MisterRyan
This is the dawn of the dark age of Zelda. And oh what a dark dawn it is.
In a parallel universe, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is a normal Zelda game. It plays with button controls like a normal video game just like every Zelda game that came before it. And in that parallel universe, it is still one of the weakest Zelda games.
Unfortunately, we live in hell and we got the version of Phantom Hourglass that’s worse in every way. The Phantom Hourglass that was made to justify the existence of the Nintendo DS.
Even if Phantom Hourglass was the perfect Zelda game, with an emotional story, soaring music, and iconic boss battles, your enjoyment of it will be through the sickening malaise of the controls. Every action is performed with the touchscreen, making it at the very least abysmally annoying to play on anything but a DS, with which it is only mildly annoying to play on.
Since the DS has a stylus, a lot of actions and theming of the game are made with charting maps in mind. It’s a cute idea that elaborates on the sea chart of the game it’s a sequel of: The Wind Waker. Watching Link scribble on his little map at the same time as you is very cute and funny and also a great bit of synchronicity, further strengthening that he is the Link between You and The Game.
The map charting is a Cute premise but it backfires in a terrible way. There are two or three exceptions to this, but the vast majority of the “puzzles” in Phantom Hourglass involve writing the order in which you have to push a switch on your map.
This game made me question what a Zelda puzzle even is. You might find yourself wanting to write a quick note down about the hint you found (as though you possibly could forget “Dodongo Dislikes Smoke” or “23 is number 1”), but the puzzle isn’t the act of writing the hint down.
Having played it twice before my most recent playthrough, my memories of Phantom Hourglass were pretty positive, despite the controls. I remember Linebeck being a contender for the best Zelda Companion of all time. Imagine my shock when on my most recent playthrough, he wound up an abject disappointment. He’s alright, but he’s not making it past B Tier. He’s not nearly as funny or charming as I remember, and that’s probably because you’re rarely ever interacting with him. It’s mostly just him and your incessantly annoying fairy companion Ceila bickering with each other.
This is one of the meanest and most incorrect thing to say about a video game, but i had a moment of weakness and thought that maybe it’s a good thing that this game is hard to preserve, because it’s so bad. But the children must know of the past. They must learn from the mistakes of those who came before them. Phantom Hourglass deserves to be saved from time’s callous embrace just as much as Action 52 does.
I want to like Phantom Hourglass, and that’s very hard to do. Nevertheless, I am a man who rises to any challenge and I found something enjoyable here. It was not very hard to find.
The Temple of the Ocean King is the most interesting and thoughtful part of Phantom Hourglass. If Twilight Princess’ Snowpeak Ruins was the clever mix of the Zelda Dungeon and the Zelda Village, then The Temple of the Ocean King is a clever mix of the Zelda Dungeon and the Zelda Overworld.
The Temple of the Ocean King is your constant. For half of the game, every completed dungeon has you going back to the Temple to delve a little deeper. And each time you delve deeper, you’re finding shortcuts to make your next trip a quicker time. And you need every second you can get; the Temple is cursed and slowly kills you. The Temple is the most Metroid-like Zelda has gotten in a long time, and I think the two styles really work together, so I would love to see more refined attempts at combining them.
One other thing I like about Phantom Hourglass, and this is tenuous appreciation, is the customizability of your steamboat, the SS Linebeck. There are 72 different ship parts in the game, for 9 different unique ship styles, allowing for seemingly endless customization. This endless customization does come to an end though when you can't find enough matching parts to really do anything. It also doesn't help that certain ship styles award more defense for your already very frail ship, funneling you into searching for the rarer parts, rather than what you like your boat to look like.
It's also a shame that these ship parts are so hard to come across. It takes a lot of grinding in a game that is not fun or comfortable to play.
I have beaten The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass three times, but i haven't 100% completed it once. This game is sick, there's too many things wrong with it. Getting every ship part is a months-long grind. Getting every heart piece requires you to have a device that tells time properly, yet another difficulty of preserving this game or any game like it.
Phantom Hourglass is Fine. But I do not recommend this game to anyone, not even Zelda Freaks. The lovable adventure you expect from Zelda is buried under a pile of fetid gimmicks. Linebeck isn't worth it.
In a parallel universe, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is a normal Zelda game. It plays with button controls like a normal video game just like every Zelda game that came before it. And in that parallel universe, it is still one of the weakest Zelda games.
Unfortunately, we live in hell and we got the version of Phantom Hourglass that’s worse in every way. The Phantom Hourglass that was made to justify the existence of the Nintendo DS.
Even if Phantom Hourglass was the perfect Zelda game, with an emotional story, soaring music, and iconic boss battles, your enjoyment of it will be through the sickening malaise of the controls. Every action is performed with the touchscreen, making it at the very least abysmally annoying to play on anything but a DS, with which it is only mildly annoying to play on.
Since the DS has a stylus, a lot of actions and theming of the game are made with charting maps in mind. It’s a cute idea that elaborates on the sea chart of the game it’s a sequel of: The Wind Waker. Watching Link scribble on his little map at the same time as you is very cute and funny and also a great bit of synchronicity, further strengthening that he is the Link between You and The Game.
The map charting is a Cute premise but it backfires in a terrible way. There are two or three exceptions to this, but the vast majority of the “puzzles” in Phantom Hourglass involve writing the order in which you have to push a switch on your map.
This game made me question what a Zelda puzzle even is. You might find yourself wanting to write a quick note down about the hint you found (as though you possibly could forget “Dodongo Dislikes Smoke” or “23 is number 1”), but the puzzle isn’t the act of writing the hint down.
Having played it twice before my most recent playthrough, my memories of Phantom Hourglass were pretty positive, despite the controls. I remember Linebeck being a contender for the best Zelda Companion of all time. Imagine my shock when on my most recent playthrough, he wound up an abject disappointment. He’s alright, but he’s not making it past B Tier. He’s not nearly as funny or charming as I remember, and that’s probably because you’re rarely ever interacting with him. It’s mostly just him and your incessantly annoying fairy companion Ceila bickering with each other.
This is one of the meanest and most incorrect thing to say about a video game, but i had a moment of weakness and thought that maybe it’s a good thing that this game is hard to preserve, because it’s so bad. But the children must know of the past. They must learn from the mistakes of those who came before them. Phantom Hourglass deserves to be saved from time’s callous embrace just as much as Action 52 does.
I want to like Phantom Hourglass, and that’s very hard to do. Nevertheless, I am a man who rises to any challenge and I found something enjoyable here. It was not very hard to find.
The Temple of the Ocean King is the most interesting and thoughtful part of Phantom Hourglass. If Twilight Princess’ Snowpeak Ruins was the clever mix of the Zelda Dungeon and the Zelda Village, then The Temple of the Ocean King is a clever mix of the Zelda Dungeon and the Zelda Overworld.
The Temple of the Ocean King is your constant. For half of the game, every completed dungeon has you going back to the Temple to delve a little deeper. And each time you delve deeper, you’re finding shortcuts to make your next trip a quicker time. And you need every second you can get; the Temple is cursed and slowly kills you. The Temple is the most Metroid-like Zelda has gotten in a long time, and I think the two styles really work together, so I would love to see more refined attempts at combining them.
One other thing I like about Phantom Hourglass, and this is tenuous appreciation, is the customizability of your steamboat, the SS Linebeck. There are 72 different ship parts in the game, for 9 different unique ship styles, allowing for seemingly endless customization. This endless customization does come to an end though when you can't find enough matching parts to really do anything. It also doesn't help that certain ship styles award more defense for your already very frail ship, funneling you into searching for the rarer parts, rather than what you like your boat to look like.
It's also a shame that these ship parts are so hard to come across. It takes a lot of grinding in a game that is not fun or comfortable to play.
I have beaten The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass three times, but i haven't 100% completed it once. This game is sick, there's too many things wrong with it. Getting every ship part is a months-long grind. Getting every heart piece requires you to have a device that tells time properly, yet another difficulty of preserving this game or any game like it.
Phantom Hourglass is Fine. But I do not recommend this game to anyone, not even Zelda Freaks. The lovable adventure you expect from Zelda is buried under a pile of fetid gimmicks. Linebeck isn't worth it.
2016
This game has ruined every other farming game for me, because nothing comes remotely close to it.
1993
it's one thing to try too hard, it's a whole other thing to not even succeed.
To keep from letting the fatigue set in (if it hadn't already), Mega Man 6 adds two new Robot Dog+Robot Boy Combination Modes for Mega Man to use in his mission for everlasting peace. The hard hitting Power Adaptor makes Mega Man's charged shot deal one tick of damage more than a regular charged shot, but with a fraction of the distance. You cannot slide with it. Save for some very specific instances, it is only useful as a glorified key for breakable walls. The other adaptor breaks something other than walls, it breaks the game itself.
The Jet Adaptor lets Mega Man fly for a short period of time. You can't charge your buster with it equipped. Hell, you can't slide with it on either, but you don't need any of that. The Jet Adaptor allows you to skip almost everything in the game. What's the point in fighting a tough enemy or performing tricky platforming if you can just fly over it? I would understand this if it was a secret mode, or something that involves collecting something from each stage, but you could get this item after your first boss kill (just so long as that first kill is Plant Man).
The Jet Adaptor is what i imagine purists think an Easy Mode is. You are indeed cheating yourself by avoiding playing the game, but look at that cover art. The Jet Adaptor is front and center, Mega Man 6 WANTS you to use it. You're playing the game as intended. There's only one tricky jump towards the end you have to do with the Jet Adaptor, but everything else is just easily skipped.
And the worst part? The parts you're skipping with the Jet Adaptor aren't even all that great. This is a pretty weak Mega Man game that struggles to find an identity.
They never shoulda made Tomahawk Man, man
To keep from letting the fatigue set in (if it hadn't already), Mega Man 6 adds two new Robot Dog+Robot Boy Combination Modes for Mega Man to use in his mission for everlasting peace. The hard hitting Power Adaptor makes Mega Man's charged shot deal one tick of damage more than a regular charged shot, but with a fraction of the distance. You cannot slide with it. Save for some very specific instances, it is only useful as a glorified key for breakable walls. The other adaptor breaks something other than walls, it breaks the game itself.
The Jet Adaptor lets Mega Man fly for a short period of time. You can't charge your buster with it equipped. Hell, you can't slide with it on either, but you don't need any of that. The Jet Adaptor allows you to skip almost everything in the game. What's the point in fighting a tough enemy or performing tricky platforming if you can just fly over it? I would understand this if it was a secret mode, or something that involves collecting something from each stage, but you could get this item after your first boss kill (just so long as that first kill is Plant Man).
The Jet Adaptor is what i imagine purists think an Easy Mode is. You are indeed cheating yourself by avoiding playing the game, but look at that cover art. The Jet Adaptor is front and center, Mega Man 6 WANTS you to use it. You're playing the game as intended. There's only one tricky jump towards the end you have to do with the Jet Adaptor, but everything else is just easily skipped.
And the worst part? The parts you're skipping with the Jet Adaptor aren't even all that great. This is a pretty weak Mega Man game that struggles to find an identity.
They never shoulda made Tomahawk Man, man
In 1788, in an attempt to lesson the burden on overcrowded prisons, Great Britain began sending British and Irish convicts to penal colonies in what would become modern day Australia. Some of these prisoners would eventually serve their time and be released to return to their lives, stranded in an unfamiliar world. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess asks what would happen if an ancient enemy of an empire used the descendants of its discarded convicts as pawns in a power grab.
At first glance, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is the antithesis to 2003’s The Wind Waker. Not even counting the quickly traversable dry land, the world is darker and more serious, Link is stoic and edgy, he and the people he meets are realistically rendered. But that’s just at a glance. When you actually play it, that’s not at all true.
The Hyrule of Twilight Princess is full of cartoonish freaks, each one brimming with memorable personality. Link himself, the lovable dope he is, has a wealth of expressions to sell the scene with. Don’t get it twisted, this is a cartoony game, it’s just rendered with a touch more realism.
That semi-realistic rendering has aged pretty poorly though. Replaying the GameCube version in the modern age on a Wii with an HDMI adaptor really shows how necessary that 2016 HD remake was. This game is muddy. This game is dark. The golden visuals sing in daytime situations, but once you enter the Twilight Realm, you’re looking at glowing noise. Next time I revisit Twilight Princess, it’ll be the HD version. And I’m looking forward to revisiting Twilight Princess again, because it really is a great time.
Sure, the dungeons are brainlessly easy, but the presentation is flawless. Lakebed Temple doesn’t offer the same head scratching-ness of Ocarina of Time’s unfairly maligned Water Temple, but it still feels like a puzzle box that you can run around in. The City in the Sky is the most visually unique dungeon in the Zelda series at that point in time. And Snowpeak Ruins. Oh, what a dungeon. An experimental fusion of the Village and the Dungeon and it’s all the more rich and interesting for it.
All the while you’re joined by Midna, the lovable snarky scamp, who is easily my favorite Zelda Companion. Midna is a member of the Twili, the descendants of Hyrule’s oppressed and relocated convicts. She is selfish and sly and has many reasons to be, but watching her motivations change as she learns selflessness from Link and Zelda is wonderful.
The same cannot he said about the foremost villain of the game, Zant. Also a Twili (with all the story baggage that comes with being a Twili), we first see Zant as an ice cold operator, smooth and calculated, moving through the scene with an aloof, mocking menace. By the end of the game, this will no longer be the case, and he is reduced to something so much less effective. His boss fight is pretty cool though! That music kicks major ass.
Speaking of kicking ass, Twilight Princess elaborates on the flashy soft-quicktime event-style parry system from The Wind Waker. Instead of waiting for the UI to blink to let you know to parry, you now have an array of special moves that you have to learn how and when to unleash at the right moment. As an added bonus, you learn these special moves from one of the coolest characters in Zelda, the Hero’s Spirit (later confirmed to be the ghost of Majora’s Mask’s Link)
When you aren’t following the story of Hyrule’s dark deeds and the small grassroots pushback against a creeping invasion, you’re exploring the lush world of Hyrule, and getting distracted by everything and everyone inside it. Bug collecting, ghost hunting, a slew of mini games, a fully fledged fishing game, a sidequest about bringing affordable shopping to Hyrule’s bustling Castle Town. You will always have something to do.
I have 100% completed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess at least two times. There was probably a third time, but it’s a little foggy. Twilight Princess is a massive and dense playground that will give you so much to do that you’ll be fully satisfied when you roll credits.
A Zelda game where you give a piggy back ride to a shortstack sheila goblin with a fat ass. This game came out in 2006 but they were making it from 3006. It’s good stuff.
At first glance, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is the antithesis to 2003’s The Wind Waker. Not even counting the quickly traversable dry land, the world is darker and more serious, Link is stoic and edgy, he and the people he meets are realistically rendered. But that’s just at a glance. When you actually play it, that’s not at all true.
The Hyrule of Twilight Princess is full of cartoonish freaks, each one brimming with memorable personality. Link himself, the lovable dope he is, has a wealth of expressions to sell the scene with. Don’t get it twisted, this is a cartoony game, it’s just rendered with a touch more realism.
That semi-realistic rendering has aged pretty poorly though. Replaying the GameCube version in the modern age on a Wii with an HDMI adaptor really shows how necessary that 2016 HD remake was. This game is muddy. This game is dark. The golden visuals sing in daytime situations, but once you enter the Twilight Realm, you’re looking at glowing noise. Next time I revisit Twilight Princess, it’ll be the HD version. And I’m looking forward to revisiting Twilight Princess again, because it really is a great time.
Sure, the dungeons are brainlessly easy, but the presentation is flawless. Lakebed Temple doesn’t offer the same head scratching-ness of Ocarina of Time’s unfairly maligned Water Temple, but it still feels like a puzzle box that you can run around in. The City in the Sky is the most visually unique dungeon in the Zelda series at that point in time. And Snowpeak Ruins. Oh, what a dungeon. An experimental fusion of the Village and the Dungeon and it’s all the more rich and interesting for it.
All the while you’re joined by Midna, the lovable snarky scamp, who is easily my favorite Zelda Companion. Midna is a member of the Twili, the descendants of Hyrule’s oppressed and relocated convicts. She is selfish and sly and has many reasons to be, but watching her motivations change as she learns selflessness from Link and Zelda is wonderful.
The same cannot he said about the foremost villain of the game, Zant. Also a Twili (with all the story baggage that comes with being a Twili), we first see Zant as an ice cold operator, smooth and calculated, moving through the scene with an aloof, mocking menace. By the end of the game, this will no longer be the case, and he is reduced to something so much less effective. His boss fight is pretty cool though! That music kicks major ass.
Speaking of kicking ass, Twilight Princess elaborates on the flashy soft-quicktime event-style parry system from The Wind Waker. Instead of waiting for the UI to blink to let you know to parry, you now have an array of special moves that you have to learn how and when to unleash at the right moment. As an added bonus, you learn these special moves from one of the coolest characters in Zelda, the Hero’s Spirit (later confirmed to be the ghost of Majora’s Mask’s Link)
When you aren’t following the story of Hyrule’s dark deeds and the small grassroots pushback against a creeping invasion, you’re exploring the lush world of Hyrule, and getting distracted by everything and everyone inside it. Bug collecting, ghost hunting, a slew of mini games, a fully fledged fishing game, a sidequest about bringing affordable shopping to Hyrule’s bustling Castle Town. You will always have something to do.
I have 100% completed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess at least two times. There was probably a third time, but it’s a little foggy. Twilight Princess is a massive and dense playground that will give you so much to do that you’ll be fully satisfied when you roll credits.
A Zelda game where you give a piggy back ride to a shortstack sheila goblin with a fat ass. This game came out in 2006 but they were making it from 3006. It’s good stuff.
1992
This has just what Mega Man 4 was missing: War Crimes.
Mega Man 5 also has a charge shot that looks great and melts through everything in the game.
Mega Man 5 ALSO has nothing but bangers in its soundtrack. I love every song in this game, especially the Proto Man stages. They were cookin here.
The Super Arrow is pretty redundant in this game though, considering Rush Jet is present, as well as an upgraded Rush Coil. It's pretty cool though!
There's not much else to be critical about here, the game is really solid all around. I love every bit of it. They added some extra frames of animation so that Mega Man can spin around. It's great! How could you be mad with that?
I've beaten Mega Man 5 four times and enjoyed it each time. I recommend it to anyone who likes video games. You don't even gotta study or play the previous games to enjoy it, just jump right in and have fun.
Mega Man 5 also has a charge shot that looks great and melts through everything in the game.
Mega Man 5 ALSO has nothing but bangers in its soundtrack. I love every song in this game, especially the Proto Man stages. They were cookin here.
The Super Arrow is pretty redundant in this game though, considering Rush Jet is present, as well as an upgraded Rush Coil. It's pretty cool though!
There's not much else to be critical about here, the game is really solid all around. I love every bit of it. They added some extra frames of animation so that Mega Man can spin around. It's great! How could you be mad with that?
I've beaten Mega Man 5 four times and enjoyed it each time. I recommend it to anyone who likes video games. You don't even gotta study or play the previous games to enjoy it, just jump right in and have fun.
What if the first eight of the Nine Circles of Hell were a gorgeous paradise of boundless joy, but the second you set foot in that ninth circle you’re immediately inundated with misery and pain so intense and frustrating it drives you mad? That’s the Minish Cap experience.
The Legend of Zelda: the Minish Cap is a spectacular game in almost every way. The sounds, the sights, the way it feels in your hands. It’s perfect. It is truly a gorgeous paradise of boundless joy. I love it.
The last game to be released in the Four Sword Saga, the Minish Cap is the first in the story for that saga. It was also, at the time, the first Zelda game in the lore’s timeline. It was how Link got his iconic hat. This quickly changed.
Anyway, as the starting point to the Four Sword Saga, Minish Cap features the forging of the Four Sword, as well as some much needed intrigue for Vaati, the spherical villain of the Four Sword Saga. He’s a twink now. It kind of makes you wonder why it took them three games to give any kind of backstory to Vaati though. We knew Ganondorf’s deal way back in A Link to the Past, before we even saw his face.
At the time of writing this, I was unable to find any information detailing the production of the Four Swords Saga games. It’s probably out there, untranslated, waiting for me. But for now I’m forced to sit here and wonder which game borrows the Link sprite from which. My uneducated guess is that Minish Cap was in production for a long time, and assets were used for Four Swords and Four Swords Adventures to tide everyone over until that big release.
I say that because compared to its peers, Minish Cap is far and away the most put together and Zelda-like of all the Four Swords games. It is, in its entirety, a Zelda game. No extraneous multiplayer baggage keeping it down. It is a pure experience. This is like if Mario Galaxy was a direct prequel to Mario Party 7.
The sprites and music in The Minish Cap are divine. The GBA gives us a great translation of the Toon Link style by simply updating the A Link to the Past style. Everything and everyone looks great and like they belong there (that wouldn’t be something I’d bring up if the previous game associated with it wasn’t Four Swords Adventures). I don’t think there’s been a Link sprite as solid and versatile as Minish Cap Link, which now has more frames than when it was reused. His head bobs around when his talking hat Ezlo is screaming at him, giving Link a sense of depth and roundness not many other video game sprites have been capable of pulling off. It’s very endearing and impressive.
The game doesn’t stop endearing you there though. The main Gimmick of Minish Cap is shrinking down to the size of a mouse and experiencing the world of Hyrule from that teeny tiny perspective. The boss of the first dungeon is a regular enemy, just fought while you’re tiny. My favorite aspect of this shrinking gimmick is how it activates the part of my brain that loves seeing the creative ways the animators of Tom and Jerry draw up Jerry’s various pocket sized living situations. The Minish Cap has the mouselike Minish living inside of books, in repurposed pots, they have a cafe in the rafters above the Hylian-sized cafe. The detail that goes into the environments in Minish Cap really sell the size differences, and i love it.
There’s so much good to say about Minish Cap. Every part of it is made to be enjoyed. That was a lie. We’ve reached the ninth circle. It’s time to talk about Kinstones, and figurines.
If you love Zelda games as much as I do, you will put in the extra time to 100%-ing them. Getting every Heart Container is the most visually satisfying part of 100%-ing a Zelda game, and for over a decade I was unable to do that. And that’s because i didn’t understand how the Kinstones worked.
Kinstone fusing is another Gimmick added to Minish Cap that involves collecting the stones from random drops and chests, and then finding a willing npc and matching their stone with one you have. Fusing a Kinstone changes the world in some way, like making a Piece of Heart accessible.
There are 100 Kinstone fusions in the game, and 18 of them are relegated to random npcs. Not all of these fusions are available from the start and become available in stages (after each cleared dungeon).
Because I was under the impression that the fusions disappear after each stage, my latest playthrough of Minish Cap was actually done twice on two separate files. One file to scout ahead and check the fusions available at any given time, and one to slowly, and I mean slowly do every fusion available at that given time. I would stop halfway through a dungeon to use the dungeon item to check for more fusions so that I didn’t permanently skip anything after clearing the dungeon (it looks like I didn’t have to worry about this). I utilized a speedrunning glitch to go out of bounds and force the game to give me hundreds of kinstones so I would never be empty handed at any given fusion.
I just wish I wrote down the names of every npc I fused with, which is what I recommend you do! If you can check those 18 random names off your list, you’re set. I spent an hour running around Hyrule looking for that last bastard to fuse with, it was a nightmare. I thought I would have to restart my playthrough and do it even slower. Thankfully I found him, but good lord. I was actually losing my mind. The Kinstone Fusions are the most frustrating part of this game. Keep a checklist on hand.
But anyways, I got the Tingle Trophy as my reward for all the fusions, but I still needed one Piece of Heart, which is locked behind the most tedious part of the game: the figurines. There’s 136 figures in the game, which are doled out in the same stages that the Kinstones use. The figurines also can’t be gotten with regular rupees and have to be traded with Mysterious Shells, which you can find throughout Hyrule but can also buy 30 of for 300 rupees (remember this). You wager your Shells for a chance to get a new figurine, the more shells you wager, the higher the chance for something new. Simple as that. If you don’t want to waste your time eating losses, you can wager huge amounts of shells to bring the chance up to 100%, or you could figure out RNG manipulation.
Since I didn’t figure out RNG manipulation, I spent a lot of time grinding for shells. After a certain point in the game, there’s no more treasure chests with hundreds of shells inside, and you can’t use the out of bounds trick to farm shells anymore. You’re left to grind for money to buy 30 at a time.
I have spent more time playing the Cucco Catch minigame than actually playing the game. (This is hyperbole)
Nevertheless i got every figurine, and then the Carlov Medal, and then the last Piece of Heart. I was done. I’ve played Minish Cap three or four times before then, but for the first time in my life I had 100%-ed Minish Cap. And it drained me.
I recommend Playing this game to every Zelda enjoyer and anyone else who likes games. It’s a treat, it’s a delight, it’s a lovely time. But know what you’re getting into if you want to 100% it. Make a checklist. Try to multitask while you’re catching Cuccos.
The Legend of Zelda: the Minish Cap is a spectacular game in almost every way. The sounds, the sights, the way it feels in your hands. It’s perfect. It is truly a gorgeous paradise of boundless joy. I love it.
The last game to be released in the Four Sword Saga, the Minish Cap is the first in the story for that saga. It was also, at the time, the first Zelda game in the lore’s timeline. It was how Link got his iconic hat. This quickly changed.
Anyway, as the starting point to the Four Sword Saga, Minish Cap features the forging of the Four Sword, as well as some much needed intrigue for Vaati, the spherical villain of the Four Sword Saga. He’s a twink now. It kind of makes you wonder why it took them three games to give any kind of backstory to Vaati though. We knew Ganondorf’s deal way back in A Link to the Past, before we even saw his face.
At the time of writing this, I was unable to find any information detailing the production of the Four Swords Saga games. It’s probably out there, untranslated, waiting for me. But for now I’m forced to sit here and wonder which game borrows the Link sprite from which. My uneducated guess is that Minish Cap was in production for a long time, and assets were used for Four Swords and Four Swords Adventures to tide everyone over until that big release.
I say that because compared to its peers, Minish Cap is far and away the most put together and Zelda-like of all the Four Swords games. It is, in its entirety, a Zelda game. No extraneous multiplayer baggage keeping it down. It is a pure experience. This is like if Mario Galaxy was a direct prequel to Mario Party 7.
The sprites and music in The Minish Cap are divine. The GBA gives us a great translation of the Toon Link style by simply updating the A Link to the Past style. Everything and everyone looks great and like they belong there (that wouldn’t be something I’d bring up if the previous game associated with it wasn’t Four Swords Adventures). I don’t think there’s been a Link sprite as solid and versatile as Minish Cap Link, which now has more frames than when it was reused. His head bobs around when his talking hat Ezlo is screaming at him, giving Link a sense of depth and roundness not many other video game sprites have been capable of pulling off. It’s very endearing and impressive.
The game doesn’t stop endearing you there though. The main Gimmick of Minish Cap is shrinking down to the size of a mouse and experiencing the world of Hyrule from that teeny tiny perspective. The boss of the first dungeon is a regular enemy, just fought while you’re tiny. My favorite aspect of this shrinking gimmick is how it activates the part of my brain that loves seeing the creative ways the animators of Tom and Jerry draw up Jerry’s various pocket sized living situations. The Minish Cap has the mouselike Minish living inside of books, in repurposed pots, they have a cafe in the rafters above the Hylian-sized cafe. The detail that goes into the environments in Minish Cap really sell the size differences, and i love it.
There’s so much good to say about Minish Cap. Every part of it is made to be enjoyed. That was a lie. We’ve reached the ninth circle. It’s time to talk about Kinstones, and figurines.
If you love Zelda games as much as I do, you will put in the extra time to 100%-ing them. Getting every Heart Container is the most visually satisfying part of 100%-ing a Zelda game, and for over a decade I was unable to do that. And that’s because i didn’t understand how the Kinstones worked.
Kinstone fusing is another Gimmick added to Minish Cap that involves collecting the stones from random drops and chests, and then finding a willing npc and matching their stone with one you have. Fusing a Kinstone changes the world in some way, like making a Piece of Heart accessible.
There are 100 Kinstone fusions in the game, and 18 of them are relegated to random npcs. Not all of these fusions are available from the start and become available in stages (after each cleared dungeon).
Because I was under the impression that the fusions disappear after each stage, my latest playthrough of Minish Cap was actually done twice on two separate files. One file to scout ahead and check the fusions available at any given time, and one to slowly, and I mean slowly do every fusion available at that given time. I would stop halfway through a dungeon to use the dungeon item to check for more fusions so that I didn’t permanently skip anything after clearing the dungeon (it looks like I didn’t have to worry about this). I utilized a speedrunning glitch to go out of bounds and force the game to give me hundreds of kinstones so I would never be empty handed at any given fusion.
I just wish I wrote down the names of every npc I fused with, which is what I recommend you do! If you can check those 18 random names off your list, you’re set. I spent an hour running around Hyrule looking for that last bastard to fuse with, it was a nightmare. I thought I would have to restart my playthrough and do it even slower. Thankfully I found him, but good lord. I was actually losing my mind. The Kinstone Fusions are the most frustrating part of this game. Keep a checklist on hand.
But anyways, I got the Tingle Trophy as my reward for all the fusions, but I still needed one Piece of Heart, which is locked behind the most tedious part of the game: the figurines. There’s 136 figures in the game, which are doled out in the same stages that the Kinstones use. The figurines also can’t be gotten with regular rupees and have to be traded with Mysterious Shells, which you can find throughout Hyrule but can also buy 30 of for 300 rupees (remember this). You wager your Shells for a chance to get a new figurine, the more shells you wager, the higher the chance for something new. Simple as that. If you don’t want to waste your time eating losses, you can wager huge amounts of shells to bring the chance up to 100%, or you could figure out RNG manipulation.
Since I didn’t figure out RNG manipulation, I spent a lot of time grinding for shells. After a certain point in the game, there’s no more treasure chests with hundreds of shells inside, and you can’t use the out of bounds trick to farm shells anymore. You’re left to grind for money to buy 30 at a time.
I have spent more time playing the Cucco Catch minigame than actually playing the game. (This is hyperbole)
Nevertheless i got every figurine, and then the Carlov Medal, and then the last Piece of Heart. I was done. I’ve played Minish Cap three or four times before then, but for the first time in my life I had 100%-ed Minish Cap. And it drained me.
I recommend Playing this game to every Zelda enjoyer and anyone else who likes games. It’s a treat, it’s a delight, it’s a lovely time. But know what you’re getting into if you want to 100% it. Make a checklist. Try to multitask while you’re catching Cuccos.
1991
Doctor Cossack looks like my dad.
Starting off with what can only be called a "previously on Mega Man!" cutscene sequence before the title drops, Mega Man 4 is a game that has fully embraced its Saturday Morning Cartoon nature.
You get more guys to fight, more music to listen to while you make your way to fight them, and two new ways to get around on that way.
Sadly though, the Wire Adaptor is made pretty useless when compared to the already established Rush Coil and Rush Jet. What a shame.
Despite the stumbles it made in the movement department, Mega Man 4 finally gives us the ability to fire a charged buster shot, dealing triple the damage of a regular shot. The charge shot itself looks kind of weird though. It looks slimy and not at all like something that will blast through a robot.
Mega Man 4 also has the most infuriating final boss, because you can't fight it without its weakness. Good luck grinding to fill up that ammo after you already spent it all.
I've beaten Mega Man 4 something like three or four times. It's pretty good, and the new additions are cute and fun, but it doesn't shine, it doesn't sing. It goes by too fast to even hear any singing that could happen. I don't think i could fully recommend this one, but i would certainly recommend checking out the promotional art for it. Skull Man's skull shaped shoulder pads are an excellent design choice.
Starting off with what can only be called a "previously on Mega Man!" cutscene sequence before the title drops, Mega Man 4 is a game that has fully embraced its Saturday Morning Cartoon nature.
You get more guys to fight, more music to listen to while you make your way to fight them, and two new ways to get around on that way.
Sadly though, the Wire Adaptor is made pretty useless when compared to the already established Rush Coil and Rush Jet. What a shame.
Despite the stumbles it made in the movement department, Mega Man 4 finally gives us the ability to fire a charged buster shot, dealing triple the damage of a regular shot. The charge shot itself looks kind of weird though. It looks slimy and not at all like something that will blast through a robot.
Mega Man 4 also has the most infuriating final boss, because you can't fight it without its weakness. Good luck grinding to fill up that ammo after you already spent it all.
I've beaten Mega Man 4 something like three or four times. It's pretty good, and the new additions are cute and fun, but it doesn't shine, it doesn't sing. It goes by too fast to even hear any singing that could happen. I don't think i could fully recommend this one, but i would certainly recommend checking out the promotional art for it. Skull Man's skull shaped shoulder pads are an excellent design choice.
1990
Classic Mega Man at its finest. It’s got that dog in it.
If Mega Man 2 improved on its predecessor by adding fun levels for the player to jump around in, Mega Man 3 improves on its predecessor by adding more things to do in new fun levels. The most noteworthy of these mechanical additions is Mega Man’s doggy friend Rush letting you jump and fly and occasionally swim. He’s a good boy.
That being said, I don’t want attention taken away from the slide, which I consider to be a huge step forward for Mega Man’s toolkit. Press down and jump and you briefly zip forward at half your height. It’s a little awkward to pull off but it’s satisfying and (with the right amount of skill) can be used for quick evasions and (with even more skill) extended jump distance.
The Robot Masters have fun designs, their stages have great music, you get to fight the bosses from MM2 again via the morbid Doc Robot (some kind of translation of its original name, Dokurobotto K-176), you get a ton of levels to play, Mega Man 3 has just about all you could ask of a Mega Man game. Except a charged shot, but I’m not docking points for that, they hadn’t thought of it yet at the time.
Mega Man 3 is on hardware that can struggle to allow for in-depth storytelling, and it was made in a time where the tricks to do that storytelling on that hardware hadn’t been discovered yet. As such, the Proto Man plotline, a fan favorite story beat, is left entirely to the ending, where the player is also left to infer a lot of the meat of this story. I’m a certified Mega Man Freak, so after hours of poring over manuals and comics, I can appreciate the story of Mega Man 3, but it would be nice to be able to just turn the game on and get the full experience. But that’s a discussion for old games as a whole, and not just Mega Man 3.
Something that bothers me is that the times that Proto Man is a mini boss, he is just regular ol Proto Man. But when we have our final showdown, he’s wearing his full mask with the Sniper Joe eye as Break Man. Those looks should have been switched around so that the player could assume they’ve been fighting an elite sniper joe. Then, we get the twist that he’s a guy like Mega Mn, and then at the end Dr. Light reveals he’s Mega Man’s long lost brother.
I’ve beaten Mega Man 3 about four or five times. It’s length and trickiness detract from its replayability, but I think it also adds to the substantialness of the experience. I recommend it to any video game enjoyer. It’s the best NES Mega Man game. No empty calories.
This is a pipe dream and a half but I fully welcome a Powered Up-style remake, just to get some cutscenes and dialogue to give us the angst and drama that this game deserves.
If Mega Man 2 improved on its predecessor by adding fun levels for the player to jump around in, Mega Man 3 improves on its predecessor by adding more things to do in new fun levels. The most noteworthy of these mechanical additions is Mega Man’s doggy friend Rush letting you jump and fly and occasionally swim. He’s a good boy.
That being said, I don’t want attention taken away from the slide, which I consider to be a huge step forward for Mega Man’s toolkit. Press down and jump and you briefly zip forward at half your height. It’s a little awkward to pull off but it’s satisfying and (with the right amount of skill) can be used for quick evasions and (with even more skill) extended jump distance.
The Robot Masters have fun designs, their stages have great music, you get to fight the bosses from MM2 again via the morbid Doc Robot (some kind of translation of its original name, Dokurobotto K-176), you get a ton of levels to play, Mega Man 3 has just about all you could ask of a Mega Man game. Except a charged shot, but I’m not docking points for that, they hadn’t thought of it yet at the time.
Mega Man 3 is on hardware that can struggle to allow for in-depth storytelling, and it was made in a time where the tricks to do that storytelling on that hardware hadn’t been discovered yet. As such, the Proto Man plotline, a fan favorite story beat, is left entirely to the ending, where the player is also left to infer a lot of the meat of this story. I’m a certified Mega Man Freak, so after hours of poring over manuals and comics, I can appreciate the story of Mega Man 3, but it would be nice to be able to just turn the game on and get the full experience. But that’s a discussion for old games as a whole, and not just Mega Man 3.
Something that bothers me is that the times that Proto Man is a mini boss, he is just regular ol Proto Man. But when we have our final showdown, he’s wearing his full mask with the Sniper Joe eye as Break Man. Those looks should have been switched around so that the player could assume they’ve been fighting an elite sniper joe. Then, we get the twist that he’s a guy like Mega Mn, and then at the end Dr. Light reveals he’s Mega Man’s long lost brother.
I’ve beaten Mega Man 3 about four or five times. It’s length and trickiness detract from its replayability, but I think it also adds to the substantialness of the experience. I recommend it to any video game enjoyer. It’s the best NES Mega Man game. No empty calories.
This is a pipe dream and a half but I fully welcome a Powered Up-style remake, just to get some cutscenes and dialogue to give us the angst and drama that this game deserves.
You don’t need to call up some friends to bring their Game Boy Advances and appropriate link cables to play this, but good lord would it help.
The second game to be released in the Four Swords Saga, but the last in the story of that saga’s timeline, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures is a bizarre Frankenstein’s monster of a game. And I kind of love it.
Featuring the original four Link sprites from the Game Boy Advance Four Swords, certain enemy sprites and environments from A Link to the Past, sprites of varying quality made just for this game (the worst goron you will ever see is in this game), and special effects from Wind Waker, Four Swords Adventures can look surreal at times. It feels like the most impressive fan game that could be made at the time. This feeling is only compounded further when the adventure is parsed out into easily digestible levels (or if you prefer, multiplayer challenges) organized on a Super Mario World-style map. It’s like your friend from another class that you only saw during recess said “what if Mario and Zelda combined?? And we could all play it!” and it was real.
2004’s Four Swords Adventures does what 2002’s Four Swords didn’t do, and made the levels have a linear flow to them. Gone are the long and drawn out open air dungeons of the past. Gone are the collectible charms that make your Link playable. This time you’re playing a game set up like a zelda game, that you can also play with 3 other people, and every Link can attack and zip around like never before.
Four Swords Adventures is the first released Zelda game using a top down point of view to give Link the ability to roll. There’s no i-frames but that burst of speed is such a delightful treat, and it feels so good to do with the satisfying click of a GameCube controller’s R button. Pressing B at the end of a roll executes an immediate spin attack, which is even more fun to do. I am not exaggerating when I say this roll is one of the reasons I like this lackluster game so much.
The game is lackluster for a few reasons, most of which stem from from its identity. Four Swords Adventures is first and foremost a classic single player Zelda experience. It is also a multiplayer experience. These two things could work beautifully together, with brain busting puzzles that really take advantage of having four Links on the screen, but the combination tends to just boil down to activating four switches at once or doing color-specific things as the matching Link. The multiplayer aspect is baked into the experience, but it the actual level and puzzle design was made for one player and then made to accommodate three others afterwards. This game is completely playable solo, which is interesting, but leaves you with a handful of stale moments meant for the full four player experience.
Another victim of the single player/multiplayer styles butting heads is every level being their own contained challenge. You can’t beat a level without getting 2,000 Force Gems (there’s no rupees in this game, just triangles), and each level makes sure you can easily get that many. They’re not carried over between levels, so unless you’re doing multiplayer and want to win, there’s no real in-game reason to grind for Force Gems.
The lack of Force Gems being carried over, means they’re not a currency (except for specific and ultimately useless situations), means that the occasional village level has none of the quiet charm of visiting a village in a regular Zelda game. There’s no shopping or side quests to do, it’s just another level. But at the same time, The Village of the Blue Maiden level is a pretty fun time! I would absolutely prefer to experience that village’s puzzle if it was a village in a Zelda game and not a village-shaped dungeon in a multiplayer game, though.
Force Gems aren’t the only thing not carried over. Link, Link, Link, and Link don’t have the usual arsenal of tools here, and instead can carry only one item at a time. In multiplayer, this could in theory make each Link “specialized” for one item as needed. Maybe the red Link’s player insists on using only the fire rod because he’s red. It’s a bit of fun character theming that the game could allow, solely due to one player’s choice. At the end of the level he puts the fire rod away, to try something else next level. But that’s not the case. Most levels are built around using only a specific item or two at a time, and they’re also made with single player in mind, and gives you four pedestals with the same item needed for the level. It’s pretty rare that a level will ever accommodate four Links using a different item each.
There is a lot weighing the Four Swords experience down (I didn’t even mention how shallow the main villain is), and yet somehow I still find it enjoyable. The game feels fun to play, and the music is great as always. But maybe do a level or two a day, so the patterns don’t make themselves too apparent too quickly.
I have beaten The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (at the time of writing this), ironically, four times. I’ve mostly soloed it but I have had friends over to play it and we had a great time griefing each other.
I’m not sure if I should recommend it though. I personally really like it, but I can still see the flaws. Still a really fun time though. But I’ll tell you what, Zelda Freaks should play this game just to see that strange collection of sprites it has.
The second game to be released in the Four Swords Saga, but the last in the story of that saga’s timeline, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures is a bizarre Frankenstein’s monster of a game. And I kind of love it.
Featuring the original four Link sprites from the Game Boy Advance Four Swords, certain enemy sprites and environments from A Link to the Past, sprites of varying quality made just for this game (the worst goron you will ever see is in this game), and special effects from Wind Waker, Four Swords Adventures can look surreal at times. It feels like the most impressive fan game that could be made at the time. This feeling is only compounded further when the adventure is parsed out into easily digestible levels (or if you prefer, multiplayer challenges) organized on a Super Mario World-style map. It’s like your friend from another class that you only saw during recess said “what if Mario and Zelda combined?? And we could all play it!” and it was real.
2004’s Four Swords Adventures does what 2002’s Four Swords didn’t do, and made the levels have a linear flow to them. Gone are the long and drawn out open air dungeons of the past. Gone are the collectible charms that make your Link playable. This time you’re playing a game set up like a zelda game, that you can also play with 3 other people, and every Link can attack and zip around like never before.
Four Swords Adventures is the first released Zelda game using a top down point of view to give Link the ability to roll. There’s no i-frames but that burst of speed is such a delightful treat, and it feels so good to do with the satisfying click of a GameCube controller’s R button. Pressing B at the end of a roll executes an immediate spin attack, which is even more fun to do. I am not exaggerating when I say this roll is one of the reasons I like this lackluster game so much.
The game is lackluster for a few reasons, most of which stem from from its identity. Four Swords Adventures is first and foremost a classic single player Zelda experience. It is also a multiplayer experience. These two things could work beautifully together, with brain busting puzzles that really take advantage of having four Links on the screen, but the combination tends to just boil down to activating four switches at once or doing color-specific things as the matching Link. The multiplayer aspect is baked into the experience, but it the actual level and puzzle design was made for one player and then made to accommodate three others afterwards. This game is completely playable solo, which is interesting, but leaves you with a handful of stale moments meant for the full four player experience.
Another victim of the single player/multiplayer styles butting heads is every level being their own contained challenge. You can’t beat a level without getting 2,000 Force Gems (there’s no rupees in this game, just triangles), and each level makes sure you can easily get that many. They’re not carried over between levels, so unless you’re doing multiplayer and want to win, there’s no real in-game reason to grind for Force Gems.
The lack of Force Gems being carried over, means they’re not a currency (except for specific and ultimately useless situations), means that the occasional village level has none of the quiet charm of visiting a village in a regular Zelda game. There’s no shopping or side quests to do, it’s just another level. But at the same time, The Village of the Blue Maiden level is a pretty fun time! I would absolutely prefer to experience that village’s puzzle if it was a village in a Zelda game and not a village-shaped dungeon in a multiplayer game, though.
Force Gems aren’t the only thing not carried over. Link, Link, Link, and Link don’t have the usual arsenal of tools here, and instead can carry only one item at a time. In multiplayer, this could in theory make each Link “specialized” for one item as needed. Maybe the red Link’s player insists on using only the fire rod because he’s red. It’s a bit of fun character theming that the game could allow, solely due to one player’s choice. At the end of the level he puts the fire rod away, to try something else next level. But that’s not the case. Most levels are built around using only a specific item or two at a time, and they’re also made with single player in mind, and gives you four pedestals with the same item needed for the level. It’s pretty rare that a level will ever accommodate four Links using a different item each.
There is a lot weighing the Four Swords experience down (I didn’t even mention how shallow the main villain is), and yet somehow I still find it enjoyable. The game feels fun to play, and the music is great as always. But maybe do a level or two a day, so the patterns don’t make themselves too apparent too quickly.
I have beaten The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (at the time of writing this), ironically, four times. I’ve mostly soloed it but I have had friends over to play it and we had a great time griefing each other.
I’m not sure if I should recommend it though. I personally really like it, but I can still see the flaws. Still a really fun time though. But I’ll tell you what, Zelda Freaks should play this game just to see that strange collection of sprites it has.
1989
The one that put my man Mega Man on the map, and for good reason.
Snappy controls, fun levels, and catchy music. That's all a Mega Man game needs and lord have mercy does Mega Man 2 have it. For a brief time in my life i would play Mega Man 2 all the way through to completion on New Year's Eve before the party would start, just so i ended the year on a high note, video game-wise.
the only thing about this game that i'm not crazy about is the weaknesses of the main bosses being all over the place, and one of the end game bosses requiring perfect play and soft locking you if you make a mistake. just don't make a mistake and the game's pretty good i guess.
I have beaten Mega Man 2 dozens of times and enjoyed it every time. The latest time i played was a little clunky, but i'm a little rusty. and yet despite that, i still had fun. Anyone who likes video games should probably do themselves a favor and check this bit of video game history out.
Long Live The Metal Blade
Snappy controls, fun levels, and catchy music. That's all a Mega Man game needs and lord have mercy does Mega Man 2 have it. For a brief time in my life i would play Mega Man 2 all the way through to completion on New Year's Eve before the party would start, just so i ended the year on a high note, video game-wise.
the only thing about this game that i'm not crazy about is the weaknesses of the main bosses being all over the place, and one of the end game bosses requiring perfect play and soft locking you if you make a mistake. just don't make a mistake and the game's pretty good i guess.
I have beaten Mega Man 2 dozens of times and enjoyed it every time. The latest time i played was a little clunky, but i'm a little rusty. and yet despite that, i still had fun. Anyone who likes video games should probably do themselves a favor and check this bit of video game history out.
Long Live The Metal Blade
1987
the shaky pilot episode of a long running saturday morning cartoon of a game series.
i love Mega Man. i don't love Mega Man (1987). it puts down the foundations of what a Mega Man game should be, but little else. they pretty much nailed how Mega Man moves, but they missed the mark on the locations he should move around. I'm sure the beginning of Guts Man's stage is what everyone goes to first when they gripe about this game, but Ice Man and Elec Man also have terrible levels. That's almost half the game, man. But hey, listen. The Magnet Beam ability is a really neat thing that showed off they could pull off some cool stuff. I just wish they did it more.
I've beaten Mega Man three times, and i used the Pause Glitch for each one of them. I cannot respect this jank game enough to play fair. i'm sorry. I recommend it to only the most avid Mega Man fans (or just video game enthusiasts), who want to play it from an academic point of view.
i love Mega Man. i don't love Mega Man (1987). it puts down the foundations of what a Mega Man game should be, but little else. they pretty much nailed how Mega Man moves, but they missed the mark on the locations he should move around. I'm sure the beginning of Guts Man's stage is what everyone goes to first when they gripe about this game, but Ice Man and Elec Man also have terrible levels. That's almost half the game, man. But hey, listen. The Magnet Beam ability is a really neat thing that showed off they could pull off some cool stuff. I just wish they did it more.
I've beaten Mega Man three times, and i used the Pause Glitch for each one of them. I cannot respect this jank game enough to play fair. i'm sorry. I recommend it to only the most avid Mega Man fans (or just video game enthusiasts), who want to play it from an academic point of view.
If you can’t stand the sailing, you only want the first half of the action/adventure genre.
Even though Four Swords was released a year beforehand, Wind Waker is the game that put the overly expressive Toon Link on the map. This is the game that truly began his massive and storied career. They never shoulda called him Toon Link, they shoulda called him Link and every other iteration “Realistic Link”. Dude’s been in more games than any other Link. Put some respect on my man’s name.
But anyway,
With iconic visuals inspired by the 1963 animated movie: The Little Prince and the Eight Headed Dragon; what used to be the “too cartoony” Zelda game is now one of the most timeless of them all. Aside from some crunchy textures here and there, 2003’s The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker looks just as good as (or really, better than) its dubiously necessary 2013 HD remake. At just a glance, Wind Waker is a game for the ages.
Looking deeper than that glance, Wind Waker is a lot of things. It’s a game about exploring a vast ocean, and in doing so, make it feel smaller. It’s a story about being turned into a secret weapon during the last gasp of a long and drawn out war. Its a story about clawing for the present while important players around you can’t feel their fingers from clutching the past. It’s a bright and cheery time full of memorable and lovable characters. It is the post-apocalyptic continuation of an epic that will leave you hopeful for the harrowing future. It also feels like something is missing.
Wind Waker is a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time, but not Majora’s Mask. I mean this in both a story and a mechanical sense. There’s no three day timer here. But it’s not a full retread of what made Ocarina of Time what it is. The Hyrule Field of old has been flooded and your big open playground is now the even bigger, and more open Great Sea.
And that Great Sea is peppered with 49 islands with various things to do and folks to meet, like the soon-to-be cornerstone of Zelda: Beedle. You can chase after flatulent pigs under the shining sun or fight the shrieking undead in the darkest depths. You can collect more rupees than you were ever able to carry and spend it all on the local auction.
According to the game, the water in the sea is cursed and can’t bear any fish so I guess everyone has been getting by on eating those flatulent pigs, but it does them well because the people of this new Hyrule are as lively and memorable as ever.
But you have to get on your boat and set sail to meet them.
Now, the sailing is probably the biggest point of contention about Wind Waker. That honor used to go to the visuals but I imagine we’ve all grown past that. But I still hear talk of Wind Waker followed up with a smug but regretful “yeah, there’s just too much sailing in it” and while I personally don’t agree with that sentiment (you eventually get the ability to warp around the map), I can understand where they’re coming from.
There is more of a disconnect between how Link moves on foot and on boat than there is between Link and Epona the horse from previous games. Link can run, roll, jump and “hiyah” his way through the environment with ease and comfort. In Wind Waker, Link’s continuous rolling can gain a bit of momentum, making traversal even more fun and easy, not to mention how cartoonishly high his jump attack is. Both Epona and the King of Red Lions are focused on speed across long distances and not necessarily agility. And even though the boat is more fully featured than the horse that came before it (you can use all your long range items as well as bombs on the boat, at this point you could only loose arrows on horseback), sailing is more of a different Mode of play, rather than a choice to be made while playing. You could, if you wanted to, go through Ocarina of Time without riding Epona because you don’t like it. You have no choice but to sail in Wind Waker. Again, I don’t have a problem with this.
If sailing really is that big of a problem for you, I recommend the speed running trick called Sail Pumping. Repeatedly unfurling and putting away your sail in a rhythm takes advantage of the initial jolt of speed you get when you first take the sail out.
The only minor problem particular to sailing I have is that changing the direction of the wind with the titular Wind Waker baton takes a little bit longer than it probably should. The HD version speeds this up, which is a welcome change. That being said, I don’t necessarily believe that something like the HD Remake’s Swift Sail is a positive change. The sailing really didn’t need to be sped up like that. Its a part of the adventure. It’s some delightful Quiet Time. I suppose I phrased that a little erroneously, as half the time spent sailing will be backed by one of the best Zelda themes of all time.
It’s a Zelda game. The music is gonna be good, I don’t need to say much more than that.
If you really gotta complain about the boat in Wind Waker, complain about the salvaging. You can find yourself boating around in circles trying to fish up that treasure. It’s maybe my least favorite thing about the game.
If you aren’t a Zelda Freak like me that has to 100% every game, you can avoid salvaging over 50 times and just do it the mandatory 8 times, during the last stretch of the game. That last stretch is sadly, where my actual least favorite thing about the game rears it’s ugly and forlorn head: that it comes to an end too soon.
Wind Waker came out only three years after Majora’s Mask. That’s a big technological leap in such a small and stressful amount of time. And because of that, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that corners were cut. One of those corners was the number of dungeons, as alluded to in a 2013 IGN interview with Wind Waker’s director Eiji Aonuma where he states that two of its dungeons were repurposed for later Zelda games (my guess is most likely Twilight Princess).
It’s pretty nice to know that the dungeons weren’t lost to time, but I would have liked to live in a world where Wind Waker could afford to get the extra dev time to have those two dungeons.
So you beat the 5 dungeons and the quests and met everyone and done everything and maybe even taken a picture of everything to get figurines made of them. Time to go to the endgame and go through what is basically an elaborate boss rush before the final boss.
But when you get to that final boss, you’re given dialogue that makes this game’s Ganondorf the uncontested best Ganondorf in Zelda. The fight is nothing crazy, but the character, the pathos. We meet him multiple times throughout the game and each time we see a bit more of him. It establishes his villainy and then gives us his motives. It is a shame that we haven’t come close to this introspective iteration of the King of Evil since.
I have beaten The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker at least five times. I haven’t gotten every figurine yet, and I will eventually, but otherwise I’ve 100%ed everything else at least three times. I’ve also done a three heart run and it turned out to be a very disappointing time. There was no adventure!
Wind Waker is an excellent game that under-stays its welcome. It feels good in the hands, and there’s tons of toys to play with, the music is great, the sights are lovely. I recommend it to anyone who wants an adventure. You’ll no doubt end up like me and wanting more (that’s where the equally excellent fan-made randomizer comes in.)
Even though Four Swords was released a year beforehand, Wind Waker is the game that put the overly expressive Toon Link on the map. This is the game that truly began his massive and storied career. They never shoulda called him Toon Link, they shoulda called him Link and every other iteration “Realistic Link”. Dude’s been in more games than any other Link. Put some respect on my man’s name.
But anyway,
With iconic visuals inspired by the 1963 animated movie: The Little Prince and the Eight Headed Dragon; what used to be the “too cartoony” Zelda game is now one of the most timeless of them all. Aside from some crunchy textures here and there, 2003’s The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker looks just as good as (or really, better than) its dubiously necessary 2013 HD remake. At just a glance, Wind Waker is a game for the ages.
Looking deeper than that glance, Wind Waker is a lot of things. It’s a game about exploring a vast ocean, and in doing so, make it feel smaller. It’s a story about being turned into a secret weapon during the last gasp of a long and drawn out war. Its a story about clawing for the present while important players around you can’t feel their fingers from clutching the past. It’s a bright and cheery time full of memorable and lovable characters. It is the post-apocalyptic continuation of an epic that will leave you hopeful for the harrowing future. It also feels like something is missing.
Wind Waker is a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time, but not Majora’s Mask. I mean this in both a story and a mechanical sense. There’s no three day timer here. But it’s not a full retread of what made Ocarina of Time what it is. The Hyrule Field of old has been flooded and your big open playground is now the even bigger, and more open Great Sea.
And that Great Sea is peppered with 49 islands with various things to do and folks to meet, like the soon-to-be cornerstone of Zelda: Beedle. You can chase after flatulent pigs under the shining sun or fight the shrieking undead in the darkest depths. You can collect more rupees than you were ever able to carry and spend it all on the local auction.
According to the game, the water in the sea is cursed and can’t bear any fish so I guess everyone has been getting by on eating those flatulent pigs, but it does them well because the people of this new Hyrule are as lively and memorable as ever.
But you have to get on your boat and set sail to meet them.
Now, the sailing is probably the biggest point of contention about Wind Waker. That honor used to go to the visuals but I imagine we’ve all grown past that. But I still hear talk of Wind Waker followed up with a smug but regretful “yeah, there’s just too much sailing in it” and while I personally don’t agree with that sentiment (you eventually get the ability to warp around the map), I can understand where they’re coming from.
There is more of a disconnect between how Link moves on foot and on boat than there is between Link and Epona the horse from previous games. Link can run, roll, jump and “hiyah” his way through the environment with ease and comfort. In Wind Waker, Link’s continuous rolling can gain a bit of momentum, making traversal even more fun and easy, not to mention how cartoonishly high his jump attack is. Both Epona and the King of Red Lions are focused on speed across long distances and not necessarily agility. And even though the boat is more fully featured than the horse that came before it (you can use all your long range items as well as bombs on the boat, at this point you could only loose arrows on horseback), sailing is more of a different Mode of play, rather than a choice to be made while playing. You could, if you wanted to, go through Ocarina of Time without riding Epona because you don’t like it. You have no choice but to sail in Wind Waker. Again, I don’t have a problem with this.
If sailing really is that big of a problem for you, I recommend the speed running trick called Sail Pumping. Repeatedly unfurling and putting away your sail in a rhythm takes advantage of the initial jolt of speed you get when you first take the sail out.
The only minor problem particular to sailing I have is that changing the direction of the wind with the titular Wind Waker baton takes a little bit longer than it probably should. The HD version speeds this up, which is a welcome change. That being said, I don’t necessarily believe that something like the HD Remake’s Swift Sail is a positive change. The sailing really didn’t need to be sped up like that. Its a part of the adventure. It’s some delightful Quiet Time. I suppose I phrased that a little erroneously, as half the time spent sailing will be backed by one of the best Zelda themes of all time.
It’s a Zelda game. The music is gonna be good, I don’t need to say much more than that.
If you really gotta complain about the boat in Wind Waker, complain about the salvaging. You can find yourself boating around in circles trying to fish up that treasure. It’s maybe my least favorite thing about the game.
If you aren’t a Zelda Freak like me that has to 100% every game, you can avoid salvaging over 50 times and just do it the mandatory 8 times, during the last stretch of the game. That last stretch is sadly, where my actual least favorite thing about the game rears it’s ugly and forlorn head: that it comes to an end too soon.
Wind Waker came out only three years after Majora’s Mask. That’s a big technological leap in such a small and stressful amount of time. And because of that, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that corners were cut. One of those corners was the number of dungeons, as alluded to in a 2013 IGN interview with Wind Waker’s director Eiji Aonuma where he states that two of its dungeons were repurposed for later Zelda games (my guess is most likely Twilight Princess).
It’s pretty nice to know that the dungeons weren’t lost to time, but I would have liked to live in a world where Wind Waker could afford to get the extra dev time to have those two dungeons.
So you beat the 5 dungeons and the quests and met everyone and done everything and maybe even taken a picture of everything to get figurines made of them. Time to go to the endgame and go through what is basically an elaborate boss rush before the final boss.
But when you get to that final boss, you’re given dialogue that makes this game’s Ganondorf the uncontested best Ganondorf in Zelda. The fight is nothing crazy, but the character, the pathos. We meet him multiple times throughout the game and each time we see a bit more of him. It establishes his villainy and then gives us his motives. It is a shame that we haven’t come close to this introspective iteration of the King of Evil since.
I have beaten The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker at least five times. I haven’t gotten every figurine yet, and I will eventually, but otherwise I’ve 100%ed everything else at least three times. I’ve also done a three heart run and it turned out to be a very disappointing time. There was no adventure!
Wind Waker is an excellent game that under-stays its welcome. It feels good in the hands, and there’s tons of toys to play with, the music is great, the sights are lovely. I recommend it to anyone who wants an adventure. You’ll no doubt end up like me and wanting more (that’s where the equally excellent fan-made randomizer comes in.)
In 1904, game designer, writer, reporter, Georgist and feminist Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord's Game: a scathing review of the contemporary trends of rent and land ownership (in the form of a board game). The idea was that players could understand the complicated web of "The Rich Get Richer" from a more simplified point of view. Fairness could be instilled in children when they play this game and realize how cruel the world could be if we let it. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, this did not work out. The world is still cruel because we have let it. Even more unfortunate for her, Parker Brothers made Monopoly in 1935, a game very much like The Landlord's Game, that quickly took the world by storm and became commonplace in American homes. Monopoly probably came to be due to some perfectly legal patent loopholes, but it's clear that a piece made to criticize greed eventually became a vehicle for it.
Perhaps Monopoly took off the way it did because The Landlord's Game is from the point of view of the owners of money and land. But what if it was from the point of view of someone who has no money?
Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland is a scathing indictment of greed and the acquisition of money, more ferocious and toothed than anything The Landlord's Game could conjure up. It is made to inspire the soul crushing feelings of a minimum wage 9-5 and it does it very well. Most games demand you grind to work your way up. Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland demands you grind to lift your pathetic leg up on the first rung of the ladder.
Everything, down to talking with npcs, costs money. And you, as the titular 35-year-old virgin Tingle, (who has very, very little to do with the series he originated in) have none of it. Want to look at things in a store? Want to ask someone a question? Better clock in and beat up some animals to do an imaginary coin flip to get an item so that you can sell it for a paltry sum of rupees.
Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland works so much better as a piece of critical art than The Landlord's Game because it is terrible. It is boring, it is bland, it is repetitive, it is exactly what having a job is like. And brother? i quit this job after two days.
I hate this game. I recommend it to not only Zelda fans, but anyone who enjoys art.
Perhaps Monopoly took off the way it did because The Landlord's Game is from the point of view of the owners of money and land. But what if it was from the point of view of someone who has no money?
Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland is a scathing indictment of greed and the acquisition of money, more ferocious and toothed than anything The Landlord's Game could conjure up. It is made to inspire the soul crushing feelings of a minimum wage 9-5 and it does it very well. Most games demand you grind to work your way up. Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland demands you grind to lift your pathetic leg up on the first rung of the ladder.
Everything, down to talking with npcs, costs money. And you, as the titular 35-year-old virgin Tingle, (who has very, very little to do with the series he originated in) have none of it. Want to look at things in a store? Want to ask someone a question? Better clock in and beat up some animals to do an imaginary coin flip to get an item so that you can sell it for a paltry sum of rupees.
Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland works so much better as a piece of critical art than The Landlord's Game because it is terrible. It is boring, it is bland, it is repetitive, it is exactly what having a job is like. And brother? i quit this job after two days.
I hate this game. I recommend it to not only Zelda fans, but anyone who enjoys art.
If your friends are fun enough people, even the worst multiplayer game could be a good time. Better hope your friends are fun, then.
As a bonus game paired with the Game Boy Advance port of A Link to the Past, the Legend of Zelda: Four Swords is the stumbling, fumbling, humble beginnings of what I call the Four Sword Saga. On paper, it’s the first on screen appearance of the lovable and expressive Toon Link, coming out a whole year before his most well known outing, Wind Waker. Not only that, but there’s four of him, one for each possible player. These players would of course need their own Game Boy Advances, their own copies of the game, and their own link cables. As someone who struggled to find more than one person at a time to play this game with wirelessly on my 3DS, I can pretty easily see why Wind Waker is the one everyone knows Toon Link for, and not Four Swords.
To make matters worse, you can’t even start Four Swords without at least one other GBA, so even though I had the cart and my pre-owned GBA I got at GameStop for $25 of chores money, I couldn’t play it. I mean, sure I still had A Link to the Past to play for hours on end, but I really loved Wind Waker and Four Swords Adventures, I wanted to see what Four Swords was all about. It doesn’t help that this version of A Link to the Past has an extra dungeon that only lets you enter if you’ve played Four Swords. Four Swords taunted me for years.
Until one day, Nintendo rereleased a single-player capable version of Four Swords as a free digital download for the 3DS, in celebration of Zelda’s 25th anniversary (at the time of writing this, that was over a decade ago, the ceaseless march of time will trample us all).
After downloading the game as soon as I could, I eagerly began the Zelda game that eluded me.
And it turns out it’s basically if Zelda gameplay and a drawn out Mario Party minigame had a baby.
Like a Mario Party minigame, the conceit of Four Swords’ gameplay is a chaotic and greedy mad dash to the end of a randomly generated, excessively sprawling “dungeon”, while gathering as many rupees as you can get your grubby little hands on. The winner is the Link with the most cash, so even though everyone is more or less working together to get through the “dungeon”, they gotta do what they can to screw each other out of rupees.
Conceptually, it’s a cool and fun idea to have a Zelda party game, and the idea of turning the classic zelda gameplay into a party game is even cooler.
In execution, Four Swords has a critical flaw that makes the foundation shaky. And it’s not the simplistic puzzles or the spongey enemies. The flaw is the upgrade charms you can randomly find. There’s a green, blue, and red charm and collecting up to three of each gradually increases your Link’s walking speed, defense, and damage output, respectively. Now this would be a great idea…if you didn’t start every match slow, frail, and weak. Collecting the charms doesn’t make you better, it makes you good. Three red charms doesn’t make you stronger, it makes you strong. Movement is a big thing for me in games, so my Link’s speed being a steady crawl right at the start is infuriating.
But I pressed on, determined to experience the story of the game, and how it connects to the rest of the Four Sword Saga.
Imagine my shock when the party game that introduces the newest (at the time) non-Ganon villain (to keep the stakes low), has very little of interest to say about him.
Vaati the Wind Sorcerer wreaked havoc in the past, and then he was sealed by some unnamed hero kid with The Four Sword. The seal that trapped him weakened and he is once again terrorizing the countryside, capturing young girls. Your mission, should you, and you, and you, and you choose to accept it, is to get three keys to access his palace and stop him. Pretty simple stuff. No time travel, no cross-dressing disguised princesses, no towns. Just Zelda action with up to four players. And it’s alright.
I have completed this game one time, and 90% of it was done solo. It was not all that fun. The other 10% was (stupidly) during senior year French class with a friend who also miraculously had the game. It was Pretty Fun.
I don’t know if I could recommend Four Swords to anyone who isn’t a die hard Zelda Freak who wants to experience everything the series has to offer. Even then I’m not sure you’d be missing much. There are at least two games that use the same assets and ideas that are far and away more accessible, and do a better job at being a fun time.
As a bonus game paired with the Game Boy Advance port of A Link to the Past, the Legend of Zelda: Four Swords is the stumbling, fumbling, humble beginnings of what I call the Four Sword Saga. On paper, it’s the first on screen appearance of the lovable and expressive Toon Link, coming out a whole year before his most well known outing, Wind Waker. Not only that, but there’s four of him, one for each possible player. These players would of course need their own Game Boy Advances, their own copies of the game, and their own link cables. As someone who struggled to find more than one person at a time to play this game with wirelessly on my 3DS, I can pretty easily see why Wind Waker is the one everyone knows Toon Link for, and not Four Swords.
To make matters worse, you can’t even start Four Swords without at least one other GBA, so even though I had the cart and my pre-owned GBA I got at GameStop for $25 of chores money, I couldn’t play it. I mean, sure I still had A Link to the Past to play for hours on end, but I really loved Wind Waker and Four Swords Adventures, I wanted to see what Four Swords was all about. It doesn’t help that this version of A Link to the Past has an extra dungeon that only lets you enter if you’ve played Four Swords. Four Swords taunted me for years.
Until one day, Nintendo rereleased a single-player capable version of Four Swords as a free digital download for the 3DS, in celebration of Zelda’s 25th anniversary (at the time of writing this, that was over a decade ago, the ceaseless march of time will trample us all).
After downloading the game as soon as I could, I eagerly began the Zelda game that eluded me.
And it turns out it’s basically if Zelda gameplay and a drawn out Mario Party minigame had a baby.
Like a Mario Party minigame, the conceit of Four Swords’ gameplay is a chaotic and greedy mad dash to the end of a randomly generated, excessively sprawling “dungeon”, while gathering as many rupees as you can get your grubby little hands on. The winner is the Link with the most cash, so even though everyone is more or less working together to get through the “dungeon”, they gotta do what they can to screw each other out of rupees.
Conceptually, it’s a cool and fun idea to have a Zelda party game, and the idea of turning the classic zelda gameplay into a party game is even cooler.
In execution, Four Swords has a critical flaw that makes the foundation shaky. And it’s not the simplistic puzzles or the spongey enemies. The flaw is the upgrade charms you can randomly find. There’s a green, blue, and red charm and collecting up to three of each gradually increases your Link’s walking speed, defense, and damage output, respectively. Now this would be a great idea…if you didn’t start every match slow, frail, and weak. Collecting the charms doesn’t make you better, it makes you good. Three red charms doesn’t make you stronger, it makes you strong. Movement is a big thing for me in games, so my Link’s speed being a steady crawl right at the start is infuriating.
But I pressed on, determined to experience the story of the game, and how it connects to the rest of the Four Sword Saga.
Imagine my shock when the party game that introduces the newest (at the time) non-Ganon villain (to keep the stakes low), has very little of interest to say about him.
Vaati the Wind Sorcerer wreaked havoc in the past, and then he was sealed by some unnamed hero kid with The Four Sword. The seal that trapped him weakened and he is once again terrorizing the countryside, capturing young girls. Your mission, should you, and you, and you, and you choose to accept it, is to get three keys to access his palace and stop him. Pretty simple stuff. No time travel, no cross-dressing disguised princesses, no towns. Just Zelda action with up to four players. And it’s alright.
I have completed this game one time, and 90% of it was done solo. It was not all that fun. The other 10% was (stupidly) during senior year French class with a friend who also miraculously had the game. It was Pretty Fun.
I don’t know if I could recommend Four Swords to anyone who isn’t a die hard Zelda Freak who wants to experience everything the series has to offer. Even then I’m not sure you’d be missing much. There are at least two games that use the same assets and ideas that are far and away more accessible, and do a better job at being a fun time.
Tingle's first appearance deserves every bit of respect it gets.
I want more games like Majora’s Mask. I’m just an illustrator so it’s maybe a little rude to demand things that I have little ability to contribute to, but at the same time I’ll just say it again. I want more games like Majora’s Mask.
Clock Town is such a densely detailed place that I sometimes find myself forgetting that there’s also other locations in Majora’s Mask. I would have been just fine with Clock Town being the only location in the game. Even after decades of replaying it, I’m still finding out new things about the people who live in Clock Town. Did you know that Anju has her own Kafei Mask that she’ll wear for you if you meet her at the laundry pool on the second day? I didn’t until my 4th or 5th replay.
Characters like Anju have more going on than their peers, but each character has a little something to them, like the uptight Swordsman being a coward on the night of the final day, or the Swamp Tourist Center Guide who is revealed to be Tingle’s father, being very embarrassed with his son. It makes Clock Town, and Termina as a whole, more rich. But that richness goes deeper when you take the three day time loop that gives almost every major character a schedule for those three days. (I think Tingle is excluded from having a set schedule and is instead at whatever major location you’re at so you can get the map for that area).
Clock Town starts off as the most involved Zelda village, and then makes sure that nothing of the standard Zelda fare comes remotely close to it.
But then you’re given the permission to leave the walls of Clock Town and there’s a whole Zelda game out there. Maybe a few less dungeons to explore and conquer but I think with the buffet of side quests to choose from, it’s a fair trade. And I would take four solid dungeons over six weak ones any day, and Majora’s Mask has some pretty solid dungeons. Any time a Zelda dungeon makes you think about the space you’re in like it’s a 3D object and you have to learn this object as much as possible to proceed, it gets a thumbs up from me, and Majora’s Mask has a good handful of dungeons like this. Especially the impeccable Stone Tower Temple.
My only gripe with Majora’s Mask is it takes an obscene amount of time to be able to save your game for the first time. It’s like, I dunno. Half an hour before you can save. What if you have to stop sooner? You’re out of luck! You gotta start the game again from the beginning some other time. And this has happened to me more than I’d like to remember. I’ve started Majora’s Mask more times than I’ve played it.
And I’ve played Majora’s Mask several times and completed it at least two times.
Alright I guess I have another gripe about Majora's Mask, I guess the mirror shield in this game is pretty ugly and should have looked like a sun to visually show that Link is going against this lunar apocalypse that Termina has been trapped in. But that's not ruining it for me.
Whether you're a Zelda Freak like me or just someone who likes video games, you should play Majora's Mask. It's really special.
I want more games like Majora’s Mask. I’m just an illustrator so it’s maybe a little rude to demand things that I have little ability to contribute to, but at the same time I’ll just say it again. I want more games like Majora’s Mask.
Clock Town is such a densely detailed place that I sometimes find myself forgetting that there’s also other locations in Majora’s Mask. I would have been just fine with Clock Town being the only location in the game. Even after decades of replaying it, I’m still finding out new things about the people who live in Clock Town. Did you know that Anju has her own Kafei Mask that she’ll wear for you if you meet her at the laundry pool on the second day? I didn’t until my 4th or 5th replay.
Characters like Anju have more going on than their peers, but each character has a little something to them, like the uptight Swordsman being a coward on the night of the final day, or the Swamp Tourist Center Guide who is revealed to be Tingle’s father, being very embarrassed with his son. It makes Clock Town, and Termina as a whole, more rich. But that richness goes deeper when you take the three day time loop that gives almost every major character a schedule for those three days. (I think Tingle is excluded from having a set schedule and is instead at whatever major location you’re at so you can get the map for that area).
Clock Town starts off as the most involved Zelda village, and then makes sure that nothing of the standard Zelda fare comes remotely close to it.
But then you’re given the permission to leave the walls of Clock Town and there’s a whole Zelda game out there. Maybe a few less dungeons to explore and conquer but I think with the buffet of side quests to choose from, it’s a fair trade. And I would take four solid dungeons over six weak ones any day, and Majora’s Mask has some pretty solid dungeons. Any time a Zelda dungeon makes you think about the space you’re in like it’s a 3D object and you have to learn this object as much as possible to proceed, it gets a thumbs up from me, and Majora’s Mask has a good handful of dungeons like this. Especially the impeccable Stone Tower Temple.
My only gripe with Majora’s Mask is it takes an obscene amount of time to be able to save your game for the first time. It’s like, I dunno. Half an hour before you can save. What if you have to stop sooner? You’re out of luck! You gotta start the game again from the beginning some other time. And this has happened to me more than I’d like to remember. I’ve started Majora’s Mask more times than I’ve played it.
And I’ve played Majora’s Mask several times and completed it at least two times.
Alright I guess I have another gripe about Majora's Mask, I guess the mirror shield in this game is pretty ugly and should have looked like a sun to visually show that Link is going against this lunar apocalypse that Termina has been trapped in. But that's not ruining it for me.
Whether you're a Zelda Freak like me or just someone who likes video games, you should play Majora's Mask. It's really special.