Reviews// Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap review

And that’s about the end of our moaning. We adore Minish Cap and take exception to some of the criticisms levelled at the game from some quarters. It’s too short according to some. How exactly this is the case is beyond SPOnG, as by our reckoning MC is around the same size as LTTP which makes it about perfect. We understand that some gamers want to only play games and nothing else, thus demanding hugely time-consuming titles. However, SPOnG believes that this is simply not reflective of the needs of the vast majority of consumers. Most of us ‘normal’ types want to be able to keep up with a game that offers the pace, involvement and flow of a decent size novel. We don’t want to have to dedicate our lives to watching the same sequence of events unfold again and again with every battle because, and we understand this might sound harsh, we have better things to do. Action RPG games can be shoddy in the extreme. Traditional RPG games can, at times, leave us concerned that anyone could consider actually investing that amount of time into achieving essentially nothing.

Zelda Minish Cap balances depth and involvement with game time better than any game SPOnG can remember playing. It’s a perfect travel companion and a great thing to have sitting winking at you from the coffee table.

It’s aesthetically sublime, with perhaps the cutest (if most androgynous) Link seen to date. There are little touches from other Zeldas too, with music from four incarnations and graphical nods to Wind Waker, including cell-shaded-a-like animations throughout – very nice indeed.

Another thing that made us feel slightly less stupid has involved following the hapless marketing strategy employed by Nintendo Europe in dealing with this gem of a game. Seemingly, it decided to do very little indeed and frustratingly Minish Cap is one of those games you might suddenly notice in your game store for sale, you being surprised that you weren’t aware of it being released on any specific date. Remember when you saw Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga for sale? The same thing is likely to happen with Minish Cap and that costs sales, devalues one of Nintendo’s key IPs thus devaluing the Nintendo brand as a whole. Hey folks, you heard of Zelda on the SNES, one of the best games of all time? Well here’s Zelda on the SNES number two and is one of the best games of all time. We believe that this message wouldn’t have been lost…

SPOnG rating: A+

If you have a Game Boy Advance, and chances are you do, SPOnG urges you to go out and buy Minish Cap. A real contender for game of the year, it manages to trounce recent Game Boy offerings on all fronts even in its stripped down single-player-only form.