46 Hours!

And I finally beat it! Of course there is still a good 20 hours or so of side stuff to go do, but I definitely want to just bask in the accomplishment of having beaten this game. I never beat FFX but I did beat both of the Kingdom Hearts games. So basically this is the first long game that I've beaten in a very long time. Now I'm going to just rleax

You've come between us and now you must be eliminated 45 hours.

So I hit the 45 hour marker yesterday just after finishing the sky temple and the first part of the twilight palace temple. suffice to say that the walk through has become something of a god-send to me. After all the temples I was really starting to get bored with the game. I'm not sure why but a puzzle is just not the kind of thing that I can sit down and derive pleasure from as easily as some other activities (this shows in my math grades). So last night for, perhaps the first time, playing zelda actually did feel like homework. Not to worry though the walk through made things move much much more quickly. Basically at this point in the game, i just want to finish the story and the puzzles were coming between me and the story and I just couldn't have that.

I've been working on my final project, that is, a zero-punctuation-style review of LOZTP. My script is mostly finished

 and I'm about 10%-20% finished with the slides for the animation. The hardest part was the initial creation of the character which, once I figured it out, was not hard to reproduce. Here's a little sneak peek at a slide i call "kick ass fedora". Right now I'm mostly just trying figure out how to say quasi-smart things in a fake british accent which, if you were unaware, a british accent makes anything you say 78% more believable. Needless to say I've watching a lot of Yahtzee's videos getting tips for how to simulate various kinds of actions with a stick figure made up of 6 parts. It's actually been rather enjoyable and is a relaxing work to do. Photoshop, while in most respects, makes things easier to work with can be a tedious program indeed  . . .  all those stupid layers!

On the Never Ending Story (20-30hrs.)

At first my goal was simply to discover the cause of twilight spread across the land. Next it was to remove said twilight. How? by gaining the power of the fused shadows of course. Only this divine power given to and hidden from us by the goddesses is powerful enough to stop the sudden and devastating spread of twilight.

What happen when I was finally in possession of this deep mystical power in form of carved stone? Midna threw it at the bad guy and missed. Then the bad guy poked me in the head with a piece of glass and here I am at the in the dessert at the top of a haunted prison looking for the broken pieces of the twilight mirror.

I'm sad. Not because the story of this game isn't coherent, but because now it's starting to drag. There is good drag and there is bad drag. LOZTP is now suffering from bad drag.

Good drag is the kind of suspense oriented movement of a story from its beginning to its end that does not lose its focus on (i) the overarching plot and (ii) the continuous development of the characters. Games that take 50+ hours to beat, in my experience, require a kind of continuity that is always geared at completing the main goal through a series of mini goals.

Why is LOZTP suffering from bad drag? because it is violating it's focus on (i) and (ii) doesn't exist. First it was "restore the spirits", then it was "remove the twilight", then it was "find the fused shadow". Now its "find the broken pieces of the twilight mirror". None of these objectives are inherently the cause of bad drag, but I am having a good deal of trouble seeing how these tasks actually help me to accomplish my overarching goal i.e. restoring the realms of light and twilight back to harmony. I understand that the designers of this game are creative enough to take an arbitrary series of events, sew them together with a plot and have the game end in a way that makes sense. But as the arbitrariness of the events approach infinity, my motivation to play the game approaches zero.

I think at the core what I want more from LOZ right now is communication. I would like to have been forewarned of (at least) most of the objectives that need to be completed in order have harmony back again. But as it is each new mini-main goal seems rather pointless and that maybe not very much thought went into it or that the kind of thought had more to do with really good mini-main goals that lack relation to one another. 

I can't be too hasty to judge however, the game is not over yet. perhaps my 50+ hour self will think my 30 hour self is being silly and that maybe, just maybe a twist will come that ties all of these loose ends together and makes LOZTP worthy of its hype.  Light a candle to St. Jude.