The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

• 1. Introduction

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  The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a 2006 action-adventure game from Nintendo, owes part of its identity to a strange dream. Its director, Eiji Aonuma, dreamed during an overseas business trip that he was a wolf locked inside a cage. After he woke, he felt confused and disoriented, and it took him a while to remember where he was. That sensation of waking in the wrong body and the wrong place became the seed of the game's wolf transformation and much of its story.

  The finished game follows a teenage boy named Link. A shadowy second world creeps over his familiar kingdom, and a mysterious imp rides on his back. How did a cartoon-styled sequel turn into a realistic one? Why did a game built for one console arrive on two, with its entire world flipped like a reflection? And how did the imp, Midna, grow from a reluctant bargaining partner into the emotional center of the adventure?

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• 2. A Realistic Zelda

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  In 2003, Nintendo announced a new Zelda game for the GameCube, made by the team behind the cel-shaded The Wind Waker. The following year, at the Game Developers Conference, Aonuma unintentionally revealed its working title, The Wind Waker 2. At that stage it was meant to share its predecessor's graphical style.

  Nintendo of America then gave Aonuma unwelcome news. The Wind Waker had sold sluggishly in North America, they said, because its cartoon appearance suggested a game for young children. Aonuma went to producer Shigeru Miyamoto with a different goal. He wanted a realistic Zelda that would appeal to North American players and match Miyamoto's original vision of realism for the series.

  Miyamoto hesitated to change only the presentation. He urged the team to look first for gameplay innovations. His advice was to begin with something Ocarina of Time could not do, especially fighting from horseback.

  Lead character designer Keisuke Nishimori took the horse problem literally and rode a horse himself, just to feel what it was like. Special care went into making the riding believable.

  The mood came from another source. The original Legend of Zelda had drawn on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings novels, and Twilight Princess looked instead to the Lord of the Rings films. Those films had just come out and were very popular. The team aimed for a large and convincing world, with the vast scale that fantasy audiences now expected.

  Within four months, Aonuma's team had realistic horseback riding to show. Nintendo unveiled it in a trailer at E3 2004, and the response was enormous praise. The game was now scheduled for release the following year, and it was no longer a follow-up to The Wind Waker. A true sequel to that game arrived on the Nintendo DS in 2007 as Phantom Hourglass. Miyamoto explained in interviews that the new style answered audience demand and suited an older Link. Beneath the realistic surface ran a modified version of The Wind Waker's engine. The harder question was what this older Link would actually do.

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• 3. Two Worlds, One Wolf

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  A Link to the Past sent Link between a Light World and a Dark World. Ocarina of Time and Oracle of Ages instead sent him between two time periods. The Twilight Princess team wanted to reuse that idea of two connected worlds. The suggestion came that Link should become a wolf, echoing the rabbit form he takes in the Dark World of A Link to the Past.

  Aonuma created the story, and scenario writers Mitsuhiro Takano and Aya Kyogoku later reshaped it. Takano wrote the script for the story scenes. Kyogoku and Takayuki Ikkaku wrote the in-game script. Early plans had Link as a wolf from the very beginning, a blunt contrast with the Ocarina of Time formula. That changed so new players could ease into the traditional gameplay and narrative of the series. Darker touches remained, such as the kidnapping of the children of Ordon Village.

  The Twilight Realm sections grew from a question about structure. Earlier Zelda games had always kept dungeons clearly apart from the overworld. The team asked what would happen if a traditional dungeon sat inside the open world instead. The answer was the hunt for Tears of Light, which players carry out across the Twilight-covered land. The designers wanted that land, and the Twilight Realm dungeon later in the game, to feel uncomfortable. They balanced it with care, so that players would neither give up nor stop enjoying themselves.

  The controls build on the scheme introduced in Ocarina of Time. One context-sensitive button serves many purposes, and a lock-on system called L-targeting keeps Link's view fixed on an enemy or important object. The screen shows what the button will do. If Link holds a rock, the button throws it while he moves or targets something, but sets it down if he stands still.

  The game contains nine dungeons. Each is a large, enclosed area where Link fights enemies, gathers items and solves puzzles, and each ends with a boss. A large overworld connects them, and Link crosses it on foot, on his horse Epona, or by teleporting with Midna's help. Enemies think harder than those in The Wind Waker. They react when companions fall or when arrows and slingshot pellets whiz past, and they spot Link from farther away.

  As a wolf, Link gives up his sword, shield and secondary items. He bites to attack and defends mainly by dodging. In return he runs faster than he does as a human on foot. He digs holes that open new passages and uncover buried items. He can also follow scent trails. With a wolf's senses, the player can see and hear the wandering spirits of people touched by the Twilight, and hunt hostile ghosts called Poes.

  Midna rides on his back. She offers hints, attacks enemies with an energy field, helps him jump long distances, and eventually lets him warp to preset locations across the overworld. This small passenger would turn out to hold the story's biggest secret.

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• 4. Midna and Zant

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  The story takes place more than a century after Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, in an alternate timeline from The Wind Waker. It is the second game in the Child Era of the "Victorious Hero" timeline. That branch begins when the Hero of Time defeats Ganondorf and returns to the present to warn young Zelda of Hyrule's terrible fate.

  Link is a ranch hand in Ordon Village when Bulblins carry off the village's children. Chasing them, he reaches a wall of Twilight, and a Twilight monster drags him through it into a shrouded forest. There he becomes a wolf and is imprisoned. A creature named Midna frees him on one condition, that he obey her unconditionally. She leads him to Princess Zelda, who explains that Zant, the usurper king of the Twili, stormed Hyrule Castle and forced her to surrender. Twilight then swallowed the kingdom and turned everyone but Link and Zelda into invisible spirits.

  To fight back, Link must revive the Light Spirits by recovering their light from the Twilight creatures that stole it. Each restored Spirit returns him to Hylian form and reveals where a Fused Shadow lies hidden. These fragments belong to a powerful relic, and it is needed to match Zant's own power. Along the way Link rescues Ordon's children and helps the monkeys of Faron, the Gorons of Eldin and the Zoras of Lanayru.

  Zant then ambushes Link and Midna. He steals the fragments, reveals that his power comes from another source, and traps Link in wolf form. Midna refuses to join him, so Zant tries to destroy her with the light of Lanayru's Spirit. Link carries the dying Midna to Zelda, who tells him he needs the Master Sword to break Zant's curse. Zelda sacrifices herself to heal Midna and vanishes mysteriously. Moved by that selflessness, Midna begins to care more about Link and his world.

  With the Master Sword in hand, Link is cleansed of the curse. Deep in the Gerudo Desert, he and Midna search for the Mirror of Twilight, the only known gateway between Hyrule and the Twilight Realm. They find it broken. The Sages there explain that Zant tried to destroy it but only shattered it, because only the true ruler of the Twili can do that. They add that they once used the mirror to banish Ganondorf, the Gerudo leader who tried to steal the Triforce, after failing to execute him.

  Once the shards are gathered and the mirror restored, the Sages reveal the secret. Midna is the true ruler of the Twili, usurped and cursed into her current form by Zant. Zant, it turns out, had made a pact with Ganondorf, who wanted help subjugating Hyrule. After Link defeats Zant, Midna recovers the Fused Shadows and kills him, having learned that only Ganondorf's defeat can lift her curse.

  In Hyrule Castle, Ganondorf waits with a lifeless Zelda suspended above him. He fights Link by possessing Zelda and then becomes a gigantic boar-like beast. Link beats him by using his wolf form, and the power Midna received from Zelda revives the princess. Ganondorf rises again anyway. Midna teleports Link and Zelda outside so she can hold him off with the Fused Shadows. As the castle collapses, Ganondorf emerges victorious and crushes the piece on Midna's head.

  He then chases Link on horseback. With help from Zelda and the Light Spirits, Link knocks him off his horse and finishes the duel on foot. The Master Sword goes through Ganondorf's chest. The Light Spirits restore Midna to her true form. She says farewell, returns home and destroys the Mirror of Twilight, severing the link between the two worlds. As Hyrule Castle is rebuilt, Link leaves Ordon Village for parts unknown.

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• 5. Mirror Image

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  Aonuma returned from producing The Minish Cap for the Game Boy Advance to find his Twilight Princess team struggling. Too much emphasis on parallel worlds and the wolf had made Link's character unbelievable. He also felt the gameplay lacked the innovation of Phantom Hourglass, which was then being built around Nintendo DS touch controls. Meanwhile the Wii, code-named Revolution, was in development. Miyamoto thought its pointing device, the Wii Remote, suited the aiming of arrows, and he urged Aonuma to consider it.

  Aonuma had assumed he would finish Twilight Princess before making any game for the new console. Instead his team built a pointing interface for the bow. Aiming straight at the screen felt fresh, much like the DS scheme for Phantom Hourglass. Yet Nintendo had planned a GameCube-only release for November 2005, and fans were waiting. Two versions meant delaying that date. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata believed that having both would satisfy players in the end, despite the wait. Aonuma began building both versions in parallel. Moving the game to the Wii was relatively simple, because the Wii was designed to run GameCube software.

  At E3 2005, Nintendo handed out a small number of Nintendo DS game cards carrying a preview trailer. It also announced a Zelda title for the Wii, then called Revolution, without making clear which game it meant. In December 2005, the British publication NGC Magazine claimed that a GameCube copy played on the Revolution would offer the new controller. Miyamoto confirmed this in an interview with Nintendo of Europe, and Time reported it soon afterward. Support for the Wii controller never reached the GameCube release. At E3 2006, Nintendo confirmed that both versions would be available at the Wii launch and showed a playable Wii build. The GameCube release was then pushed back to a month after the launch.

  An early prototype swung the sword by gesture from a first-person viewpoint, but it could not show the variety of Link's movements. Once the third-person view returned, Aonuma found it strange to swing the Wii Remote with the right hand to control the sword in Link's left hand. The team mirrored the world map in response. Then demo users complained that the controls were difficult. Aonuma realized his team had built them with a mindset of "forcing" users to adapt, instead of making the system intuitive and easy to use.

  He began rethinking the controls with Miyamoto, with comfort and ease as the focus. The camera movement was reworked, and item controls changed to avoid accidental button presses. The new item system needed the button that had held the sword, so sword attacks went back to gestures, which E3 attendees had said they wanted. That revived the handedness problem. There was no time to rework Link's character model, so the team flipped the entire game into a mirror image. Link became right-handed, and references to east and west were reversed.

  The Wii version launched in North America in November 2006, and reached Japan, Europe and Australia the following month. The GameCube version followed in December 2006 as the last first-party game for that console. The Wii Remote's built-in speaker gave the Wii version extra sounds, including a bowstring when Link shoots, Midna's laugh when she offers advice, and the series' trademark chime when he finds secrets. The GameCube version let players move the camera freely, and the Wii version required a special "lookaround" mode. The GameCube version allowed only two secondary weapons to be equipped at once, against four on the Wii.

  GameCube players kept the original orientation. The official player's guide focuses on the Wii version, but it ends with a section of mirror-image maps for them.

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• 6. Sound and Voice

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  Toru Minegishi and Asuka Ohta composed the score, with series regular Koji Kondo serving as sound supervisor. Minegishi took charge of composition and sound design, and he wrote all of the field and dungeon music. The trailers received three separate pieces from different composers, two of them by Mahito Yokota and Kondo. Michiru Ōshima arranged all three for orchestra, and an ensemble conducted by Taizo Takemoto performed them. Kondo's piece was chosen for the E3 2005 trailer and for the demo movie after the title screen.

  Media requests at that trade show pushed Kondo to consider orchestral music for the rest of the game. That suited his own preference for live instruments. He pictured a full 50-person orchestra for action sequences and a string quartet for more "lyrical moments". The finished game used sequenced music instead. Kondo later named the lack of interactivity in orchestral music as one of the main reasons.

  Midna has more voice acting than anyone else in the game, though none of it is real language. Her on-screen dialogue is often accompanied by a babble of pseudo-speech. It was produced by scrambling English phrases sampled by the Japanese voice actress Akiko Kōmoto.

  On the 19th of November 2006, six- and seven-track versions of the soundtrack were released through a Nintendo Power promotion. Each came bundled with replicas of the Master Sword and the Hylian Shield.

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• 7. Acclaim and Sales

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  Perfect scores arrived from major publications including 1UP.com, Computer and Video Games, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Informer, GamesRadar and GameSpy. On Metacritic, the Wii version holds 95 out of 100 and the GameCube version 96, a rating of "universal acclaim". It is the highest-rated game of 2006 on that site. GameTrailers called it one of the greatest games ever created.

  Many critics, including writers at IGN and The Washington Post, judged it the greatest Zelda game made. Game Informer called it "so creative that it rivals the best that Hollywood has to offer". GamesRadar described it as "a game that deserves nothing but the absolute highest recommendation". Cubed3 went further and hailed it as "the single greatest videogame experience". Computer and Video Games felt its atmosphere beat that of any earlier Zelda, and PALGN said "the cutscenes are the best ever in Zelda games".

  Not every verdict was glowing. IGN and GameSpy both noted blurry textures and low-resolution characters, since the game was designed for the technically limited GameCube. Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot said the Wii controls felt "tacked-on", while 1UP.com called the sword swings "the most impressive in the entire series". IGN also criticized the MIDI-formatted songs for lacking "the punch and crispness" of orchestrated music, though Gaming Nexus considered the soundtrack the best of its generation.

  The awards were plentiful. For the GameCube version, IGN gave Best Artistic Design, Best Original Score and Best Use of Sound. IGN and Nintendo Power both named it Best Graphics and Best Story. Game of the Year honors came from GameTrailers, 1UP.com, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Informer, GamesRadar, GameSpy, the Spacey Awards, X-Play and Nintendo Power. At the 10th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences gave it "Outstanding Achievement in Story and Character Development". Nintendo Power later ranked it the third-best game released on a Nintendo system in the 2000s.

  In North America, three of every four Wii purchases in the first week included Twilight Princess. The Wii version sold 412,000 copies in the United States during November 2006. That was 87 percent of Wii launch sales that month, the highest attach rate for a launch game since Super Mario 64 arrived with the Nintendo 64 in 1996. Across the Wii and GameCube, it became America's fifth-best-selling game of 2006, with 1.5 million copies. In the United Kingdom, the Wii version earned a Platinum award, which marks sales of at least 300,000 copies.

  The Wii version had sold 5.82 million copies by March 2011, and the GameCube version 1.32 million by March 2007. By September 2015, worldwide sales reached 8.85 million. That made it the best-selling game in the series until The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild passed it in April 2018.

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• 8. Remaster and Legacy

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  A flaw in the Wii version gave hobbyists an unexpected door into the console. Players discovered a buffer overflow vulnerability, and an exploit called the "Twilight Hack" followed. A specially designed save file made the game load unsigned code from an SD card, including homebrew Wii applications. Versions 3.3 and 3.4 of the Wii Menu blocked copying such save files onto the console until workarounds were found. Version 4.0 patched the vulnerability.

  The high-definition remaster began as a side experiment during production of Breath of the Wild. Nintendo tried an HD version of Twilight Princess on Wii U development kits while settling on a look for the new game. That work led to The Wind Waker HD, which Nintendo built internally in only six months. Its success encouraged more remasters, and the Zelda team chose Twilight Princess next. Because most of the team was busy with Breath of the Wild, Nintendo partnered with the Australian studio Tantalus Media.

  Nintendo announced The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD in a Nintendo Direct on the 13th of November 2015, and it reached the world in March 2016. Aonuma, who directed the original and produced the remaster, wanted it to use the Wii U GamePad from early on. The GameCube control scheme was adapted because the two controllers have similar button layouts. Underwater gameplay improved significantly, some overly long cutscenes were sped up, and Tears of Light collecting was made less repetitive. A commitment to "preserving the feel of the original" kept the frame rate at 30 frames per second.

  Assistant director Tomomi Sano described a surprising problem with sharper graphics. In his words, "When we created more precise models of objects to go with the higher resolution, we found that everything was too clear and we lost that soft and delicate atmosphere that you get in particular at twilight or with the light in a forest".

  Certain bundles included a Wolf Link Amiibo figurine. It unlocks a Wii U-exclusive dungeon called the "Cave of Shadows", where Link fights waves of enemies while stuck in wolf form. It can also carry data over to Breath of the Wild. Other Zelda Amiibo have their own effects. Link and Toon Link replenish arrows, Zelda and Sheik restore health, and Ganondorf makes Link take twice as much damage.

  The remaster holds 86 out of 100 on Metacritic and won Nintendo Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards in November 2016. In its first week in Japan it sold 52,282 copies, more than the 30,264 that The Wind Waker HD managed in the same period. By December 2022, it had sold 1.17 million copies worldwide.

  The story kept growing in other media. Akira Himekawa wrote and drew an eleven-volume manga based on the game. It ran in Japan from the 8th of February 2016 to the 30th of January 2022, and Viz Media published the English edition from 2017 to March 2022. Nintendo also released a Nintendo 3DS puzzle game, My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, to mark the launch of the My Nintendo program.

  Midna, Zant and a minor character named Agitha later became playable warriors in the crossover Hyrule Warriors. After that game appeared, Agitha was recognized as a "main character" of Twilight Princess.

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