The game limits you to just a few visits to the parallel version of Hyrule, during which you're usually performing repetitive fetch quests, like collecting Tears of Light. If only Twilight Princess allowed you to spend more time exploring the Twilight Realm. It all comes together to give the Twilight Realm a strange, cohesive sense of place. The game's soundtrack, which is solid throughout, is at its absolute best here, where every combat encounter features eerie atonal horns that shout over frantic synth arpeggios. That distinction really shines through in the Twilight Realm, which despite what its name suggests, doesn't feel oppressive or scary as much as it feels completely alien. Many enemies, and even some friends - here's looking at you, Ooccoo - are downright uncomfortable to look at, making them all the more striking and memorable. Inhabitants of the Twilight Realm aren't just evil versions of franchise mainstays they're tentacled mutants sporting ornate, gigantic black masks. Faces drift between realistic and cartoonish, from clown-like to monstrous.
Across the various Hylian races, character proportions differ wildly from person to person. Twilight Princess HD's graphical improvements drive home what's truly unique about the game's aesthetic: It isn't just dark, it's bizarre. The more essential change is to the screen itself: Twilight Princess HD's UI is pared down - the original's Wiimote-shaped interface, which took up nearly one-quarter of your TV's real estate, has been removed. A lot of textures - particularly those on important character models - have been fully replaced, making Link and the cast he comes in contact with as vibrant as they deserve to be. The visual enhancements of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD are impressive, where present. But while its subdued palette makes it unique in the Zelda series, many of its environments resemble the lifeless, unsaturated worlds that characterized most of the previous console generation. When exploring a village illuminated by glaring sunset light, or a dungeon where abstract neon lines cut through shifting black fog, Twilight Princess can be a lovely game. This art direction isn't always successful. That aesthetic is at its extreme in the Twilight Realm, but even regular old Hyrule looks half-alive and ominous, and the events that transpire there are equally unsettling. Twilight Princess is unique among Zelda titles because of its pervasive darkness, a theme that informs the aesthetic, character design and general feel of the entire game. One such Twilight inhabitant is Midna, Link's constant, smart-ass companion throughout his journey. The usual routine of dungeon diving, Pieces of Heart collecting and princess rescuing remains intact, but with a twist: Link is able to transform into a wolf when he interacts with the Twilight Realm, a parallel world to Hyrule that plays host to cryptic, shadowy beings. Structurally speaking, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess doesn't stray too far from the franchise's time-honored path. Twilight Princess HD isn't just dark, it's bizarre Twilight Princess HD lays bare the decade-old original, but in doing so, gives it an identity beyond gimmicks. More than nine years later, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD doesn't have the distracting zeitgeist of a hardware launch to accompany it, and absent that, its flaws are a bit more pronounced. Even its darker, more "adult" (for lack of a better term) world assured me that Twilight Princess was the deep, polished Zelda game I'd wanted for so long, and persuaded me to ignore the many reasons that it was not. Its simulated swordplay was rudimentary, but satisfying. Firing an arrow out of the tip of your controller was exhilarating.
The experience of playing through Twilight Princess with Wiimote in hand - assuming you didn't hold out for the GameCube version - was a powerful way for Nintendo to introduce its new motion-sensing hardware. The elements that made The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess so exciting when it launched alongside the Wii in 2006 haven't aged very well, and that's not entirely a bad thing.