It´s been a long time since The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was released for the Nintendo Gamecube, being a phenomenon for having for the first time a The Legend of Zelda that tried to be more realistic and darker, many fans of the franchise love this game, including me, although there are others that hated it, reaching the point of acclaiming that it is the worst 3D Zelda ever. What is certain is that Nintendo released a remaster in HD for the Wii U a few years ago, a remaster that I just finished and I would like to point out some changes with respect to the Gamecube and Wii versions.
The first thing I would like to emphasize is that I think this is the definitely version to play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, since it has some changes at the playable level that could make our experience better. The first change that we will be able to notice in the game is that it runs at a resolution of 1080p, a very considerable change since the old versions run at 480p, I want to make clear this game runs 1080p at 30fps almost stable all the time, it is sad that it did not reach 60fps but I suppose that is a lot to ask for a Nintendo console.
The change in resolution is noticeable and the truth is just watching images or videos is not enough, the change is more visible when you are playing the game, apart from the resolution, there are also other visual aspects that were greatly improved such as the textures that now they look better than ever, not only the textures, but also other details such as lighting, shadows and even water reflections have been improved. I have to admit that Zelda Twilight Princess HD doesn´t reach the heels of the Zelda Wind Waker remaster, even so, it looks amazing.
There are many people who claim that this game is too dark and I´m not talking about the story, I talk about the color palette that is quite saturated, giving the game that air of being dark, even during the day we can see a dull tone in the game, not to mention when we transformed into Wolf Link and the world became even darker, I have friends who told me that this bothered them, some even give them a headache, it was never my case but I can understand it, it is my joy inform these people that the brightness of the game can be reduced or increased, so if you are one of those people who were affected by the darkness of the game, let me tell you that you can increase the brightness and make a better experience. There are also other features we can check like Motion Controls, Camera Control, Aim and so on.
At the playable level, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess allows us to play in many ways and choose the one that seems most comfortable for us. First of all, we will be able to play with the Wii U gamepad, as in the Zelda Wind Waker remaster, we will use the gamepad as the inventory of our items, which means that we will not have to pause to choose them, well, technically if we want, it is possible, but it is better to choose the items in real time, we will only need to drag the item we want to the necessary box, that is, the button we want, we can do this with the gamepad buttons or with a stylus.
If what we want is to play in a traditional way as we used to do with the Gamecube version, we can use our Wii U pro controller, in this way we can play in a conventional way, I have to point out that playing with this control is actually quite comfortable so if the gamepad is not your thing, you can use the pro controller, in addition, the pro controller has a duration of 90 hours, which looks attractive compared to the battery of the gamepad that at most will give you a duration of 3 hours, when playing with the pro controller, you won´t need to use the gamepad for anything.
Finally, it seems that nobody remembers that the Wii U had a handheld mode, indeed, you can play this game portably if you like, just press the button (-) on the gamepad and the game will be playable on the gamepad while the TV is off, it is quite useful since if you want to play only for a while you can lie down on your bed and play Zelda Twilight Princess placidly. I have to clarify first that when playing in this mode, the fps will be a bit more unstable, especially in areas where there is a lot of grass and several enemies, the fps can drop drastically from 30 to 20, the resolution is also somewhat affected, it´ll suffer a downgrade from 1080p to 720p, still manages to look pretty good.
The game also adds some changes that make certain tasks easier, for example, collecting insects for Maripola is a little easier since the game will tell us in which area the insect lives respectively, this task was a bit tiresome in the old versions, but thanks to this addition it is no longer so tedious, to mention another, while hunting poes, we can use a lamp that lights up with a blue light when there is a poe nearby, this is really useful since in the old versions we didn´t have way of knowing in which areas there were poes left.
In summary, as I mentioned before, I still think that the Wii U version is the best way to play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, not only that it looks fantastic visually thanks to the graphic upgrades, but also at the playable level it adds certain mechanics that will help us a lot in our adventure, in addition, the game allows you to play in several ways being able to choose the one that seems comfortable to you, I am sure that sooner or later it will arrive on Nintendo Switch but until now, this is the only way to enjoy The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD.
I had this game on Wii, although I did not play it, I saw my brother doing it and the truth is that it is an interesting proposal. Without touching aspects of the story of the game, visually I loved it. Zelda has always been characterized by maintaining a visual aspect with vivid colors, or at least in most of their games. Twilight Princess everything becomes a little more mature or Dark as some have called it. This reminded me a lot of the evolution of textures that Super Smash Bros had when they released Brawl. In Super Smash Bros Melee the characters have bright colors, but in Brawl these colors lost their intensity because of the textures they added. I would love to play this HD version, I loved reading this article.
I agree with you, visually it looks amazing, I like Tloz being colorful and all but I always wanted to see a darker tone on the series thankfully Twilight Princess exists but I´d love to see another Zelda game with the visual aspects from Zelda TP.