Mirrors play an important role in Zelda games. We have the Magic Mirror in A Link to the Past, that allows Link to return from the Dark World to the Light World. We have the Dark Mirror in Four Swords Adventures, which created the Dark Links. And we have the Mirror of Twilight as a portal to the Twilight Realm. But one mirror in the Zelda series was a real subject of debate...
The Mirroring of Twilight Princess!
It all started at E3 2006 and the demo of Twilight Princess, where people expected that if you swing the Wiimote, Link will actually swing his sword in the game. How dumb of them! :D No, seriously, you would think, that Nintendo would have come up with that idea by theirselves, but actually it came from the reactions to the E3 demo, where you needed to press B to swing the sword. So, the whole sword swinging was more or less a last minute addition and it would require to make Link right-handed, since most people are right-handed. But the way how they pulled this change off was rather cheap. You would think, that they'd change the character models of Link and his enemies or at worst just mirror the models. But no, they mirrored the entire freaking graphics of the game! They just flipped the x-axis and that's it. And this resulted in mirroring the entire world of the game. What was once west is now east and vice versa. And there's no option for lefties like it's that no one cares about this minority anyway.
Getting to know the world of one version and then switching to the other version can really make you confused and give you an headache. I was originally playing the Gamecube version of the game, I completed it twice and I repeated some of the dungeons multiple times just for fun. But when I first played the Wii version it was a total mess. It's so confusing, because you think you know the places, but you really don't. If you want to go left, you have to go right and the other way around. In some of the dungeons with a somehow symmetrical layout this wasn't much of a problem, but in some places like Ordon Village or Lake Hylia it felt like a total different area. It's really confusing.
But the most annoying thing is, that the Zelda team even seemed to be proud about that solution. Just read the "Iwata Asks" interviews about Twilight Princess, there they will tell you how cool the mirror version is, it's like having a total different world. They even admit, that they get confused by it as much as the player. The only difference is that they think this is a good thing. But sorry, Zelda is NOT Mario Kart (and even there I don't like the mirror tracks much). For some reason I fear that they will add a Mirror Mode as a feature to future 3D Zelda games... just to annoy you even more.
Hey, even the final boxart of the game confused the people:
:D
The Mirroring of Twilight Princess!
It all started at E3 2006 and the demo of Twilight Princess, where people expected that if you swing the Wiimote, Link will actually swing his sword in the game. How dumb of them! :D No, seriously, you would think, that Nintendo would have come up with that idea by theirselves, but actually it came from the reactions to the E3 demo, where you needed to press B to swing the sword. So, the whole sword swinging was more or less a last minute addition and it would require to make Link right-handed, since most people are right-handed. But the way how they pulled this change off was rather cheap. You would think, that they'd change the character models of Link and his enemies or at worst just mirror the models. But no, they mirrored the entire freaking graphics of the game! They just flipped the x-axis and that's it. And this resulted in mirroring the entire world of the game. What was once west is now east and vice versa. And there's no option for lefties like it's that no one cares about this minority anyway.
Getting to know the world of one version and then switching to the other version can really make you confused and give you an headache. I was originally playing the Gamecube version of the game, I completed it twice and I repeated some of the dungeons multiple times just for fun. But when I first played the Wii version it was a total mess. It's so confusing, because you think you know the places, but you really don't. If you want to go left, you have to go right and the other way around. In some of the dungeons with a somehow symmetrical layout this wasn't much of a problem, but in some places like Ordon Village or Lake Hylia it felt like a total different area. It's really confusing.
But the most annoying thing is, that the Zelda team even seemed to be proud about that solution. Just read the "Iwata Asks" interviews about Twilight Princess, there they will tell you how cool the mirror version is, it's like having a total different world. They even admit, that they get confused by it as much as the player. The only difference is that they think this is a good thing. But sorry, Zelda is NOT Mario Kart (and even there I don't like the mirror tracks much). For some reason I fear that they will add a Mirror Mode as a feature to future 3D Zelda games... just to annoy you even more.
Hey, even the final boxart of the game confused the people:
:D
oh, i was very disappointed, when i first played TP and noticed, that there wasn't mirrored anything at all... not even the parts when link's a wolf... i hoped so much for that, since i knew that they had to mirror the hole game for the wii... so i actually thought, that these parts would be mirrored as well... but nooooo, they really didn't get that...! what a pity, that really would have made the game much more interesting... like this, it's just... yeah like: wow, i'm a wolf now and i can't use my weapons, but not this confusing feeling of familiarity and yet not the same... i missed that.
ReplyDeletebut i like TP, the story is very mystic! *-*
xoxo