The Legend of Zelda on a Game Boy Advance. This should blow my mind, right? A reliable game series on a handheld console that I wish I knew more about when I actually had one. The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is - I hope - going to entertain me.
But I know nothing about it. I can be safe in saying there'll be dungeons and monsters and puzzles, navigated by a kid in a green tunic called Link, in a land called Hyrule, but apart from those common elements (and many more besides), I don't know anything about The Minish Cap.
Let's dive headfirst into this tiny cartridge and unpack its secrets.
Fun Times
The opening tale is one as old as time, and one like many Zelda titles before it. Mysterious, other-worldly creatures appear to help people quell this or that evil problem, all through the heroic actions of a blond guy with a sword.
Threat averted, normality returned, the land now hopes for those dark times to never return, all while every little boy dreams of becoming the hero of the legend.
We roll out of bed and proceed to roll around the room with the right shoulder button, dashing around the place to get a feel for the controls. They're pretty good. No diagonal rolling, but that's fine. We're just a kid. We're not all born with the ability to move at those angles.
Heading downstairs, we're greeted by our grandfather and our childhood friend, Princess Zelda, who wants to drag us to the Picori Festival, a celebration of those mysterious helpers of old.
We might as well kill two birds with one stone and deliver a sword while we're at it. It just so happens to be the prize for the winner of a tournament to find the most heroic fighter or something like that, and given that the competition is presumably already taking place somewhere, we better not hang around.
I think I can see where this is going... Something tells me we're going to be thrust into the role of hero sometime soon.
You can enjoy the festival and chat with the locals, who all tell tales of how great the Picori are, and how much fun this festival is. I don't see it myself. Princess Zelda is going absolutely barmy over it all though, her attention flitting from one thing to another before you can even get a word in.
A sword and a shield. This is fate. Let's head to the castle and see if we even get the chance to hand the sword over in the first place.
We do hand it over, and just in time for the ceremony for the tournament victor to win. Their prize is to touch the one and only Picori Blade. Not to hold it, not to take it home for a year until the next festival, just to touch it.
Who has won this year's tournament?
Well, that's a problem. The clearly evil Vaati (was it the purple or the laughing that gave it away?) has not only touched the sword but taken it out of the chest which it seals, releasing untold horrors into the world.
Not only that, but he's turned the Princess into stone, and is looking for something in the chest. He doesn't even care about the one and only Picori Blade. What could be more important than that?
We don't find out. Disappointed, but somehow okay with it, Vaati disappears to look for this mysterious thing elsewhere, leaving us to clean up the mess.
And so The Minish Cap begins. Apparently, the Picori only make themselves known to children, and we just so happen to be a child and are therefore entrusted with the entire task of getting the Picori Blade fixed so that the stony curse put upon the Princess can be lifted.
The king points us towards the Minish Woods, and we get going with earnest, swiping monsters out of the way as and when we see them.
It looks like a Zelda game, and it feels like a Zelda game. A couple of items on hand, a hearty health bar, rupees hidden in the grass. If you wanted Zelda on the Game Boy Advance, you've got it.
The Minish Woods take on a spookier, more magical colour palette. Something is going on here. The forest floor is dotted with mouse holes, and there's a tiny building of some sort nearby. There's more than meets the eye here, but we're not given time to investigate as we hear a cry for help.
This is Ezlo, a bird-like blob who knows a lot more than we do, and decides the best course of action is to tag along with us on our travels - if he can keep up.
Attaching himself to our head, Ezlo turns into our hat. Obviously. At least it fits with the childish, cartoony nature of the graphics. I quite like them but in some places more than others. There's no doubt that this is going to turn into a good looking game, though, and Ezlo is eager to introduce it all to us in quite some detail.
This is The Minish Cap's selling point, the ability to shrink down to a teeny tiny insect-sized version of yourself so that you can explore the world in a whole new way. You need to find portals to shrink or return to normal size, so it's not at will, but it does mean some of the artwork starts to make sense. There's a whole world down here, hidden in the forest. The Minish, aka the Picori, world.
Our first task in this little village is to find someone living in all these jars and barrels who can speak English, which doesn't take too long. He says we need to eat a Jabber Nut to understand anyone else, though, so we need to hunt one of those down.
The village elder, or the mayor, or whoever this guy is, knows how to help solve our problems, and marks the location of four mystic elements on our map, and one of which happens to be just over yonder, in a shrine.
Yes, he did, Ezlo. Let's get slaying! Our first dungeon in The Minish Cap. This is where all the puzzles are. This is where the useful loot can be found. This, too, is where the boss monsters hang out.
The shrine plays out like many from the previous games, with switches revealing chests, and chests containing keys to locked doors. New to this one (or new to me, or new to my memory) is the inclusion of pushing and pulling objects and levers to manipulate or even navigate the levels.
Pulling a switch far enough reveals a bridge to a mushroom, and pulling an incredibly stretchy, springy mushroom launches us over gaps.
I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of that, as time goes on.
One of the first rooms contains a barrel that can rotate, once you've burnt away the vines that have tangled it up. Doing so allows you to decide where the doors in the barrel are facing, and in turn, open up new sections of the shrine to explore.
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You're free to explore as you see fit, but you are shepherded onto a path so that you can actually solve the puzzles. There's a lot to get distracted by, both in terms of artwork and enemies, but each room tends to have one central problem for you to work out.
Sometimes, Ezlo will chime in and make the solution obvious, without telling you how to actually solve it step by step. Here, I needed to keep weight on a switch that wasn't my own weight. What could I drop onto it to serve that purpose?
It turns out that pots can't be placed back down once you pick them up with the 'R' button. As soon as Link picks something up, he only has his sights set on throwing it, where, in the case of the pot, it smashes, and is useless. Time to walk out of the room to reset the puzzle...
I must admit, I was almost embarrassingly stupid with some of the puzzles. Ezlo mentions that I can both push and pull objects and that I'd do well to remember that - which I immediately forgot, obviously. Don't worry, though. I got whatever was in there soon enough.
I wouldn't say my progress was swift through this shrine, but it wasn't a slog, either, and bit by bit I built up a map of the order in which I had to do things. I got lost, even with a map, but it's not the end of the world.
As I say, you're funnelled towards doing things in a specific order, and it was finally time to return to that caterpillars' room. We couldn't cut through the spiderwebs earlier, but now we have a key to another door in...
Defeating this thing was a doddle, and we get rewarded with an item so useful I replace my shield for it. The Gust Jar. It sucks things up and spits things out.
It took me a while to realise just how much stuff was hidden in this place, as sucking up whatever the mess on the floor was revealed many switches and secret chests. This would surely be precisely what I need to solve a problem I had earlier.
A room in the basement had a chest that only revealed itself when a switch was pressed, but you can't open chests from behind, so you had to be on the right side of the chest before the switch was pressed to reveal it... but you can't move things onto that switch, even with the Gust Jar.
My mind was boggling at this puzzle. What was I missing? What was the order of events here? I had to make progress here; otherwise, the shrine couldn't be completed. I had to resort to looking up the solution on the Internet, where I learned how important it was to pay attention to the details in a Zelda game.
The solutions are always obvious when they're told to you, and here was no different. I'd ran passed it several times. A spider web blocking a door, a Gust Jar that can remove spider webs... I am a fool, but I am now a happy fool, on my way through this rest of this dungeon.
We get to make great use of the Gust Jar in this next bit, blowing our lilypad around these canals, inevitably deciding to go down the wrong path from the fork in the road, and having to blow ourselves all the way back to where we need to be.
Lots of pots and a switch in need of some weight. I should be a pro at this by now.
Oh, God damnit. Reset the puzzle, Link...
Finally, we get the key to open the door that leads to some mushroom flinging around a room that contains a chest with the Big Key. The Big Key means only one thing: Boss time. Are we ready?
I'll just try that jump again. I'm very thankful that water isn't an instant death in here. I'd have quit a long time ago if it was.
Dropping from the ceiling is this wobbly blobby thing. He's much bigger than we are. You've probably noticed that already. Is he smarter, though? Probably, yes, but for the purposes of this blog, no, he isn't. We have a Gust Jar. What use could it be against you?
I'm not sure on the specifics, but we can suck out his blobby foot from underneath him, and after taking care to avoid his wobbling head until he falls to the floor, we can slice him up with all the 'hyahs' we can muster. A couple of rounds of this and we're good.
Well, not quite 'at once', Ezlo. That's an excellent time to call it, don't you think?
Final Word
One dungeon down, what do I think of The Minish Cap? Simple: even when I didn't know what to do, I kept playing, wanting to figure it out. I was at the controls for an hour and a bit, walking through the festival, making my way to the woods, solving puzzles and slaying monsters, again and again. I was clearly having a good time.
But it's not absolutely fantastic. I'm not a massive fan of a race of tiny magical creatures living in the forest. Shrinking in size does lead to some interesting puzzles, I'm sure, but it also leads to artwork that strays a little too close to 'oh, look at that, little Link is only as big as a strawberry, how cute'.
No reason for that to detract from a solid game, though. Just because it's not my idea of perfection, doesn't mean it's to be avoided at all costs. Quite the contrary, in fact. Seek it out. If you've found yourself enjoying Zelda titles, The Minish Cap continues to offer what they've seemingly always offered players, on a fantastic little handheld console.
Before this 1001 list, I was content to just watch Zelda games instead of playing them, but as they've come up, I think they're chipping away at something. I may finally be coming around to The Legend of Zelda.
I wonder what's next for the series.
Fun Facts
For European fans, you could buy The Minish Cap with a golden, Zelda-themed GBA SP, and for six lucky fans, they'd get an actual gold-plated Game Boy Advance as well.
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, developed by Capcom, Flagship, first released in 2004.
Version played: Game Boy Advance, 2004, via emulation.