Twilight Princess
Playing Zelda: Twilight Princess on the faithful old GameCube. I think Wind Waker is a better game-more original, more bracing, more built from an organic whole-but Twilight Princess is the more fun of the two. I’ve waited a long, long time for this game to come out-my pre-order was made in July 2005-and so maybe there’s a tad bit of letdown, since my expectations were so sky-high. In a way, it reminds me of the kind of (slight) disappointment I had with the Return of the King movie-which, compared to the Two Towers (my favorite of the 3 movies), felt a bit overedited and a consolidatory gesture (edited once the other two movies were hits). Twilight Princess has a lot of amazing set pieces, similar to Return of the King. The game knows what the fans want, and is giving it to them. Wind Waker, on the other hand, with its gorgeous, seamless cell-shaded world, was much more unapologetic about what it tried to accomplish. There was a creative tension that comes through in the gameplay.
(With that said, playing Zelda on the Wii might be a whole other basket of eggs. However, the Wii version is in essence a GameCube port)
With that said, saying Twilight Princess is not as good as Wind Waker is like comparing which of the Dakotas is bigger. (And heck, I’m maybe only a fifth of the way through the game.) The graphics are mind-blowing, breathtaking, giving a sense of tactile space…pretty much everywhere.
And there’s plenty of time in the game in which Link is transformed into a wolf. Where you have scenes like this:
and this
So you really can’t go wrong with that. Plus there’s jousting, goat wrangling, plenty of devious puzzles, swordfights while walking on a ceiling (metal boots + magnetized ceiling = vertiginous good times), a stagecoach chase (ok, yes, this game is solidly in the “fantasy western” subgenre, it seems), and plenty more surprises, I’m sure, to come.
Dude, East Dakota is totally bigger.