I’ve been playing the Cube version of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the past hour, and its seriously the most aggravating, and depressing, video game-playing experience I’ve had in a VERY LONG time. I’ve barely started the god damn game and I’m already stuck. Again, for an hour now I’ve been trying to catch a fish and its just not happening.
For those who don’t know, before you can do anything, you have to catch a fish for some stupid cat which is supposed then allow you to buy some item or whatever so you can finally leave the village and get a sword and actually get on with the damn game. Yeah, its just as retarded and gay as it sounds.
First off, I appreciate the game designers trying to create some mood or some shit by having you perform dumb little tasks before starting off on your grand journey, but come on, this is fucking ridiculous. I bought a goddamn Zelda game to fight bad guys and to explore dungeons, among other things. Not to spend, once more, literally AN ENTIRE HOUR trying to catch a damn fish. It wouldn’t be so bad if fishing was something you did later on in the game, like a side mission or a mini-game, but to force you to do it right from the beginning is just plain insane. Again, when you do dumb little tasks around your homebase before setting off, its to hone skills that will be used later on. So am I to assume that fishing is going to be a major component of the entire game?! But the thing is, I actually like fishing in video games! The heart of the problem is the method itself makes no fucking sense on any level.
You start off by casting your line into the water with a button. Fine. But then once its in the water, you really can’t do anything. In virtually every single fishing game out there, what you do is draw the hook back towards you since the movement is what attracts the fish and entices them to bite. Not in this game. Literally all you do is throw the hook into the water and wait for the fish to just come to it. And trust me, I’ve tried every damn button on the controller to move the line, and none of them do shit. The only other action is to bring the hook back, by hitting back on the C stick.
Though making things much worse, and COMPLETELY nonsensical, is the fact how the hook after its cast will fall below the line of sight, so you have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on. You might see fish sorta swimming around, but there’s no way to tell if its approaching the hook or not. Then again, its not like you can do anything about it.
But the worst part is when you finally get a catch. Because no real instructions were given on how to properly reel your line back in, you’re just stuck there without a clue to do. Again, you’re supposed to hit down on the C stick, but either I’m doing it too fast or too slow because virtually every fish has been lost. Considering it takes like five minutes of just standing there and doing nothing to finally get a bite, this is fucking AGGRAVATING.
Oh, so get this: I finally caught a fish, so what happened? Nothing. According to online resources (the fact that I had to consult one for a Zelda game so early on pisses me off on so many levels), I have to catch a second fish, which is the one that the cat will take for himself (why the fuck doesn’t he just take the first one?). So after what seemed like forever, I managed to get a second fish. Guess what again? NOTHING. Apparently the cat wasn’t there, so the action he was supposed to do couldn’t happen. FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This shit is so bad that I am seriously fighting the urge to either chuck my GameCube out the window or just give up on video games in general. I’m gonna give it another shot, and if I can’t get shit to happen in the next thirty minutes, then I’m giving the game to the first person who asks for it.
EDIT: Okay, so after almost another hour of me trying, I finally managed to catch another fucking fish very late last night. And poor MK had to sit and watch me get all pissed off the whole time, as well as assure me that there was no reason to get so angry at a video game, but she also gets super annoyed by such retardedness in video games, so she could at least sympathize.
I realized by myself that if I ever so slightly touched the C stick, I could kinda move the hook around, but there’s zero degree of finesse involved, due in part to the size and shape of the C stick (now I understand why everyone hates it so much), so instead of delicately moving the line around, it’s mostly just awkward, sudden movements. Plus I still couldn’t see what was going on. And there was like a solid twenty minutes where I would get a bite every one or two minutes, but once more, since I had no idea what the best way to reel the fish in, they always got away. The key I would discover was to VERY SLOWLY tug at the line, but whenever I finally got a bite, I would get so excited since something’s actually happening (and I so desperately wanted to get it over with) that I would hit the stick just teeny-weenie bit too much and fuck things up.
But anyway, I got another goddamn fish, which the dumbshit cat grabbed, which meant I could finally buy… a slingshot. But then I didn’t have enough money! Which meant wasting another ten minutes running through the grass looking for loose change or throwing fruit against the wall to see if any rupees are inside. At this point it past four in the morning and I seriously wanted to just shoot myself. Eventually I got enough fucking rupees to buy the fucking slingshot, which again I was supposed to get, but in the end it was just to impress a bunch of kids and do some dumb little target practice game, and it seemed to have nothing to do with getting my sword. What bullshit.
My enthusiasm to play this game has been severely diminished. I know that thing are going to get better (well, it god damn better), but I’m already so annoyed that I kinda don’t care anymore.
