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| Oh, Link, you magnificent elf-guy-thing you. |
For those not familiar with Nintendo's best known game series, the ever-present Zelda titles usually are cut from the same cloth of the typical fantasy genre game - a lone character involved in a 'coming of age' story loses a person close to them, and their quest to return their world to some sort of normalcy results in a 'save the world' fight against a supremely evil being. Oh, and this one character (normally known by the name 'Link') has been destined for this fight since the beginning of Time.
There, you're all caught up with the Zelda franchise. Congratulations.
The game has it's own terminology and play type of it's own, of course - and a bunch of wonderful execution of that game play. Picking up and throwing bombs which somehow grow from plants or otherwise are discovered within tall grass makes me wonder if Link has perhaps been wandering through a suddenly quiescent war zone with unexploded IED's scattered everywhere. Chopping down grass or trees to find rupees (the games ever present diamond shaped currency) is omnipresent, and catching fairies in a bottle to serve you later has me looking over my shoulder for a PETA spokesman.
The good: The story is excellent, though, and I can't fault the art direction - even with the Wii's underpowered graphical abilities (in comparison to the Xbox360 and the Cell-based PS3) the backgrounds and characters are beautifully done. The game conveys emotion brilliantly for the primary characters (Zelda, especially), and for once Link isn't some vaguely spiritless automaton when bad things happen (and they do). The music is straight out awesome - you know that it's effective if you're humming it over the next few days. If you like the music, then get the gold pack (if you can still find it) - it comes with the music on CD.
The okay: The control method in the game has caused some controversy with players - some people hate it, while others have apparently declared their undying love for them as they stand. For myself, I view the controls with the new Motion+ as interesting (this is one of the games for the Wii where the updated Wiimote is required to play - you can't get past the intro screen without it) and believe they were well thought out - enemies are smarter and more agile, thus fighting them requires specific thrusts and slashes (for instance, an enemy blocks slashes from the right and above with a sword and shield, requiring you to attack from the left), and when multiple enemies are involved this can be challenging. Another 'okay' goes to the side quest lines in the game - offered as a method to increase playability and lengthen the games' duration (almost similar to achievements for the Xbox/PS3, although there's no record for other players to see what you've collected), they normally reward those who do them with money (which can be used to purchase various items and upgrades) or a 'heart piece' - after collecting four pieces, you get a full heart (which is the games method of graphically displaying the available amount of health you have). Some are fun, others are just plain annoying.
The bad: The controls - even though I like them as they are, with Motion+ I find a small twitch will cause me to execute something I really don't want to happen (a sword stroke when running for my life, or jumping off the edge of a sky city accidentally...whoops). And as always for the Wii, the graphic fidelity - running at 480p might have been acceptable five years ago..but not any more. Hopefully Nintendo makes the Wii-U version at a full 1080p/3D (if it's anything like Uncharted 3's 3D, it could be eye-popping, and more than enough reason to pick up a Wii-U when it's released). And finally, like all Zelda games - the repetitiveness and rehashed items from previous Zelda games - namely, having to find an item to enter a new dungeon, then using an item in that dungeon to go back to previous ones, ad nauseum.
Overall summary? I'm enjoying it - but I think that it should move away from the same design that it's executed since the original Legend of Zelda for the NES. Sure, it's proven to be a license to print money since that period (except for the horrible CD-i releases), but at some point it makes the franchise too predictable. How many times do I want to play the same game? I'm not suggesting an MMO or even a multiplayer version of the game - there can only be one Master Sword/Hylian Shield, and one Hero of Time, after all - the 'upgrade' system in Z:SS is a small update, and one which should have been more fleshed out. A single-player Zelda-based Oblivion, perhaps?
I'd rate this a solid 8.5 out of 10. If you're a Zelda fan, that's nothing to sneer at, but this doesn't knock the top rated Zelda game (Ocarina of Time from the N64) off it's lofty perch.
