The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (Game Boy Advance Review)

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Released November 4, 2004 (JPN) January 5, 2005 (US)
Directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi
Co-Developed by Capcom and Nintendo
Published by Nintendo 
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack

I wanted to play Minish Cap for the first time in twenty-one years because, frankly, I didn’t remember much about playing it as a teenager. I remembered certain aspects like the Kinstones, the limited usage of the shrinking aspect, that you fight a giant Octorok, and how small in scale the game felt (no pun intended). But I didn’t remember anything about the dungeons or even the items. Not one single detail. My brain completely deleted the gust jar and digging claws, the boxes and jars used for growing and shrinking, and even the main villain. But back in 2005, I was still recovering from life threatening injuries sustained in November of 2003 and had basically just started gaming full-time again. The main thing I did remember was liking Minish Cap a lot and thinking it was one of the better Zelda games.

Metroid: Zero Mission was another game that I played during the same binge that I first played Minish Cap, and it was kind of in the same boat in that memories of it besides basic things just didn’t take root. Zero Mission is also the reason I put off this review. One thing I did remember about Zero Mission was thinking it was a masterpiece and one of the best games I’d ever played. It’s not. When I replayed Zero Mission for an IGC review, I still had fun but I was also really disappointed, too. So I’ve had one question on my mind: “am I a bad person for wanting to catch a fairy and then shake the hell out of the bottle, or is it okay because fairies are just another breed of unholy abomination that populates Hyrule and the whole ‘restore life’ thing is clearly a ploy to give them better public relations than, say, Moblins or Wizrobes?” Wait, I meant “since I can’t remember sh*t about Minish Cap, did I overrate it too?”

Graphically, Minish Cap is trying to look like a 2D version of Wind Waker, which is another game that’s a lot smaller in scale than you expect from a Zelda game. In my memories, Wind Waker felt simply massive, but the overworld is lacking in consequential locations and the actual dungeon count was really low. I still enjoyed it, but I was legitimately startled by how wrong my own memories of the game were, to the point that I’m now terrified to replay the N64 games. But I wasn’t worried about that happening with Minish Cap. I remembered a small-in-scope Zelda game, and now that I’ve 100%ed the game, I can confirm that’s exactly what it is.

The overworld of Minish Cap is like an abridged version of the Zelda map. All the tropes are here: the town, the swamp, the forest (complete with fog effect), the rugged mountain area, Lake Hylia, the graveyard, etc. But a person can travel even without warping from place to place in just a couple minutes by foot. Oh, they’re mostly well constructed. Mostly. There’s a few letdowns, like the graveyard also combines the Lost Woods concept but the actual scale of the area before you enter the lost woods gimmick is compact and can be explored in a minute or two. The fields that surround the center of the map are even smaller. It’s like condensed soup. Zelda boiled down to the bare essentials, but what’s here does feel fairly packed with content.

I’ll give credit for a game that’s overflowing with treasure teases. I don’t know if they have a name or what else to call them. “I see something that I know I can’t get right now, but oh boy am I excited for when I get the item that lets me do it!” That’s a treasure tease. The Zelda franchise is built around this concept, and for its small size, they packed a lot of these moments into Minish Cap.

But, they overstuffed the game with these teases and vastly undelivered on payoffs to them. This is largely tied to these doohickeys called “kinstones.” Kinstones are broken discs that come in four colors and a variety of shapes, like so:

And the game wants you to locate someone who has a matching disc and fuse stones with them. When you walk up to someone (or a wall, because sometimes it’s a f*cking wall) and they have the ability to “fuse kinstones” a little thought bubble will appear that tells you what the reward for this fuse is. If you press the L button, you’ll go to a screen where you have an opportunity to fuse stones with them. If you’re carrying a stone that fits their stone, they fuse and something will happen somewhere in Hyrule. It might spawn a treasure chest or a golden enemy, open a previously inaccessible walkway, reveal a hidden door, and a variety of other surprises.

It’s not the worst idea, but the execution is the worst, because there’s not actually a fixed amount of kinstones in the world. For the most part, only the yellow kinstones are context sensitive plot devices that are functionally like keys for the overworld and necessary towards completing the game. If there’s a yellow kinstone, you’ll get it exactly when that is the next area of the game and not a moment before and you absolutely will never have extra ones.

For the other three colors, the game gives players way more kinstones than there are people or things to actually fuse kinstones with. Apparently there’s 100 total fusion moments in the game. After I activated the final fusion, I still had 136 unused kinstones. That means I had collected a total of 236 kinstones, over twice as many as the game actually requires. They’re dead inventory. The Hyrule version of Skylander or LEGO Dimensions figures. That would be like finishing a game with 136 unused keys. It’s a satisfying mechanic rendered VERY unsatisfying.

I legitimately think the kinstone concept is the worst one in the history of Zelda from an execution standpoint. Of the 100 fusions in the game, 9 are gold ones that happen on a set schedule. Of the 91 remaining ones, 24 of them reward a fusion of a kinstone with ONLY more kinstones, in some form or another (a chest or a merchant selling them). After beating the game, I went around to find the kinstone fusions I missed. When I got to the final two, I was also missing three pieces of heart to 100% the game. I knew one of those pieces of heart was going to be from getting all 136 figurines in the town, but the other two I was sure must have been from fusion. Nope. The last two fusions I did placed treasure chests in the world that gave me a different kinstone.

Just like the light rings in the water from Wind Waker, they ruined a good idea with overindulgence. Kinstone collecting and fusing SHOULD have been exciting, but the lack of tight design around them takes the zing out of them. Plus, some of the characters in the game can fuse with you multiple times, and 16 out of 49 green fusions, along with one red and one blue, are determined completely at random, along with which reward they unlock. I think it would have been so much more interesting if every character had a unique fusion item. Would that have complicated things? Maybe, but hey, we’re smart. We can grasp that an item belonging to Smith goes to the character named Smith.

And while I’m whining about tight design, there’s 44 pieces of heart, but one of them I’m almost certain you can’t get until after you beat the game. It’s this one:

The game teases this piece of sh*t heart right from the moment you’re able to fully explore the town. But to get it, you have to collect every single figurine from a capsule game in the corner of the town. Only, you can’t actually spend money at this game. Do you remember the secret seashells from previous Game Boy Zelda games? Those are the currency for this one part of Minish Cap, and you don’t spend them on the capsule game. You bet them to increase the probability of getting a new capsule. This is the one aspect of Minish Cap I cheated via rewind with and discovered the game is semi-rigged. You’ll get the same capsule every time until you pass a threshold. Early on, I didn’t bet my shells wisely, so my last hour with Minish Cap was spent grinding coins via another gambling game (yeah, I cheated there too) so I could spend 800 rupees for 120 shells to win toys so I could get a piece of heart I didn’t need anymore.

And the kicker is that the house with the heart piece belongs to a Richard Branson satire (not f*cking kidding) who, after bragging about how rich he is, is so impressed with the amount of time you wasted getting Zelda’s most tedious and boring collectables that he lets you steal 600 rupees and his heart from his home. All those worthless kinstone fusions and THIS is how they decided to pay off this treasure tease that you saw right at the start of the game? Despite its small size, Minish Cap manages to fail to deliver on so many promises that it’s stunning.

But, those are just the side quests. The actual adventure is a different story. The big gimmick with this Zelda game is the ability to shrink at designated spots. It’s a fun gimmick, no doubt……. But don’t get too excited. The actual tiny Link exploration only happens in designated areas that, ironically, usually aren’t large in scope. Take this spot in the mountain, before you reach level two. I’ve circled the area where the game zooms in on tiny Link.

Once you shrink down, you’re so small on the screen that the game has an indicator to point you out, along with any of the Minish tribe that happen to be nearby. But when you enter the little mountain pass that circled above, the game activates a brief set piece where you run down a straight corridor while avoiding rain drops.

And that’s it for that section. It does make for an exciting one-off set piece that lasts, oh, fifteen seconds, maybe twenty. But it’s also pretty basic and not memorable. That’s the shrinking aspect of Minish Cap in a nutshell. It’s very gimmicky, but the actual gameplay red meat feels too narrow and short, to the point that I wonder if it was the smartest idea to base the entire game around it at all.

Places where you can transform are usually roped off in a way where escape is impossible, which they sort of HAD to do to make sure players didn’t use this ability to softlock themselves. So, even tall grass, a doorway or a crack in the pavement will stop you. Yeah, it’s not exactly like a Link to the Past’s “two completely different worlds in one game” is it? Hell, locations you have to shrink to enter like the Minish Village or the Minish Mines in the mountain are functionally just normal villages that require an extra step to enter. For those locations, the shrinker is right there next to the entrance. And the shrinking also leads to many other eye-rolling moments. One of the places you shrink are upside down pots, like seen in this picture to the left of Link.

Those pots start normally, but you can’t just flip them with the same two hands you’ve been using to fight monsters and save the world with. Oh no. You need a magic item to flip THOSE pots. The most comically lame item I can remember in a Zelda game: the Cane of Pacci. An item with the sole ability of flipping things. Link does have thumbs, right? I can suspend my belief and say, yes, Link actually does need to shrink and fight giant sized versions of enemies in dungeons that are, in theory, so small that he could step on them and pick through the rubble to find the magical element to defeat Vaati and save Hyrule. But he can’t flip a f*cking pot? It’s heavy? There’s other people! They know you’re trying to save Zelda! Ask them for a hand!

Over the course of the game, there’s really only one major moment that’s heavily set-up that gives you a taste of how good the concept of shrinking could have been, and it’s the quest to get the item that lets you shove objects while being small. It happens in the central village and you can suss out what route you’ll need to take is long before you’re equipped to do it, but it’s well foreshadowed and executed perfectly. I so wish the game had more of that. So while the shrinking has its moments, including a few VERY satisfying side quests, it feels like an upjumped dungeon item that somehow got star billing.

Of course, the main reason I play Zelda is the dungeons. If Nintendo were to ever put out “Legend of Zelda: Oops! Only Dungeons!” I could seriously live with that. I think most fans could. There’s only six full-size dungeons in Minish Cap, and the first one is like baby’s first Zelda dungeon. It’s basic even by the standards of a tutorial dungeon and I was just bored out of my skull like you wouldn’t believe. I sincerely thought “oh no, I’m not going to like Minish Cap and Nintendo fans are going to be so mad at me.” Thankfully the other five are a lot of fun and probably saved Minish Cap by themselves.

And I even enjoyed items like the gust jar, which I’m not even sure why it’s called “gust jar” when it mostly sucks and only blows a little, literally. “Vacuum Jar” makes more sense. I liked the digging claws too. The cane was stupid as f*ck, but, hey, I liked the Superman cape, especially when they came up with cute gimmicks for it, like one spot where Link has to use a fan to assist with the jump. I’m not sure why Hyrule’s superheroes wear capes like superheroes in Earth’s fiction do. Is there a Hyrule version of Superman? Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be Link?

I wasn’t sure if Minish Cap was truly unmemorable or if it was just me. I think it’s probably a little of both. I struggled to write this review because there’s very few moments that actually stand out in Minish Cap. The main villain, Vaati, is one of the most forgettable big bads in a major gaming IP. Not a single puzzle stumped me except one: I didn’t realize you could pick up this giant seed. Well TECHNICALLY it’s a normal sized seed and I just happen to be small in this picture:

In my defense, by the time you reach this point, I already realized there were book cases in the town that I couldn’t shove as Minish Link yet BUT would be able to with the right item, and for whatever reason, I didn’t press the lift button next to seed because, I assumed, I wasn’t strong enough to lift anything yet. So I tried everything with this seed but lifting it. I assumed there was something I was missing. I probably spent close to thirty minutes going back and forth trying to figure out what exactly that was before throwing in the towel, hitting up Google, then returning to the seed red-faced and embarrassed while also muttering “that makes no sense.”

That was the only part I needed help with besides the last three heart pieces post-game. None of the dungeon puzzles were that hard, and the layouts were some of the easiest to navigate in Zelda. Hell, the swamp was harder to find my way around than any dungeon. While dungeons were fun, as Zelda dungeons tend to be, there’s no “oh my GOD!” moment in any of them, with one exception: this boss, the highlight of the game and one of the best 2D bosses in the franchise.

This giant flying manta ray is flanked by a smaller, blue flying manta ray. You hop across them, create duplicates of Link so you can then hit the eyeballs that are open at the same time. It’s exciting, challenging without being unfair, and different from the typical Zelda bosses in both theme and execution. But is it memorable? It doesn’t look like a Zelda boss, or feel like a Zelda boss, and I already totally forgot it once before. While playing its level, for the life of me I couldn’t remember a single detail about the boss. Not one.

But ultimately, I never thought any element of exploring or puzzle solving, whether it was the overworld or any of the dungeons, was all that clever. Minish Cap is Zelda: The Zelda Game. It looks exactly as good as it needs to look. It has a roster of enemies exactly as big as it needed to not get slammed by critics. It has the bare minimum amount of dungeons to not feel like a rip off. It’s Zelda kept just exactly at subsistence level. It’s one of the strangest gaming experiences I’ve had because normally I’d be so pissed about a game that aims as low as this does. But I can’t really get all that angry at Minish Cap because it’s a lot fun. I think that probably speaks more to the Zelda formula than the raw content of Minish Cap. Zelda as a franchise is so good that THIS is lesser Zelda. Wow!

I wasn’t kidding when I called this “abridged Zelda.” That’s literally what it is. It’s the boilerplate Zelda game with all the expecting fixings and none of the highlights. The action is fine. The exploration is fine. The dungeon design after that first level is fine. That’s not to say it doesn’t excel in other areas. It controls great. The combat is nice and crunchy. It’s also a beautiful game when it needs to be. Like, look at these screenshots:

Golly, that’s gorgeous. It’s not always that good looking, but again, it’s almost like it knows exactly when you’ve reached a part where it needed to visually strut and do the heavy lifting for a game that’s otherwise often lacking in inspiration. Because, in gameplay terms? Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap never rises very far above fine, except for one damn boss that isn’t even the last boss. It gets a YES! because it never sinks too far below “fine” either. The kinstones, figurines, and heart pieces might have annoyed the sh*t out of me, but those are the distractions that I think only matter if the main parts are bad. The overworld. The dungeons. Well, those are fine, so Minish Cap is fine. How fine? Exactly as fine it needed to be, and not a drop more. It’s THAT Zelda game.

I’ve wanted to play this since reviewing Metroid: Zero Mission and it turns out this is to the Zelda franchise what that game is to Metroid: it checks all the boxes, and it checks them well, but it also only checks the boxes it needs to. I would never have picked up on that as a teenager. Both Minish Cap and Zero Mission feel like games that aren’t made to dazzle anyone who is deeply experienced with their respective franchises. They feel like they’re made to satisfy fans while leaving any truly good ideas on the table for a bigger, more important game later on, and preferably one that costs more than a GBA game does. Minish Cap and Zero Mission feel like games scaled down for the Game Boy Advance in not just size but scope. That’s the sense I got. It’s like someone looked back on that one time Nintendo released two brand new Game Boy Color Zelda games on the same day (and they originally meant to do three, jeez) that each were full-sized (and huge) 2D Zelda adventures, with ten dungeons each and said “whoa, whoa, let’s not do THAT again! We ain’t running some kind of adventure charity over here!”
Verdict: YES!