Twilight Princess: A Special Game I Wish I Could Change | PART 1

07 Jun, 2024

There are so many movies, songs, books, and video games that create memories that stay with me forever. Just thinking about one of them can bring me back to how I felt in the moment I first experienced it. The Legend of Zelda is a series of video games that has consistently created those kinds of memories in me. Out of every game in the series, it’s Twilight Princess that left me with some of the most unique feelings.

After all, Twilight Princess takes a slightly darker tone than the other Zelda games. And as fate would have it, I was in middle school when I first played it—truly the perfect time to get the most out of such a game.

Twilight Princess was actually the game that piqued my interest in the Zelda series in the first place. I knew of Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf from Super Smash Bros. Melee, but I had never really seen their games—except for this one time when my friend was playing Majora’s Mask. Even though I had a GameCube, I can’t remember my friends ever telling me to get Wind Waker—and I’m a bit disappointed about that, looking back. However, in 2007, I was at this kid’s house and he was playing Twilight Princess on GameCube. And this sparked something in me.

Growing up as a shy, book-reading kid, a bit of love for fantasy had inevitably found its way into my heart. And the glimpses I got of this game seemed extremely exciting because of that.

In the game, Link could travel this big world and fight goblin-lookin monsters using his sword and shield. He could transform into a wolf. He had a weird-looking companion who spoke some crazy-sounding language. There were other weird characters he could talk to, as well, and there were spooky ghosts at night who wielded scythes.

Also, there was snowboarding. Rad.

You would think that at that point, I made it my quest to obtain this game for myself, but that’s not what happened. I did not get to actually play Twilight Princess until Christmas 2008. But that was actually for the best. I had to get a proper education before then, after all.

Ocarina of Time

For many years, one of the most popular answers to the question “Best game of all time?” has been The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Which makes sense because this game is amazing.

Here’s the thing about my gaming background: I didn’t really get to play what people today would consider to be “the classics” as a young kid, other than some arcade classics we had on a Windows CD-ROM, and Roller Coaster Tycoon—that’s a classic, right? Other than that, my gaming time consisted of playing Backyard Sports games, license-based titles—SpongeBob and Harry Potter, mostly—and free online games. Most of those were Flash games, though there was that one period where everyone in my class was playing Runescape, so I felt like I had to try it too (it didn’t take). Eventually I got a GameCube and got into Smash Bros. and Mario Kart (and I also played the actually good version of SpongeBob Battle for Bikini Bottom instead of the cruddy PC version¹). But like I said earlier, I never played Zelda, and I didn’t even play Mario Sunshine.

However, when I got a Wii in 2007, I started to get interested in playing older Nintendo games. I knew the Wii Shop Channel had old games available for download, and that seemed very cool, so I had to try it. I had kind of a curiosity for NES and N64 games based on past encounters with those systems (yet I never did encounter a SNES as a kid for whatever reason). So, once we got the Wii connected to our Wi-Fi (which wasn’t until months after getting the console), I was eager to download some old games and whatever else they had on the Wii Shop Channel.

And that’s why I didn’t play Ocarina of Time until 2008.²

When my younger brother decided to download Ocarina of Time (or maybe it was me? I can’t remember whose idea it was), I honestly thought playing a Zelda game for the N64 could basically be just as cool as playing Twilight Princess was. When I actually saw the game, I quickly changed my mind, because it looked old.

Eventually though, I seriously got into Ocarina of Time. And I’ll tell you why: the game is absolutely magical. If it was the desire to explore an epic fantasy world that made me interested in Zelda in the first place, Ocarina of Time delivered on that promise to an astounding extent.

It may not sound that impressive today, but the day/night cycle did so much to make me feel immersed in the game world. You’re traveling through this big open field, when the sun starts to go down. The drawbridge leading to the castle town goes up, preventing your entry. And soon, as you wander off the path, skeletons begin to burst from the ground. Never before had I seen such a dynamic game world.

Exploring Hyrule in Ocarina of Time is wonderful fun. The game tells you early on to go to the castle, but you can really go wherever you want, to an extent. There’s a peaceful village, there’s a river, there’s a ranch, and there’s this desert where these tall ladies tell you to go away. There are also plenty of secrets—holes in the ground where you’ll find some weird, surprising stuff.

There’s a level of open-ended-ness to the game’s structure that I really appreciated back then and still do today. When I was in the Forest Temple, I just ditched it at one point to go check out Death Mountain. And I got further than you’d expect for doing things in the “wrong order.” Eventually I had to go back to the Forest Temple, of course, but going off-track felt like taking a useful break.

Ocarina of Time’s story is simple yet incredibly effective. In the beginning your quest is pretty simple: obtain the three spiritual stones so that you can stop Ganondorf, who’s apparently plotting some evil stuff. You meet all these characters, and you encounter some troubles, but things usually seem to work out.

But then, you accomplish your goal—and everything goes wrong.

You wake up seven years later, and when you step outside, the peaceful world you knew is in ruins. What a devastating moment. What’s happened to all the people from back then? I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more motivated to beat an evil boss than I did in Ocarina of Time.

Though my initial reaction to it wasn’t all that positive, did Ocarina of Time end up appealing to the same part of my brain that seeing Twilight Princess did? Yes, I’d say so. In the game, I was on an epic quest in a world I felt immersed in. Yes, the graphics looked old, but the game’s overall atmosphere was stunning.

Audio is definitely one of the biggest factors in creating that atmosphere. In Hyrule Field you’ll hear adventurous music encouraging you to press onward during the day, while at night there is no music, just the sounds of birds and insects. Dungeons, of course, call for a drastically different mood. The music for the Forest Temple is ominous and haunting and made me wonder if those ghosts in there were waiting just around the corner—yet somehow this music is beautiful at the same time. The Forest Temple was where the game basically told me, “We’re taking off the kid gloves from now on,” and that sense of fear and wonder I felt from the music really drove that home.

Speaking of the Forest Temple, man there are some crazy locations in this game. (This is spoilery if you never played the game, but come on, play the game). There’s a weird little dungeon beneath a well, there are zombies within a tomb, there’s a huge temple at the bottom of a lake, there’s a temple where Hyrule’s royal family apparently hid their dark deeds—yes, there’s a lot of interesting stuff below ground level, clearly. And then there’s this huge temple in the desert, but you have to cross through an endless sandstorm by following a ghost’s guidance to get there.

Somehow Hyrule in this game feels, to me, big and small at the same time. It didn’t take long for other games to build far larger 3D worlds than this one. But there are so many interesting places and little secrets in Ocarina of Time that I think coming back to the game to explore is always going to be fun.

One particular little aspect of the game world I appreciate is the effort to maintain a sense of connection between areas. The most obvious example is how, when you climb Death Mountain, you can look down from a certain spot and see Kakariko Village, like you would expect to. It’s yet another realistic touch in a game full of em.

Yes, between the sound, the world, the story, the art style, and the characters, Ocarina of Time was an epic fantasy adventure that would sear itself upon gamers’ memories forever.

Now what does that have to do with Twilight Princess? Well, a lot.

The Wind Waker Graphics Backlash

See, when Nintendo GameCube came around, Zelda fans were super hyped for a new Zelda game with cutting-edge graphics. At the Space World expo in 2000, Nintendo showcased the GameCube’s graphics with a brief movie of Link and Ganondorf battling. The characters looked like their Ocarina of Time selves, but the quality was much higher. The fans went wild (I assume).

But then in 2001, Nintendo showed what they were cooking for the actual next Zelda game. It didn’t look like that tech demo.

The graphics of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker upset a lot of fans, especially in North America. People thought this cartoon style was childish. It didn’t help that a lot of gamers thought Nintendo as a whole and their new purple console were childish too. The more “realistic” tone of Ocarina of Time felt grown-up, but this little cartoon Link? This is for kids.

With hindsight, that whole conversation looks ridiculous, because Wind Waker is a gorgeous, wonderful game. But at the time, the sentiment of this being “kiddie” Zelda did seem to legitimately affect the game’s sales (but not its sails). So, at Nintendo, they said, “Well shoot. Better give the Americans what they want.”

In summer 2004, Nintendo held a press conference at E3,³ as usual. Towards the end of the show, a trailer started playing with familiar music. Conan the Barbarian music, yes, but it was familiar for another reason—it had been used for the TV commercial for Ocarina of Time. Fans soon saw a horse galloping across a field. Could it be?! Riding atop the horse was Link, looking all grown up once again. The crowd erupted in deafening cheers.

When Nintendo started developing the look of Link for this new GameCube game, which would eventually be called Twilight Princess, they consulted with the North America side, who pretty much straight-up told them: “What the fans want is the Link from Ocarina of Time.”⁴

It was never solely about seeing a familiar-looking Link, though. I think fans wanted to see Nintendo compete in a gaming landscape that had become more adult-oriented. That’s not to say most people were asking for graphic violence in Zelda. But this new game was, like Ocarina of Time, presenting itself as a challenging and epic experience. And with the more “realistic” graphics, it was something people could show off to their friends with pride.

I’m pretty sure the people who care the most about whether a game looks grown-up or not are like twelve years old, though.

But that’s the thing! When I was like twelve, Twilight Princess looked insanely cool! It looked grown-up and serious, yet also a little weird! And it was even rated T for Teen!

And of course, now that I had played Ocarina of Time (didn’t even know it existed a year ago, but that’s a long time when you’re a kid), I loved how the game looked like a modern version of it. I remember perusing the website—and it was one of those interactive Flash-based websites that were common back then, even though they took a long time to load on our Internet—and I saw a video of there that showed, if I remember correctly, Link going to Zora’s Domain. I saw the shield on his back and I was like WHOOOOA IT’S THE HYLIAN SHIELD FROM OCARINA OF TIME BUT IT’S SO SHINY NOW.

Majora’s Mask was a game that looked like Ocarina of Time but was smaller, length-wise, and had even crazier time travel stuff going on, Wind Waker was a colorful seafaring adventure that really looked unlike any other game out at the time, but Twilight Princess looked like the true successor to Ocarina of Time.

The game’s director, Eiji Aonuma, noted the similarities of the game to Ocarina of Time as well: “The atmosphere in this game reminds me a lot of Ocarina of Time. That game's atmosphere really was in a class of its own and I'm sure fans of the series will agree.”

This game was gonna be BIG. And I mean that in terms of popularity. But also, in a literal sense, the game world is quite big.

The Feeling of a “Realistic” Fantasy

Why do people like the feeling of “realistic” Zelda or other fantasy, anyway? I think a big part of it is that it lets you feel a sense of danger which just amplifies the excitement.

In a more whimsical fantasy story, it doesn’t feel like anything truly horrible could happen. Objectively, Link in Wind Waker goes through some crazy stuff. But look at his cartoon face. How can you be sad with a face like that? This is not meant to be derogatory towards Wind Waker, of course, but to explain the difference in tone.

In Twilight Princess, the colors are darker, the music is overall a little less bright and cheery. Monsters even look a bit nastier. Like Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask before it, it feels like there is real danger in this world—and that’s exciting.

As you may have noticed, I grew up in the 2000s. When you talk about fantasy from that era, obviously there was Harry Potter, which I got into from a pretty young age. But you know what else came out around that time? Lord of the Rings, of course.

The first of Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy released in 2001, but all three of them were rated PG-13 because of the violence, so I didn’t watch them until I was a bit older.

But I mean, not being able to watch them because they were too intense for kids only made them seem cooler in the meantime. The only random glimpses I got of the movies before actually watching them were: one, the part where the Fellowship was in the Mines of Moria and the orcs were about to break through the door—and two: uhhhhh, I mean, I saw Gollum one time. He seemed pretty weird.

When I finally did start watching the movies, I was like, “Yeah, let’s see some fighting!” Most of the runtime of Fellowship is not fighting, but even if I was sometimes bored, I certainly did appreciate the world and the characters’ travels through it.

Now, even though Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are both within the fantasy genre, Harry Potter is more kid-oriented (at least until the later books and movies). So what is it about The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy that makes it a bit too intense for kids? I mean, literally, it’s mostly because of violence. But why have violence in a fantasy story anyway? Because it can help a story about a dangerous adventure feel grounded, and it helps establish the stakes, both of which ultimately make the story feel more exciting. Fellowship of the Ring is mostly pretty good at feeling grounded, I think.⁵ Most of the characters aren’t wizards or insanely good fighters, and that means when they encounter enemies, they have to fight with the sword or run away. They generally don’t get out of problems via unexplained magic. And even the character who is a wizard has a lot of trouble in Fellowship, to say the least! So anytime the group encounters a new enemy, you can’t be sure they’ll make it out unfazed.

So basically, a tale of epic adventure will greatly benefit from having some parts where the characters are up against such powerful or terrifying enemies that you, as the audience, feel nervous and start to wonder how the heroes will survive.

Every story is going to have a certain tone to it based on how you tell it. The Lord of the Rings movies took everything seriously. That doesn’t mean characters never tell jokes or anything, but it means emotions are played straight: when there’s a sad moment, you better believe the music is going to be sad, and no characters are going to undercut it with a joke! The same goes for moments of triumph, or romance. Now compare it to a fantasy movie like the recent Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which I really enjoyed. Tonally, it is incredibly different from Fellowship of the Ring, being a comedy, yet it still manages to be a genuinely exciting adventure, too.

And again, tone is why the world of Wind Waker might feel safer than the world of Ocarina of Time—even though Wind Waker has similar types of enemies and a backstory where the old world was drowned by the gods with only a few survivors. It might sound dark on paper, but the experience of playing the game is anything but dreary. When I think of Wind Waker, I think about the happy music on Windfall Island and all the funny characters there. I also think of the boss battles—they’re a lot of fun, and they’re big, but even they feel a lot more upbeat and whimsical compared to bosses in Ocarina of Time.

In 2024, we should all know by now that there are many different ways to make a Zelda game. The “realistic” style is one of them, and it’s always going to have its fans. Can you blame us? Aiming for a level of realism in fantasy, as contradictory as it may sound, can truly up the tension of a story. It’s not just about having so-called “good” graphics (and let’s be real, Twilight Princess’ art style aged so much worse than Wind Waker’s—but that doesn’t mean it has no value).

So how did the Zelda team go about creating a tone that would satisfy those hungry for the realistic style?

I mean, the graphics is the obvious answer. There’s more to it than that, but let’s start with the graphics.

Tone Through Aesthetic and Gameplay

Obviously, Twilight Princes looks completely different from its predecessor, Wind Waker. Characters look a lot more like real humans, and the color palette is far from vivid.

I’m gonna be honest: even in 2009, I thought that some aspects of the game world were kind of ugly. But there truly is beauty to the art style, and if you could just redo a lot of the assets and lighting to meet the potential of modern hardware, that beauty would fully reveal itself.

Rough edges aside, the important thing is, the game looks like Nintendo’s version of a dark fantasy, and that’s what I think is so cool about it.

It’s not like fun and whimsy are gone. But kooky characters in a cartoon and kooky characters in a more photorealistic style give off a very different impression. In Wind Waker, I can see a weird guy and laugh. In Twilight Princess, a weird guy might make me say, “What a weirdo. That’s kind of disturbing, actually.” I mean, it’s still funny, but just different.

By the same token, with this art style, you feel like there’s a chance you could see some real creepy crud in this game. Heck, the villain you see early on in the game, Zant, is pretty dang creepy-looking himself. As are the shadow beasts, and the giant spiders.

Link, meanwhile, looks like pretty much the coolest version of Link ever. I mean he’s still wearing that green tunic, yet he makes it look cool—it helps that his clothes have realistic touches, like the pouches he wears, that make them look practical. Link will also sometimes swing his sword a few times as a celebration when you win a fight. I always thought that was a lot of fun and would be disappointed when I’d press the sheathe button and he didn’t do it. Link may be just a young man, but he seems like he’s ready for action from the moment the game starts, and that’s pretty exciting.

Now, you can’t talk about tone without mentioning the music. The Zelda series has an incredible history of memorable music, and Twilight Princess adds some absolute classics to the pile. Faron Woods is one of my favorite pieces: it’s mysterious, yet peaceful (though my enjoyment is slightly held back by how synth-y it sounds, which is not something I noticed when I was younger). Hyrule Field has a beautiful, grand orchestral sound and changes depending on whether you’re on horseback or not. The song is shouting, “Go Link! Go and do hero stuff!” Yet I’ve never found it to be a totally happy tune. The introductory trumpet “fanfare” sounds like they cut out a phrase from the original Zelda theme and turned it into a minor-scale version that sounds absolutely intriguing.

And the battle theme? Ooh, I like that one. It’s creepy. It sounds dangerous and urgent.

I also gotta mention the cutscenes. Games in general were becoming more movie-like at the time, and this was no exception. While Wind Waker’s cutscenes often had characters mostly standing still as you read their dialogue, in many of Twilight Princess’s cutscenes, characters’ mouths move, and their faces and body language are very expressive. There still isn’t voice acting beyond the little grunts and whatnot, but man, this game feels a lot more cinematic than any Zelda before it.

That cinematic feel is backed by an action-packed, exciting story. There are some really memorable sequences in this game, like when King Bulblin, who’s like a big goblin riding on a giant boar, suddenly storms into Kakariko Village and you have to chase him down in Hyrule Field. There’s this moment in the middle of the game where Midna gets injured and you have to rush her over to Princess Zelda—and me playing this for the first time as a 13-year-old, I am desperate to make it there as quickly as possible. I’m spamming that A button! The story of Twilight Princess may not be considered one of gaming’s all-time best, but I really enjoyed it, at least when I was a youngster.

The visuals, music, and overall presentation give Twilight Princess an unforgettable tone that feels darker than other Zelda games. But this is a video game, and certainly the gameplay itself contributes to the tone. A section ago, I said that much of the appeal of a more realistic form of fantasy is the sense of danger you feel from it. For a video game, I would expect the gameplay itself to contribute to that feeling.

For example, I feel like getting killed by a weak-looking enemy early on in Dark Souls sets the tone for the experience. It’s a brutal world, and you’re going to have to learn how to survive. On the other hand, when you’re playing a Batman Arkham game and you can easily counter multiple enemies right at the start, what you learn is that you’re Batman and you’re very powerful.

The ease at which you can defeat enemies is just one part of gameplay, of course. So let’s talk about the game design of Twilight Princess.

Continued in Part 2