The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a superb new installment in the venerable series.
The Bad: Wiimote speaker sounds tinny; no voice acting; score is not done by orchestra; ultimately a Gamecube port and not built ground-up for Wii; too easy for the hardcore.
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess still stands as the best game to get on the Nintendo Wii. It is a great new installment of a long-lasting series, and is probably the best installment as well.
Twilight Princess's strength doesn't come in innovation, even though it's on the Wii. Instead, it's a fairly conservative game, except it does everything spectacularly well. While there are a few new additions, in the relative scope of the game, they're fairly minor, nevertheless, this game is basically everything cool about Zelda jam-packed into a 40-hour quest.
The gameplay will be familiar for Zelda fans, with a similar mix of puzzles and action, all the while using various items you pick up along the way. Perhaps the biggest concern was how well it would translate to the Wii. In a word, it's great. The Wii shows it's ability to do traditional style gaming with Zelda, and I would argue that it's in fact a little better than the Gamecube version in terms of controls. That said, the game wasn't built ground-up for the Wii, and it's easy to get a sense of lost potential with Twilight Princess in terms of the possibilities inherent in the system. The Wiimote might be used as your sword, but it's more analagous to an interactive button press since it doesn't map the movement. Nevertheless, it's more precise to aim the bow, boomerang, grappling hook etc. with the Wii and more fun, and in addition, even if the sword control isn't one-to-one (or even vaguely motion-mapped) it's still more fun than just pressing a button and is still just as precise.
The visuals when you're not in the Twilight Realm hearken back to the well-loved look of Ocarina of time. This Link is far older than the Link in the previous Zelda installment, the Wind Waker, and the more realistic style is accomplished excellently within the Wii's (really the Gamecube's) capabilities. That said, it's not without it's blemishes when compared to true next-gen visuals, but the art style helps to distract. This is particularly evident in the Twilight Realm, where Link turns into a wolf. As a wolf you play quite similarly as you do as a human, except you do have a couple of added abilities, but you can't use items. The real difference is in the art style. The Twilight Realm is stunningly beautiful and stylized, and extremely tough to describe. It's best to just look at screenshots and let your jaw drop.
While in the Twilight Realm, an impish Twilight dweller named Midna will ride you, and she will also later accompany you into the light realm (though not visibly). While she adds some abilities to your wolf form, and later on allows you to teleport around the map, her chief function is for the story. The story is perhaps the biggest break in Twilight Princess from any other Zelda, it is dark and theatrical, and extremely well done, with Midna at the center of it. Cinematic is generally a good term to describe Twilight Princess, in the game, they strive (and succeed) to achieve a scope of which there has never been in a Zelda before. This translates to the gameplay itself as well: the map is massive (the size of Hyrule Field is often cited as an example) and the main quest is quite lengthy as well, spanning at least forty hours. This number can balloon if you are obsessed about finding every secret, however, there's not much incentive to do so, you'll typically have plenty of rupees and enough hearts to survive as well. In fact, though some of the puzzles are deviously clever, in terms of combat the game will be disappointingly easy for the hardcore crowd, and even some of the less ardent. The boss fights in particular are this way, though they are often epic in their size they tend to be somewhat easy.
The meat of the game is really in the puzzles in the various dungeons, which is good since they are extremely well-designed. No puzzle is unfair, they're just clever. You always have all your devices available to you that are necessary to complete the task. So even if you're lost or confused, it's just because you haven't made some sort of logic connection. This means that the game will probably make everybody playing it feel incredibly dumb at least a couple of times, but there's a lot of satisfaction in figuring out these puzzles, as they're both well-designed without being illogical in their methods.
Most of the caveats about the game will come with the sound. The Wiimote speaker is used frequently, but it occasionally sounds tinny and tends to annoy in these cases. It's a crime that the well-written script isn't voiced, it doesn't particularly matter for Link, who doesn't talk (as usual), but the rest of the characters and the script in general would benefit from the additional characterization. Another big complaint is that the typically superb score isn't performed by an orchestra, instead trying to recreate the sound with what sounds like MIDI keyboards. The latter two are most annoying, particularly since they seem to clash with the kind of majesty this game attempts to achieve.
Sound problems aside, Twilight Princess is just a class act from start to finish. It might be very long for an action-adventure, but the bigger shocker is that there is no filler - it's extremely well-paced, with little backtracking in the forty-plus hours of gameplay inside. It's like I said earlier - everything cool about Zelda in the previous games, jam-packed into one great package. Plus more - you'll fight while on horseback, you'll sumo wrestle, herd goats, etc. The new cinematic flair to the game and the gorgeously realized new realm only add to the impressive achievement. While it's not enough to make you buy a Wii if you own a Gamecube (the Wii version is only slightly better), if you do buy a Wii, then this is the first game to get.