Rewriting Twilight Princess: The Most Flawed Narrative of the Zelda Series

Hm. Well, that title certainly won’t piss anyone off at all. Not a chance.

Although you can probably say the same about any Zelda game, when you talk about Twilight Princess especially you’re bound to get a variety of opinions from different fans. Some love the game to death; others would love to put it to death. Those are the extreme ends of the spectrum, of course – there are plenty of people who love certain parts and hate others. And there are a number of gamers who once loved it, but now, years after its release, just feel…dissatisfied with it.

I’m a member of that final group, as I sang praises for the game when it was released in 2006, but slowly and surely have found more and more things to be bothered with. A few months back I started trying to figure out the root cause for some of the issues I took with it, and in the end I came to a surprisingly simple conclusion:

The storyline of Twilight Princess is fundamentally flawed.

I write that, fully aware that many readers will have the knee-jerk reaction of “he hates Twilight Princess! HE MUST BURN IN THE FIERY PITS OF TINGLE’S HELL!” Heck, half of our viewers probably aren’t even reading this paragraph – they saw the preceding line (or maybe even just the title of the article) and immediately leapt into the comments to start textually assaulting me for daring to say something negative about a game that they like.

This new series, for which this article serves as the introduction, is not for those people. I’m not writing for flamers who, at the end of the day, I will laugh at for their inability to read more than ten sentences without flying into a temper tantrum (and I invite all of you still reading to join me in laughing at them too. It’s really fun!). This series is to be an in-depth study of the game and its many story issues, through which we might spark some serious conversations that really get to the heart of what makes Twilight Princess so…disappointing for many of us. It’s not for trolls – it’s for those of us who want to understand this game’s shortcomings and explain them to others.

We’ve been struggling with how to explain that for a long time…especially since, when you get down to it, the game we got is anything but bad.

The Game We Got

Let’s face it: the difficulty in criticizing Twilight Princess really stems from the fact that it’s an awesome game, jam-packed with exciting moments, massive dungeons, and epic boss battles the likes of which we had never before seen. Many readers will have already jumped to the conclusion that I think the opposite, but I never stated that the game is bad – I only said that its story is flawed.

There’s a huge difference there that we’ve stopped seeing. So many people – gamers, developers, journalists, etc. – have given stories so much focus in recent years that the entire gaming industry seems to have forgotten a simple truth: story is but one tool in a developer’s belt, and it’s not even an essential one. If it was, then how on earth has Mario remained so popular? How did Wii Sports move so many consoles? Heck, how are many of the older Zelda games still held in such high esteem?

Despite its story issues, Twilight Princess has everything it needs to be one of the greats: solid gameplay, excellent dungeons, a vast world to explore, etc. Are there flaws in those aspects of the game too? Well…yes, there are, but nothing that completely ruins the experience or makes the game outright bad.

The Problem

Even if it’s not essential, though, don’t think that narrative is unimportant. Like any other game development tool, if you’re going to use story you have to use it correctly – otherwise, you’ll find your game drowning in inconsistencies and issues. Players will notice such problems, even if only on a subconscious level, so although it may not “ruin the experience,” a poorly executed narrative can still damage and devalue the game in the eyes of many.

Twilight Princess‘s story was rife with such problems, and to make matters worse, that story was emphasized and focused on far more than we’d seen in any Zelda game prior. Its issues weren’t merely ‘present’ – they were practically shoved in your face, forcing you to look at them no matter how much you wanted to pretend they weren’t there. Narrative problems are nothing new for the series (even Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask had such issues (…please don’t kill me)), but back then they were easily ignored or overlooked because the games didn’t focus on them. Instead they became little loopholes and talking points for us fans to enjoy and theorize explanations/solutions for.

You can’t say the same for Twilight Princess – many of its storytelling problems lack in-game explanations entirely, and we fans have been arguing about them for years, giving ourselves some major headaches in the process. People complain about Ilia. They criticize Ganondorf’s appearance in the game. They claim that Link felt more like Midna’s sidekick than the other way around. Why do we feel this way, and why did these and other issues start feeling so wrong to us as the years went on?

It all comes back to the story.

Proposed Solution

Since simply stating my theory isn’t going to change anyone’s mind (and why would it? Only amazing, brilliant, gorgeous people like yourself will have read this far into this article, and you’re far too intelligent to accept my hypothesis without evidence), we’ll be spending the next few months delving into the major narrative issues that I have found through my study of the game’s storyline. Each week I’ll select one such issue to present, and we’ll go over my reasoning for what makes it a flaw.

Now, the thing about me is that I don’t like to criticize stuff – not because I don’t see problems, but because I don’t feel like I have the right to criticize something if I couldn’t do it better myself. So…no choice then. In addition to explaining the problem, each week I’ll also present ideas I’ve come up with for how the story could have been rewritten in order to fix or remove said problem. Hence the series’ name: “Rewriting Twilight Princess.”

Sure, the game is already out and nothing we say here will change it (unless one of you has a time machine you’d like to donate to a good cause), but that doesn’t devalue a good “what-if” scenario. Talking about this sort of thing can make for some truly fascinating and thought-provoking discussions, as you can see in videos like What if “Star Wars: Episode 1” Was Good? or our own Francis’s Resistance member articles.

For this series, though, I’d first like to lay a few ground rules:

  • We will focus specifically on storyline issues; gameplay problems are a whole other beast. The two often intertwine, and we’ll discuss them when they do, but I have no intention of talking about, say, the first few days in Ordon Village. No matter how dull or boring sequences like that may be to play through, we won’t touch them unless they actually harm the story arcs of the game or characters.
  • We will stick as close to TP’s original storyline as possible. It would be easy to fix all these problems if we scrapped the whole thing and rewrote it from scratch, but where’s the fun in that? The goal of these rewrites is not only to provide fixes, but to provide reasonable fixes, ones that the development team could have made themselves had they recognized the problems and their import. I can’t promise that we’ll never make huge, sweeping changes (some issues are just too massive to solve otherwise), but we’ll avoid them wherever possible.
  • Please remember, these are my solutions. Each week I’ll give the solutions that I came up with, but I won’t pretend to think that they’re the only fix. They might not even be the best fix. And I’m sure that some people will love them and others will hate them; it’s not exactly easy to satisfy a fanbase, especially when Zelda‘s the subject matter. If you disagree with my proposals, the comment section is ready and waiting for you to share your own ideas – I only ask that you finish reading my solution before trying to explain why you disagree with it (read: don’t be a troll. You’re better than that).

The End Result

This article shows the general format we’ll go through each week as we focus on the different issues of the game. After introducing the subject of the week, I’ll give a short recap of what happened in the released version of Twilight Princess (“The Game We Got”). Then we’ll examine what problems exist in the execution of that part of the story (“The Problem”), followed up with ideas for how the tale could have been rewritten to remove or resolve those issues (“Proposed Solution”). We’ll end with a quick recap of the changes we’ve made (“The End Result”), along with my final words on the subject.

After that you guys can comment away with your own ideas and opinions – assuming we can all stop laughing at the trolls long enough to write such comments.

We’ll kick things off next week by examining one of the most controversial characters in the game (because apparently I like to torture myself like that). Many people can’t stand him…while many others can’t understand what’s wrong with him. Whether he’s one of Zelda‘s best villains or a bane on the series’ existence, there’s no denying that he was intended to be a masterpiece of a character. Come back next week, when we’ll work to understand what exactly it was that turned such a massive portion of the fanbase against this once esteemed character.

And now, if I may revive the old sign-off I used to use back when I wrote for the now-dead fansite The Desert Colossus:

Until then, this is Alpha, signing off to go do…stuff.

“Rewriting Twilight Princess” is a series focused on examining the many narrative issues of this epic Zelda game in an attempt to understand why it has garnered such negativity from the fanbase over the years. Join us each week as Tyler “Alpha” Meehan delves into each of these issues, explains what was wrong with it, and explores ideas for how the storyline could have been rewritten to salvage such problems.

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