I like the Zelda games, but I don't love the Zelda games.
I'm well versed with the series' staples - your empty bottles, your Lon Lon Ranch, your Gorons and Octoroks and such - so I do feel the nostalgic gush when those recurring elements are re-invented for each new game. And of course I enjoy the music, a quest's soundtrack that instantly identifies the shopkeeper, the fairy fountain and the dungeon. In each game, I want to fill up the inventory screen, collect all the heart pieces, and, of course, follow the threads of plot towards the annual goal of saving Princess Zelda.
But I usually find that the game works against me. As a concept, I think the Zelda franchise could use some smartening up. Once upon a time, Zelda was the vanguard of innovation in adventure games, and it ought to push a little harder rather than recycling many of the same old gimmicks.
Minish Cap is (hopefully) a transitional Zelda game. There are some clever and exciting changes to the formula... but also a whole lot of what irritates me about the Zelda series. There's a spark here, but not a brushfire.
The "Link" of Minish Cap is another green-suited young lad, typically mute and ordinary. His world, very reminscent of the seminal Zelda game Link to the Past, is the familiar Hyrule... a forest zone, a rocky zone, a water zone, etc. To keep you from exploring too quickly, you'll find barriers everywhere that you can't cross until you've found a particular item or gained a new ability or reached a special plot point. All as expected.
I named my "Link" Mitch, by the way. It amused me.
The game's major enhancement comes from a new race in Hyrule: the Minish. They are a tiny race of elf-looking meercatty things, like the happy ceramic mice your grandmother collects. Early on, you'll finds talking hat who serves as the plot device to keep you on task. Named Ezlo, he regularly urges you from zone to zone, occasionally offering reminder hints (although most of his hints are useless, as in "Gosh, Mitch! How are we going to get over those tall rocks!" Ezlo, old man, I was hoping you'd tell me that.)
Ezlo's primary function is to act as your key to the Minish world. It's not that mysterious; their world is the same as everyone else's, just at a Smurf-eye level. While standing on a magic tree stump, Ezlo can shrink you down to Minish size. The puzzles and interplay that grow out of this simple arrangement - the big world and the small world - are the game's shining moments. It's just all around well done. When you shrink (during an unsettling little ritual) you appear in the normal world as a figure only a few pixels high. Most big world enemies will ignore you unless you run into them, but you can talk to friendly animals. Tall grass - the kind that Link usually cuts down with a sword swipe - block your path, as do puddles (until you get a swimming upgrade.) So there's another way the game gets to regulate your exploring and force you into finding alternate pathways and puzzle solutions.
It doesn't take long to spot the tiny mouse holes, mushroom huts and miniature ladders all over Hyrule when you're normal sized. When you shrink, you get to enter these locations, usually resulting in a perspective shift as the game zooms in to give you a better view. The Minish will be inside, ready to chat, trade items or complain about something they need you to do for them. Like the rest of Hyrule, they're a passive-aggressive bunch.
One new Zelda secret: the Minish claim to be the ones who hide rupees and items inside pots and rocks and grass across Hyrule. So all this time, you haven't been stealing from townspeople when you smash their pots, you've been finding hidden Minish treasure! And smashing townspeoples' pots.
Once you discover the Minish, the game's pattern emerges: head to a quadrant of the map searching for a lost item, find just the right weapon you need to enter/beat the dungeon, then bugger off for the next dungeon. Inbetween the dungeons, you can roam about Hyrule (as far as the game will allow), talk to the townspeople, and kill the same keatons and octoroks and peahats over and over again.
Sometimes you just won't know what to do. That's when I get annoyed at the Zelda series. Maybe you missed something while exploring underground, or you didn't talk to the one guy in town you need to trigger an event, or maybe the one wall you need to bomb just happens to not have any visual clues that it is a bombable wall (I want to scream when they pull that little trick.) Asking Ezlo won't help. The game will cut you no favors. Either you find what you missed or you stop playing. In most cases, it's a frustation that just isn't needed.
Compared to LTTP or Wind Waker, Minish Cap does have one important contemporary addition: quest markers on your map. You'll get little check marks showing you where the next big dungeon is located... as well as little icons indicating new sidequests that you've unlocked. That is a superb feature, and one that I wished for during most of Wind Waker. I want to play the game, not feel like I'm stupid for not remembering some subtle clue that the village elder dropped two hours ago... or, heaven forbid, something that was stated the last time I picked up the game a week ago. Just give me a quest list or map markers so I can stay organized.
Most of the sidequests in Minish Cap are triggered by kinstones, one of the game's collectible items. Kinstones come in a handful of shapes that match up to other kinstones. Nearly every character in the game will, at some point, want to trade kinstones with you. If you have a matching kinstone, you'll unlock a secret. It could be a hidden door, a rare monster... or, annoyingly, a treasure chest that contains another kinstone. Whatever is unlocked could be on the complete opposite end of the world, so it is nice that the game marks your map. Because there is no way I'd remember 100-couple kinstone secrets scattered randomly across Hyrule.
Some kinstones are story-dependant and therefore unique, but most kinstones you find (or buy) are one of a handful of common types. Don't sweat saving your common kinstones. By the end of the game I had 5 to 10 of each variety sitting unused in my kinstone bag.
When Nintendo first announced Minish Cap, the idea was that you could link up with another player and trade kinstones over cable or wireless adapter. It was a cute Pokemon-style idea and the main reason why I wanted Minish Cap. However, that feature was tossed and no website or magazine article I found ever commented on its disappearance. I'll comment on that: what a rip. They pulled out what would have been a fun multiplayer connection, destroyed any concept of "rare" kinstones, and diluted the whole notion of trading kinstones down to just you and all the stupid NPCs. Now, instead of a genuine feeling of collecting something cool - and trading with real-world friends to score the ones you don't have - you have a mediocre series of fetch quests with no tough choices on what kinstones to "spend" and what ones to keep. Bleah.
Another new element that fares a little better than the whole kinstone thing is one taken directly from the shamefully underplayed Four Swords games (still collecting dust on your local gamestore shelf for GameCube and on the GBA Link to the Past re-release). As you collect the four elements to super-charge your sword, you will gain the ability to split into multiple Links. (In fact, the ultimate sword you get in the game is called the Four Sword.) Unlike the Four Swords games, the extra Links are not meant to be controlled by other players - which is another missed opportunity for a multiplayer bonus game - but instead their movements mimic your own. Their chief purpose is for puzzle solving or to further controll your exploration... early on you'll find lots of blocked paths that require two, three or four Links to pass, usually because you need the extra manpower to push a rock out of the way. They also figure in to some of the game's more ambitious boss fights.
There are some very clever boss fights, most of which take a classic Zelda enemy and tweak it to take advantage of Minish Cap's gameplay. For example, the old Aztec-looking statue head with floating attack hands guy returns... but this time you have fight him until it is safe for you to shrink yourself to Minish size, so you can climb inside him to do the real damage. There's a boss battle atop flying stingrays that requires multiple Links and is a real show-stopper. the final sequence against Vaati (no Ganondorf this time!) uses almost every trick in your book.
I actually had more trouble with the miniboss enemies than the bosses in most cases. Particularly the Darknuts, against whom I never really mastered a strategy other than to keep swinging the sword and hope to get lucky.
One item that really needs to be fixed for the next generation of Zelda games is the save function. I am easily frustrated by the current notion that saving doesn't mean "save exactly where I am," rather, it means "save the fact that I entered this zone, reset all the bad guys, but don't reset my life points or weapon ammo." Knock that crap off. You can save the game deep in the middle of a dungeon, as close as you dare to triggering a boss fight, but still be forced to fight through most of the dungeon again (with zero bombs and arrows) should you restore your save file later. I would be all for upping the difficulty of the Zelda series if they would just implement a save-anywhere-at-anytime policy. It is annoying and unfair to keep shoving players back into complicated puzzle rooms and tough sub-enemies over and over again just because they haven't figured out the trick to beating the boss. That is a decidedly 1986 way of thinking and ought to be dumped.
Now, given that the game has a ton of sidequests and hidden items, a fair amount of time-killing activities in the central town, and low-level bad guys that always respawn... wouldn't it be nice if you could keep playing even after taking down Vaati and beating the game? That would be nice, but it ain't the way it is. Once you beat Vaati, you can indeed save the game... but that save will just jump you back in time to right before you conquered the jerk. You can't beat Vaati and then head back to town to polish off the sidequests you missed or locate the kinstones you have yet to match. Replay value: reduced to zero. Credits roll; cartridge out.
But, this is still a Zelda game... made by Capcom to Nintendo's exacting standards of quality. So it's going to look nice and play nice. You never encounter any graphical glitching or cheap level deaths. Graphically, the game does some great things with perspective and has nice detailing for a GBA game. And it is nice to see the anime-inspired cel-shaded Wind Waker/Four Swords Adventures style artwork, since the next GameCube Zelda is going for a Peter Jackson LOTR look.
The problems I have with the game have less to do with the technical and more with the philosophical. Why can't I have an in-game quest list? Why can't I save wherever I choose? Why can't I change weapons without having to jump to the pause screen? Why can't I keep playing after finishing the main storyline? Why is there no multiplayer mode of any kind?
That's why I hope this is a transitional Zelda game. There's plenty of new(ish) meat here, but it is buried under the same old pre-conceived notions. Not that I expect the shrinking to be in every Zelda game published forthwith; I was surprised to see the Four Swords stuff make an appearance. Just that this series, especially any future 2D versions, needs to drop what is holding it back. Minish Cap has fun new gameplay elements and Wind Waker-style imagery grafted onto the support structure of Link to the Past... and while that is all proven to work, the game really should have been allowed to stand on its own. It's time to let Link to the Past's unforgiving restrictions in the past and bring the Zelda games wholly into the modern era.
