Manga First Impressions - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Welcome back!

The manga we have today is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

My friends are huge Zelda fans. I would like to be -- I've played a moderate amount of Link's Awakening for the Switch, A Link Between Worlds on the 3DS, and Breath of the Wild, but I haven't completed any of them and I'm terrible a video games. It's not that I didn't like them, but I get frustrated with singleplayer games if they're too challenging and I find my attention wandering... I just generally prefer reading. 

However, I still really like the world of Hyrule and the characters inhabiting it, so I figured maybe I'd give it a chance in a medium I really enjoy and like to collect. 

And... well...

It's actually not bad! 

I expected it to be really mediocre. And I'm not gonna say it's flawless or anything like that (I also won't pretend to know anything about the story of the game). But I wasn't bored at all while reading it, which is a huge compliment for virtually anything. 

The story is very straightforward -- as the back of the book puts it, "An evil menace is trying to find Midna, princess of the Twilight Realm, and the fragments of the Shadow Crystal to gain the power to rule over the Twilight Realm and the World of Light." This leads to a "call to adventure," as I'd put it, at the end of the volume; throwing our hero Link back into a fight he admits he'd previously run away from to protect the people of his village. Oh, and he also turns into a wolf. 

But the most shocking thing about this manga is that LINK TALKS!

And it actually has very enjoyable art -- 

There's a rule among some manga collectors known as the "Rule of Three," which is to say that a new series gets three volumes to impress you. Sometimes I give a series far more than three even if I think it's not that great, and other times I'm unfair and give a series only one. This time, I plan on at least picking up volume two, and seeing what we can get from there.

The setup was generic, but that doesn't make it bad. Starting Link off in a village where he's got rooted attachments is perfectly fine motivations for the hero of an action story, and my friends say that Twilight Princess is a good pick for making into a manga.

Just look at that! What a great page. 

I hope the rest of the series is just as engaging as volume one. Until next time!