Reviews// Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap review

It’s too easy to feel stupid these days. There’s too much going on to keep up with and it’s starting to piss SPOnG off a bit. But there is hope; a new Zelda offering, surely a respite from this increasingly cruel existence.

We started to feel slightly better; loading up the Capcom co-developed Minish Cap our GBA SP coming to life. We felt even better reading one review of the game that began, “Du-du-da-DA! It all comes down to that. Every time you encounter that symbolic fanfare, you've just found something worth cheering. You hear it a lot. And the journey to each salute is deliberately meandering and reliant on your constant adjustment to circumstances.”

It’s like he squeezed it all night long but nothing came out…

However, as is always the case, our slightest hint of a smile, perhaps the best feeling we had enjoyed in weeks, was soon crushed, devoured by the darkness - and reality hit home. We have become stupid. Dungeon one in Minish Cap stumped SPOnG for ages. Dungeon one! The first dungeon. Oh god!

It gets worse. Simple, SIMPLE puzzles involving sliding little squares around went wrong, resulting in the shameful “walk out of room for magic block reset” coming into play far too often.

What has happened? Our brains used to be strong and powerful. Is the game harder than say, Link to the Past? No, though it’s certainly more cerebrally expansive, bringing scale-driven access gaming into the mix. This however, isn’t reason enough for our decline. We have become stupid. It’s probably the lager.

SPOnG will now nutshell Minish Cap. It’s a Zelda game right? Arguably the spiritual sequel to the SNES monster Link to the Past. It’s standard stuff except for one key gameplay mechanic – You can shrink. You discover a hat, or a cap, made by the Picori. Picori are really small people who live dotted about Hyrule. They made a cap, a rather annoying cap that lives on your head throughout the game. You keeping up? Small people, called Picori, made an annoying cap, lives on your head, reminds you of Jar Jar Binx. The cap enables Link to shrink to Picori size and do small person things.