Wii Zapper + Link's Crossbow Training

 

    So I've been wanting to get around to playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, as it was pretty much the biggest launch title for the Wii that wasn't Wii Sports, but I've always had a bit of trouble getting into Zelda games. It's the same problem I have playing RPGs, where I'll play one for a few hours, really like what I play, forget to play it for a month, and then try to jump back in wondering what the heck I was doing before never playing it again. As such, I probably won't be reviewing Twilight Princess for a while, but then I realized I could play something Zelda-related that I actually could finish and would be funnier to write about. As such, I sat down to play Link's Crossbow Training, and then after roughly an hour passed, I stood up again because I had finished it.
    The game is a pack-in for and made to sell people on the Wii Zapper, the first of many, many, many plastic shells for the Wii Remote that try to make things more immersive. Of course, when thinking of those, most people's minds go to the completely useless ones made by other companies that only changed its aesthetics, so the Wii Remote can kinda look like a tennis racket or golf club or something. Nintendo's own shells were never that impractical, as they always changed the grip of the controller in some way to make things more comfortable for specific games. The whole premise of the Wii Zapper, then, is to make things more ideal for playing shooters of most any kind, but personally, the end result is very, very mixed.
    The initial setup process to get the Wii Remote and Nunchuk correctly attached is unusually complicated, especially compared to other Wii accessories. You have to pretty much dismantle the entire thing to slide them in, unplugging and re-plugging the Nunchuk so that the wire can be stored in the back cover, and it's incredibly temperamental trying to get everything to stay in its proper place. Once everything's attached, actually holding it does kinda feel more gun-like, but also not. The trigger feels appropriate and has a good click to it, but something about the way it's stuck together with the double grips makes it feel downright goofy to hold. Having the Nunchuk attached means you have to move both it and the Wii Remote around to aim and shoot, and while I was able to get used to it, I still say that only having to move the Wii Remote feels better.
    But that's just the accessory itself, it of course also comes with Link's Crossbow Training. It's ostensibly an asset flip of Twilight Princess, taking the environments and enemies from that game and rearranging them all to fit a high score based third person shooter. It's an incredibly bizarre concept; for something like this, I'd imagine something like Metroid or Star Fox would be better suited to gunplay, since placing Zelda into a shooter results in a lot of strange concessions having to be made. Sure, Link shooting things instead of using his sword can be hastily justified with it being a crossbow, but then in some levels, you can gain power-ups like a fully-automatic crossbow, and I'd like to ask the dev team how much sense that makes. Those notes of weirdness combined with the asset re-use makes it feel only one step removed from those fan-made mods where they give Mario a shotgun or something, and it results in the game being unintentionally darkly hilarious, watching the grand mythic hero of Hyrule decide to just shoot down everything in his path.
    The game is all around fine for what it is, even though it's incredibly short. There are nine stages, each with three short sub-stages, and each have you doing something different. Sometimes you break targets, sometimes you defend against enemy hordes, and sometimes you gain full control of Link to kill a certain number of enemies. The game's length means you're mostly just gonna be going for high scores were you to play it for any longer, and fair's fair, the game does have a pretty addictive combo system that rewards methodical and accurate shots. However, the fact that it took me five paragraphs to even talk about the actual gameplay says a lot about its brevity, I feel.
    So far, this is the one pack-in game I've played for the Wii that feels the most like a pack-in. It doesn't really have the infinite replayability of the others I've talked about, although the fact that it came with an accessory makes me wanna treat it a bit kinder than I did other games with a lackluster amount of content, like Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree. However, the quality of that accessory itself is debatable, as even playing the game completely designed around it, I found the Wii Zapper to be okay, but not great. The fact I never knew anyone that actually owned this thing back in the day speaks to how it never really caught on, but compared to the aforementioned completely useless accessories, the Wii Zapper proved to be only semi-useless.