What a fun little Zelda game! I started this one up two weeks ago and was barreling along with the kind of momentum I don't often build up while playing video games these days. In my first session I ripped through a dungeon and a handful of side quests, and by my second day playing this game I'd put in six or seven hours and it felt like I'd be done the next day. Unfortunately, as so often happens, life got in the way - first in the form of an absurdly long homework assignment, and then by way of a midterm exam I spent the recent long weekend studying for. Come on!
Thankfully, once I finished that test last night, I had nothing but time to dump into The Minish Cap and killed it off in the wee hours of the morning. What should have taken me a few days to beat instead took two weeks, but who cares? This was an excellent game.
It's hard to pin down what makes a Zelda game a good one. First of all, they're all pretty good, and secondly they span a thirty-year period that's seen video games evolve from eight-bit meat grinders to massive stories with fifty-hour playtimes. The franchise also understands the difference between console gaming and handheld gaming, never asking you to spend more than fifteen hours on a three-inch screen despite frequently pushing forty on the bigger ones. But comparisons are both fun and useful, so I'll at least say that The Minish Cap was my second-favorite handheld Zelda game after 2013's A Link Between Worlds.
What I loved here was the balance between exploration and constraint. When it comes to Zelda, ideally I want an open enough world that I can find secrets and hidden paths before I can access them, but I also want something linear enough that I can't get completely lost or bogged down by exploration and side quests. This game straddled that line perfectly, allowing me to spend all kinds of time hunting for heart pieces and upgrades without ever feeling like I was procrastinating on the main quest. This was also the first handheld Zelda game that looked and sounded, well, pretty. No disrespect to Link's Awakening or the Oracle games, but I want to see Hyrule depicted in bright colors with varied environments instead of the same pen-and-paper-looking block-sized sprites.
There's not much to say about the gameplay; this is Zelda and it didn't try to reinvent the wheel. The game's biggest gimmick was probably the ability to shrink down in size at certain points in order to access small areas. It didn't really add much to the game, but it did allow what initially felt like a small Hyrule map to really feel full of secrets and hidden opportunities. Another gimmick was the ability to clone up to three copies of Link in order to push very large stones around. Both of these gimmicks played a central role in the final boss fight, but most of the game's best moments and puzzles didn't incorporate either of them.
If I have a complaint here, it's with the item inventory access. Designed for the Game Boy Advance, The Minish Cap only incorporates an A button and a B button for using items. Assuming I always want your sword equipped, this meant I had to pause the game and cycle through the inventory screens every time I wanted to switch between, say, bombs and the bow. This is a very small complaint and it comes from a place of 2016 privilege, but it took some getting used to all the same. (On the other hand, I was able to abuse the Wii U Virtual Console save state feature during the final boss fight, when I had three hearts and no fairies by the time I understood the appropriate fight patterns. Why go back to ten minutes prior when save states let me advance through the battle on a blow-by-blow basis?) And if I have a second complaint, it's with the way some of the "Kinstones" were implemented - but that's an entire system begging for an explanation I'm just not willing to go into right now - perhaps in a podcast.
Anyway, bottom line - this was a great game and definitely one worth dropping five to ten bucks on if you've got a Wii U.
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