The E3 demo featured 5 different stages to play through, all showing off various elements of the game. A town, an ocean, a stealth stage, a dungeon, and a boss battle. However, they had a 20 minute time limit on all of the kiosks, so I wasn't able to finish a couple of the stages. Regardless, I managed to collect enough info to do quite a thorough breakdown. Have a look, eh?
Island of Beginning
The "Island of Beginning" is very similar to the Kakiriko and Kokiri villages in Ocarina of Time. It's cheerful and relaxing town, full of helpful citizens eager to assist you in learning the basics of the game. At the start, Link is introduced and told to go find his sister, Arill. It's his 12th birthday, and he just received his new green outfit. Once you finish the introductory dialog, you're free to roam the town.
The town is a costal village dotted with several huts and backed up against a sheer cliffside. Various tufts of grass and tropical vegetation cover the ground, and Link can cut up the majority of it - including many of the smaller trees. The beach is home to sand dunes and easily-frightened crabs, and borders on some absolutely fantastic looking water. If Link walks too far into the water, he'll start to swim. New to this version of the game, however, is a meter that restricts the amount of time you can spend swimming in the water - regardless of whether you're diving or not. Birds flit through the air, and clouds pepper the sky. It's really quite beautiful.
The first character you encounter meets you on the path from your house. She's carrying a pot on her head, and tells you how to pick up pots by yourself. Apparently your little sister wanted to know. You then bump into a little boy who has something dangling from his face. Upon closer inspection, it turns out to be a giant string of snot. As he talks to you, he periodically sniffs it back into his nose. When you're done talking to him, though, he still follows you around and bumps into you. And all he ever has to say are things like "Hey!" Most people playing the demo learned early on that it's best to just run from this kid once he gets you in his sights.
One of the huts on the island is home to an oriental sword-master. This guy teaches you how to handle your sword and perform all the different types of attacks. Once he instructs you to do a certain attack, you have to do it several times in a row before he moves on. You face him and attack, and he'll block every hit with his staff. If you screw up even once, he'll knock you down and tell you to start that particular attack all over again. He's quite a harsh master. Once you successfully complete the training, Link and the teacher bow politely to each other and you're free to keep exploring.
There's a bridge that crosses a little river that runs through the town, and there are several rocks sticking out of the water to the side of it. In the middle of the bridge, a little girl asks inquisitively if it's true that you can jump from rock to rock if you run as fast as you can. Taking her hint, you can jump to all the rocks in sequence and collect the rupees on each. It functions just like it did in Ocarina of Time.
If you talk to the woman inside the animal pen, she'll tell you how she desperately wants some livestock. Remembering past Zelda games, it would stand to reason that you're off to find some chickens, right? Wrong. Seems that the animal of choice in this particular village is the pig, and you're off to go find her a bunch. As you go searching, you'll come across a man hunched over and looking into a dense patch of grass. He'll tell you that there's a pig in there, but you can't get close to it unless you crawl. So you sneak up to the little fella and pick him up. He'll squeal and squirm, but won't get away. Take him back to the animal pen, and go looking for some more. In another large patch of grass, there's a man who tells you how you can find all sorts of neat items by cutting the grass to bits. Among rupees and hearts, you can find another pig in the grass.
This pig, however, I decided to have some fun with. I took it over to the little river and chucked it in. After the satisfying splash, it reared its head and paddled back to shore! It climbed from the river, it shook the water from its skin, and trotted away. I promptly caught it and brought it back to the pen. The next pig I found sorta... walked off a cliff. I wanted to find another and see if attacking it repeatdly would result in a swarm of angry attacking swine, ala the chickens in all the past Zelda games, but the demo's time limit was looming. So I figured that was enough of THAT.
After all that fooling around, it's finally time to go meet Link's sister. There's a little pier that juts out from the mainland and leads to a ladder of high-dive proportions. At the top, a flock of seagulls scatters to reveal Link's little sister. She congratulates you on your birthday, and gives you the Telescope. You're then told to equip it and have a look around. If you zoom in on some sort of bird-man that your sister refers to as the postman, he'll look upwards and start to flip out. You look upwards as well, and a little cinema scene begins. A giant eagle of sorts is being chased by a pirate ship. The eagle has a child grasped in its claws, and the pirates are firing their cannons at it. Eventually they clock the bird in the face, and it drops the child in the forest at the top of the cliffs that border the village.
Your sister flips out, and you go to investigate. There's a path that leads up the cliffside, and you can follow it to enter the forest. Inside, there are various platforming situations where you have to jump from logs and levels to get to the child - who is stuck up in a tree. A couple birds drop in some sort of rat-pigs that you have to fight, and you eventually battle your way to the tree that the child is hanging from. The branch breaks, she falls to the ground, and the demo ends.
Vast Ocean
I didn't get to play this stage, but I saw plenty of people going through it. It starts off with a guy talking to Link about a minigame, and after you learn the rules you're thrust right into it. You find yourself on an ornately carved sailboat in a large yet confined ocean setting. The object of the minigame is to collect as many rupees as you can and make it back to the finish line before the 3 minute timer runs out.
The boat controls are fairly easy to understand. You move around with the control stick, and press R to hoist or furl your sail. You go much faster when it's hoisted, and the actual act of hoisting it propels your ship into the air temporarily from the sudden gust of wind. You have to use the wind dial in the lower right corner of the screen to plot a course around the area and get back in time. As you sail, you'll come across two types of barrels - both of which have rupees sitting on top of them. The barrels that lie on their side you need only sail over to claim their rupees. The upright barrels, however, you have to jump over via the little boost you get from hoisting your sail. If you crash into one of the upright barrels, Link is thrown from the boat and you have to swim back to it before you can continue.
After you make it back to the finish line, the demo ends. Quite short, but it manages to show off the absolutely beautiful water effects. Also, you're sure to use this particular boat in other instances of the game, as the man you talk to at the beginning comments on how you own such a beautiful craft. Not once in a 3D Zelda game have you been able to ride a manually controlled boat or raft, so it should be very interesting to see how this all pans out in the final build of the game.
Island of Magical Beast
This was one of the more difficult stages present in the demo, and ideally would've taken a long time to explore. Unfortunately, due to the time limit, not many people managed to get all the way through it. You start off being discovered on a pirate ship by the pirate girl who was dropped into the forest in the "Island of Beginning" demo. After chewing you out, she points to the Island of Magical Beast - an island lair full of rival pirates. Apparently this is where your sister is being held, after being kidnapped by a giant bird. The pirate girl points out a particular window of the fortress where seagulls are flying around. The seagulls were quite fond of Arill before, so it would stand to reason that they're gathering around the room that she's imprisoned in. (Although it could just be a room full of fish guts... but I digress.)
So how do you get to the island? Link himself is quite surprised by the solution, finding himself in a barrel on a giant catapult. The pirate girl snickers to herself, but tells Link that this is how it's always done. As the countdown begins, Link goes through a variety of emotions before being flung, screaming, into the sky. He crashes into a wall inside the fortress, splashes into the water, and climbs to shore. Soaked, he hunches over and drips with an annoyed look on his face. The whole sequence is very well done, and serves to illustrate how fantastic Link's facial expressions can be.
Once you dry off, it's time to sneak into the depths of the fortress. The whole thing is quite similar to sneaking around in the pirate fortesses found in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, but there are quite a few new stealth techniques - as detailed in the Gameplay Mechanics section of this feature. As link climbs a flight of stairs, the pirate girl contacts him through a magical rock she slipped in his pocket and tells him to be very careful while trying to get through the criss-crossing searchlights on the landing above. Luckily enough, there's a barrel nearby. By picking the barrel up over your head and then putting it back down over your body, you can use it to sneak through the complex. When the searchlights hit you, quickly drop to the ground so they won't notice. When they pass, just keep waddling towards the next doorway.
Once you get to the door, there's a neat little transition/loading distraction where the screen flips over like a piece of paper to reveal the next room. After shooing away a few rupee-stealing rats, you come across a hallway full of the pirate Moblins shown off in the original Space World Zelda video. You can use the barrel to sneak by, or try sidling up against some walls, but you're bound to be caught eventually. At least, I was. The Moblins walk through the hallway, periodically sniffing the ground and looking about. They're suprisingly smart, though. Even when concealed in my barrel and motionless, one Moblin got close enough to notice me and shattered the barrel violently with his torch. Link put his hands up in the air, and the next thing you know, he's thrown to the floor of a prison cell.
Breaking out of the cell is fairly easy. Just push a box out of the way on one side, and crawl through the little passageway. When you get to a twist or turn in the little tunnel, the game will pause and tell you which ways you can go. It's quite intuitive and Link doesn't ever get stuck or lost. Once you're free, you can start your search again. Upon escaping the cell you'll end up in the upper part of the room you were originally in when you started the level. There's a torch on a rope swinging back and forth, and you can jump to it and swing across a gap to progress - much like the effect of using the grapple in the boss battle level. You'll then find yourself on a wall that borders a central area being swept by spotlights. The object is to get to the spotlights and disable them so you can get by. As you travel along the wall, you'll come upon two sets of spotlights that simply require your presence to disable. The rat-pigs operating the things notice you when you come near, aim the spotlights towards the sky, and come after you. Just kill them and move on. Eventually you'll have the whole area cleared out, and you can keep going.
That's as far as I got in this particular level, due to the looming time limit. However, from what I've seen of other people playing, it seems that after you get through that last area you end up fighting some of the Moblins before finally getting to the tower where your sister is kept. It's a short reunion, however, as the bird who captured her to begin with crashes through the ceiling, ending the demo. Will she be captured again? Do you get to fight off the giant bird? Guess we'll have to wait till the game comes out officially for the answers to those particular questions.
Dragon Mountain
This is a truncated version of the first dungeon in the game, and starts you off in a room with a couple rat-pigs. The first few rooms of the dungeon employ all of the standard Zelda dungeon techniques, such as killing all the enemies in a room to open the door, lighting a stick with a torch and using the the stick to light other torches, and revealing hidden treasure chests. Once you get through the first couple of rooms, you find yourself in a hallway with a wooden blockade at the end. As you approach it, a rat-pig breaks through and attacks you. If you kill him and take his sword, you can use it to break through the wooden blockades that impair your progress elsewhere in the dungeon. The next room is a huge amphitheater that goes both way way up and way way down. Lava bubbles at the bottom, and the heat and smoke ripple and distort everything around you. If you follow the path around the room, you eventually come to a wooden blockade that's followed by several flaming bats. Kill the bats, break through another blockade, press a switch, and there's a door that leads you to some vastly different surroundings.
You'll find yourself on the outside of Dragon Mountain, traversing along cliffsides and climbing upwards. Lava periodically spews out of holes that dot the rocky walls, and bizarre birds fly from their perches to attack you. This part of the dungeon serves to teach several techniques, which the pirate girl from before explains through the magical rock she gave you. You sidle across tiny crossings in front of violent lava spouts, drop off the cliff and inch across while hanging from the edge, and maneuver through other rocky outcroppings by varying the height of your sidle. Once you get to the top, you press a switch and go through another door that leads inside the mountain.
The next area is pitch black with the exception of a single torch. Wooden clubs sit in a nearby vase, and you can light one on the torch and use it to guide the way through the darkness. Scores of bats try and kill you in the passage, and you can swat at them with the club as you progress. Once you get to the end and unlock the door by lighting another torch, you'll find yourself in another huge amphitheater. This particular area is very similar to the interior of Death Mountain in Oracina of Time, and you cross over some wooden bridges while fighting off a bunch of rat-pigs. The coolest part, though, is that you can actually cut or slowly burn the ropes on the bridge. Destroy too many of them, and the bridge falls into the lava below. As such, you have to be quite careful while fighting on them, though you can use it to your advantage if you're at the edge of the bridge and there's an enemy in the middle. Just start hacking at the ropes, and he'll fall to his demise.
I didn't get much farther than this in the dungeon level, though I do remember there being another door that you got into by picking up a vase and setting it down on a switch. The next demo level was the boss of the dungeon, so I assume the dungeon wrapped up before then so as to not have two demos featuring the exact same thing.
Battle With the Boss
I'm going to make a harsh generalization and say that this was the coolest looking boss in any video game ever. And considering that it's only the FIRST boss in this game, that says quite a lot for what else is in store.
You start off with this huge parasite/insect/ghoma creature rising from the pool of lava in front of you, and screeching like it's got a lava rock plugged where the sun don't shine. Once you regain control of Link, the battle begins. The boss will slam its claws down on either side of you, trapping you between them, and blow fire directly at you. So what do you do? Well if you look at the top of the arena you're fighting in, you'll notice a long... something... hanging from the ceiling. If you switch to your grapple, you can launch it upwards and grab on to what is revealed as the tail of the dragon that's sitting on top of the mountain. Once you pull up into the air, you'll be swinging back and forth with this huge monster sloshing around in the lava beneath you. At the apex of your swing, press B to let go and try and land on one of the platforms that borders the upper part of the arena. Regardless of where you land, the ceiling will crack and fall as a single unit - landing squarely on the boss's head. After an amusing little sequence where the boss keels over slightly from the weight of the ceiling, you get to do it again. The boss will rise in the air, push the ceiling back in place, and start attacking you again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Once you pull the ceiling down a total of three times, you enter phase two.
The boss, enraged, will totally shed its protective armor - revealing the soft and icky creature beneath. Your new objective is to stun it by hitting it in the eye. You can do this by launching your grapple at it, or waiting for it to lower its head and then hitting it with your sword. Once it's stunned, just start hacking away. It will eventually regain its composure, at which point you try and stun it again. Eventually, the punishment will simply be too much for it to handle. The boss rears in the air, becomes petrified, and starts to dissolve. Its head crashes to the ground next to Link, and the lava pit solidifies. Link jumps up and down happily as a blue point of light starts to glow in the middle of the pit, and boom. The demo ends.