E3 2005: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

The demo begins by treating the player to a wide cutscene, showing off lighting effects and the like. You're not given long to admire though, as TP tosses you right into the action as soon as the cutscene ends. Link is in a fairly open area, like a meadow but narrow -- almost an outdoor corridor -- and he's being rushed by two very angry looking Lizalfos. After spending a little time getting used to your various techniques and fighting off both of the Lizalfos, you'll move toward a vined wall and meet up with two new foes: The Deku Baba, and the small spider, both trying to stop you from reaching the top of the wall in front of you. Slaying the Deku Baba will leave behind a Deku Nut which will do a very effective job of eliminating the small spider. Climb the wall ahead, and you'll see a circular stone door with a red swirl symbol that looks vaguely familiar to the one found on the wooden Kokiri shield in Ocarina of Time. (We don't know if there is any connection and only mention the Kokiri to reference the symbol.) Link presses against it and with a heave, struggling to roll it to the side. Entering through the door, you'll find yourself in a very large room. Directly ahead is a staircase, spider webs strung across it, which leads to a raised platform in the middle of the room.

When we reached the top of these stairs, a large spider dropped down from a web above and we did battle with it. After defeating the spider, we finally reached the chest we had seen on the platform. The chest we'd come for: the chest containing the Gale Boomerang.

After setting the boomerang to either X or Y and playing around with it for a bit, a quick look around revealed more of the same circular doors on every side, but those to the left and right were both blocked by large gaps that Link couldn't jump, so we walked around to find another door, but a wooden gate blocked the way forward, effectively sealing the door shut. We surveyed our surroundings a bit more though, and noticed something above the door. A strange wooden pinwheel/windmill of some kind was placed there, and so -- making the natural logical conclusion -- we threw the Gale Boomerang at it, fully charged. And, lo and behold, the gate raised...about a half of an inch. So we threw the boomerang again...and again. Three times always has been a sort of magic number when it comes to Zelda and this was no exception.

With the gate no longer an obstacle, we entered through the door. On the other side of it, we were treated to another cutscene. A small monkey dashed across the large wooden bridge ahead of us, running in our direction and clearly terrified. Shortly after, we saw why. Out rushed a very malicious looking Baboon with a boomerang of his own -- this one clearly charged with some kind of dark energy. The Baboon charged his dark boomerang and threw it at the ropes suspending the bridge before tauntingly slapping his butt and dashing off the way he came, cackling wildly. The bridge then split in half, dropping the little chimp, which had not yet made it across into the abyss. But before we even had time to mourn, we saw that the monkey had managed to grab onto the bridge and climb to where we were. As the cutscene faded out, we were left to wonder how we were ever going to get across the now non-existent bridge. Before we got too worried though, the now friendly chimpanzee ran over to the door we just came through and beckoned for us to follow. This hardly seemed productive to us as we'd just left that room, but there were precious few other options, so we followed the little bugger.

Returning to the room where we'd received the boomerang, we were led to our left and toward one of the gaps we had previously been unable to cross. Our new simian friend, however, was clearly not about to stand for that. There was a rope extending across the top of this gap, and he leapt towards it, grabbing on with his tail and screeching at us. After standing bewildered for a moment, it occurred to us to try jumping across the gap. As we did so, the monkey grabbed onto us and tossed us the rest of the way to the door before running across to it to demand we follow. A great partnership was beginningbut not without its downsides. Beyond the door, lied a room filled with water and a wooden bridge to cross. However, blocking the path was a Deku Baba. It quickly became apparent that our monkey friend was no warrior, as he ran and cowered in fear until we took down the Baba. In fact, he would run and hide at the sight of any enemy. So much for avoiding fights.

A gap lay ahead, and a large spider dropped down in front of it, blocking our way. (Can somebody say Skulltula?) A quick blow from the Deku Nut our last foe had left us dispatched him quickly. (Alternately, we learned we could cut the web with the boomerang, which would drop him into the water, and water apparently killed him.) Making our way to the end of the room, the chimp beckoned us to follow him through the door ahead, but we weren't about ready to leave yet. A bridge lay to our right, so we went that way. On the other side of the bridge laid a wooden gate and two windmill switches. Throwing the boomerang at each of them did nothing, until we realized we had to spin them at the same time and locked on to both with one throw. The gate opened and ahead was a dark cave.

As we entered the cave, a single Keese flapped towards us, and was taken care of with a quick swing of our sword. Ahead lay a chest, guarded by a Lizalfos. We made quick work of him and opened the chest, which revealed the dungeon map. (We'll also take this moment to note, with the screenshot shown below, the interesting discovery that Link now holds some items in front of him rather than above his head.) Satisfied, we now followed our awfully pushy new pal where he wanted us to go, and were rewarded with another cutscene.

Ahead laid a clearing with a single totem pole at the center, and atop the pole was a small cage with another, almost identical, monkey inside. Our little friend monkey, seeing his friend imprisoned, ran toward the pole and violently jumped at the cage, yanking at the bars with all his strength before giving in. Naturally, we felt compelled to help the creature in need. (Besides, these little buggers were useful.) We ran across the bridge next to us and towards the staircase down to the pole, and as we did, the bridge broke, effectively trapping us in the room. Looking at the size of the gap, it seemed it would take two of our friends to get back across. Fair enough, since we'd have two in a second. So we ran up to the primate on the ground, and the context sensitive A button flashed a "check" function. Pressing it caused our chimp associate to roll into the pole with nowhere near enough strength to achieve anything and then continue to flail wildly at it. An obvious enough hint for us; we rolled into the pole, causing the cage to wobble. One more roll knocked the cage onto the ground, breaking it into tiny wooden splinters. Both free, the monkeys rushed toward each other, hugging and frolicking happily.

This would have been a delightful scene if two Lizalfos hadn't then dropped in from seemingly nowhere and make our tiny companions cower in fear. No worries, this kind of situation is where Link shines, right? We made quick work of them and our cohorts led us out of the room, back the way we came. With two of them now in tow with us, one swung us back to the center platform, and the other swung us to the final door in that room, the only door we had yet to enter. Moving through this door revealed another clearing, and both chimps stayed behind for some reason. We soon realized that we'd be going it alone again. The clearing ahead was more important though, and looking around revealed a baby Deku Baba. (The sight of its snakelike tongue flicking at us, as it slithered around after being detached from its stalk, is still a little chilling.)

After we got rid of the threat of the Deku Baba, we took a closer look at our surroundings. The only way ahead was a staircase ahead of us, but it was blocked by a massive boulder. There was, however, a strange bulbous insect next to us which the A button was prompting us to pick up. So we did. Which is when it started flashing red, revealing that it was in fact a bomb. (We thought about how interesting a bomb insect was later, when we weren't holding one that was about to detonate.) We tossed it at the boulder, and much to no one's surprise, the boulder blew up. (An interesting aside, however, is that instead of vanishing without a trace, the boulder left behind a pile of rubble that Link had to scramble on top of.) We dashed to the top of the stairs and looked around again. There was a bomb insect next to us and a boulder straight ahead, but quite a ways off. We'd have to move pretty fast if we wanted to avoid having the bomb asplode all in our faces.

To the left of the boulder was a raised cliff. We decided to check that out first. There were vines growing on the side of it, making it a simple leap and climb from the slightly lower platform we were on. The vine also had a single small spider crawling around on it, but a single toss of the boomerang fixed that problem. We hopped onto the higher cliff and headed through the door ahead. Another cutscene, which, if patterns were worth anything here, probably meant another monkey. It did. However, this one was behind a caged door with a big padlock on it. And straight ahead of us was the key. (Fair enough.) We moved forward to take it...and then some plant ate it.

This plant was an odd looking foe. It had a single stalk with a mouth and teeth, which made it look like an overgrown Deku Baba. This is what picked up the key. However, the stalk was attached to a strange bulbous center which it dropped the key into. We stepped cautiously forward -- sword drawn. It was a very simple mini-boss though, with a very basic fighting style. It would lift its head up, out of reach, and then rear back and strike after a while. We merely had to dodge the lunging head and then strike it with our sword. This caused the stalk to fall to the ground before hardening and crumbling (It looked like it withered and then turned to stone, before crumbling to dust. Strange effect). (On multiple runs, we defeated the head in as few as one slash, and as many as three. We are certain it depends somehow on precisely where you hit it, but we were unable to determine exactly where its weak point was.) We still didn't have the key though, as the bulb remained. Seeing a bulb with our key in it and a bomb insect in every corner of the room, we solved that mystery pretty quickly. One bomb in the center of the bulb, and the explosion caused that part of the plant to wither and die too. The key was left behind, and we used it to free our third primate partner. There was also a chest in his cage where we found the compass, which actually ended up being invaluable in the next room, but we'll get to that in a second. Now that we were done in this room, we blew up that last boulder, which took a few tries as it required almost perfect timing to avoid the bomb insect exploding up in our hands, and went through the door behind it. A very open room was ahead of us, with two spiders patrolling the floor ahead and a raised platform on the other end. And on that raised platform was another caged monkey, trapped behind the same sort of padlocked cage the last one had been. We quickly took care of the spiders before realizing we had no idea how to free him.

After examining the raised platform the poor monkey's cage was on, we saw two steps leading up to him, but the first was too far off the ground, and the next was too far from it to jump to even if we could get to the first. There were gaps next to both steps, where third and fourth steps would go, that would easily fill those gaps, but how to raise them? After spending a few minutes wildly running around with no clue what to do, we accidentally stepped on a strange circular switch and one of the steps lowered to ground level. Which, while rather counter-productive, did at least give us an idea. We looked around, and there were four switches in the room -- one in each corner, each corresponding to a different step. With a little time we raised all of the steps and were able to ascend to the chimp's cage. Another spider guarded his cage, but he proved an easy enough foe.

Anyway, that was all well and good, but we still had no way to open his cage. We'd explored pretty much everything in the room and hadn't found a key. Frustrated, we were about to go back to the beginning to really explore when we noticed that our compass showed a strange white square in the center of the room. Now, we had no idea what 'white square' meant, as far as the legend went, but we figured it couldn't hurt to check it out. Looking around showed no switches, chests, or anything else out of the ordinary, though. So we threw the boomerang at it. (Watching other people play revealed this to be a common philosophy among E3-goers, actually. Don't know what to do? Throw the boomerang at everything in sight!) And it actually worked. The wind generated by the Gale Boomerang lifted the floor tiles and revealed a key lying underneath them. Which, really, is awesomely cool. And so, quite pleased with ourselves, we freed the last monkey and backtracked all the way to the intersecting central room where we had obtained the Gale Boomerang, since we knew the first two chimps were still waiting there. (We were, at this point, getting a little tired of returning to that room, but at least we knew it was coming to an end.)

When we got back, all four monkeys quickly joined up and ran toward the room with the large bridge -- now broken -- where we'd met the first, beckoning for us to follow. So, naturally, we did. And four monkeys proved to be all it would take to cross the entire gap where the bridge had been. The chimps ran ahead of us and one by one grabbed onto the rope to swing us across. We prepared ourselves for the climactic battle we knew was coming and passed through the door, ready to fight the boss. ...Except that the Baboon was waiting for us before we could. We'd forgotten about him, somehow. Oh well. We re-geared ourselves to fight him, surveying the arena. The room was a series of totem poles, one of which he was standing on, and the ceiling was covered in baby Deku Baba. The Baboon stomped the pole that he was standing on, knocking two of the slithering plants onto the ground in front of us, and the battle began. After killing the plants, the Baboon threw his boomerang at us, and we slashed at it with our sword, deflecting it back in the Baboon's direction. The Baboon caught it, but volley fights are nothing new as far as Zelda goes, so, certain we were on the right track, we spent far too long trying to hit him in this fashion before realizing it wasn't going to work.

At some point one of us had the brilliant idea to roll into the totem pole and make the Baboon fall, which didn't work, at least not directly. It did, however, make him lose balance, and luckily we had done it right after he threw the boomerang. So when it came back to him, instead of catching it, he got hit in the face by it and fell flat on the ground. We locked on to him and rushed forward, swinging our sword wildly. His Baboon red-ass was a rather obvious weak point, so we hacked at it until he jumped up and hopped onto another of the totem poles. The fight continued until, in true Zelda fashion, the third knock-down brought about his end. He hopped up and ran for a pole, slamming his head against it, and knocking the strange black thing attached to his head loose. The black object then shriveled up and vanished in a puff of really weird looking smoke, and the Baboon, free of some sort of curse, ran off scared and clearly entirely unaware of where or even who he was. It seems the evil spreading across Hyrule had made it here and affected even him. Another mystery solved and another creature saved, we prepared ourselves for the real boss battle and stepped forward.

Or we would have, if the demo hadn't ended there. Since the boss was separate, what really happened was that we got a "Thank you for playing the E3 demo" message, and it took us back to the beginning, surely forcing us to hand the controller off to some impatient guy behind us. By the way, the demo did require complete memorization and extremely speedy execution to complete in the 15-minute time limit, but it still seems to us like that shouldn't have been possible. We theorize that this demo is a truncated version of the dungeon we'll see in the final game.

As Link entered the room where he'll do battle with the final boss of the Forest Temple, two very large versions of the same circular doors we'd been seeing everywhere rolled shut behind him, trapping him in the room. The camera panned around to give us a look at the scenery, which was quite lovely, until a giant monster popped out of nowhere. The boss battle was held in a large circular room composed of a swamp-like pool of toxic purplish water with walkways encircling the pool and a massive tree sprouting out of the center of the area. Around the outer circle were various waterfalls pouring into the center, and on the top left -- built into the wall -- is a small cave-like entrance with a small wooden doorway built into it and vines hanging out of it. We thought that was strange, but we didn't really have much longer to think about our surroundings. We made note of the bomb insects which were scattered around the whole place, knowing we'd likely have to use them in the battle, and prepared for the fight.

Two massive plant stalks popped up out of the water on the left and right sides of the giant tree in the center. Remember the giant plant mini-boss that ate the key in the dungeon breakdown? Take just the stalk, multiply its size by about twelve, add a second, and you've pretty much got what we're facing. We weren't quite sure what to do, so we grabbed a bomb insect. As the first head struck us, it swallowed the explosive little guy and fell back into the pond. That was awfully easy. We picked up another of the bombs and the second head struck, swallowing it and falling into the water. Surely that wasn't all, right?

Right. Both heads popped right back up, and this time they brought a center plant with them, popping up right in front of the huge tree, which was twice as large as they were. We dashed to pick up one of the bomb insects, but it wasn't there. None of the bomb insects were there. This is roughly about when we started running wildly around in circles. The heads on the sides struck, and we attempted to dodge and slash at them, but we just kept getting poor Link knocked flat on his back. And just as we were about to insist that Aonuma was an evil genius and had made his demo impossible to beat (just to mess with people), the baboon -- no longer possessed -- popped out of the wooden doorway in the wall we'd noticed earlier. And he was holding a bomb insect! Bless his soul. He grabbed on to the vine and swung back and forth across the room, holding the bomb insect the entire time. Retrieving the bomb with our boomerang, we fed it to one of the side plants, and the baboon dashed off to get us another bomb. We defeated both of the side heads and grabbed a third bomb. And the central head just sat there. We tried, to no avail, to throw the bombs at it, but the gap created by the toxic water was simply too large.

The Baboon swung back down, another bomb with him, and we locked on to retrieve it. As we were locking on, we noticed the cursor appearing on the plant's head as well. Finally understanding, we locked on to both and used the boomerang to carry the bomb from the Baboon to the central head, stunning it. It landed in front of us and the bulb fell open, revealing a very strange eyeball-on-a-stalk nucleus in the center, which we frantically hacked at with our sword. After a while, the plant retreated into the water, and when it popped back up, the two stalks on the sides returned with it. The center head, now fairly annoyed with us, then proceeded to spray some of the toxic water at us. It followed a fairly basic left to right lawn sprinkler-esque motion, which made it easy enough to anticipate and avoid until it stopped. We then tried carrying bombs into the side heads by queuing lock-ons, which worked, revealing that we didn't actually have to wait for them to strike, and we even tried hitting the center head without first eliminating the side heads, which also worked. And after bringing down the central head and hacking away at its eye a third time, it reared back, flailing wildly as the camera initiated a slow-motion death sequence (showcasing some very nice blur effects) and fell to the ground, withering and turning to stone in much the same way the plant mini-boss had. Link twirled his sword, sheathed it, and posed smugly as the camera zoomed in on the victor. The demo then faded out, and our time with the Twilight Princess demo had sadly come to an end.