I finished playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess a couple of weeks ago and it sort of left me with a feeling of ".... That's it?" I liked the game, don't misunderstand, but it just didn't really feel like there was much to it. First of all let's just say that it was probably one of the most beautiful games I've ever played. I just liked looking at the game. The story was also very interesting. There's also these ghost hunting and bug hunting side quess that were quite challenging.

.... but

The game was too easy. I didn't die once in a boss battle and while I'd like to attribute that to my mad gaming skillz, but I'd know it wouldn't be true. If I can beat a higher lever game boss without any problems then you know something's wrong. I died about twenty times the first time I faced Bongo Bongo in The Ocarina of Time, and I still have nightmares about that fish boss in Majora's Mask. *shudder* The dungeons themselves were also very easy and not terribly difficult to figure out. I was stuck in that water temple in Ocarina of Time for several days before I managed to puzzle it all out.

That ghost hunting side-quest I mentioned earlier-- that in and of itself was challenging and the reward you get for it is unlimited money. This sounds great but by the time you find all of the ghosts you've almost finished the game and you don't really need to buy anything any more as you find pretty much everything you need during the main quest. There IS this suit of armour that makes you invincible when you wear it but it eats up your rupees (your money) at a rate of about 1 per second. The only time you'd really need to wear it is in the Cave of Ordeals (a really hard dungeon I'll talk about in a minute) but it makes you run out of rupees too quickly (and you won't find ANY in the cave of ordeals) and should only be used in an emergency.

The Cave of Ordeals... Ahhhhh! The very name sums it up perfectly. This is without a doubt the most difficult dungeon and completely unnecessary to completing the game (Thank GOD!). It's fifty levels filled with progressively more difficult enemies. The really hard thing is that the enemies rarely drop any hearts, equipment, or rupees and you'll only find one golden chu to refill all your heart containers. If you're doing the ghost side quest you HAVE to play through this dungeon to at least level 48 (AAAARRRRGGGHH!!). Let me start off by saying that I suck at leveled dungeons like this but I managed to get all the way to level 48 and snagged that last ghost (with only one quarter of a heart container left ). What do you get for all of this? Every ten levels you'll talk to the Great Fairy and she'll release the life giving faries into the Spirit Springs around Hyrule and on level 50 she'll fill one of your bottles with fairy tears (fills all your heart containers and boosts your attack for a while). But wait, THAT'S NOT ALL!!! Play through the cave a second time and it's more difficult than the first time with more enemies than before. Make it all the way to level 50 this time and the Great Fairy will show up at any of the Spirit Springs and give you fairy tears whenever you want. That's Great..... but, like the ghost quest,  the reward doesn't matter because the game is so  easy you'll never need to use the fairy tears to fill your life or make yourself stronger.  Play the Cave of Ordeals for the challenge itself but keep in mind that it isn't important to completing the game.

The bug hunting quest is useful, particularly at the begining of the game, but by the end you'll just be finding the bugs just to find them. All around Hyrule (and keep in mind this is a HUGE world) there are 22 of these these itty-bitty golden bugs that like to hang out on cliffs, fly around, or just hide.They're usually very hard to spot and sometimes very hard to catch. But if you do manage to catch some of them then you can sell them to a character in the game and she'll give you a wallet and lots of cash. It's useful because you can use that cash to buy a piece of heart for 1,000 rupees early in the game. If you find them all the character will give you a bigger wallet but by the end of the game you won't really need it.

Like I said before, Hyrule in this game is absolutely beautiful and huge, but.... you don't really do much other than run around from here to there most of the time. IIRC, you have to fight on horseback (really cool, BTW) three times, there's one race where you have to avoid enemies when you're walking across the field, and that's about it. What good is having a huge world if you don't really do much with it. Even in The Wind Waker (also a huge world and traveling across it also felt like work) there was something to do on every single island. Unfortunately the pieces of heart, golden bugs, and ghosts were massively spread out. Like I said, mostly it's just running from here to there. There wasn't even a horseback race in the game and you'd think that would be a natural  thing to have in a game with a huge world, a horse and lots of room to run around

There's also a point in the game where you can travel to another world that looked really cool. Unfortunately you don't do anything there except go through a dungeon. You can't explore it. You can't even talk to the people there. A missed opportunity if ever there was one.

Lastly, the Spinner. It was single handedly the most fun thing in the entire game. It's sort of like a spikey floating skateboard that runs on tracks. Hard to describe. Just check this site out: The Spinner So what's the problem with it? After you find it and use it in one of the boss battles you'll rarely use it again in the game. A travesty! When I first got that thing and learned how to use it I spent about a half hour just hanging out in that dungeon just jumping from track to track, it was that much fun! There should have been a spinner mini game

I told a friend on another forum about how I felt about this game. I said that I liked the game but it kept giving me this feeling of "Almost.... but not quite."

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