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Funny coincidence: I've been half- watching a friend do a completionist run of Twilight Princess, because I'd never played anything other than OoT and apparently missed out on the best waifu in the series.
The actual dungeon puzzles don't seem awful, at least compared to my memories of the OoT water temple, but the side quests are ridiculous.
Huge open world to explore? Sure. But needing to fly a chicken to revisit a specific hidden ledge, at night, only after you can control your wolf transformation and have talked to a specific NPC in a subbasement on the other side of the world... Yeah, that gets a bit much. Playing it blind would require searching every inch of the world about 10 times over.
I can imagine it would get annoying to play if you're not as obsessive as my friend, but Midna's ass covereth as many sins as it inspireth new ones.
I haven't played Twilight Princess, but looking up Midna on Google Images gives me a disturbing possibility: you like weird goblin looking things.
I was pretty disturbed when it was revealed that my former progressive college acquaintances (I think everyone screenshotted is either nonbinary or trans now) vocally expressed their support for some image in the manga where Link is embracing the little fucked up imp thing in a sexual manner.
Think I just got to the scenes your friends were talking about. the writers went so hard on their relationship I'd have thought this came from a doujinshi, not an official Nintendo manga.
Checked the authors' early life sections just to confirm, and of course they are both women.
Someone could write a book on why women love the small bratty girl vs strong but vulnerable guy pairing so much. I've just been calling it the Ernest & Celestine effect
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Looks like the manga was a big factor in reviving her popularity. I got sent a panel from their first meeting after saying I never played it. That damn grin <3
All I can say is that your friends saved up all their correctness points to be objectively correct about this one thing, at the cost of not knowing what sex they are.
If it makes you feel any better there's a good chance they've silently done a 180 in perfect lockstep since then. The "le heckin wholesome" reddit fandom go from gushing about things to declaring them ultra-problematic on a weekly basis, with feuds between influencer cliques bubbling into ideological shipping turf wars like a much gayer version of the 30s soviet union.
Just tell your friends they're guilty of a gross objectification and done a yikes media illiteracy, because only alt-right Blue Archive playing chuds like Midna. That should take care of it.
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Twilight Princess is great, but yeah the Midna thing with some of the fans is hella weird. She does tell you the whole time that the imp form isn't what she normally looks like. And when you do finally see her with the curse broken, she is a fairly normal (for a fantasy setting) young woman. But generally you don't see the fans gushing over the real Midna, it's always her imp form.
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To some extent, if you're not that obsessive you just don't do that level of completionist run: the games have increasingly made the more annoying collectibles useless or mocking.
That said, there's a lot of the earlier 3d games that were really bad about it. Not fucking about with Korrok Seeds in recent 3d zeldas is the healthy option, where Majora's Mask and the Couple's Mask was legendarily difficult to figure out and time-consuming once you have, and it was something closer to 'major side quest' than 'random golden crap'.
I've always wanted to play Majora's Mask just to experience the groundhog day mechanic. Being able to have active NPCs without breaking a save if you messed up their questline seems really cool. But nobody copying it in the last 20 years means it probably didn't pan out as well as I'd hoped.
And I always give the japs a little extra leeway when it comes bizarre puzzles, just because half the time a Japanese player would be going "aha, this is clearly a cultural reference to kaguyahime the moon logic princess, that means I should go cut some bamboo and give a rabbit his mallet back."
That's fair, and definitely happens -- I think there's been a few Persona games that ask for Majong questions that are trivial for anyone familiar with the game, but nonsense to most Americans, myself included. For the Couple's Mask, there's a bit of that, but mostly the logic is fairly reasonable: it's just the timing being incredibly tight. There's a good number of critical points where you have to be in the right place in a 10-minute window, and if you screw up even one bit, you're back to stage one.
And if you aren't trying for a completionist run, it's a lot less bad. I think my first casual play got a little over half the masks without any real problems or GameFAQsing.
You see variants of the gimmick a bit in visual novels and related games, though usually with a different framing. Being able to continue on and learn from a failure before a reset is a really clever gimmick where it works, and I'll point to Ghost Trick as another game that's a great exploration of that concept. The flaw is less there, and more that the introduction of a strict timeline struggles where the time pressure is too high or too low. Where that pressure's right, you have a lot of strong incentive to keep playing and keep your tempo and focus together. But even with a casual run in Majora's Mask, there'll be a good couple times where you have to sit around for a few minutes just waiting for an event to pop, and there's other times where you'll be sprinting from one event to another because you underestimated how long a fight would take. And that's a problem common to games that did pull a bit from Majora's Mask's social graph side, like the increasing focus on timed behavior in Harvest Moons and other lifesim games.
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