We finished The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess over the weekend.  I’ll try my very best to avoid spoilers, but I do have to tell you that at the end of the game you find out that Ganondorf is Link’s father, and Zelda is Link’s sister, and they had a retarded inbred love child at the end of Ocarina Of Time and that is what the Ooccoos are descended from.  Sorry, I couldn’t just keep that to myself.

We clocked in at just under 60 hours, including finding all the heart pieces, which I am proud to say did not require GameFaqs (although we did use the assistance of the fortune teller to find three of them).  That also includes hunting down all the Poes, something for which I did use GameFaqs (but just for the last ten).  If there were some way in-game to tell if you got all the Poes in a given area, I wouldn’t have cheated.  But with the entire game to explore, I just didn’t have the patience.  In Ocarina Of Time, there would be a Skulltula icon beside the name of each area on the map for which you had found all the Skulltulas.  Something like that for Poes would have been nice.  A way of changing day to night would have helped too, since most Poes are only out at night.

The weirdest thing about the game is that Link is not left-handed (something I wondered about last May).  If you’ve not heard about this, allow me to explain.  The game was developed (as a Game Cube game) with a (canonical) left-handed Link, just like Link has always been (except when facing east in A Link To The Past, naturally).  When they decided to move the game to the Wii, they found that people wanted to control a right-handed Link.  But all the maps had already been designed for a left-handed link, and they didn’t have time to change them.  So they did the easiest thing possible—they flipped everything in the game.  What you see is a mirror image of how the game was designed.  Link is right-handed.  Most other characters are left-handed.  Characters will shake hands with their left hands.  The layout of Hyrule was supposed to (approximately) line up with the map from Ocarina of time (i.e. desert and lake on the west, Kakariko village on the east).  The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.  Maybe they thought no one would notice that, but I used the location of the sun to determine if it was morning or evening, and that messed me up a bit.

Lastly, I’d like to mention the Wii’s notorious battery usage.  After going through two sets of batteries in about a week’s worth of Wii Sports and ten hours of Zelda, I bought some rechargeable batteries (the kind that claim to work 4x longer in high tech devices).  For the rest of Zelda (about fifty hours of gameplay), I didn’t need to recharge the batteries once.  This could be because the batteries actually last longer (hey, anything’s possible, right?).  But I think the main reason is that I played with the pointer functionality turned off.  Since using the pointer basically turns the Wiimote into a low-res IR video camera, I think that drains a lot of battery.  I set it to not use the pointer because: a) I kept selecting the wrong things in the menus, b) “calibrating” it to my TV actually made it worse, c) I hated having a fairy on the edge of my screen all the time, d) when I went into first-person mode I had to hold my hand awkwardly to look around, and e) if anything was on my coffee table the view to the sensor bar would get blocked.  Now I can add another reason to play without the pointer function, if any other games give that option.

In conclusion, if you’ve been avoiding Zelda games in the past because the great fairies weren’t topless, then Twilight Princess is the right game for you.