The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Wow, I just completed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Nintendo Wii. This is a great, if at times frustrating, game, and one that I recommend highly.

Twilight Princess has excellent gameplay, nice graphics, interesting story, and sometimes devious (hence the frustrating part) puzzles; the puzzles, however, always turned out to be logical. No trick questions, here.

It took me 72 hours, 16 minutes, plus an hour or so playing time to complete the game. The variability results from the fact that you can't save games during the final scenes/battles. Well, you can save your game, but when you load it always sends you back to before you meet the final boss. Wangos. When I discovered this tiny relevant fact my frustration level reached an all time high.

Spoilers may follow.

I say "may" follow because I mention things in the game without providing background. So unless you're familiar with Twilight Princess you might have difficulty understanding the context.

Completing Twilight Princess was supremely satisfying. Why? Because I had a heck of the time defeating the final boss in his last iteration. The difficulty stemmed from the fact that despite learning it from the Golden Wolf, I had never mastered the backslice. My success with that technique always seemed random. I jumped and swung my sword, and sometimes it worked but more often not. For myself, getting out of the backslice training session was one of the most difficult parts of the game.

Anywhoo, once I did learn how to perform the backslice on demand, the final boss went down without trouble. It's just a matter of being patient and persevering, since the boss will block you after you get a couple strikes in.

I never collected all the Poes -- there's 60 of them?! I only collected 29.

I think the second Star Game with the double-clawshot is much easier than the first.

The non-speaking lines was novel at first, but after a while I kind of wish they included speaking lines.

I wonder what the maximum number of hearts, is. Is there 10 on the top row? I think I ended up with 14 - 17, then.

There are a lot of mini-games and other stuff I didn't complete. I wish that after you complete the game they'd let you wander around and finish everything.

I'm not sure if I want to replay this game, but I'm mighty tempted; I've been playing on an old dinky 24-26" CRT television. How amazing would it look on a 42" LCD flatscreen?

On to the next game.... :o)