You know, as I get older and see more and more of my childhood games leading up to their 20th anniversary, it probably won’t do much to ease my sense of panic about getting older, but unfortunately, time doesn’t Mind you, it’s a simple fact that The Legend of Zelda: Tiny Hat came out twenty years ago. Existential crises aside, anniversaries like this are a great time to remember a Game Boy Advance classic, not just because it’s timely, but because we’re almost certain to get a brand new Nintendo console, and developers can There’s a lot to learn from one of the best Zelda games.
It’s a shame that not many people play The Minish Cap. If you ignore the HD port of Twilight Princess, it’s actually the third-worst selling entry in the series, which I was actually a little surprised when I was researching the title, but then I realized that it was released a little while back By less than one, I was less surprised. One month before the Nintendo DS came out – Why buy an old, smelly GBA game when you can buy a Nintendo Dog?
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I think it’s been a bit forgotten due to low sales, and while it’s extremely enjoyable, it also means a lot of people don’t really realize how weird it is. Of course, it has the usual staples; a silent young hero named Link, a princess named Zelda who you must rescue, and a companion who basically does all the talking for you, this time in the form of E. In the form of Zillo, a talking hat (there’s obviously more going on, but, that’s spoiler territory). However, something important is missing: Ganondorf and the Master Sword.
Now, to be clear, this isn’t the only fact – there have been other games that didn’t feature ole Dorf as the bad guy, and Link’s trusty blade didn’t end up in his sheath, but I think The Minish is the thing Cap does best is to deal with these absences. First, Link finally gets a master sword, the Four Swords, a weapon that allows the user to split himself into up to four copies, making for some fun puzzle moments, but of course, that comes with restrictions and rewards .
It’s all tightly tied into Minish’s story, meaning the game doesn’t just switch back and forth between regular size and shrinking down to pin-head size. But those moments are important and special too! The game has an incredible sense of scale, and the pixel art helps sell the developer’s vision effectively. It’s a weird game in that you really can’t do it any other way than 2D, other than there’s an incredible Astro Bot level with similar mechanics, so who knows.
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The fact that these mechanics are so closely tied into the story is the real highlight of the game, and even if it’s not particularly inspiring or lore-expanding, it feels fresh even now because it’s so disconnected from everything else. This might have something to do with the fact that it’s actually a Capcom-developed game, funnily enough, but it’s just so weird.
There might even be a lesson here that Nintendo should open the door to occasionally letting other developers tackle the series, not just those closely associated with it, like Grezzo (the developer of Echoes of Wisdom). Remember when an indie team was working on Cadence of Hyrule? Is this a rhythm action game with a completely unique Zelda twist? Nintendo, please provide more.
Echoes of Wisdom is a change of pace in its own right, and I wish it had worked harder on these changes at times, but it’s clearly an experiment that Nintendo is undertaking at the end of the life of its most successful console. I hope that weird feeling returns even more strongly on Switch 2, so we get games like Minish Cap again that don’t feel beholden to all the Zelda games that came before it. To be honest, I would also love to see Minish again.
