There are times when videogames ask you to do things that result in a kind of "fight or flight" response. Do you tough out a particularly daunting section, or do you just give up?
The Minish Cap made me give up.
Don't get me wrong – at first, I found The Minish Cap to be a transcendent experience, a game that I was pretty much certain I was going to come out of thinking was one of the best ever. It appeared to marry the beautiful 2D artstyle of A Link to the Past to a story of some depth and character, and an attention to detail in its world that had me briefly thinking that this might be the great marriage between Chrono Trigger and Zelda.
The central idea behind the Minish Cap, besides being a kind of "origin story" for the Zelda series, is that Link has to interact with a tiny race of beings only visible to purehearted children, called the Minish. This means that he has to not only traverse the "big" world, but the "small" world as well, using a magical hat (the Minish Cap of the title) named Ezlo. In the early going, this game has a very distinct feeling to it, as if Capcom (the developers of the game) decided to take some inspiration from the storytelling devices present in their own Breath of Fire as opposed to, say, Ocarina of Time.
That's only the opening, though, because then the game settles into a familiar Zelda rhythm. The combat, the puzzling: it all feels familiar, which is to be expected in the Zelda series. So why did I give up? Well, it was a confluence of events, really.
See, finding a GBA copy of The MInish Cap was going to prove to be a little too expensive, meaning that I had to turn to emulation (sorry, everyone). I got to a point where I had to hit a switch with a bomb or the boomerang. The problem was that the emulated copy I have wouldn't let me throw bombs for whatever reason, meaning I had to raise 300 rupees to afford the boomerang. That meant I had to spend 80 of my 100 rupees on a larger wallet, and then somehow make 280 rupees. The only feasible way of doing this was to play a chicken-catching minigame that proved to be way, way too hard for me. I could have tried and failed and tried and failed, but instead, I put the controller down and walked away. It would be silly for me to try to pretend I finished this game – I have no idea what it's like after that point. Much more useful to acknowledge, I think, is that sometimes, games just get a little too "chore-y". It was a problem I had with Red Dead Redemption too (though that game has the gumption to integrate its chores directly into its shaggy plot), but it's just no fun to have to do things that feel so empty and hollow to progress. I didn't progress, and I'm OK with that.