The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess came with baggage. Postponed multiple times, it was teased at E3 as the ultimate realistic Zelda for the GameCube with a strong Lord of the Rings influence, and many a Zelda fan ate the hype up with a spoon. When it was held back further to add ‘waggle’ Wiimote style control for the Wii launch, folks were skeptical. The fact that the game was not improved on for the more powerful console (save for a wide screen option) didn’t help.
While it never quite reaches the “ultimate Zelda” I imagined during those E3 teases, Twilight Princess is still a very, very good game. The dungeons are, without a doubt, the best in the series to date—sprawling, varied and with just the right mixture of puzzle solving and combat. The wolf nether realm angle with Midna is a nice change of pace, and while it is dropped around midgame for a more traditional Zelda experience (*see Leaving Midgar in Final Fantasy VII), it comes back nicely near the end game.
Sure, the unskippable tutorials last way too long, the vast scope of the game world turns the optional collection of bugs, poes and heart slivers into too much of a 'fetch quest' by the end, and some of the combat moves prove a bit too much for the Wiimote to handle (I'm looking at you, Shield Attack!), but all-in-all, it's a very good game, and can certainly hold it's own against the better offerings on the PS3 and 360.
If you are a Zelda fan, or just a fan of traditional games, and you somehow missed Twilight Princess, I highly recommend it.
2011 ben langberg, all rights reserved.