 Believe it or don't, I hadn't really played Legend of Zelda Minish Cap until recently, or rather I hadn't sunk any meaningful time into it past the first two dungeons, and since I'm enjoying the Game Boy Advance library lately, let's take a look at this one and how it holds up. If you're not familiar with this game, it was developed by Capcom and Flagship, with Nintendo having the final say, so it largely has the same folks behind earlier games in the series like Oracle of Seasons and Ages, for Game Boy Color, and Four Swords, also for Game Boy Advance. Minish Cap was released in January 2005 and the DS had already been out for a couple months at this point, so you'll be forgiven if you're not all that familiar with this one. So, in this particular version of Hyrule, Link and Zelda are childhood friends and they're on their way to a festival celebrating the anniversary of the arrival of these magical little guys called the Picori. The festival features a sword fight, so of course there's some guy there dressed as Magus from Chrono Trigger and he runs through that tournament like crap through a goose, only instead of taking the famed Picori Blade as a prize, he decides to blast it apart in an attempt to open up this chest, but instead he unleashes a bunch of monsters. Whoops. Turns out that Not Magus is a sorcerer after a source of power and Zelda tries to stop him and she gets turned to stone for her efforts, so in order to get her back, you have to take the shattered Picori Blade to the Picori themselves, or the Minish as they prefer to be called, so they can fix it. I've always liked the idea of Hyrule functioning more as a canvas for different kinds of stories and I appreciate Minish Cap for being different. It feels kinda off the beaten path the same way Link's Awakening does. I poke fun at the villain, Vati, but he's okay and it's nice to see someone other than Ganon for once. Every handheld Zelda game has its own gimmick, so to speak, not just with the stories but with the gameplay. It started with the original Zelda handheld, Link's Awakening, where you could combine items to solve puzzles like putting together a bomb and an arrow. Or later on in Link Between Worlds, you can make yourself two dimensional and scale walls and find all sorts of neat stuff. The gimmick in Minish Cap is in fact the cap itself, it shrinks you down to a miniscule size at these warp points, usually found in boulders or tree stumps, so you can interact with the Minish and find out what you need to do to get this sword fixed up and the hat begrudgingly guides you along the way. I like how Link actually looks annoyed at this guy. The shrinking mechanic is put to good use right away, you can shrink down and wander around the overworld map to places you couldn't otherwise go, and as you could probably imagine, a lot of the game's puzzles revolve around switching between regular size Link and fun size Link. The meat and potatoes of the game are mostly the same tried and true Zelda stuff. You know, sword, shield, heart pieces, widgets, and what-sits, although Minish Cap is unique in that it combines the look of Wind Waker with the top-down perspective and controls of Link to the Past. Of course there are some wrinkles here, the most notable being the roll with the R button, which really comes in handy right away when it comes to getting from point A to point B, but otherwise the combat feels pretty much exactly like every other top-down Zelda game up to this point, with the range and quickness of your sword immediately feeling familiar, the A and B buttons each get assigned an item, and in addition to rolling, the R button also acts as your action button, which can change depending on what you're doing. This is one of the more linear Zelda games, it's about a 12-hour play-through with eight bosses you gotta defeat before you face Vadi, the dungeon design here is just as you'd expect from a Zelda game, like right away in the first dungeon, you get the gust jar, which functions as a vacuum just in case you wanted Link to be more like Kirby, and you use it to clear pathways and define treasure and to whip yourself around dungeons using these mushroom things to use one example. Later on you get a cape that allows you to jump, mulmits that let you dig, the ocarina of wind that allows you to warp around the world map, and the cane of Pocky, which sends a bolt of lightning into an enemy or an object and it flips over. I should mention that these items are only in the Minish Cap and haven't been featured in any other Zelda game to date. There's also a fair share of the usual Zelda items here too, like the lantern and the Pegasus boots. The dungeons make great use of all these items, while also including the shrinking gimmick and overall it's well done. The closest comparison I can come up with is Illusion of Gaia. That's another game that has you switching between two different forms to solve puzzles and access new areas. Minish Cap is just as good, it reuses a lot of the same areas in clever ways and for me personally that's all I'm really looking for in a Zelda game. Puzzles that make you sit there and stare at them for a couple minutes until you get it. Most are straightforward and satisfying though, like carrying this giant seed over here to plant a beanstalk so you can make your way up Mount Cronell, what like Romeo Cronell? Or using these tiles to create multiple links to deflect these projectiles so you can open this door. This dungeon here is laid out kind of similarly to the Skygarden in Illusion of Gaia where you're jumping around on clouds trying to find your way around, and the boss fights hold up there into the bargain too for the most part anyway. Some are used a couple times in the game, but the battles themselves are fun, like this guy here, you play tennis for a bit, then he freezes the ground and you gotta make your way around him and burn his ass with the lantern. There's also some good old fashioned sword and shield combat too that kinda sorta reminds me of Zelda 2 a little bit. I should mention though that overall Minish Cap is a pretty dang easy playthrough, the challenge in this one is mild except for the final boss. He's tough as hell, but otherwise you should be able to breeze through this one and have a good time doing it. Well, for the most part anyway, this game is not without its flaws. Minish Cap is both very hand-holdy and sometimes not very intuitive at all. It's kinda weird. Nearly every time something happens your hat guide has to tell you all about it, even if it's super obvious, and that can get old after a while. I found myself wishing for a way to turn off the hat or just, I don't know, leave it at home for a while or something. What's really confusing though is that the game has some oddball stuff that doesn't always track like you'd expect it to, like when you first show up at Lanlan Ranch. Okay, I'm supposed to go look for Talon, so where the heck is he? I can't find him, so I get kinda bored and just do some other stuff and it turns out, completing one of the weird little side quests is what gets Talon to appear. There's a couple other instances like that in this game as well, and as a result, this game doesn't feel as polished as you might expect for a Zelda title. Like I mentioned earlier, Minish Cap is mostly a linear, straight ahead playthrough, but the game tries to make up for that by providing two optional collectathons, where you explore all over and pick up random stuff. There's the Kinstones, which are these broken medallions, and you go around asking NPCs if they have the other half. There's a ton of these, and the game does a nice job making it seem somewhat important, and you do get some heart pieces once in a while from completing a Kinstone, but if you collect all of them, you're rewarded with… a trophy. Oh my god. Oh, but there's more. You also have the mysterious shells that you collect so you can trade them for figurines, and if you get all 800 gazillion figurines after God knows how many hours, that allows you to scroll through and listen to the game's soundtrack. Well, it's better than the trophy, I guess. Within the context of when this was released, these collectathons make sense for a handheld game, but generally speaking, they don't add much of anything today. It's the kind of thing that was made for when you were stuck in the backseat of a car for several hours. But ultimately, optional extra stuff like that doesn't really matter, and that's not really what's going to hook you on playing Minish Cap, because there's a ton of classic Zelda stuff right from the beginning of this playthrough, as well as nods to past Zelda games, like bits of music from Ocarina of Time, or seeing some Gorons here and there. Overall, it's a good time. It's just not quite as polished as some of the other Zelda titles, but it's still Zelda, and it's still got some fun puzzles, dungeons, and boss fights, and some items that are unique to this game that are fun to use, and it's available on Nintendo Switch online through the Game Boy Advance Portal. That's how I was able to play this one. This is one of those games that's well worth checking out. Just keep your expectations in check. Personally, I still prefer Link's Awakening, both the original and the remake, as well as Oracle of Ages and Seasons, but Minish Cap is still a really good time. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day!