Review:
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap was not a game I thought I was going to like. I've seen people play through Minish Cap at various points in my life and it's not that I ever thought it was a bad game, but it was that it seemed to be a generic one. I jokingly referred to it as the "most" Zelda game for many years. And there are definitely things that I do not like about Minish Cap and, largely, think are pretty generic. Minish Cap has a lot of reverence for the Zelda series in a way that can both be a blessing and a curse. Its dungeons can be pretty bog standard, its overworld doesn't rock the boat, it tends to follow convention to the letter. That being said, I kind of fell in love with Minish Cap a little bit. This game has so much charm and so much heart that it's difficult not to love it. Minish Cap is one of the most aesthetically and thematically pleasing Zeldas. With its pitch perfect adaptation of the Wind Waker style and its story about little people that can only be seen by children, Minish Cap sells itself as a fairytale very effectively. It has some very inspired ideas that make its very small over world a joy to navigate. I think, genuinely, if there was a game that took the core ideas of Minish Cap and made a more expansive adventure out of them, I'd adore it. It might even replace Link's Awakening as my favorite 2D Zelda. As it stands though, I like Minish Cap, but I don't love it. It has really high highs and also really low lows. 7.9/10
Diary:
1/2/26
This was a long time coming. I've been a fan of the Zelda series for most of my life, I've played almost every game in the series at this point save for the most recent entry, Echoes of Wisdom. I need to get on that, I think I'd really love Echoes of Wisdom. There are very few Zeldas thar I haven't beaten, actually, with most of them being handheld titles from the series' history. The Oracles games, I've played half of Seasons of none of Ages, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks (I've DNF'd Spirit Tracks, I'd be interested in playing it though if Nintendo did like a remaster with button controls), Tri-Force Heroes which is bad, and today's subject, Minish Cap. I'm cautiously excited to finally be playing Minish Cap, I know a lot of people really adore this game. More than a few of my friends say this is the best 2D Zelda, which is crazy because Link's Awakening and Link Between Worlds exist but I digress. But also like, I've had kind of a character arc with Zelda and what I want out of it. And for the traditional Zeldas, I've come to find out that I like Zelda the most when it's very exploration based, with a big free open world to explore, and less so when it's heavily dungeon based. Starting this off with a controversial take, I think Zelda dungeons are actually pretty overrated. People talk up a huge game about how great the puzzle design and then like 90% of the time the puzzle is "push a block to the right spot to proceed". Minish Cap IS a pretty dungeon heavy Zelda game from what I can gather. I'm curious how I'll feel about it when all is said and done.
The presentation in this game is excellent. I tend to be critical of GBA graphics, it is unfortunately a system that, in hindsight, did not produce games that look good. A lot of GBA games have very washed out color palettes unfortunately. It's always amazing to me when a GBA game, in spite of its system, looks amazing. Minish Cap looks really good, it's a very pretty game. I love how well they managed to convert the Wind Waker art style to a GBA game. I think this game is actually a better transition of the cel-shaded art style to a handheld system than like. The actual sequels to Wind Waker do. It's probably the best looking game on the system all told. It especially comes out in the environments where the game is trying to make you feel how small you are, some incredibly beautiful scenes arise as a result of this. S tier presentation.
I like how the story for Minish Cap now kind of contradicts the story for Skyward Sword. Like, they couldn't have known this at the time of course, Skyward Sword would be over half a decade off from Minish Cap's release. But I actually adore how incompatible these two stories are. Full disclosure, I am a pretty massive critic of the Zelda timeline. I think most things are lessened from in-depth lore discussions, I tend to find that people who hyperfixate on lore tend to really miss the point of the work. This is especially true of Zelda, I think the Zelda timeline really detracts from Zelda as a series. I strongly believe that the best way to view Zelda is as what is said on the tin, a legend. Each Zelda game exists as a story being retold, passed down throughout the generations, each telling being slightly different. So Minish Cap having some of the bones of Skyward Sword but telling an entirely different, largely incompatible story with them really does feel kind of special to me. It's like the idea that the Legend of Zelda is just a Legend being told and retold over and over is validated somehow, it's super neat.
I'm amazed by how small this world is? Like, I knew going into it, obviously, that it was going to be fairly small. I've seen playthroughs of Minish Cap before and I've played the intro through the first dungeon myself in the past. But I think, genuinely, that this is the smallest map the series has had so far. It's like divided into a handful of sections and each section is only 2-3 screens long. I don't know if maybe the focus was so much on the dungeons that it caused the world to be tiny or maybe it was a consideration for the size changing mechanic. A world that is too big would be a pain to navigate around in the instances where you have to navigate around as small Link. Either way, this game feels so tiny, and it's crazy. This console had Link to the Past ported to it and that game is like 5 times the size of this one, AND has an entire second map.
You can tell the Capcom team that made this game adores Zelda just from the very beginning. Zelda has always been a series that is very self-referential. Every Zelda game will include references to locations, characters, and events of previous Zelda games. Minish Cap is unique in this, however, in that it basically attempts to include every Zelda character it can think of. It not only has much of the cast of Wind Waker reappearing, providing different roles, but it also has a lot of the cast of Ocarina of Time in the game too. Like the entire construction crew who got themselves arrested trying to meet hot singles in their area makes an appearance in this game! You can tell there's a reverence for the series' history that would not be seen again until like. Breath of the Wild, a game which includes references to basically every Zelda game.
Ezlo is a very entertaining partner character. It's kind of crazy, actually, I think if I had played this game as a kid and encountered Ezlo then, I'd probably hate him. I remember the first time I played Majora's Mask, a game I now consider my favorite game of all time, I hated it for many reasons but Tatl was a major one. This arrogant, presumptuous, selfish partner character was not the vibe for me as a kid. Now though? I find Tatl hilarious, she's so good. Ezlo is similarly absolutely hilarious. He has such an ego about him, immediately deciding he's a fixture in Link's life and like, if you go home he keeps mentioning about how he's moving in and Link should lead him to his room. He's so self-important, but it's so funny. If only he wasn't such an obnoxious handholder at the beginning. Like, he already has a built in hint system, I don't know why he also stops you in he dungeon to go "oh we can't do anything in this room yet, so don't bother". Hopefully that gets better as it goes on.
The first dungeon was definitely a Zelda dungeon! It's funny, I joked about "pushing blocks around" being most of the Zelda puzzles and like, pretty literally the first dungeon is mostly pushing blocks. It was fine. Like, the impression I've always gotten from Minish Cap seeing others play it is that Minish Cap is the most "comfort food" Zelda? While it certainly has its unique flavor, a lot of the game's theming and gameplay is built around the size changing mechanic, by and large Minish Cap seems like it's goal is to be the most Zelda. And so far that's been true, the first dungeon is an incredibly bog standard Zelda dungeon with an admittedly very cool and impressive central set piece, this barrel that you have to rotate inside of to progress. I'm amazed they got this to work on a GBA, to be honest. The boss is also really cool, I appreciate Minish Cap using its theming to make normal enemies into larger than life bosses.
1/4/26
Why is the spin attack a thing I have to learn? This has actually been tripping me up for the entire early game so far, the fact that the spin attack isn't part of Link's basic kit. The spin attack is almost inarguably the most important part of Link's moveset in the top down Zeldas, it gives you such an important range of motion that it lacking is super noticeable. I have to wonder if the idea was that this was meant to be a full origin story for Link and his iconography, you know? Like, a major part of this game is the Minish Cap, the hat that Link wears, and it's always been implicit that this was the origin of the hat. Actually I remember back when Zelda timeline discussion was pretty common, THE timeline video by Ocarinahero10 I think his name was back then was very controversial in that it posited that Minish Cap being early on the timeline just because it seems to be the origin of Link's hat was stupid. But yeah, having the Spin Attack being a part of his kit that he has to learn instead of being default would give credence to the idea that Minish Cap was intended as an origin story.
I'm surprised at how little I mind the Kinstones. The Kinstones have always been the mechanic I dread from Minish Cap, this massive sidequest where you have to talk to like every NPC and find out who has Kinstones to fuse and match the Kinstones so you can then go find the thing they spawn. It seemed tiring and while Minish Cap is a pretty small world, I wouldn't want to be scouring it for stuff I unlocked by doing Kinstones. But I'm surprised at how easy the system is to use in practice? Like you cannot possibly miss an NPC who wants to trade Kinstones, they have comically large thought bubbles that take up half the screen. A lot of Kinstone pieces are just found by interacting with the environment, cutting grass or destroying pots, so it's hard to hit a wall where you find a character who has the wrong Kinstone piece for what you have? And something I never realized from watching other people play Minish Cap is that the Kinstone treasures you unlock are on your map. Minish Cap has a horrible map, mind, I don't particularly love it, it's weird that this tiny world needs you to zoom into each section of it like it does. Give how small it is you probably could've just done the map as one thing and let us scroll. But at least I'm never at a loss for where a Kinstone treasure is!
Mt. Crenel is just like an unnecessarily epic place for the second area of the game. A major contributing factor is the theme, mind, it feels like an endgame theme. It goes way too hard for no reason. But it fits the area a lot. A lot of Zelda mountains tend to be overly epic but there's also some familiarity to them, you know. Like people live in the mountain, there's a civilization built around it, so while it tends to be a very aggressive area there's also a softer edge. Mt. Crenel is untamed wilderness, the only thing up there is an abandoned mine. It's a place that the Kingdom of Hyrule never goes to, they literally have guards stationed at the exit to insure citizens never go up that way. Not even the monsters seem to want to go up there, with the only thing around being Tektites who are obviously native to the mountain. It's a great theming for an area, especially in a game about such an early version of Hyrule.
I met the Great Fairy in this session for the first time and like. There have been a lot of excellent Great Fairies in the series' history. I like the Wind Waker Great Fairy a lot, with her otherworldly appearance and multiple arms. I know a lot of people find the Ocarina/Majora Great Fairies to be creepy but I always thought they embodied the fae very well. The BotW/TotK Great Fairies are my loves forever, I think about them all the time. But the Minish Cap Great Fairy is so stunningly beautiful it's astounding. There's kind of a Lord of the Rings inspiration with her design, she looks a lot like Cate Blanchett's interpretation of Galadriel in particular. It's a rare moment where I think GBA games' tendency to be very bright and washed out since they were designed around the base GBA screen, which famously did not have a backlight, works to the game's favor. It gives the Great Fairy this ethereal quality, like she's appearing to you through fog. It's very well done, I'm always astounded by how good this game looks.
I really wish this game had more to its overworld. Like, it definitely has a lot, especially with the whole Kinstone mechanic, but like. As mentioned before, I love Zelda games that are really exploration based, I love it when a Zelda feels more like a big open area for me to explore and find my own adventure in. I've grown to be dissatisfied with the more dungeon focused Zelda games. So Minish Cap has created this interesting little feedback loop where I'll get to exploring the overworld and the game will introduce some really interesting mechanic to help exploration. Like in this section the game introduced gliding, an incredibly useful mechanic that could absolutely make for some super deep exploration. But then like, the overworld is really small and really railroaded because Minish Cap's focus is on dungeon design. This was at a point in Zelda where dungeons were king, the post Ocarina world where dungeons became the most defining part of any Zelda game and fully reshaped how people viewed Zelda games. And so these mechanics are usually introduced in a tutorial capacity in the overworld to then be used to aid the dungeons. Like, this isn't bad game design, it's just not what I prefer.
That being said, I am enjoying Minish Cap a lot more than I thought I was going to. I think it's just such a charming and well made little game that it's hard not to be endeared by it. It's just so ambitious and so pleasant, it's not surprising to see why it ranks on a lot of lists as THE best GBA title of all time. It wants to be the best Zelda it possibly can be and I think it's commendable for that, especially since it does not come from the core Zelda team. I don't even know if the Capcom Zelda team is still around but if they are, I'd love to see what they would do with a more modern approach to Zelda, I think taking Minish Cap's core design ideas and attaching it to a more open world Zelda would rule, honestly. I'm actively looking forward to playing Minish Cap. It's wild too, I was so sure for so long that Minish Cap would be a bottom 5 Zelda but I'm really digging it!
1/5/26
Oh boy, the boss of the third dungeon was a giant head!? AND it had two floating hands!? WITH EYES??? Minish Cap, you spoil me. I kid but this is probably one of the better Nintendo eye bosses there's ever been in my opinion. Which, you know, is crazy since this game wasn't made by Nintendo but as mentioned previously, Minish Cap is obviously made by people who have a ton of reverence for the Zelda series. The boss is a very nice take on a similar boss from Wind Waker, taking the core Aztec inspired design and make it super bright and colorful. It's a very good use of all the mechanics of the game, with you having to shrink down to go inside the head to deal any actual damage after the boss has been stunned. It manages to not only use the dungeon item effectively but also requires other parts of Link's toolkit, meaning it's not just a "use the dungeon item to win" boss like so many Zelda bosses tend to be. Good boss fight, probably one of my top ten Zelda bosses now.
Unfortunately this dungeon is among the worst in the series in my opinion. The Fortress of Winds is a very odd dungeon with how it functions. So, if you've played a Zelda game before, you know how dungeons typically work. You go in blind, with the game autofilling the rooms you've been in, until you find various items to help you progress. Usually a map to show you the dungeon layout and a compass to show you where all the chests are. The Fortress of Winds, for some reason, has several rooms in the dungeon that just aren't on the map. Like, I guess the idea is that it technically has an outside and inside area, the Fortress is built within a cave and half the dungeon is in the cave because of that, so why would it appear on the dungeon map? But because of this, navigating the cave half of the dungeon is often really annoying! I've mentioned recently that I tend to be over reliant on maps in games, it's one of the reasons I wasn't initially gelling with Hollow Knight. So having just half the dungeon be off the map? Big issue for me. I kept getting lost spatially. It also has two rooms that are required to finish the dungeon that are completely hidden! Like, one of them does kind of appear on the map because the two chests in there appear even if the room doesn't, but the other definitely took a while to figure out how to get in there.
The introduction and usage of the clone mechanic though is pretty cool. Adds some depth to my favorite Zelda puzzles, putting something on a switch!!! I'm surprised how immediate they are with going "okay, you have a cloning ability, now we're going to make a whole bunch of puzzles where you need to be mindful of your specific positioning." It's a welcome escalation, mind, but a surprising one, I kind of expected them to ease you into this more. I guess, despite all of Ezlo's overexplaining and handholding, they do trust their playerbase to be smart enough to just get how to use the mechanics super quickly. It's also surprising that this really doesn't come back as a mechanic in future Zeldas? Like the Four Sword is a thing, Minish Cap is the origin for it, and you could probably do a lot with building an entire game around a cloning mechanic. But instead the Four Sword is just used for the multiplayer titles. It's sad, to be honest, I would love an entire Zelda game ABOUT cloning.
I think the pacing for Minish Cap is kind of weird? Like, it feels like as I get more and more into this game, the time between areas/dungeons is getting longer? Granted, a part of that is that I am doing a lot of Kinstone stuff, I'm kind of running around between dungeons talking to everyone and fusing any available Kinstones I have. So I'm adding quite a bit of time between dungeons that way. That being said, it feels like as the game has gone on, I've had to do more running around between dungeons each time. Like, there's just been more and more errands I have to do. It's not a bad thing per se, I'm glad on some level that the game is taking me around the world each time I finish a dungeon. Giving me room to find new things with the items I've obtained from the previous one. But I also feel like Zelda games should have a pretty consistent flow between the dungeon and non-dungeon segments as well, it makes the game feel a bit padded to have the time between dungeons keep increasing? At least to me. I got a fast travel in this section though so maybe the time between dungeons will slow down as a result of that?
That being said, I do love how much more the shrinking and growing is coming into play for completing objectives too. Like, you're finding out more and more about the Minish themselves, as you go into town and find all these nooks and crannies that they use to get around. The fairytale influence is especially coming into focus, with cute little plot points like "the Minish are living in the home of the town cobbler and finishing his shoes for him while he sleeps". When you're small, you can talk to animals to either gain information or overcome roadblocks. Talking to the dogs and having them be super pleasant is great, love them dogs! As an aside, Lon Lon Ranch is in this game but in this game it's more of an actual ranch with cattle and I really hope I get to talk to the cows later on, I love cows. I've mentioned Minish Cap being charming like a hundred times already but, genuinely, for all my problems with Minish Cap this is one of if not THE best Zelda in terms of tone and theming. It feels like a genuine fairytale, it's infinitely endearing.
Matching with that fairytale vibe, I love how unrepentantly evil Vaati is. Like this guy is just such a fun, blatantly evil antagonist, very Maleficent. Like, the Zelda series has done this kind of antagonist before, mind, Ganondorf is practically the poster child for "blatantly evil" in most of his incarnations. But I think Vaati has the benefit of being in a lighthearted project. Ganondorf is often depicted as an intimidating, grand sorcerer, the kind of character who would be the final boss of an epic fantasy film or a D&D campaign. You are meant to fear and respect him, because the tone of the works he's in are more serious. Vaati, meanwhile, is in something far lighter, and as such he gets to chew the scenery. Vaati LOVES being evil, he turns the Princess to stone on a whim, he turned Ezlo into a hat just to show he's better than him. And now his plan is "I'm tired of working hard, so I'm going to mind control the King of Hyrule and make him send his army to do my work for me". I love Vaati, he's such an entertaining villain. Top 3 Zelda villains, easily.
1/6/26
This section is the best section of the game because we get to be a librarian!!! Ignore the fact that in order to start this chain, you have to go fast travel to a point you've never been to but is in an area where you could, reasonably, go there during the main journey and so you have to just remember which fast travel points you have or have not unlocked. Odd decision, to be honest, but whatever. Anyways, you have to obtain the flippers in this section to cross the water and they belong to a Minish elder named Librari. So, obviously, you have to go to the library to meet him. But it turns out that Librari has been trapped in his house for some time as the way to get in and out of Librari's house, which is found within a book, is through a series of books that are long overdue. And so we get to play the librarian's enforcer, traveling around Hyrule Town to shake people down for their overdue library books. Support your local libraries, see if they too need an enforcer!!!
Remember when I mentioned how it felt like I was doing more and more errands between sections? Yeah, this section was much longer than the previous one. Some parts of it I did like, the game is providing useful tutorials in these sections for what exactly your recently obtained items can do for you. The Mole Mitts especially can tunnel into certain walls to reveal caves to explore, so by forcing you to do it in the main questline you're then like "wait a minute, I've seen these walls before, I should go check them all out". And again, how can I hate on this section, we're helping the librarians! The librarian is even a cutie! On the other hand, like. I'm just not about the pacing. I understand that, with a game as small as Minish Cap actually is, they are already running out of new areas to take the player, making them do a runaround between each dungeon makes sense. I just wish Minish Cap had a more substantial world to explore so that it didn't need to keep padding the between dungeon sections by making you run around Hyrule Town for four hours. It's not bad, it's just not to my preference.
I do, once again, want to highlight how good the vibes in Minish Cap are. Like, despite my other criticisms of Minish Cap, its tone and theme have been hard carrying. The library section was yet another instance where I couldn't help but smile, being able to approach this bookshelf and dive into this entire civilization of Minish that live within the books really makes me happy. The ability for this game to just make the player feel joy is unparalleled in the entire Zelda series, for all my other problems with this game, it's really a top 3 Zelda in terms of vibes. I've always believed Minish Cap was going to be a game that ranked really low in my Zelda rankings because it does a lot of things I don't prefer within my Zelda games and in general it always felt toothless to me seeing gameplay. Like its only thoughts were "be a Zelda game" and it didn't have any ambition beyond that. I am pleasantly surprised, this game is probably my 7th or 8th favorite Zelda, it's endeared itself to me in such a massive way.
That being said, Temple of Droplets is once again one of the worst dungeons in the series' history. I feel bad because in theory I like the Minish Cap dungeons a lot. They all have pretty interesting themes, they play well with the mechanics of the game, they do really make you feel like you're small by having ordinary enemies become larger than life bosses. The Temple of Droplets especially has a very strong boss fight which turns THE Zelda enemy, the Octorok, into this giant monster that we have get creative on how we fight as our sword cannot pierce it at our miniscule size. And it also does a really unique thing, starting the player out with the boss key as the boss is technically in the main room of the dungeon and then kind of having them play the dungeon backwards from there until they awaken the boss. I can't think of another Zelda dungeon that does something like this.
The Temple of Droplets is also an ice dungeon with entirely slippery floors that has numerous puzzles built around pushing blocks on slippery floors. It's the worst. There's already a critical mass of block pushing in this game and now you want to do it on ice!!! Not to mention that it's only our second dungeon which takes place entirely as small Link, previous dungeons would have you switch between the two sizes to solve puzzles. And a lot of the dungeon design is incredibly similar to the first dungeon of the game. You have the lilypad raft that dominated the first dungeon being a core mechanic of this one. They repeat a lot of similar rooms and enemies from the first dungeon except now they're on ice. The midboss of the Temple of Droplets is just an enhanced version of the boss of the first dungeon. In a way this is nice, you have that "look how far we've come" moment from revisiting these ideas. But also, I feel like doing this is best served in a final dungeon where you can repeat a lot of the themes of the previous dungeons, not just a dungeon in the middle of the game? It feels worse this way for some reason.
I only have one more dungeon to go, I'm pretty sure? Well, I have two, of course, the final dungeon obviously is a thing. I don't know if anyone else does this but I often forget to count the final dungeon when I'm thinking of Zelda dungeon counts. Like I guess it's because the final dungeon usually doesn't have an item connected to it, so it doesn't FEEL like a proper dungeon even if it objectively is? Vaati is continuing his role as both a very intelligent villain and a very fun one, manipulating the king into now locking down the castle in an attempt to prevent Link from inserting the castle. I would not be surprised if my next update is my last update, if I just choose to play through the rest of the game in one sitting. I have a lot to do before the next part, I just unlocked the ability to make three clones so if I really wanted to, I could do a whole other sweep of the game and figure out what I can do with it. Also I have the flippers so a ton just became accessible to me as tiny Link, water was a massive hurdle in the past as even puddles were essentially oceans for tiny Link. If this is my penultimate update, I just wanna say I was pleasantly surprised by Minish Cap. As I've mentioned previously it was a Zelda I was always skeptical of, and even if I don't always LOVE the game, it's presentation and commitment to feeling so distinctly like a fairytale has really won me over. It's a good Zelda game, I'm glad I played through it.
1/8/26
I should've known that this game wouldn't end without a lost woods segment. Capcom just has too much love for the Zelda series to not do a Lost Woods section. I don't know why I always expect the solution to every Lost Woods to be "North, West, South, West", objectively speaking while that would be a fun nod to include, it's a terrible idea. But my neurons did fire when I saw that the first two rooms were "North" and "West". Anyways, the Royal Valley has such a good vibe to it. Like, again, Minish Cap's strength to me is in its vibes, it's a good game to experience even if I'm not always in love with the gameplay. But Royal Valley is an S tier spooky area. Its dark color palette and effective atmosphere really puts you into that haunted house headspace. And it obviously has a Lost Woods and like, who doesn't love a Lost Woods section? ESPECIALLY in a spooky area, having this endless labyrinth of trees to get lost in really sells the atmosphere well.
The Royal Crypt being a sort of throwback to Zelda 1 dungeon designs because it's the tomb of the first king of Hyrule was such a clever choice. Though it is kind of funny in context of the greater Zelda series that Minish Cap is doing retro throwbacks to other Zelda games when it's one of the earliest Zelda games on the timeline. I digress. The Royal Crypt is one of the highlights of my adventure so far. Like, I'm a huge fan of Zelda 1, playing Zelda 1 was a really magical experience for me. It still holds up as one of the greatest adventure games of all time. And it feels like the Zelda series doesn't really focus on Zelda 1 fanservice in the way the Mario series focuses on Mario 1 fanservice. More often it feels like if the Zelda series is doing fanservice, it's to, like, Ocarina of Time. So the Royal Crypt made me smile from the moment I heard the theme. It's also an interesting little microdungeon where you have to guide a series of clones through obstacle courses because the clones will disappear immediately if one of them hits a wall. It's a good tutorial for one of the key mechanics of the fifth dungeon in the game, the Palace of Winds.
I've been doing a ton of Kinstone stuff and by and large I don't think it's the most interesting. There are certainly some sidequests locked behind Kinstone fusing that are potentially interesting, helping the witch make the perfect potion, the Gorons digging a tunnel in Lon Lon Ranch, finding the three Oracles from the Oracle duology homes in Hyrule. But a specific Kinstone that I find fun is from just a random NPC. There's a random NPC living in Hyrule Town who you can fuse Kinstones with and they do something super unique. A glowing rock spawns next to Link's house, a very peculiar rock. When you step on it, it instantly warps Link to a mysterious building filled with people who dress like the NPC you fused Kinstones with. You can fuse Kinstones here but can't do much else, as you cannot leave the building and cannot progress with what the characters here wish for you to do. See, their elder has been infected with a ghost and you do not currently have any methodology for dealing with ghosts. Unable to do anything here, you are forced to exit and come back later.
So, after you head up into the sky, you meet the Wind Tribe. They are a race of humans who, long ago, abandoned their home in the southwest of Hyrule to go to the clouds, dissatisfied with the impurity of the world. That's a big thing, to live in the clouds you must be pure enough of heart as to essentially walk on air. Again, extremely fairytale. They are currently locked out of their home because the winds shifted while they were down on the surface for the festival that starts the game. After reopening their doorway by gliding around the clouds fusing Kinstone pieces, you arrive at their home, a giant castle in the sky, and when you enter it you find out this is where you've been warping to this entire time. It's interesting that, by doing the Kinstone stuff, you get foreshadowing to an area you won't naturally be able to get to for several more hours of gameplay. It's also convenient to do this because it means you get a fast warp back to the surface, you don't have to find your way back outside the castle and then call for the fast travel bird.
So I haven't been in love with any of the dungeons so far in this game, they all kind of rank pretty low in the history of Zelda dungeons. My general opinion has been that while Minish Cap has a lot of excellent ideas for dungeons, they are at best pretty standard and at worst they're some of my least favorite dungeons in the series' history. The Palace of the Winds though? The Palace of the Winds is REAL GOOD. It kind of takes the idea of the Temple of Droplets, the idea of doing the dungeon in reverse, and really commits to it. You start on the outside of the dungeon and you have to climb around the outside, steadily making your way up until you find the boss key and use it to enter the dungeon proper. Because instead of taking you to the boss, it takes you to one of the minibosses which then allows you to enter the dungeon's interior. At which point you have to climb back up through the interior of the dungeon, finding your items in reverse order. It's incredibly well done, I'm a big fan of the Palace of Winds' structure.
It's also the first dungeon and, honestly, the first thing in the entire Zelda series that has actually good platforming. Zelda games, especially Capcom's Zelda games, have tried platforming in the past, typically with an item that Link would use to jump. The problem with this item, the Roc's Feather, is it tended to limit Link's movement a lot. You basically had vertical movement now, but your horizontal movement tended to be very limited. Enter the Roc's Cape. The Roc's Cape completely revolutionizes Link's platforming abilities, giving Link not just an increased vertical capacity by giving him a double jump, but also giving Link a glide. The Roc's Cape really allows Link to platform properly, as he has a considerable amount of horizontal movement in the air. The dungeon is very well built around this, using the crumbling ruins on the exterior and the clouds that have formed around them to get effect as Link jumps and glides around the central Palace to get in. Super cool item, definitely the best platforming has been in any Zelda game. Also, it allowed them to adapt the down thrust into a Zelda game again! The down thrust is such an iconic piece of Link's toolkit that it's crazy it's almost exclusively been in Smash games and the only Zelda it appeared in before Minish Cap was Zelda II.
Gyorg is also just an absolutely killer boss. Once again, I'm super impressed by how they got this to work on a GBA. The Gyorg fight not only has multiple massive sprites, as you battle these flying rays high up in the sky, but it has to remember where all these rays are at any given moment. The main Gyorg is absolutely huge, it's a true larger than life boss fight and it's one of the best looking parts of this game. It also effectively uses the GBA's limited 3D capabilities, with the rays not only flying over and under each other, but also doing barrel rolls as they attack you. It's just fun too. Like, it makes great use of the dungeon item as you jump from ray to ray, dispatching each of them before hopping off to your next target, but it uses the cloning mechanic super well. The main Gyorg has eight eyes on the top of its head but will open three of them in a pattern. You have to make three clones of yourself to hit the three eyes, causing the beast to then open all of its eyes and allowing you to damage it. It's kind of an actiony switch puzzle like that, it's super well done. One of the best Zelda dungeons, one of the best Zelda bosses, I'm a big fan.
I found out in this section that the cap of Mysterious Shells is only 999? That's like actually ridiculous. The Mysterious Shell thing is something I'm not doing, I have actually 0 interest in playing gachapon. But if you were to 100% Minish Cap, you would have to do this because a Heart Piece is locked behind 100%-ing the gacha machine. So the game gives you an overabundance of mysterious shells so that you can afford to keep pulling the lever and getting new figures out of it. In a way, it's well designed. It's not actually, mind, there are videos on why this heart piece is one of the worst 100% requirements in gaming history. But in theory it's well designed. The problem with there being a cap is that, well. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, you didn't know that the gacha machine was a necessary piece of completing Minish Cap until late in the game. You thought it was just a cute side thing and only found out via walkthrough that it's required for 100%. If you did that, you would likely have just thrown away thousands of mysterious shells. A lot, and I mean A LOT, of chests give you dozens if not hundreds of mysterious shells. And because this is a pre-Twilight Princess Zelda game, if you open a chest that has something you don't have room for, it's just gone. It's an absurd way to do things, if you ask me, I would've simply just had Rupees be used for gacha pulls. They are much easier to obtain, lol.
I have a feeling my next and final update will be pretty short. Like, maybe I should do some Kinstone stuff, get the most out of this game I possibly can, you know. But in practice all I have left is the final dungeon, which is going to be Hyrule Castle. It always is. And then Vaati. I find it interesting that Vaati is now holing himself up inside the castle, having ordered the guards to not allow any trespass and flooding the place with monsters. Like, it seems obvious, every Zelda villain does this. They take over the castle and wait for Link to come to them. But Vaati actually benefits the most from giving Link a clear path to achieve his goal? Like, to get into the Sacred Realm and obtain the Triforce, Vaati needs Link to finish infusing the Minish Sword with the four elements, thereby becoming the Four Sword. And I'm pretty sure he knows this, it's the only reason why, despite his ability, he doesn't just come to Link and kill him outright. I don't know, just seems like an oversight for what is, typically, a fairly smart villain. Either way, next time I update, I'll have beaten the game. See you then!!!
1/9/26
As expected, this final post will be the shortest because I technically didn't even finish the game!!! I'll explain in a bit. So, to answer the question I had posed at the end of the last section: Vaati knew exactly what he was doing the entire time. He needed Link to get into the royal vault and so he presented the illusion he had already lost and was trying to wall himself up to incentivize his opponent to hurry up on his own quest. As soon as Link actually got into the vault, Vaati appeared, overjoyed that he now knew the location of the "golden light" and doubly so that it was already within his grasp. Vaati, in overtaking the castle had gained unrestricted access to the Princess he turned to stone at the beginning of the game. And wouldn't you know it, the Princess has the golden light within her! So now Link has to make his up to the bell tower at the top of the castle before Vaati can take the golden light for himself.
The problem is that Dark Hyrule Castle in Minish Cap is awful. I'm not going to act like Dark Hyrule Castle is ever great, to be honest. The final dungeon always feels kind of bad in these games, a dungeon built out of necessity rather than a desire to build the best dungeon possible. They usually don't have particularly interesting or memorable mechanics or puzzles, the final dungeon is almost always the weakest one. Dark Hyrule Castle in Minish Cap sets itself apart by being an entirely combat focused dungeon in a game whose combat isn't always its strong suit. A lot of 2D Zeldas have problems with their combat, namely from being a top down experience and thus limiting the movement you can do. While Minish Cap does give you a lot of interesting combat options, it's still pretty limited combatwise and, so this dungeon just doesn't work out very well.
The primary reason is that the main combat in this dungeon is against Darknuts. Darknuts are an iconic Zelda enemy and especially in this era, they kind of became the go-to "mini boss enemy" because they got recontextualized from their top down roots as just soldiers into these super cool royal knight enemies. Those of us who grew up with Twilight Princess remember how cool it was to get to the Temple of Time and fight that Darknut for the first time. Darknuts in this game are insufferable. You have to play this waiting game with them because they're only open for attack either from behind of after they have attacked. This is a pretty direct adaptation of the way you fight them in Wind Waker, the game Minish Cap takes a lot of its style from. Wind Waker, though, was a 3D game with a counter mechanic. You could roll around or helm split over an enemy if you hit the button with good timing, so exploiting Darknuts' weaknesses and openings was very natural. Here you can just fight a Darknut for a hundred years waiting for it to open up and hope your positioning is right to exploit the windows where they are open. It's very unfun combat, some of the most unfun in the series' history, and it's made worse by the fact that this dungeon not only has the strongest variants of Darknuts, the red and black ones, but that you fight them multiples at a time pretty frequently. It's just not fun, I did not like this final dungeon.
So why didn't I technically beat the game. Well, I made it all the way until the final room before the final boss. Vaati is, at this point, trying to put infinite roadblocks in your way so that Link won't make it to Zelda in time to stop him. The final room is the most challenging of these, as it has two red and one black Darknut. I tried my best to fight this trio but I lost due to the black Darknut's fast movement and very limited windows of opening. And when you lose on this final chain, what is meant to happen is it shows a bad ending cutscene, Vaati successfully obtains the Triforce and wins the day. It may also be timed to do this, I don't know, it seems like it isn't but it very well could be. Anyways, I didn't get that bad end. Instead the game just softlocked. It softlocked in the beginning of the cutscene, I don't know how exactly, I know it wasn't frozen. The fire graphics were still working. It just completely softlocked. I'm willing to call that a game clear though, like yeah, I didn't technically beat it but also like. I beat 99% of the game and then the game said "no, you don't get to do the final boss". And reloading my last save would literally just mean playing all of Dark Hyrule Castle again. Not about to do that just to get a more legitimate game clear. No thank you. So that's it for Minish Cap, I'm sorry it's anticlimactic, but that's how it rolls sometimes.
Despite a rocky finish, I did end up enjoying Minish Cap. I think that if you took a lot of the core DNA of Minish Cap and applied it to a more open Zelda experience, this would be a top 3 Zelda game for me. There's so much to like about this game, it has so much heart and charm to it. It has so many interesting items and ways to travel around the overworld. It has a wonderful fairytale vibe to it. I even liked the Kinstones way more than I thought I was going to. Unfortunately I think that it's not always a great gameplay experience. The dungeons, while cool conceptually, have some of the worst design in the series in my opinion. It tends to go overboard with both enemies and mechanics. And it's truly a nightmare to 100%, one of if not the worst in the series. It's almost brilliant to me. But still, fun game, decent little game. 7.9/10
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