Media in Review: The Legend of Zelda - The Minish Cap
(This review will have mechanical spoilers for the final boss)
Seeing as I got burned by Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom looks like more of the same, I thought I would fire up Minish Cap instead. I never played it as a kid, and it seems unlikely that we're going back to this style of game for a while, if ever. And for the most of the runtime, MC is...let's go with "Aggressively Fine™". It's not great, it's not bad, it's just kinda there.
It's got a few interesting ideas for items, I quite like the Mole Mitts and the Roc's Cape, but also some serious duds with stuff like the Cane of Pacci. The dungeons themselves are mostly pretty solid, but there are multiple places that feel like they should be at least a proper minidungeon and instead, you get the equivalent of, say, the Royal Family Tomb in Ocarina, but with the Bow in the back. Why is something that important in this random cave in the swamp? Was there seriously not anywhere better to put something like this? Pretty much everything that isn't a dungeon in this game feels like peak filler.
The main gimmicks of the game are both pretty awful; shrinking is cool in theory but in practice just makes you move really slowly and can't use any of your items or move over 3/4 of the terrain, while splitting yourself is at best tedious busywork and at worst an absolute nightmare to navigate. Before you can split you have to charge up your spin attack and then wait for a second meter to fully charge, step on the appropriate tiles, and then navigate to whatever you need it for, but literally everything can ruin any of these steps. Got hit while charging? Lost it, start over. Got hit while you were going over the tiles? Lost it, start over. Got hit trying to get to wherever you need it? Lost it, start over. Accidentally walked one of the phantoms through solid terrain? Fuck you, you lose it, start over.
And we can't go without talking about the final boss because good lord that might be the worst one in a Zelda game ever. Before you can even start, there's a sequence of trash mobs you have to fight through, including a fight with three simultaneous Darknuts. The black ones in particular have a single microsecond where they're vulnerable after attacking before you bounce off their shield, so that's a great start. Phase 1 is mostly nondescript, but does get a demerit for being shaped like an eye switch but actually being vulnerable to whatever, when the rest of the fight will demand your arrows. Phase 2 requires at least four bow shots per attack just to figure out what formation you need, then has a tendency to hide out where you can't even get to it, and god forbid you accidentally hit one of the billion spikes on the ground or a falling boulder because then you get to walk your dumb ass back to the tiles to charge up another one! And when you finally get to Phase 3, Ezlo helpfully informs you that you need to use "one of your gizmos" to stop the hands and make the main body vulnerable. Oh, you want to be a little more specific there? No? NOW you've learned some subtlety, on the literal final boss of the game? (It's the Cane of Pacci, by the way. An item that has been literally useless since Dungeon 2) Make it through all this and you get one more split attack (complete with electric balls flying everywhere for maximum chance that you'll have to go back and charge up again), and you can finally breathe because god forbid you die in literally any part of this fight because your dumb ass is going back to the start of it.
Fuck Minish Cap.