Last Christmas we saw the release of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a game which was hyped to an extreme rarely seen. Perhaps the last time a game was as over-hyped was 2004’s Halo 2, but that’s a discussion in and of itself. Twilight Princess was announced in 2004, the same year that Nintendo was pimping the rough design of a soon to be famous handheld. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? We can probably agree that Nintendo unveiled the game way too early, but in a way, who can blame them? The GameCube was dying a horrible death in what would have been the middle of any normal console lifespan, and with the cushy mattress of exclusivity soon to be pulled out from under Resident Evil 4, Twilight Princess was likely the only thing that kept people from dropping their GameCubes off at the local EB Games for a console that still had more than four games coming out each month.

"Nintendo made their fans sit on their thumbs (literally) for an entire year with nothing to play, waiting on a game Nintendo announced way too early. "

Then Nintendo went and did the unthinkable. They delayed the game a year past its expected release, and then announced a release window for their soon-to-be-renamed Wii console. Anyone with half a brain knew exactly what Nintendo was planning to pull. Take a ridiculously over-hyped game, and then use it as a launch title to usher in a new console, turning a blind eye to the GameCube owners who sat a year without a single first party game to keep them busy. Sure, the game came out on GameCube two weeks later, but did anyone care by that point? It was a token gesture since that build had been finished a year before. Nintendo made their fans sit on their thumbs (literally) for an entire year with nothing to play, waiting on a game Nintendo announced way too early. By the time the game landed at retail, its hype was mostly riding on the coattails of the Wii. People had honestly stopped caring about Zelda for Zelda's sake, but that fact seemed to slip under the radar thanks to (mostly) shining reviews. Now that we are more than a half a year past the launch of Zelda (and the Wii), though, the events of the launch can be observed from a different perspective.

Nintendo damaged the Zelda franchise during this process, more than people immediately realize. Twilight Princess was meant to be fan service to people who wanted another Ocarina, but the events that built to its long overdue release were an insult to those very same people. Sales in North America have been passable, but in Japan the game has, for the sake of being blunt, bombed. For a couple of weeks the game managed to crack the lower top 20 (at number 16), but soon afterwards the game fell off the charts and never made a resurgence.


Though we know not to what degree, the Nintendo fanbase is smaller than it used to be. Each Zelda installment consecutively since Ocarina has failed to sell as much as its predecessor, but as long as the numbers stayed high enough, this issue never came to the forefront. Now the problem is starting to materialize in front of people. Having already missed its release window, Twilight Princess would have been a speed bump had it not been released during the hype of Wii launch. It missed the boat. Twilight Princess was not next-gen, and it was not innovative. It was a game meant for Holiday season of 2005 as an apology to the fans who had suffered through the horribly dry stages of the late GameCube era. In that marketplace and time, the game would have likely done exceptionally well and garnered tons of praise, as well as undermined the launch of the Xbox 360 and its then weak lineup.

Released in 2006, Twilight Princess was just an afterthought to fans that were burned out on hype, and a public that had lost interest several delays ago. As 2006 went on, the game started to slip down various “most anticipated” lists. Most reviewers tried not to punish the game’s last-gen appearance that came courtesy of Nintendo porting a last-gen game to a next-gen machine, but it was glaringly obvious in most of their write-ups that this was the case. The fact that the GameCube version trampled the Wii version in all regions (except Japan where the GCN version was only offered through online shops) exemplifies what a bad choice it was to move the game to Wii launch.

"The fact that the GameCube version trampled the Wii version in all regions exemplifies what a bad choice it was to move the game to Wii launch."

This scenario has become obvious in the passing months since the hype surrounding Wii has mostly settled down. It is so obvious that even Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the franchise, admitted as much in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. In his own words: “I think it's that there are fewer and fewer people who are interested in playing a big role-playing game like Zelda."