Jeff, good call on Twilight Princess. In hindsight, 8.8 almost seems a little high to me. Twilight Princess was great and all, but it had some mad crazy problems, featured some poor design, it stuck to close to the formula, and failed to be the epic next-gen Zelda experience we were all waiting for. Perhaps I should elaborate before people start putting me on their hit list.
First of all, the game has some basic design issues with a lot of your objectives. Like, for instance, the cat in the beginning of the game you had to get into the house. That undeniably was more frustrating than necessary. Same thing with a Goron later in the game, who wants hot water. The logical thing to do is go to the hot spring fountain, get a bottle of this hot water and rush all the way to the Goron in Hyrule field. Magically, as you approach this Goron with the hot water, it instantly turns cold no matter how much remaining time you have. It turns out you have to do something entirely different to help this guy out, but the game should not penalize you the way it does for thinking logically. Alternatively, they could have had you take the water to the guy, he thanks you, gives you some reward, but tells you it's not enough and hints you in the right direction to solving this problem.
Another issue involves rupees and chests. In Twilight Princess, if you open a chest with rupees but don't have enough wallet space to carry it all, you're forced to put it back in the chest and close it back up. Initially, that actually seems like a smart change. In previous Zelda games, you'd take the money, even if you couldn't hold it, which would essentially make those extra rupees disappear completely. So now with this new method, you can come back to that chest later in the game to collect some more cash. The problem with this is that first of all, people are not going replay through temples just to get more rupees, and secondly, once these chests are closed, they look exactly the same as any other normal chest in-game and on your map. This becomes a problem in temples when you end up needing to re-close nearly all the chests and then don't remember which ones you've opened or haven't, and if you're trying to get all the heart pieces you can, you can expect to reopen a lot of these same rupee chests at least a second time. They could have either caused these chests to appear a different color on your map or something, or went the way of Phantom Hourglass and used the Wii pointer to let you draw on the map yourself so you could mark these particular chests. Also, spread out throughout all of Hyrule, there are a lot of puzzles with chests that are in sight but yet out of reach. Most of them will be taunting you throughout the game, and you're eager to figure out how to get them (however, most of them are actually simple and just require a new weapon to get them, which is a little disappointing since it's not a matter of actually solving the puzzle, but just waiting until you have the proper means to do it). So anyway, the time comes, you get a new weapon and realize it's what you've needed all along to get to this chest. You finally get to it, almost feeling very rewarded because it's taken so long to get to this moment, and dude... more rupees? And I can't even carry them? That is totally lame. Rupees in general don't serve much purpose in Twilight Princess, or most Zelda games really. We're like trained to collect every single one we see, however, there's hardly ever anything to buy with them except stuff you can gather for free just by playing the game. You don't ever really need to buy arrows or bombs or red potion or anything so you're going to be spending most of the game with full pockets, so rupees are never really a good reward.
Then of course, everyone gripes about the bosses being too easy. I'm gonna take that a little further and say all enemies in the game are too easy. Why is that? It's not exactly that the enemies aren't challenging or anything, but simply that they never do enough damage. You can get your butt kicked pretty bad, but if you have more than 5 hearts or so, you're still probably not going to die. Not to mention that early on in the game, any respectable Zelda player is going to start loading up on fairies. That's what kills the challenge in Zelda games. It's simply hard to be killed, whereas pretty much any other enemy can be killed with just a few hits. That's not cool, dude. Does Nintendo remember the first Zelda? Yeah... good luck with never dying in that one... Remember the first Twilight Princess trailer? All the enemies approaching in the sunset from the horizon? Man, it seemed like Hyrule was going to be an epic warzone, but we don't really see any of that in the final game. I'm not saying it's a bad game, but I certainly don't think it's the best game ever or nearly the best Zelda game.
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