The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (Game Boy Advance) Playthrough
175A playthrough of Nintendo's 2005 action-adventure game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap.
The Minish Cap was the fourth and final Zelda game produced for Nintendo by Flagship, the Capcom studio that had previously worked on Oracle of Ages ( • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages (... ), Oracle of Seasons ( • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Season... ), and A Link to the Past and Four Swords ( • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Pa... ). It was also the only game in the series to see Keiji Inafune in the role of producer. That's a fun piece of Zelda trivia.
Set as a prequel to the Four Swords games, The Minish Cap begins with Vaati, an extraordinarily flamboyant villain-type who is searching for the "light force," turning Princess Zelda to stone and shattering the legendary Picori Blade. The king then sends Link off on a mission to seek out the Minish, a race of tiny creatures who know how to reforge the sword, in order to take down Vaati and save the princess.
The game plays like a traditional 2D, top-down Zelda game, and it introduces several new gameplay mechanics to the series. The most meaningful of these, the "minish cap," allows Link to shrink down and explore the world from the perspective of the Minish, paving the way for all sorts of cool puzzles that bridge the gap between parallel worlds. Also new to The Minish Cap is the gust jar, an item that acts like a high-powered vacuum cleaner, and the cane of Pacci, a wand that can flip stuff upside-down.
The densely packed world is impressively well realized, the puzzle design is on par with the best 2D Zelda games, the graphics look like a storybook brought to life, and the sound quality puts most of the GBA's library to shame. It's an excellent package, overall...
But there were two things about it that really bugged me. First, the rewards doled out by the kinstone system and the lottery are random, and it's absolutely infuriating when you miss out on things like heart container pieces because the game has decided that it doesn't want to hand them out. Basing such things in RNG goes against the spirit of the Zelda games, and I hated its implementation in The Minish Cap. And second - oh my God, this game does not know how to shut the hell up and to get out of its own way. Every NPC shovels paragraphs of text at you, and most of the time, they aren't saying anything meaningful. They grind the action to a halt to mercilessly paraphrase things you've already been told half-a-dozen times.
So, the Minish Cap is an excellent game, and it's a good Zelda game, but did the experience set a new standard for the series? I didn't think so.
*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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