So a whole slew of bits of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD news dropped this week, which isn’t a big surprise considering the game’s release date is March 4. First off, it’s apparently going to have an extra dungeon that you need an Amiibo to get to. Yup, that’s going to be controversial, but hey, new content! Hard to complain too much about that. Second, a small tidbit picked up by Nintendolife hints that the most irksome aspect of the game may be scaled back: the quests for the Tears of Light.
Is Nintendo Streamlining The Tears of Light In Twilight Princess HD?
The most tedious part of Twilight Princess came early. Three times throughout the game, Link ventured into parts of the world that had been inundated with twilight, and he had to collect a dozen and a half or so Tears of Light to return the land to normal. He had to do it in wolf form, in a limited time, in brand new areas he hadn’t yet explored. It all sounds fine in theory, but in practice it was a giant pain, and not very much fun. Wolf mode is cool for fighting, less so for exploring. It wasn’t quite as bad as the Triforce quest in Wind Waker HD, but it still was no highlight.
It’s flimsy evidence, but it’s evidence nonetheless: The hardworking team at Nintendolife noticed that, in one of the Famitsu screenshots of the new game, the Tears of Light meter has about five fewer spaces than it did in the GameCube original. That seems to suggest that those quests have been streamlined a little bit, to shorter and more focused versions of themselves.
There’s ample precedent for that. Nintendo has made minor to medium-sized changes in all its Zelda re-releases, and the console versions tend to get slightly bigger revamps. Wind Waker HD got a slew of interface improvements, and the Triforce quest was made marginally less onerous. It’s not at all surprising that some things in Twilight Princess will change as well. And the Tears of Light quests are the easiest area for some quick streamlining.
The wolf stuff in Twilight Princess never achieved its full potential. Sure, it was always fun to be a wolf for a little while, but the handful of long sequences where Link stayed in wolf mode for a long time just didn’t have the same magic. The game has tons of other great gameplay, so we won’t lose out on much if the Tears of Light quests get cut down. It will just make the early game feel a bit better in terms of pacing. So I say, bring it on.
