gamerforever wrote: twilight princess was first shown in 2004!
Time has flown by so quick!
I
cannot believe that was seven years ago. I can still remember when the news hit me back in June 2004. I had discovered Game Spy about a year prior, and was still--one year later--trying to suss out how File Planet worked. While seeking out where to download music from the site--I'd been redirected there from Golden Sun Realm, having tried to download the bit of music for Tundaria Tower in
The Lost Age--I can recall the absolute negation of pretty much every one of my bodily senses except for vision, all upon one glimpsing one genuinely heart-stopping image: Link--donning a gritty, muddy tunic--pitted against three reptilian enemies.
I gazed at that one, solitary image with unwavering stillness as if suspended in time: I was positively and utterly dumbstruck, robbed of lung function and power of speech. I can recollect, so clearly and resolutely, doubting that the game was even authentic. This didn't even
look like the
Zelda I knew. Link was dressed in
chain-mail, and no longer was he the cleanly-coloured entity of before--here, his clothes were
textured, and stained with grime; enemies were
dark and
dirty, and not identikit; everything shown looked vast and simply
too true to life; and the lack of a HUD made it seem like a PC game dressed in
Zelda-like clothes. I can remember summarising these sentiments by remarking that the aesthetics looked like they had been pilfered straight from
Lord of the Rings--it seemed too good to be true chiefly because it looked exactly like what people wanted.
Still on dial-up, I left the computer on overnight to download the trailer for this enigma of a
Zelda game in order to validate its existence. Waking up for school the next day, I watched the trailer and forthwith took as many screencaps as I could to distribute to my friends. There was a seismic sense of excitement, that lunch-time. The worlds shown looked vast, serene and curiously quiet; the mellow music seemed much too subdued and film-like to be at all redolent of
Zelda--which was composite to making the game feel that bit more exotic and remarkable than normal. Despite its exoticism, though...Link
was there,
astride Epona, tumbling through vacant lands whose parameters could not be gleaned from the trailer. Nothing shown gave the suggestion of borders or restrictions: the forest was wide and open, with no structure to lead Link down a given route; the waste-lands, pouring with rain, offered no purpose than to drum up suspense and incite query of their secrets; and most of all, there was the meek and shy little river that trickled gently beneath the stone bridge all to the gentle sigh of the music, all as if to invite you to follow it and eke out its mysteries. That first image--the one of the river, trees, mountains, distant castle, and the grave-like stones--tailored my expectations for this game that I hoped would be the most personal of journeys. Link and Epona--as well as their adversaries--were the only creatures of note in the trailer, and it was my hope that this game would embrace this lonely sense and send you off to carve your own journey in a
Zelda world more realistic and open than any previously. To me, it was like the first
Zelda game and all its associated freedoms had been transmuted into 3D: you could find a forest on your own and explore it; you could happen upon a grave and open it; you could crawl beneath a bridge and find something--nothing appeared to direct this freedom, or govern what patterns or manoeuvres you would exercise. I was enchanted beyond comparison, more excited for a game than any time before.
It is weird looking back on these preliminary expectations and comparing them with the eventual
Twilight Princess, a
Zelda game more filmic than any other--and one whose movie-like leanings necessitate greater direction and control over the player than usual. It's no wonder I received
Twilight Princess with such bitterness when I played through it, given just how specific my hopes were after watching that first trailer, and just how diametrically opposed they were to the ethoses of the finished game. I'd spent two years feverishly building up my hopes for something else entirely.
No matter how much ire I still possess vis-a-vis
Twilight Princess, though, it will probably always represent the height of my anticipation for any game.