The Zelda that could have been great.
I waited for a very long time to play Twilight Princess (as everyone did) and throughout this time, especially around E3, I heard talk from Nintendo of how this was going to be the greatest Zelda game ever made; it was going to top Ocarina. Well, this got me pretty excited to say the least. By the time the Wii was released I could think nothing but how grand and amazingly awesome Zelda: TP was going to be. Well, it wasn't....
TP looks amazing from a graphical stand point, there's no denying it. It's the most beautiful Hyrule has ever looked. This is great and all, but it will only carry the game so far. The Wii remote controls the game perfectly. It doesn't feel sloppy or anything, it seems to work just as it should. The controller makes a lot of things in the game (such as any item requiring first person view) much easier and intuitive to learn. The speaker in the control was a nice touch as well for things like shooting the bow. My problems with the game come from the actual gameplay. Through the first three dungeons of the game all I wanted to do was stop because it was no good at all. I don't want to spoil anything in perticular, but throughout this beginning part of the game I wanted to just score it at about a 6 for trying. Luckily after that it picked up. This is where I give the game most of its credit, after those three dungeons the fun level increased exponentially. In fact, it kept me sitting for 16 hours straight cause I couldn't stop playing. What went wrong at the beginning there? The boss fights were the biggest let down of the game. They were short and simple. Zelda has been a game in the past with multiple steps to taking down each boss, a lot of which are not completely obvious to figure out. But there's no thinking when it comes to the bosses of this game. What item did I get in the current dungeon and where can I apply it is all you need to think about. Each boss will basically require only the item from the dungeon, and after each dungeon that item basically becomes obsolete (except for maybe in heart piece searching).
My final big complaint is how uninspired the game is. The names of many villages and dungeons isn't even changed from Ocarina. It seems to me they wanted to make a remake of Ocarina, but tried to hide it...poorly. The idea of the wolf is kind of cool to, but its underused and in comparison to a game like Okami it just plays like crap. I know I complained a lot, and a lot of hardcore Zelda people would disagree with me or whatever, but thats what I think of the game. Uninspired, way too easy, but pretty. The main amount of my points for the game come from the fact that it kept me going for 16 hours straight and I couldn't put it down for whatever reason it may have been. I guess you should play this game cause its a part of the Zelda series, but I'd wait till it drops in price. In the meantime just keep working on Ocarina and/or Wind Waker, whatever you prefer. We'll keep our fingers crossed that Zelda DS isn't such a big letdown as well.