The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

I recently began a new job, which allows for more time with reTROview, but a lot less time to actually play video games. What I have been able to increase, however, is my handheld playing, as my lunch break has turned into an extended handheld session time. When I thought about the number of handheld games I needed to beat, this turned from a curse to a blessing, as I have been able to chew through a good amount of my backlog in the month and a half I've been working.

For my first game in the new job era, I picked The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. I had heard superb things about the game, and had even played a bit of it when I was a kid, as my friend on the bus had a copy.

Zelda, as a series, is a bit cursed in that nearly every entry in the series (barring the CD-I games) is of superb quality. While this shouldn't seem like a curse, it highlights the flaws of the weaker (but still very good) games in the series. This is why so many people seem to dislike the superb Wind Waker, or pick on poor, underappreciated, Zelda II. When you're surrounded by real greatness, greatness begins to be expected. And for the most part, Zelda, as a franchise, has delivered some real classics. A Link to the Past, A Link Between Worlds, and Link's Awakening are not only among my favorite Zelda games of all time, but also some of my favorite video games, period.

So Minish Cap's review will likely be negatively colored by this fortunate reality for the series. It stands on the shoulders of giants, and is merely a very good game. I may be underrating it due to this perspective, so take this review with a pinch of salt.

I liked Minish Cap. But I didn't love it. We'll start with the positives. The visuals are gorgeous, following in the more cartoony style of Wind Waker (which I infinitely prefer to the hideous visuals of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask). The dungeons are excellent and creatively designed. I found myself needing a guide to get through them to be the exception, rather than the rule. But they always felt just challenging enough to solve with a sense of accomplishment. The story was good, and the shrinking mechanic was interesting, and used to fairly good effect. The game controlled extremely well.

I didn't like several things about the game, however. The first, and most important, drawback to the game was length. A veteran could probably clear the entire campaign in about 8 hours, although it probably took me, as a first timer doing a lot of meandering and fusing kinstones, about 15 hours. The game featured 6 dungeons, a very small amount for a Zelda game. A person may object to this criticism, however, arguing that the handheld nature of Minish Cap necessitated a more compact presentation of the Zelda formula. I would buy that if not for two observations. One, the three previous handheld Zelda's (Link's Awakening, Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons) were all FAR longer than Minish Cap. And these were all on an older system, with older cartridges, and two of them were designed by the same developer responsible for Minish Cap (My beloved Capcom). Two, the length of Minish Cap is much, much more unforgivable when you consider that a great amount of the game's length is not contained in doing interesting things, but is rather spent doing random fetch quests just to get the one item necessary to go to the next dungeon. This is an element, to a certain extent, in all Zelda games, and extends their play time a bit, but it is one of the more onerous and unappealing aspects of the games. What's more, Minish Cap seemed to have more of these quests, and the quests were longer. This small campaign is poorly complicated by a tiny world. Even Link's Awakening was bigger than the world of Minish Cap, and Oracle of Ages and Seasons positively destroy it in size.

The music was pretty uninspiring, to be honest. Zelda games generally have superb soundtracks, and the previous Capcom developed games (Oracle of Ages and Seasons) have some of the best soundtracks in Zelda history. This one is mostly unremarkable, with a few good tracks, and a few very tiresome ones.

Finally, I found the kinstone fusion to be very repetitive and boring, especially for the more common fusions, which summon chests with rupees across the map, gold monsters that drop extra rupees, or other uninspiring rewards. It is hard to keep track of all of the secrets you unlock with the kinstones, and most of the rewards are boring and uninteresting.

Anyway, Minish Cap is good, but disappointing relative to the Zelda series. I enjoyed it, but found myself wishing for a superb Zelda experience a la a Link to the Past, and finding Minish Cap to be wanting in that regard.

I'd rate it is a 8.6/10.

-TRO