The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. This is an odd one, to be sure. Even now that I've finished it, it's hard to see a "bigger picture" view of the game and what it was trying to do. That's not good. On the other hand, the game is made up of individual dungeons that are some of the most brilliant work the series has ever seen. And by "brilliant", I don't just mean "good", I mean
brilliant. They use misdirection and humor and a shorthand for telling the player things and all sorts of other clever techniques. This game is playing on a level that, to the best of my knowledge, no game has since
Ocarina of Time.
But on many
other levels, this is no
Ocarina of Time. It had so many good ideas, but didn't follow through and really develop any of them. It had a story that kept
promising to go someplace interesting, but never did. It's confusing for new Zelda players. It doesn't reward exploration and presents many distractions that don't go anywhere interesting in themselves. And now that I've finished it, I don't feel like I've gone on a coherent game-length emotional journey, because it didn't really give me one. It just jumped from brilliant point A to brilliant point B to brilliant point C without any clear connection between them.
And yet, this game is inspiring. It's
stuffed with great ideas. It's got game design which by any standards
but Zelda's would be considered unsurpassed genius. It begins with a four-hour experiment which is fascinating to me in an academic sort of way, and it has a
magnificent ending (which has nothing at all to do with that beginning), and in between there are an astonishing number of good and fun ideas well implemented and not any bad parts. This
isn't, though I hoped it would be, the game which equals OoT. It didn't do a
lot of things I'd hoped it would, and there's a lot of missed potential. But whenever it actually set out to do something, it did it so well and cleverly I was left in awe. So it would be
unfair of me to give it any less than
5/5
