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Notice that you’re also now using the targeting system not to jump staircases but to pounce on birds. Oh, those Zelda designers! They’re always teaching you things when you don’t realize it.

You fight across rooftops, which is a grander setting than you normally have in a Zelda game, and then you scamper into one of the castle’s towers.

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You meet a lady. You can safely guess who she is.

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She tells a story through a fairly quiet and ominous cutscene. It’s the story of bad guys who show up to kill Hyrule castle’s guards and take Zelda’s throne. This is the game pushing darker themes again. We’ve seen Zelda dethroned or kidnapped before, but never quite with this degree of menace. It feels like Nintendo trying to be grittier and while it sort of works, it also feels like it’s competing against the series’ trademark charm.

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The story ends. We get the expected reveal.

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Midna lightens the mood.

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But Zelda makes it clear: This is not a game for jokes.

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That’s where I stopped playing on Sunday, but I played a little more this morning to refresh my memory about how the wolf stuff plays out. I’m glad I did, because you wind up going back to town for reasons that further improve my impression of the game but also remind me of some of its flaws.

The game warps you back home, but it also points out that you’re stuck as a wolf.

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Midna hangs back for a bit and you’re left to see what it’s like to just play as a wolf. You’re back in the forest where you first rode Epona and—what do you know?—it’s far easier to run through it on your own four legs.

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The game also introduces a clever social inversion: People are going to be afraid of you when you’re a wolf, but you can now talk to animals.

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By the time you get back in town, you’ll be having conversations with that hungry cat, a dog, some chickens and a frog. They all have things to say.

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Remember that guy you helped before? He hates the new you. He thinks you’re a monster.

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So he picks up that weed you blew in, and he summons the hawk to attack you!

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The designers have some good intentions here. The role reversal is clever. Having the townspeople turn on you is smart, because it introduces a new conflict while also immediately discarding the idea that combat would solve the problem. Zelda enemies are usually dealt with by killing them, but you’re surely not going to resolve this problem by killing the people in town. The solution is to scare people off, and to do so by sneaking up in them.

Previous Zelda games included stealth sections, but they were usually slow-paced and involved things like hiding behind bushes while waiting for guard patrols to pass. This game dabbles with something different. The previous section in Hyrule castle introduced the idea of the wolf and Midna teaming up to rapidly leap to higher perches, often one after the other. The town turns out to be set up for some similar moves. The only problem is that this movement system relies on trigger points, which don’t mesh well with realistic graphics. You need to be standing on that gray rock, not anywhere else, for Midna to prompt you to jump to the roof.

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A little later, you get a shield and grab the sword. It’s kind of a joke, of course, because you can’t use this stuff as a wolf. Midna has no time for them, either.

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The game sends you back into the same forest you’ve been to a few times, though it’s filled with meaner enemies now. You’re discouraged from fighting on your own, because it just doesn’t work that well. If you leave any of these guys alive, he’ll revive his buddies.

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Midna has the answer and introduces a distinct new approach to Zelda combat that is based on clustering enemies together. It’d be nice to think this is what all that ranch stuff was training you for, but not really. Midna can extend an energy field around you. If you can catch all of the enemies in it, you’ll be able to trigger a rapid attack where you’ll take out all of the enemies pretty much at once. This is what playing as the wolf is about: rapid, often vicious maneuvers.

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The game introduces a new thing to collect: Tears of Light. The idea is that that there are little bugs that you can only see with your special wolf vision turned on. Killing the bugs releases drops of light that in turn let you access a key area.

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Like gold coins in a Mario title, the bugs/tears are a motivation to get you to move through part of the game. Since we’re still in the same forest we’ve been in for most of the last two hours, though, the game is testing your patience. You’re treading over familiar territory. Thankfully, the rapid wolf combat is fun and the designers set up several rapid-jumping sequences that are a pleasure to go through, so long as you can find the trigger point. Again, that’s a weird deficiency. Here, for example, the trigger point is not the edge of the dock:

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It’s this spot in the corner:

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Once you get it, the action is good and playing as the wolf feels empowering. And just as the designers have proved that this wolf thing was a good idea, they finally bring you to the moment you probably expected from the start. You’re transformed back into a person, chat with a spirit who says you’re the chosen one and then you finally get geared up:

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Back into the forest you go. (Three times is a bit much, Zelda designers!) Twilight Princess is finally in gear. The build to that moment is slow and you’re not even properly in the open world yet or reunited with Epona, but you have been taught an impressive amount of gameplay concepts, been introduced to a slew of characters, had Zelda’s fundamentals reinforced while also getting indoctrinated into a new style of wolf-based gameplay.

Unlike Wind Waker, the graphics don’t seem to help the game and may even work against it at times, but Twilight Princess’ designers otherwise set themselves up for what should be a very strong game. Does the rest hold up as well? Is the game better than I remember? A week ago, I wasn’t even interested in answering that question. Thanks to starting the game all over, I am now eager to find out.

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Maybe this game is better than I remembered.

To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo.