ZELDA: TWILIGHT
PRINCESS HD
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Price: £30 Standard, £42 with
Amiibo (Amazon)
Platform: Wii U
ZELDA: TWILIGHT PRINCESS HD
O
20
n a warm day in
summer 2005,
this magazine’s Overlord and I took a trip
to the Victoria Embankment in Nottingham. It was the yearly
Riverside Festival, and
though there was much
in the way to do - street
theatre, craft fairs - we
had our eyes set on
only one thing. Picking
as our landmark the
giant inflatable Pikachu (the one you’ll no
doubt have seen online
with the questionably
placed entrance flap)
we marched towards
a line snaking back
around a hundred
people in between
metal barriers.
This line, with a
45-minute dollop of
queueing on top, led
us to two televisions,
set up on stands by
roller banners and
GRAPHICS: 6
GAMEPLAY: 9
SCENARIO: 7
CONTENT: 9
bored-looking teenagers with leaflets. But to
us, we might as well
have died and gone to
heaven. As we took up
the GameCube controllers in front of us,
and began to chase
Moblins across Hyrule
Field, we disappeared
from that city park and
were transported to
what was, at the time,
probably one of the
most amazing games
we’d ever seen.
The Legend of Zelda:
Twilight Princess hasn’t
had such a great appraisal from hindsight.
It’s generally considered the worse of the
two GameCube Zelda games (and for all
its Wii version sold,
it was built and designed for the ‘Cube).
Criticisms have ranged
from being an inspiration for every furry
7.8
who was waiting for
an excuse to get their
claws into Zelda, to
having long slogs as a
wolf in the early parts
of the game, to being
generally brown, full
of bloom and full of
gloom.
All valid, perhaps Wind Waker is undeniably the superior game
- but Twilight Princess
has serious merit. Nintendo obviously thinks
so too - hence this most
recent re-release for
the Wii U.
"IT’S UP
THERE AS
ONE OF THE
BETTER 3D
ENTRIES"
The first and most
obvious update is to
the graphics, and here
we see an immediate
red flag waving. The
cel-shaded style of
Wind Waker is fairly
timeless, and meant
that an update to that
game could look genuinely modern without
too many changes. But
here, while the textures
and resolution have
been updated, the
models have stayed as
they were on release in
2006. That’s a problem.
It may be one of the
few instances of a resolution boost not being
to a game’s graphical advantage. The
low-polygon models
and Weetabix hair
stand out all the more
when presented in crisp
1080p. Given Nintendo have had years to
work on this, an update
to even the main character’s model might not
have gone amiss. It’s
fortunate that the game
looks relatively good
to begin with, and the
combination of factors
levels out to the high
end of decent, but it
doesn’t reflect well on
Nintendo’s level of effort.
The plot changes little. You’re still running
around Hyrule trying
to de-evil various locations before getting
hold of the Master
Sword, then taking
on a quite impressive
number of dungeons
(including the brilliantly
inspired Yeti-occupied
mansion that forms the
ROBIN WILDE
ice