Reviews// Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap review

Kinstones. We didn’t like Kinstones. Kinstones are little broken circular stones that can be fused with the help of NPCs in Minish Cap. When you approach a character, a little bubble will sometimes pop up next to their head. At this point you tap the left shoulder button and you enter the fusing menu. It’s rather simple: cycle through your stones to see if you have one that fits. If so, fuse it and something happens, something kind of like this: You cut to a close up of a part of Hyrule. Something appears, a golden enemy (which when killed rewards a ton or rupees) or a chest or a tree opens up – standard Zelda stuff. Then the map screen is displayed showing the location of the Kinstone-activated event. The big problem is that it happens far too often. Your map, which in SPOnG’s opinion is the worst map in any post 16-Bit Zelda offering, becomes overrun with little flashing symbols and so often you trek across to the latest chest, open it, it’s 50 rupees and you really wish you hadn’t bothered.

So why does this happen so often. Well, as the whole point of SPOnG is to tell you secrets, we might as well squeeze one into this review. Kinstones were supposed to be multiplayer tradable objects. Indeed, Minish Cap was originally going to include a version of Four Swords a la Link to the Past. Speaking to two sources close to the project, all this was stripped out earlier this year in favour of a cleaner, slimmed down offering. So the code was left with tons and tons of Kinstones still in place and most of them serve to fill out gameplay in a frustrating and unnecessary way.

Okay, so that’s the map, Kinstones, Jar Jar Binx hat… there was something else. Ah yes, revisiting Hyrule for ten seconds reminds us that there is too much item switching in Minish Cap. In some rooms, you’ll be hitting the clunky menu six or seven times and it drags out the gameplay with no gain. Oh, and the hints system sucks really bad too.