It's a damn shame too. At first, I did not like the time aspect, but playing it again I've grown to like it as it allows more depth in world interaction. It's funny seeing how a simple event like getting that Inn reservation forces a poor Goron to sleep outside.
Yup. I've never understood how people can dislike the mechanic, MM is basically Ground Hog's Day: The Game. I guess people just don't realize that you can slow down time or just never the game a chance in the first place.
It's easily the most reactive Zelda game there is. Not in the sense that there's a million different ways to accomplish a goal like Deus Ex, more in that it's very dense with content that you'll only really see if you're looking for it or stalking a townsperson. People act differently not only based on some of the quests you've finished in some cases, but also depending on what mask you're wearing and what time of day it is. Go visit Romani Ranch on Day 3 without completing the UFO quest and the little girl is basically a husk. When a thief steals a bomb bag from an old woman, you can either slash the stolen bag free or just blow up the fucker with an arrow (which does end the quest immediately, but is funny to do). There's even the little touches like the slutty girl who runs the treasure chest mini game charging the roguish, teen heart-throb Zora Link less rupees than she does fat doofus Goron Link :patriot:
What did you think of Twilight Princess?
My feelings on TP are pretty much 'meh'. I only played through it once, and never had the desire to really touch it again. I was absolutely psyched for it when it was announced and watched the trailers obsessively. I mean, who could forget?
I'm not the toughest critic, but I don't think the game that was released was 'bad' per se. It just didn't live up to the hype and really failed to do anything as exemplary as the other games in the series. Most of my complaints about the game you'll probably find repeated by other people on the internet.
For one, yeah, as you said, the combat was really fucking easy. As an experiment, I remember standing still and taking the blows from the last boss to see how long it would take for him to kill me (not including fairies, even). It ended up taking something like a 1.5-2.5 minutes? Ridiculous. I don't know how inept Nintendo thinks its playerbase is, but that's a pretty far cry from the punishing difficulty in Zelda 1/2. Which wouldn't be so bad in itself, but you very rarely get anything but heart pieces and sword techniques from uncovering secrets. What's the point of all these sword moves when you practically can't die already? I remember the big, secret reward in the game being a suit of armor that drains rupees instead of hearts. Just what I needed.
One of the big things I liked about OoT and MM was sequence breaking and the neat little tricks you could do. In OoT you could grab a heart piece in the windmill early by tagging it with the boomerang. You could grab a heart piece above Goron's Lair by backflipping off a railing. I always had the Biggoron Sword before starting the Forest Temple, just like I always had Bunny Ears by the first dungeon in MM. TP seemed too gated in comparison. You were always cut off by one barrier or another before you could proceed, maybe I'm mistaken but it seemed much more linear than its predecessors. It's the Metroid Fusion of Zelda games.
It wasn't all bad, or anything. But it lacked some of the excitement in exploration that some of the previous entries had. At the start of every zone, you need to go through that dumb bug-catching fetch quest as the Wolf. God help you if you can't find that one last bug, and your reward every time is simply 'now you can play in this zone'. The game was full of cool items and neat ideas that weren't really fully realized. The ball and chain was badass, but where was it used? Double Hookshots? The Spinner? The hawk-summoning reed? All of those items were cool in their own right, but you never really used them outside of dungeons you find them. It's like every item was the kinda neat but ultimately pointless Ice Arrows from OoT.
For what it's worth, the game had some good set pieces and I loved it aesthetically. TP Link is a straight up baller, and I played the shit out of him in Smash Bros. The Twlight Realm itself is cool. The bow and arrow was really fun to use, I remember shooting the pupil of one of those eye-laser monsters through the small hole in a swinging guillotine. The horseback sequence in the last boss fight was neat, as was the Western-themed shootout. But ultimately, it was a pretty big disappointment to me and I honestly haven't kept up with the series as much since. I think Twilight Princess needed its own Majora's Mask, instead of the direction the series has taken. I also think it would've turned out better if they hadn't wasted dev time on the Wii version and just kept it on the Gamecube.
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