E3 06: Hands-On Twilight Princess

The game of last year’s show was definitely The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and many assumed that this year, it would once again steal the show with its new Wii-mote capabilities. This year, players were granted access to a new dungeon level with lots of short hops, long range enemies, and a little bit of puzzle solving, all so they could experience what using the Wii-mote would be like with Link. Ladies and gentlemen: It’s not that good.

Please, hold all hate mail until after you read the rest. The demo began with a simple enough sword fight with a scarecrow. As it began, I fully recognized the fact that I would need to take some time to get used to the new control scheme, so I spent a full five minutes just on the scarecrow itself. Swordplay was moderately confusing at first because, believe it or not, having your hands separated makes initial coordination awkward. It’s like rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time, really.

But within five minutes, I had a hang of the swordplay and it was fun. You lock on using the trigger on the nunchuku, you jump using the A button and the analog stick, and you push B on the back of the Wii-mote to attack. Additionally, you can thrust the controller forward to do a parry or a shield bash. If you swing the nunchuku around quickly, you’ll do a spinning attack as well. Overall, sword combat is not bad. There’s nothing particularly profound in the system, but it works well.

General movement, likewise, is fine and dandy. The control stick on the nunchuku is very light and responsive, more so than the GameCube, so there’s a little more to get used to. You can perform basic tasks like jumping and climbing like you would in the previous iterations of Zelda, there’s no additional motion control there.

The real trouble comes when you try to whip out anything that requires you to aim. And this isn’t something that you can get used to, there’s actually a fundamental design flaw here, one that hopefully will be rectified by the end of the development cycle. To pull out your bow and arrow requires you to hold down one of the D-pad directions (where your items are assigned) and then let it go when you’re ready to fire.

Flaw 1: The controller was apparently designed for massive hands or some weird grip style I am not accustomed to, because the D-pad is positioned near the top of the Wii-mote. If I placed my hand in a position where my thumb could touch all of the directions easily, my middle finger is over the B trigger. In short, many people may need to adjust their grip for firing weapons and then adjust back.

Once you get your hands settled, and a D-pad direction depressed, you can strafe about while aiming using your left analog stick. So, while strafing, you begin to aim with the Wii-mote.

Flaw 2: The crosshairs are overly sensitive. It takes very precise movements to move the crosshair even a bit. Hopefully, sensitivity will be an adjustable configuration.

But sensitivity is something you adjust to. And, after two playthroughs, I did get used to the sensitivity. On my second round through, I was sniping off enemies fairly easily while strafing, although it took me at least an extra couple seconds compared to if I had an analog stick. So, once adjusted to the sensitivity, things should have went smoothly, eh?

Flaw 3: Very limited range. What I mean by that is you have about a 2-inch window within which you can move the controller and see the cursor/fairy moving on the screen. If you drop out of that range, you place yourself in a situation where your camera may go into a tailspin. Once you lose sight of the sensor, it is hard to recover gracefully and once you do recover, who knows where you’ll be pointing. You could have had Link do a complete 360 and get pelted with arrows in your back as you stumble about like a drunken sailor.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess will be a great game, no doubt. The game itself is terrific, however the control style as it stands, is flawed. There are a lot of things that simply take time and effort to get used to, but there are things that need to be fixed as well. We left our concerns with Nintendo so we’ll hope it comes out well!