'll be collecting kinstones, which are small discs with various designs on them. More accurately, you'll be collecting kinstone halves, since the object is to find one half of a kinstone, find the person in the game who has the matching other half, and link them into one whole to create a new effect or gain access to a new area. This is accomplished with a nifty puzzle interface where you can spin a ring of your available kinstones to match up with the other person's half. The game will even support the new GBA wireless adapter, and you'll be able to match kinstones with other human players.

To create The Minish Cap's world, Capcom could have simply used all of the art from A Link to the Past, since that game is already up and running on the GBA. Instead, though, it's re-creating in 2D the fanciful, cartoonlike style used by The Wind Waker, which gives the game a cool look that's both familiar and unique. We especially liked the backgrounds when Link is tiny--there are a lot of details that make you feel like you're really only a few inches tall.

Though the playable demo was extremely short, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap seems to be coming along nicely (as if you'd expect anything else), and fans of the series finally have an all-new 2D adventure to look forward to. No release date has been announced as of now, but we'll be sure to bring you that information and any other details on the game as they develop.