Warning: this article will contain lots of spoilers for Twilight Princess, and will also be highly critical of the game. If either of these things will bother you, maybe don’t read this. If the spoilers are the issue, I would recommend that you just go ahead and play the game, because despite all of the horrible things I say about it Twilight Princess is still a really good game that is worth playing. Plus a lot of my criticisms won’t make much sense without context. With those disclaimers out of the way, let’s get started.
I have an interesting relationship with this game. I first got into the Zelda series right around the time when Wind Waker was first released, and I greatly enjoyed both it and the Gamecube ports of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. While I know these games haven’t always existed, they’ve existed for as long as I’ve been a Zelda fan. Twilight Princess was the first Zelda game I was aware of before it came out, and naturally I was really looking forward to it. The trailers that came out ahead of its release looked incredible, and I could not have been more excited. But when I actually got it and played it, I ended up feeling rather disappointed. It wasn’t bad, not at all, but it just didn’t seem as good as the games that had come before, though at the time I couldn’t exactly put my finger on why.
Years passed, and while I still regularly revisited Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, and Majora’s Mask, I didn’t replay Twilight Princess that often. Eventually I graduated high school and became an adult, and got some life experience. Lots of boring serious stuff happened, including being forced to drop out of college due to mental health problems, and undergoing a bit of an identity crisis brought on by crushing disillusionment with my religious beliefs.
While the initial reception toward Twilight Princess from the Zelda fanbase was a bit mixed, over the years it's mellowed out, and the general consensus is that it’s actually a really good game. A few years ago I realized that it had been a long time since I’d played Twilight Princess, and I was in many ways a fundamentally different person. I reasoned that it was possible that my disappointment with Twilight Princess had been because I was just a stupid kid with unrealistic expectations, and that now I would be able to truly appreciate it. But when I sat down and played through it again, the overwhelming feeling I got was “I remember now.”
Before I go any further, let me be very clear that Twilight Princess is by no means a bad game, far from it. By most normal standards it’s a superb game, and deserves to be played. But it’s unfortunately in the same position that The Legend of Korra was. When your predecessors were near flawless masterpieces, anything less than that is going to feel like a disappointment.
When Ocarina of Time first came out it was critically acclaimed and almost universally loved, and for good reason. In an era where many series trying to make the leap to 3D crashed and burned, Ocarina of Time preserved all of the best qualities of the Zelda series while successfully translating it to 3D and adding tons of its own new content and ideas on top of that, all while being an incredibly fun and memorable game. It was a landmark title in both the Zelda series and gaming in general.
Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker were also fantastic games, as they took the foundation established by Ocarina of Time and took it in new directions, mixing the familiar with the fresh to add their own unique marks to the series, and both did so very well. But while these games are widely beloved nowadays, at the time they were overshadowed by the hype surrounding Ocarina of Time, and while some fans appreciated Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker, others criticized them for the ways in which they differed from Ocarina of Time, with Majora’s Mask being seen as too dark and weird, while Wind Waker was seen as too cartoony and childish.
Because of this mixed reception there was a lot of pressure on Nintendo to bring the series back to what the fans liked about Ocarina of Time, and unfortunately they ended up trying to do this by just doing Ocarina of Time again. And that’s the biggest problem I have with Twilight Princess. Where Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker used Zelda tropes and staples as a lubricant for their own original ideas, Twilight Princess feels straightjacketed by the Zelda tropes it uses, and it’s obvious that a lot of things it does it only does because Ocarina of Time did it. Twilight Princess does have some new ideas, but unfortunately a lot of them get only token attention before being shoved to the side in favor of well established Zelda tropes.
Some good examples of things Twilight Princess did just because Ocarina of Time did it are Link’s tunic, the first three dungeons, the Master Sword, Ganondorf being the main villain, and the Triforce. Let’s go through them one by one.
Now Link’s tunic might seem like a minor point, but the way it’s handled in Twilight Princess feels very forced. A lot of the Zelda games don’t explain why Link is wearing green, and that’s fine, but for the ones that do, the explanations they offer usually make sense. In Ocarina of Time Link is wearing green because he grew up in the Kokiri forest, while in Wind Waker Link is wearing green because his grandma was making him do Ocarina of Time cosplay for his birthday, which adds to the worldbuilding. Meanwhile in Twilight Princess the only reason why Link is wearing green is literally because the Gods said so. Or, more accurately, because it’s what Ocarina of Time did. It’s a minor point, but it demonstrates how Twilight Princess feels compelled to follow staples of the Zelda series just because it’s tradition, and not because it’s what’s best for the game.
The beginning part of Twilight Princess also closely mirrors the beginning part of Ocarina of Time, in that Link has to travel to three dungeons to retrieve three magical macguffins, one in a forest, one in a fire mountain, and one in a water area. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this format, but copying Ocarina just feels boring. Majora’s Mask threw this format away completely, and while the first part of Wind Waker sort of follows it, it still subverted it in several ways to keep it feeling fresh. The forest dungeon in Twilight Princess feels fairly distinct, but when it came time for the other two dungeons it went straight back to the Ocarina of Time comfort zone, bringing back the Gorons and Death Mountain for the fire dungeon, and the Zoras and Lake Hylia for the water dungeon. It’s not bad, but it feels very safe and predictable.
The Master Sword is another thing that feels thrown in as a blatant call back to Ocarina of Time. In Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker Link acquiring the Master Sword felt earned, but in Twilight Princess it just comes out of nowhere, and could easily have been replaced with a different magic object. But because Ocarina of Time had the Master Sword, Twilight Princess had to do it too, because that’s the tradition.
Ganondorf being the main villain in Twilight Princess never bothered me as a kid, mostly because that twist was spoiled for me by a guide I had. But looking back on it now I just have to roll my eyes. In Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker Ganondorf is established as the villain very early on, and we get to see him interact with Link on several occasions before the final battle, so we get a good sense of his character. But in Twilight Princess Link never sees Ganondorf until the very end of the game, and it’s painfully obvious that the game is just expecting us to fill in all the blanks regarding his character with what we remember from Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. It’s wanting to reap the benefits of having a memorable villain without actually having put in the work, and just hoping that evoking our memories of what a good villain Ganondorf was in the previous games will be enough.
Another reason it bugs me is that the whole twist of making it look like a new character is the main villain only to reveal that it was actually Ganon the whole time has already been done, several times. It was done in A Link to the Past, it was done in the Oracle games, and it was done in Four Swords Adventures. It’s not surprising or interesting anymore. And games like Majora’s Mask and Minish Cap have shown that it’s possible to have a solid game with someone other than Ganon as the villain. Zant was perfectly fine as an antagonist, and for most of the game he is genuinely threatening. But when you actually fight him he inexplicably begins acting all crazy and silly, and it’s painfully obvious that the game is trying to make Zant look ridiculous just so that Ganondorf can look intimidating and cool by comparison. It’s clear that the only reason Ganondorf is the main villain is, once again, tradition, and because it’s what Ocarina of Time did.
The Triforce in Twilight Princess also really bothers me, as it actively contradicts what was established in previous games. In Ocarina of Time Link had the Triforce of Courage, Zelda had the Triforce of Wisdom, and Ganondorf had the Triforce of Power. The reason for this is because Ganondorf stole the Triforce of Power, and as a direct result the other two went to individuals of destiny. In Twilight Princess all three characters have the same respective Triforces, but the game offers no explanation beyond because the Gods said so. It’s especially baffling in Ganondorf’s case. In Ocarina of Time he had to actively steal the Triforce, while in Twilight Princess he fails to steal it, and him getting it anyway is hand waved away as a “divine prank”, otherwise known as lazy writing. It’s yet another example of Twilight Princess doing things just because it’s what Ocarina of Time did, regardless of whether it’s what’s best for the game or whether it even makes any sense.
There’s lots of other aspects of the plot that bother me, either because they make no sense, or are just incredibly unsatisfying. I won't go over all of them, I'll just cover the biggest ones. I like the concept of the Twilight, but the way it’s handled in the game seems almost backwards. In A Link to the Past you start off in Hyrule, and then get sent to the Dark World in the second half of the game. In Ocarina of Time you start off in peaceful times, and then get sent to the future where everything is darker after Ganondorf has taken over. But in Twilight Princess most of Hyrule starts off under Twilight, and then you remove the Twilight. It starts off dark, and then gets less dark, which is the exact opposite way it should go if one is trying to raise the stakes. I know it’s explained in the story, but it still feels a bit off.
I also didn’t like how after freeing the Lanayru region from the Twilight we don’t really see the Twilight ever again except in one dungeon near the end, and that’s it. I think it would have been really fascinating if we had gotten to spend more time in the realm of Twilight itself. But unfortunately the game didn’t seem to have much faith in its original ideas, as it would focus on them only for a little bit at a time before hastily cutting back to traditional Zelda staples. The ending where we confront Zant at the Twilight Palace, only for Zant to be discarded as a secondary antagonist and the actual climax to happen at Hyrule Castle against Ganondorf is a perfect encapsulation of why this game doesn’t work for me as well as its predecessors. Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker fully embraced their original ideas, while Twilight Princess seems almost embarrassed by its original ideas.
One major plot hole that happens near the beginning is when the kids are kidnapped by monsters. Something similar happened in Wind Waker, where Link’s sister gets kidnapped at the start of the game. In Wind Waker the meta reason is to set Link out on his Hero’s Journey, while the narrative reason is that his sister was kidnapped because she has pointed ears, and Ganon is kidnapping girls like her in order to find Zelda. In Twilight Princess the meta reason for the kidnapping is the same as in Wind Waker, to set Link out on his Hero’s Journey, but the narrative reason for the kidnapping is literally never explained. There’s absolutely no material or strategic value in kidnapping the children, and the monsters just abandon them on the side of the road to die before they’re rescued by Renado. It’s one of many instances where the story doesn’t make any sense and is just hoping that you won’t notice.
Another thing that makes no sense is the resistance. Now the resistance makes sense from a gameplay perspective, as each resistance member helps point Link in the right direction of where the next dungeon is. But from a narrative perspective it makes no sense whatsoever. A resistance movement would have made perfect sense in Ocarina of Time, as in that game Ganondorf has openly and clearly taken over Hyrule. He’s a tyrant imposing his dark will upon the land, and therefore is a clear threat and enemy that they can rally against. But in Twilight Princess it’s never explained what the resistance is, well, resisting. Because of the way things are set up, where only a tiny handful of people know about the Twilight, Zant, or Ganondorf, almost nobody knows what’s really going on, and neither does the resistance. It’s just strange.
The story does have its moments. Midna is by far one of the best characters in the entire series, and while there are a lot of aspects of the plot that don’t make much sense, it’s presented and paced very well, and if you just go with the flow and avoid asking too many questions it does work. But its attempts to be more dark or more mature fall really flat when many parts of the story make no sense if you think about them for even a little bit. Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker might have had fairly simple straightforward stories about good vs evil, but at least their stories made sense.
I also found it strange how after you reach the Mirror of Twilight the main plot just kind of stops. It’s not that nothing happens, but the overall narrative stalls while you go and retrieve the lost mirror fragments. The main villains do almost nothing to stop you from acquiring the mirror fragments, nor do they make any appearances or do anything noticeable to Hyrule, they just rather politely sit around and wait until Link and Midna show up to fight them, so functionally everything that happens between the moment when Link and Midna first reach the Mirror of Twilight and the moment when they return after retrieving the missing fragments is just the game padding out the run time.
But I’ve certainly seen worse stories, and I’ll admit I’m not sure exactly how I would fix the story without potentially causing issues with the gameplay. While I do have some issues with the gameplay, the core gameplay loop and level progression is solid and incredibly well polished. But talking about the things that are good is boring, so let’s go over the problems I have with the gameplay.
Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask have fairly small game worlds, as they were held back by the limitations of the N64. But this ended up working in their favor, as each location is only as big as it needs to be, and travel time between locations isn’t too long, with Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time being about as tedious as it gets. With Twilight Princess though they clearly wanted to offer an even bigger and more realistically sized world, and so the maps are much larger. At the time this did give the game a sense of grand scale, but in a post Breath of the Wild world it comes off as rather quaint. In practice all making the maps bigger did was make everything more spread out, making it harder to find secrets and collectibles and adding a longer commute between locations. As a result Twilight Princess’s world really does come off as an awkward phase in between Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild’s worlds, as it lacks the efficiency of the former and the grandeur of the latter.
I mentioned in my Wind Waker review that the difficulty felt like it had been dumbed down compared to the N64 games, and unfortunately Twilight Princess takes this a step further. I have literally never died while playing Twilight Princess, ever, and this is largely because very few enemies pose any sort of threat. Even the bosses are disappointingly easy to defeat, and it feels like the game was more concerned with spectacle than substance, more occupied with making the bosses look cool rather than actually being interesting or challenging to fight. And unfortunately this includes the final bosses, all of which are awesome in appearance and concept, but are pathetically easy to take down. I could go through each of the bosses and explain in great detail why most of them suck, but I’ll just focus on the third boss, Morpheel. After a decently challenging first stage, the second stage is a total letdown. It looks terrifying, but if you pay attention you’ll notice that it literally never attacks you unless you intentionally swim directly in front of its mouth. It’s really underwhelming, and the game is full of moments like that.
Another issue is with the dungeon design. In Wind Waker I noted that a lot of the dungeons had kind of lackluster layouts. Unlike in the N64 games, where the dungeons were essentially one giant puzzle that forced you to use your brain to navigate it and solve it piece by piece, Wind Waker's dungeons had a tendency to have a string of self-contained puzzles with little connectivity between them at all. Twilight Princess continued this trend and made it worse, and most of the dungeons are incredibly linear and boring, with very few puzzles or challenges that require you to actually think.
There are a few exceptions. The Forest Temple is actually really good, and is probably one of the best first dungeons in the entire series, with nicely put together puzzles. The Lakebed Temple isn’t too hard, but did have some clever stuff you had to do when it came to redirecting the flow of water, so I liked it. And Snowpeak Ruins was incredibly solid, with well thought out puzzles and enemies that actually posed a threat. But the rest of the dungeons were very easy and bland. That’s not to say that they were bad, or that they didn’t have their moments. I liked what they did with the iron boots in the Goron Mines, the atmosphere in the Arbiter’s Grounds is effectively macabre, and the City in the Sky is pretty amazing as a setting. But it again feels like the game invested more time and effort into spectacle rather than substance, as the environments and locations of the dungeons are fantastic to look at, but they aren’t that challenging or interesting to play.
The one dungeon I actively dislike is the Temple of Time, which is by far the worst dungeon in the game, and probably one of the worst dungeons in the entire series. It is blatantly linear, even more so than the other dungeons, and the music is so dull and repetitive that by the time I reach the end I want to claw my ears off. But to be fair that track is an outlier, as most of the music in Twilight Princess is phenomenal, even if some of it is recycled from older games.
Two final gripes I have with the game are the game’s economy and the day night cycle. As with many Zelda games in Twilight Princess you can collect a ton of rupees, but there's almost nothing you can actually spend them on. It’s clear that the developers were aware of this problem, but rather than actually address it in any meaningful way they just slapped a band-aid solution onto it by making the magic armor you can get cost rupees to use, which is incredibly lame. It also really pisses me off that the magic armor doesn’t fully protect you, as while you don’t take damage when you’re wearing it enemies can still knock you down. But in fairness that’s a problem that’s been in pretty much every Zelda game to have a similar item, so it’s not unique to Twilight Princess.
The day night cycle in Twilight Princess bothers me because unlike literally every other 3D Zelda title there is no way to switch back and forth between day and night at will. This is a problem because one of the main side quests is tracking down the 60 poes that are scattered throughout the world, and many of them only appear at night. So if you want to hunt for poes but it’s the middle of the day, you have no choice but to just stand around for a bit until night comes, which is really annoying. It’s doubly annoying that this problem wasn’t fixed in the HD remaster, as it should have been an incredibly easy thing to add.
But the thing is, a lot of these problems I only notice or complain about because I’ve beaten the game multiple times. If I don’t like a game, I generally just won’t play it. But with Twilight Princess I do like it, and I do play it. The main reason I judge it slightly harsher is because its predecessors are some of my favorite games of all time, so I hold it to a higher standard than I normally would.
But while Twilight Princess isn’t one of my favorite games, my opinion on it has mellowed out somewhat over the years. I do still like it, and while it’s not the best Zelda game, it is above average in many areas.
In terms of which version you should play, it really comes down to the Gamecube version and the HD remaster. I don’t like the Wii version, as the whole map flipping thing bugs me a lot, and I don’t really like motion controls that much. The HD remaster is probably the best version, as it does make a number of improvements and fixes, but the Gamecube version is still perfectly fine. As seems to be the case with most of the Zelda remakes, the HD remaster was extremely conservative about making any changes, so while there are some improvements none of them are drastic enough to make the Gamecube version seem bad or obsolete by comparison. Even the visuals didn’t seem to be that much better in the HD remaster. I’m sure if I looked at a side by side comparison I would see the difference, but when I was playing through the HD remaster it never seemed to look all that different from the original.
In closing, while I do have a number of issues with Twilight Princess, to the point that I felt like writing them all down here, in the end Twilight Princess is still a really good game, and one that I’m sure I will revisit from time to time. It’s not one of my personal favorites, but I can definitely see why people like it, and if it is one of your favorites that’s perfectly understandable.
Final arbitrary score: 8/10 (Great)
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