Ronnie

I quite like the design, I'm not really into nerdy gaming t-shirts but I might pick this up once I decide black or green.

Days lasting 4 minutes was too strange for me to really miss a proper day/night cycle, and the quirkiness of being able to sleep in other people's beds make up for it anyway IMO. Not being able to fly at night is a little strange though.

So basically, Wind Waker 2, up in the sky? The sky was disappointing I thought. Sailing in Wind Waker I enjoyed a lot, but flying just felt like a chore in this game.

^ funny, I thought the bit where you have to sneak around Eldin Volcano collecting your gear was a highlight of the game. The whole atmosphere and mood of that sequence was fantastic I thought. On an unrelated note, apparently the cutscenes where Link goes down stairs before each dungeon was a homage to how he did the same in LOZ on the NES I was also convinced there'd be an aerial part of the Demise battle on your loftwing but I guess not.

Did anyone else have a lump in their throat when Fi said goodbye to Link at the end? That hit me far more than Midna going through the mirror. I think the fact that they made Fi so cold and calculating throughout the game, only made her 'emotional' parting with Link all the more powerful. Going back to Link never looking so expressive, you could tell he was on the verge of tears, which I thought was very well done. To me it just seems like extremely trivial aspects of the game to argue about but oh well. The thunderhead as you rightly point out, was very lazily implemented. big anticlimax and the Isle of Songs was a little meh, apart from how you got in.

I can't disagree more with both those comments. We've had the hookshot in countless Zeldas, it was great to see them try something new with the grappling hook and what you could do with it. It added to Wind Waker's charm. As for the sail and the leaf being the same object, I don't see why, and even if it would have made things easier to equip and use, that's nitpicking for the sake of it.

44 hours in and finished. That must be the longest ever Zelda game surely? Outstanding game. A joy to play from start to finish Visuals, controls, gameplay, level design, story, tone, sidequests... perfect. No wonder EDGE and Famitsu gave perfect scores. Masterpiece.

This topic seems to have slowed to a crawl :-( Loving the last few bits of the game, the final dungeon was really enjoyable.

And I thought the first revisited area was good fun, the second one was brilliant! A highlight of the whole series I'd say. The whole tone, look and feel of that sequence was fantastic, loved the heartbeat as you approached an enemy. If this is an example of the fetch quests people are complaining about, I don't see the problem, they're good fun IMO. Picking up 5 bits of a key was far 'worse'.

Wait, you shave? :P

Fuck me this game is amazing. It just gets better and better!

Enjoying the 6th dungeon a lot, 4 and 6 have been really good, but 5 was pretty uninspired by comparison, it basically just rehashed 3 in terms of gameplay. Back to 6, this is going to sound seriously Zelda-nerdy, but did anyone else notice the way the boss music finishes when you beat the mini-bosses? at 1:20: It sounded great, rather than just fading the tune out like they have done in every other Zelda, including this one. Ok pretty sad that I noticed that, but a cool addition to the game.

Yeah that illustrates it pretty well. I still don't personally see the Four Swords games as proper Zelda titles but more like party games, but oh well.

Wow, that graphic couldn't be more unclear and confusing.

I don't see why they wouldn't send him there straight away. It doesn't conflict with Majora's Mask. They apprehend him, sentence him etc and then exile him. Probably shortly after Link returns to the past. The fact that he doesn't have any recollection of a green-clad hero in Twilight Princess probably means it happened whilst Link was out looking for Navi, so they never actually met. Link did go back to Hyrule after MM, it's just that the rest of his life wasn't shown in a game. It was only years later that Ganondorf broke out of the Twilight Realm, and by then there was a new Link.

Hamishmash, good post. Yep that makes a lot of sense too, after all, wouldn't there be an infinite number of timelines? There's the main one, OOT > MM > TP and two alternate ones that give us a look at how things would have turned out IF... etc etc Not sure where you got that from, plus isn't Link only gone a few days/weeks in Majora's Mask? Twilight Princess follows on from the Young Link timeline because Ganondorf is sent to the Twilight Realm, whilst Link is playing out Majora's Mask. The events of Wind Waker occur because there's no hero to stop the Great Evil taking over, as he's beensent back in time. It's a little convenient how they chuck all the older Zeldas onto a third timeline, but oh well. Three timelines give Nintendo a lot more freedom for future games anyway.

Yeah and sound-wise, I loved that nightmarish electronica vibe you had when Twilight baddies approached in TP. And the horn-like sound when you killed them. I can't believe just how poor the music in this game is, by Zelda standards at least. What a disappointment, I'm surprised none of the reviews seemed to agree. Having said that I just arrived at an area somewhere before dungeon 6 that had nice, if a bit kerazy, music.

Here is the timeline from the book Two thirds of it most people will have agreed with for a while now (branches 2 & 3) + Minish Cap coming early on in the history. And then they just stuck the earlier games into a generic 'Link fails' third timeline, which is fair enough I suppose. That's the best they could probably do after only starting to pay attention to a chronology from OOT onwards. (though I'd have ditched the Four Swords games entirely, they're more like party games IMO)

I take it there are no spoilers for Skyward Sword in that last bit?

I've ordered a copy. No doubt the US/European one will get announced tomorrow.

Are we talking in the region of 2 or 3 hours or 10? :-) I thought you hated the fetch quests later in the game, saying it was just padding to draw the length of the game out?

A question for those who have finished it...

They've just made her go OTT on the probability chat, if she occasionally offered up %'s it'd be amusing, but the fact that she literally does it at every other conversation is too much. A bit of warmth would be nice, but apart from 'Congratulations Master' after each trial, there isn't anything even remotely personable.

Finished the fifth dungeon, thought it was alright. Nice setting but in terms of layout, gameplay etc, pretty meh. The boss was cool though.

I'm tempted to spend 60 quid for the Japanese version, who knows if they'll ever release it over here