Not quite sure what triggered it but recently I’ve been on a Zelda kick. Maybe it was started by the announcement of the HD remake of Wind Waker, or maybe replaying Okami in HD made me want to replay Zelda games since it’s pretty much the same thing. Whatever the reason, I’ve been feeling the itch and my girlfriend is forcing me at gunpoint to play through the Zelda games she hasn’t seen. To my surprise she had actually beaten the Zelda game I neglected to ever finish, The Minish Cap. So I plunked down, started a fresh save and began the journey anew.

Sometimes I miss the Gameboy Advance before life was cheapened by 3d graphics and polygons and high frame rates. Minish Cap’s visuals are wonderfully animated pixels done in the style of both Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker character designs. Despite the lower frame rate the characters are all animated really well and the game really does a good job of capturing the classic Zelda feel from both the SNES and older game boy games. A few things are different though. There seems to be a serious lack of health dropping from enemies or coming out of pots and rocks, making the game occasionally harder especially if you are rushing through it at top speed like I was and get hurt a lot. Fortunately I remembered some tricks from the old games like how if you hit the sparks with a boomerang they turn into healing fairies. In fact, the boomerang is just as overpowered as it was back in Link to the Past and should be acquired as quickly as possible.

Unlike the old games some items have windows of opportunity to get and it is very possible to miss them, mainly the Light arrows which you get from the often irritating and excessive “Kinstone” system. This bothered me quite a bit since until now I had always played Zelda games up to the point of just before the final castle before I hunted down all the side stuff. It seems like the vast majority of the side quests in this game require the kinstones, in fact, I think they ALL do. The game also has the return of finding seashells but this time they are a secondary form of currency to buy a gigantic amount of figurines that serve no real purpose other than to get you a heart piece. All these oddities to a Zelda game are probably the result of the game being developed largely by Capcom, similar to the previous 2 handheld Zelda games, Oracle of Ages and Seasons.

Minish Cap has a really odd selection of items and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Many of the mainstays return like Roc’s Cape and the bow, but new ones like the Staff that makes things flip over and the wind vase (which returned in Skyward Sword), and the glorious return of the lantern which hasn’t been used since the Link to the Past. While I love these items the cumbersome nature of item use in the GBA Zeldas limits your available items to 2 at all times and this includes your sword and shield, so changing weapons is a hassle. That and like so many Zeldas the game doesn’t give you much reason to use a lot of the items enough, but does manage to involve most of them in the games’ final battle. And on the topic of the final battle, someone forgot that this game was on a tiny handheld screen that wasn’t originally backlit. Making the necessary attack target nearly impossible to see was not a good decision, which brings me to my next point.

The main gimmick of this Zelda is that Link shrinks in size to access small secret areas and what not. By Shrink I mean down to the size of about 6 pixels and while the game does indicate your location with a little comic balloon of your face that doesn’t make it much better to see. I had to dust off my old GBA GameCube adapter for this one so I could actually see what I was doing. The parts where you can’t see yourself very well tend to last a bit too long and encourage you to explore as best you can during them, making them a bit of a hassle. That and after the 45^th time you jump up on something and the hat casts the lengthy shrink spell it gets annoying. Did something change in the Zelda games where they thought it was a good idea to have slow unskippable cutscenes like this or the ones in Skyward Sword informing you that you’ve picked up an item you know about for the umpteenth time? I get that this might be helpful if you took a long break from playing the game and forgot what things were. There has to be a better way to do this, though.

I will say this, I really liked the dungeon design in Minish Cap and they really shook up the usual formula. Like with the one that gives you the boss key right away and that just unlocked the majority of the dungeon which then centers the dungeon process around thawing out the boss. That and some old classic Zelda tropes were present like the subtlety hinted at bombable walls and the rocks shaped like iconic Zelda things that have hidden keys in them. Those moments really sold the game for me. It’s a shame that a lot of these tropes didn’t translate over to the 3d Zeldas since this style is more or less gone. Sunrise sunset I suppose.

Overall, I generally enjoyed the game and if you need something to get you through these early year video game doldrums give it a shot. Assuming you’ve already beaten Sly 4 and Metal Gear Rising, which you no doubt have as they aren’t that long.

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