Minish Cap Conclusions

This morning on the bus to work I finally beat the final boss of Minish Cap. He has three phases and I'd died to the third phase a couple of times before I finally got him. He worked pretty much the same way as every other boss in the game. He was invulnerable to damage but had one Achilles' Heel. Use the right special item in the right way to knock out his defenses for a short period of time at which point you could beat him up with your sword. The trouble I had with the final stage is how much damage he put out. I couldn't try all the items I had on all his different bits to find out his vulnerability before he'd kill me and force me to restart from the beginning of the zone. Once I put it together and found the way to actually damage him he went down like a ton of bricks.

In all the game was pretty fun. It had several new items I hadn't seen in a Zelda game which was a nice change of pace. It had lots of secrets to find. It was a decent length. Not too long, not too short. It did suffer by being a GBA game. It didn't use enough of the buttons and required entering the menu entirely too often to change items. The instructions on what to do next were not always clear and it wasn't possible to get a reasonable recap from your annoying buddy. I had to turn to the internet a few times when I got stuck. I believe this was mostly because I was playing the game in short chunks while tired but I feel like a handheld game should take that into account. Also, twice I had to bomb unmarked walls to progress and that really makes me mad.

It was definitely worth the price I paid (free!) but I do think it was a fair bit worse than Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time.