The Legend of Zelda: The Minish CapPublisher: NintendoGame Boy Advanced$34.99ESRB: E (Everyone)

With 12 games made and a thirteenth in production, The Legend of Zelda is one of Nintendo’s longest running video game series. The Legend of Zelda is also probably Nintendo’s most debated series, with no official timeline and countless theories on the order that the games occur, people have created whole websites on this topic. But the order of the Zelda games is a topic for a book, or at least another article.

Now I will quit rambling early for once (it’s late and I’m tired) and get right to the game. The Legend of Zelda: The Minnish Cap is the forth Zelda game made for a handheld system. The first was Link’s Awakening and the second and third were made by Capcom. Although good, the second and third handheld system games (known as the oracle games for their titles, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons) lacked something that only Nintendo-made Zelda games have. However this new Zelda game lacks nothing and does everything its creators set out to do: challenge and entertain the player and continue to fuck with the Zelda timeline.

According to the story put out by The Minish Hat, a long time ago evil spirits descended on the land of Hyrule. When it seemed that all hope was lost (this is the series’ cue for help to arrive) a race known as the Picori came from the sky. They gave humans a “shining golden light” and a sword. These were used to fight of the evil and return peace yadda yada yadda, fast forward a few hundred years. Every year the Picori festival is held to give thanks and every hundred years on the day of the festival a door to the world of the Picori opens. This year is the hundredth year since that last happened. The game starts with Princess Zelda asking Link (the main character, you) to come to the festival with her.

When you meet the winner of that year’s sword tournament it turns out that he’s an evil wizard who breaks the Picori sword (the sword given to the humans by the Picori) and unleashes monsters on the land, and turns Zelda to stone. Now your quest begins, and you have to find the Picori (who only appear to children) and re-forge the Picori Sword so you can break the curse on Zelda. Now the game gets interesting. One of the most interesting features of this game is Link’s new sidekick, a talking hat named Ezlo. I kid you not, the hat gives you advice anytime you want and is a dick the rest of the time. However the hat gives you the other great feature of the game. You see the Picori are small. Really small, smaller than George Bush’s IQ. And you have to go to their level to talk to them. What I mean is that you have to find warp points throughout the game that let you shrink down to their size. This gives an all new perspective to the game. Monsters you can normally kill with one hit become hulking behemoths, blocks you could push become insurmountable walls. While the game is somewhat short compared to other Zelda Games (smaller map and only six dungeons) the game makes up for it with a metric shitload of extras.

The biggest being Kinstones. Kinstones are circular rocks broken in half, you find one half than find someone who has the matching other half and “fuse” them together. This causes good things to happen, either a treasure chest to appear or a doorway somewhere to open up. Nearly every character in the game has a Kinstone (some have multiple). While it’s mostly optional, some Kinstones are required to advance the game, which can leave you spending hours looking for the matching piece to one someone has.

With this and some of the most challenging puzzles ever (you can’t overlook a single detail anywhere) with have you spending hours in a single dungeon. Minnish Cap is a great game to tide even the most ravenous Zelda fan over until Zelda 2005 is released. I give it Four out of Four Swords (people who have played this game will see the pun there).

John Kane III is the Photography Editor of The Mass Media, All opinions expressed in this column are solely his own and he can be reached at [email protected]. Congratulations to Jeremy Krantz for being the first person to email me about my column.