![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Twilight Princess, Part Two
Sep. 5th, 2015 09:17 amI'm having a lot of fun with Twilight Princess.
I'm not sure how this is possible, but each set piece is more fantastic than the next. The dungeons are all utterly brilliant. I don't think I'm going to beat the game and then immediately go back and play it again (which I've done with Ocarina of Time several times), but I'm definitely planning on revisiting it within the next twelve months.
Still, the opening is rough. It turns out that the whole Ordon Village sequence was an early gameplay demo that Miyamoto insisted be put back into the game much later in development, so I suppose this makes sense. Once Twilight Princess is done forcing all manner of strange one-off control schemes onto the player (like, now you're fishing, now you're flying a hawk, now you're fighting on horseback, now you're sumo wrestling) and actually settles into being a Zelda game, it works amazingly well.
I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out the story, though. I know Zelda games aren't about their stories, but usually simplicity and tight narrative control work together to make the plots at least halfway intelligible. Twilight Princess is trying to be a mystery, but there are too many dead ends and not enough clues. To make matters worse, because this is a Zelda game, the tiny chunks of exposition that do occur pass very quickly and don't immediately fit into any larger narrative.
To give an example, I'm not quite sure what's going on with Link's childhood friend Ilia. She and Link are both kidnapped by the same (adorable) pig-riding orc at the beginning of the game. Link, being the hero, rescues himself. Not everyone can be the hero, but Ilia still manages to escape captivity. By the time Link reaches her, however, she has lost her memory, including her memory of what happened during her abduction. The game never makes more than a cursory effort to fill in the gaps; and, when Ilia recovers her memory as a result of Link's heroic efforts, she goes from being the spirited and adventurous young woman she was at the start of the game to being all like "I will always wait for you Link."
Twilight Princess is not misogynistic or sexist, so I think there's something more than typical Skyward Sword style damseling going on here. More specifically, I think the game is trying to demonstrate the appeal of innocence to the player, with Ilia being positioned as the moral center from which Link can't deviate too far if he doesn't want to be corrupted in the same way that Midna and Zelda are corrupted. Ilia represents what Link has that neither Midna nor Zelda will ever have – a supportive community that sees him as a person and not as a figurehead. Regardless, there's no need for Ilia's character to be so passive. So not only does the player never figure out the finer details of the plot surrounding her, but the entire set of scenarios involving her is also thematically jarring in that innocence cannot equate to passivity in Link's particular case. If the developers were attempting to suggest that Link, by acting, is abandoning his innocence, they could have figured out a better way to do it.
I've put thirty hours into Twilight Princess, and I'm guessing I've got about ten more hours to go. It's going to take me a week or two longer to finish the game. I desperately wish I had more time to spend with it.
I'm not sure how this is possible, but each set piece is more fantastic than the next. The dungeons are all utterly brilliant. I don't think I'm going to beat the game and then immediately go back and play it again (which I've done with Ocarina of Time several times), but I'm definitely planning on revisiting it within the next twelve months.
Still, the opening is rough. It turns out that the whole Ordon Village sequence was an early gameplay demo that Miyamoto insisted be put back into the game much later in development, so I suppose this makes sense. Once Twilight Princess is done forcing all manner of strange one-off control schemes onto the player (like, now you're fishing, now you're flying a hawk, now you're fighting on horseback, now you're sumo wrestling) and actually settles into being a Zelda game, it works amazingly well.
I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out the story, though. I know Zelda games aren't about their stories, but usually simplicity and tight narrative control work together to make the plots at least halfway intelligible. Twilight Princess is trying to be a mystery, but there are too many dead ends and not enough clues. To make matters worse, because this is a Zelda game, the tiny chunks of exposition that do occur pass very quickly and don't immediately fit into any larger narrative.
To give an example, I'm not quite sure what's going on with Link's childhood friend Ilia. She and Link are both kidnapped by the same (adorable) pig-riding orc at the beginning of the game. Link, being the hero, rescues himself. Not everyone can be the hero, but Ilia still manages to escape captivity. By the time Link reaches her, however, she has lost her memory, including her memory of what happened during her abduction. The game never makes more than a cursory effort to fill in the gaps; and, when Ilia recovers her memory as a result of Link's heroic efforts, she goes from being the spirited and adventurous young woman she was at the start of the game to being all like "I will always wait for you Link."
Twilight Princess is not misogynistic or sexist, so I think there's something more than typical Skyward Sword style damseling going on here. More specifically, I think the game is trying to demonstrate the appeal of innocence to the player, with Ilia being positioned as the moral center from which Link can't deviate too far if he doesn't want to be corrupted in the same way that Midna and Zelda are corrupted. Ilia represents what Link has that neither Midna nor Zelda will ever have – a supportive community that sees him as a person and not as a figurehead. Regardless, there's no need for Ilia's character to be so passive. So not only does the player never figure out the finer details of the plot surrounding her, but the entire set of scenarios involving her is also thematically jarring in that innocence cannot equate to passivity in Link's particular case. If the developers were attempting to suggest that Link, by acting, is abandoning his innocence, they could have figured out a better way to do it.
I've put thirty hours into Twilight Princess, and I'm guessing I've got about ten more hours to go. It's going to take me a week or two longer to finish the game. I desperately wish I had more time to spend with it.
