first up: spoilers. of course.

i just completed the legend of zelda: twilight princess. it... uh... took me more than 52 hours according to the in-game clock, which would make it the longest adventure game i've ever played through. actually, twilight princess is the first zelda game i've completed; for however many years, i've had a link to the past, ocarina of time and wind waker gathering dust on a shelf, each somewhere around two-thirds complete.

i think the reason that i've finished twilight princess is fairly simple: someone involved in the design process made a conscious decision that they wanted players to finish the game. midna, for example, gives advice during boss battles at the slightest sign of trouble. even towards the end of the game, when you'd normally expect the difficulty curve to rise a little, she'll literally call the next action the player must take - not the weakness to be exploited, mind, but the action needed to exploit it. the result is that you get a feeling of being led by the hand through the game.

i want to say that if anything the designers have erred on the side of over-friendliness in this and other cases - that by smoothing (almost) every sharp edge, they've made the experience less memorable. after all, the best gaming moments are those where you overcome ridiculous adversity single-handed through sheer bloody-minded force of will, dexterity, strategic planning, preparation, speed of reflex, etc.

but it turns out i don't believe that. on the one hand, link to the past and ocarina of time would both be on my list of top 10 or 20 games. on the other, most of my memories of those games are of frustration. where's the next dungeon? (hour of random wandering later:) i've found it, now how do i get in? why do i have to clear this room of the same six monsters for the ninth time? how do i damage this boss? where are all the pieces of heart? if i'd had just one more, i might have been able to kill that invulnerable boss, right?

the reason i finished twilight princess it that there's effectively none of that frustration. your path is largely signposted (literally in many cases with flashing beacons on the map); there are very few unique techniques to be mastered to, for example, get access to a dungeon, and those that are necessary are explained clearly; where rooms full of monsters do regenerate, they're generally of the one-hit-kill variety; midna calls out with boss strategy tips at the slightest sign of need; a fortune teller will show you an in-game shot of the neighbourhood of each piece of heart.

and, yeah, sure, that makes the whole thing a lot easier. the sensation of being "stuck" is basically absent. so, what purpose did that sensation really serve? why were designers evoking that response, and is missing out on that sensation going to curve my spine and stop us from winning the war (ref: george carlin)?

purpose one: prolonging the game. back when games sold fewer copies (but did they really?), budgets were smaller, so less content could be produced. also, cartridge sizes (SNES and N64) constrained the amount of content that could be delivered. so slowing the player down with frustation was necessary historically to ensure players felt like they were getting their money's worth.

now, i don't think that was the intention during either OOT or LTTP's design; they're both games that were innovative and/or revolutionary for their time, and the majority of their innovations improved the player's lot by smoothing out the types of jagged edge i talked about earlier.

however, i do think that one of the big arcs in the history of gaming is a move away from evoking feelings of frustration in the player, and that LTTP, OOT and TP are each points on a curve of increasing player-friendliness.

purpose two: gotta be cruel to be kind. gotta feel the terrifying lows to really experience the giddy highs (not forgetting, of course, the creamy middles). gotta be frustrated to later feel satisfied. hunger is the best sauce. sweet anticipation.

this is where, for me, the jury's still out. the sense of satisfaction i have right now having completed TP just isn't that great. it's certainly nothing compared to the day i got under 0 seconds on the Grand Prix Legends handicap, which set a "par" time for a hot lap around each of the 1967-era grand prix circuits in the game according to the standard set by the game's developers. gpl is a brutal, uncompromising driving simulator; while it's possible to criticise its realism (something even its lead developer has done, saying it feels to him like driving on ice), the world ice-driving circuit it does simulate is one in which you can invest a huge amount of effort improving your skills to achieve a certain standard. the difference between GPL and TP is that back when i would happily spend two hours polishing my line around a single track, i knew that there was a risk that at the end of two hours i wouldn't actually be any faster; that i might tweak some aspect of my style, find that it wasn't an improvement, and then somehow be unable to find my way back. in TP, i didn't have much feeling of risk that i wouldn't progress - x hours invested translated pretty consistently to y completion percentage points, with a very small standard deviation.

a related point is the difficulty curve. TP's level of difficulty (in terms of dungeons, combat, and boss battles) really didn't seem to ramp up very much on the way through the game. the challenges i was overcoming later in the game were only feasible because link's capabilities had improved (due to new items), not because my skill in deploying those capabilities had improved.

the whole thing's kind of depressing. is TLOZ turning into WoW? a noob with a freshly purchased level 60 character will destroy the world's best WoWer playing a level 30 character, right?

anyway, all that aside, i still think that TP's the best game i've played for a couple of years at least, and i definitely believe it's the best game in the Zelda series. definitely recommended.