The worst game ever: Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
As part of our month long coverage of the 1 year anniversary of the Nintendo Wii, we’ll be looking back at some of the highest profile games released at launch. The most eagerly anticipated launch title was easily The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the continuation of the long running and much lauded series. Here is our exclusive review, only a mere year late.
Nintendo Fanbots: use your personal computer’s two dimensional pointing device and select that long narrow white space a few inches above these words and navigate someplace warm and safe because really, I’m about to break some hearts here. May I suggest you double over and cry your eye’s red on Japan’s Club Nintendo website and its constant mockery of Nintendo America’s insulting incentives? Okay, for those of you still here, either you read the headline and are already enraged, clumsily attempting to trace my I.P. address and correlate that information to a Google-map in hopes of retribution, or you’re clearly not an idiot. I know that you people don’t want to hear this, but really, someone has to say this: Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess is the worst game ever made.
Thank god super stars don’t really exist because I’m pretty sure that an enterprising Nintendo fan would be bursting through my wall right now, like so much Kool-Aid man, for that last revelation. Now before you go and kill yourself trying to summon flashing stars from masonry, hear me out. While what I’m about to tell you won’t prevent you from killing yourself, it will at least be for different, non-videogame, related reasons. I know you must be thinking at this point this is hyperbole, or being said for dramatic effect, but really it isn’t. You’re going to have to live with the fact that this Zelda game is worse that Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis and Superman 64 – combined.
Ugh.
Let’s just get this out of the way: this game is ugly. I don’t even know why Nintendo would ship a game so brutally disgusting. Didn’t they see Gears of War, a game released around the same time? Of course they did. This means Nintendo intentionally shipped you a game with crippling, nausea inducing graphics. That is just irresponsible. Look, before you Nintenerds start complaining with, “but the game is actually very good looking! Of course, it may not compare well against ‘technically superior’ graphics but it has style and great art direction!” let me just say that you’re wrong. Here is why: whenever an advancement in technology is made, all prior technologies are instantly obsolete, and quite honestly, a prehistoric abortion. Case in point: I defy you to watch a black and white movie. Go ahead, watch Citizen Kane, go do it, I’ll wait.
Back so soon? Oh, you couldn’t stand constantly throwing up over the grainy, non-HD, black and white, analog-shot film? Yeah, I thought as much. Now imagine that Citizen Kane is interactive and stars an elven male of indeterminate age and you have a pretty good idea of what playing this Legend of Zelda is like.
I’m pretty sure Nintendo just repackaged the unsold copies of Ocarina of Time and called it a day. No, scratch that: Ocarina of Time looks better than this. Don’t you understand what this means? People at Nintendo actually took time out of their busy schedule of constant auto-fellatio to make a perfectly good game terrible. I mean, at least with Ocarina of Time I could actually decipher the jumbled mess in front of my eyes as something resembling a game, but with Twilight Princess… I just don’t know what is wrong. Did Nintendo make the first interactive magic eye or something? No, that is impossible. That would of required effort and for someone at Nintendo to actually possess a soul within a human body and not within one of their large soul-capturing devices.
If Zelda were a but-her-face, then maybe I could understand some legally blind people confusing this for Bioshock and playing it. But truth is, this game plays terribly as well, especially on the Wii. The whole point of the Wii is supposedly to remove the barrier between the hardcore gamer and the causal/non-gamer, but dear lord, Zelda fails here on so many levels. Here is its first failure: sword swinging doesn’t correlate 1:1 with how you move the Wii remote. Yeah, that’s right, when you swing the remote it essentially acts as a button press. What the fuck is the point then, Nintendo? It adds nothing at all to the gameplay, so on that concession alone it ruins the game. The game is further ruined when you realize that the wii-mote doesn’t transform into an exact replica of the master sword either. How the hell are you immersing me into the game when I still realize I’m playing the game? You fail Nintendo, get your gimmicky shit out of my god damn house.
“Heresy,” you say? Eat it, I say. How could a game, so famously delayed in development, go so wrong, you ask? While I’m not an analyst by any means, there are a few notable reasons
Look it’s true. Nintendo honestly thinks it can sell a slightly modified Nintendo 64 with a gimmicky controller just because it’s their next system. They also expect you to pay a ridiculous amount of money for decades-old technology. I did the math and the grand total for the tech in the Wii is about 25 dollars. Yeah, thats right: 25 dollars. Considering how all they’re doing is repackaging a 2nd-generation Super NES with some low-rent, gimmicky controller, it could be significantly less. These figures depend on how many unsold systems they had lying around, so it could vary
This is the only logical conclusion that can be drawn for any amount of playtime from Twilight Princess. I’m sure somewhere in Nintendo’s Tokyo offices there is a lab filled with howler monkeys that have lost the will to both procreate and live. These are the monkeys that Nintendo allows to randomly smash keys on a keyboard, oftentimes with their own useless genitalia. At the end of the night, Shigeru Miyamoto comes in and takes the random jumble of letters, numbers, and punctuation and inserts it verbatim into older, better games from a generation long dead. I am positive that this is how Nintendo makes all its Wii games.
I am also positive that there is another lab filled with monkeys that have yet to lose the will to live. Nintendo lets these creatures program the DS games as a way to break them down to the base animals that program the home console’s library. Just imagine working on a system even less powerful than the Wii; No developer on the face of the earth, lower primate or not, could stand that
I don’t mean this figuratively. Nintendo is actually trying to kill you and everyone like you. Do you often wonder why games like Battalion Wars 2 or Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn don’t get huge advertising blitzkriegs? That is because 99% of Nintendo’s operating budget is entirely devoted to killing you. There is yet another lab, buried deep within the labyrinthine walls of Nintendo Japan, where a third subset of monkey, still chemically castrated, is given a cocktail of testosterone, adrenaline, and crystal methamphetamine. They are routinely bludgeoned with Nintendo Entertainment Systems unfit for being packaged with a gimmicky controller and are given only one option: destroy all those that love real, hardcore gaming. They are taught the ways of Ninjitsu and are given razor sharp, poison filled, prosthetic talons. They take rudimentary civics courses and are allowed to stratify themselves into specialized talent groups, like the “underwater explosive lobotomy” group or the “rape” group.
This is where 99% of Nintendo’s budget goes. The other 1% is devoted to developing games that make you want to kill yourself. Thus: Twilight Princess.
The only thing positive one can say about this game is that, thankfully, Nintendo had yet to develop the technology that forces you to play their games. Truly, this is the game’s only saving grace: you can avoid it.
I give this game the absolute lowest score I can possibly give: 8.7/10
- Rob O’Reilly
