I have played two games in my entire life that sucked me into the world and made me hate seeing the ending credits: Mass Effect and Ocarina of Time. I've been gaming for a long time, and those are the two games that, on a story level, hit me the deepest. Both an a large, epic scale that made me feel as though I was a little person in a huge world with an interesting and important journey to complete. Many games have large worlds and grand stories, but these were the first two and most prolific of my gaming life.

Twilight Princess was the one Zelda game I had not given a fair shake, and so I sat out to fix that. I popped in the Wii disc (as I can't justify spending $50 on a Gamecube game over a $20 Wii copy as a married adult), and started going. About 10 hours in (a third of the way through my personal adventure), I began to think, "Why do people dislike this? This is fabulous!". The land of Hyrule seemed vast and expansive, the plot appeared strong, and the first temple was very intriguing.

By the end of my 30 hour journey, I wish I had quit a long time ago and never looked back. Distant are the memories of the Forest Temple and the fun puzzles that laid within it, and fresh are the horrors of a game that feels low quality in the stable of Nintendo games. In reflection, there are really three things that stick out as the marks of death on a game with much promise and appeal.

First, the Wii version of the game is on-par with much Wii trash of the era. Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 had spot on, tactile controls (well, as tactile as a Wiimote can be) in games that required decent precision and accuracy (and without using Wii Motion Plus, no less). Twilight Princess, being one of the first Wii games, feels very much like a tacked on, afterthought experience (as it likely was). The aiming reticle is poor when using things like the clawshot and the bow. Often would I go to shoot Keese or birds only to find myself needing 6-7 arrows just to hit a single Keese. Many puzzles were spent repeating steps or waiting around due to mistakes caused by poor controls. The spin attack is a rare occurrence, only working about as often as unicorns skip outside my window. Often times, I'd lose a heart container or two whilst flailing my nunchuk back and forth as though I were having a mild seizure before giving up and attacking the enemies with basic swings. In boss battles, I would line up the perfect angle to attack or try to use an item, only for my aim to be offset by the "Point at the screen" when my little fairy reticle was very much on screen when I hit the B button. The Twilight Palace and Zant's Hands were a particular nightmare that almost caused me to leave the game altogether. When comparative to the typical Nintendo standard of technical quality, Twilight Princess is a blemish on a great track record.

The second issue (that often stems from the Wii issues) is just poor design. There are numerous instances where it feels that the game was not tested or researched with normal gaming conditions to figure out design choices that make the game frustrating and cumbersome. The response time it takes for Link to stand up after being knocked down versus the cooldown time between enemy attacks makes for an extreme irritating situation where getting knocked down leads to multiple hits by the same enemy before there is finally enough room to get away. The camera system in the Wii version of Twilight Princess is one of the worst design issues of the game. There were at least two dozen glitches that occur when the camera was in a spot or at an angle that caused a bit of trouble. Also, multiple issues occurred when falling off a ledge or climbing up vines where, if the camera was not centered on Link's back, the controls would become mangled by the strange camera angle and inputs on the analog stick would often move Link in different ways than expected. A final instance of poor design choices leads straight into the third major issue with the game.

The game is simply not fun. That's a strange thing to write about a Nintendo product, but it is something that resonated at almost every step of my journey. It takes nearly two hours to get into the first dungeon, even if you know what you're doing and aren't wasting time figuring out the next thing to do. After about 20 hours of gameplay, and realizing that I was just around halfway finished with the game, I contemplated signing off and moving on to something else. I had played for 20 hours and hadn't achieved nearly close to what effort I felt like I had put in. By the end, I was ready to put the controller down and move on to another game that didn't force me to use bad controls and a broken camera system. What may be the most criminal issue here, however, lies within the wolf gameplay. I remember reading a Nintendo Power a year or two before the game came out (nearly a decade ago) and thinking it sounded stupid. In practice, the wolf and twilight dynamic might be the best part of the game, adding a fresh new way to solve puzzles and something new to the traditional formula. It was like adding a new spice to a familiar soup. The unfortunate part was that the spice was cinnamon and the soup was tomato. The Tears of Light "puzzles" (they aren't even really puzzles) were boring, monotonous, and completely pointless. Why not have the player engage in something more interesting? These bits often added nothing to the game, as comparative to, say, a small mini-mini boss area that could have done the same thing narratively in regards to banishing the twilight from an area and provided a better challenge.

It is extremely disappointing that by the end of Twilight Princess, the game is stale and overstayed its welcome. The last two boss encounters are probably the best of the entire game, despite the Twilight Palace being overly frustrating due to poor controls and design and too simple to provide any sort of challenge. The battle with Ganon and the final "dungeon" area leading up to it are great and epic in scale, yet the journey to get there will wear down the nerves of all who attempt the adventure. I went from unexperienced to fervent defender to despise in 30 hours of a game that has an incredible scale, a great plot, and an interesting world. That's something that should never happen, especially with a Nintendo game.