Reviewing Monsters: The Legend of Zelda - Minish Cap, Part 2

The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap

Part two of my coverage of Minish Cap enemies. Originally meant to be a single article, I cut it into two articles because of length. 

Ghini: We start this half of the article off with yet another returning enemy -- good ol' Ghinis! Ghinis are still one-eyed spherical ghosts that stick their tongues out at you. In an attack that I don't remember seeing in games prior to this, Ghinis will wrap Link with their tail and lick Link. Okay, sure!

Gibdo: Gibdos make their apperance here, and I like how the Gibdo in the Minish Cap really does look like someone in a cheap Halloween's costume, with those sausage fingers poking out of the bandages as it moves threateningly towards us. While Zelda has never been the most realistic game out there, it does make TMC Gibdo look a bit more different. As with traditional 2D Gibdos, burning off their bandages will turn them into Stalfos... which begs the question, though, where did the flesh in the fingers come from? 

Door Mimic: Ah, more mimics! They pretend to be gateways that are locked by small keys, but when Link approaches them the door sections slam down on Link, before retracting back up with a chain. I found this so hilarious, and felt a lot more elaborate than the traditional 2D Door Mimics, which are just... doors. 

Rock Chuchu: Another Chuchu variant! It's the Red Chuchu who has a layer of rock that surrounds their head like a helmet. They don't actually have any lava powers, but the imagery definitely evocates something volcanic! While they don't actually need a specific item to defeat, their rock helmet are susceptible to Link's "Pot-splitter" sword technique. 

Wisp: These are basically Bubbles from the traditional games, but have been named as 'Wisps' here both in the Japanese and the English versions. They're skulls with little flaming balls that float around, and will 'curse' Link to be unable to hold his sword, similar to Majora's Mask Bubbles. Nothing too interesting to otherwise say about this, though. 

Cloud Piranha: One new area that the franchise first explored here is the Cloud Tops, where Link travels to a realm above the clouds. This was years before Skyward Sword made a whole game out of it! And apparently, the clouds are infested with Cloud Piranhas! They're fishes with a metallic covering over their upper body -- and in Jaws style, their fins show above the surface before they jump and try to bite Link. Nothing in its anatomy tells us why it's living in the clouds, or how they swim in the clouds. In a fun bit, Link can trick them into jumping out and falling off of the clouds themselves, presumably causing a massive shock that an angry, chomping sky-fish fell down from the sky.

Lakitu: This one is definitely a Mario enemy, although it does make sense why the Lakitu show up in the Cloud Tops. They sure are spherical blob dudes hanging on clouds that launch lightning bolts at Link! They hide within their clouds if Link gets too close, so he needs to snipe them from afar with ranged weapons. I tend to not have much to say about these sort of 'hey, it sure is a blob' style of enemies. 

Bombarossa: Are these Mario enemies, too? They might be? They're more hazards than anything, being very angry and threatening-looking floating bombs with two huge spikes on the sides of their heads. They show up mostly in the Cloud Top areas. It's honestly kind of a shame that in all of the sky or cloud-themed areas in Minish Cap, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, we don't really get a whole ton of sky-themed enemies. 

 

Ice Wizzrobe & Fire Wizzrobe: Variants of the Wizzrobe enemy that utilize their specific enemies. I do like that their Gandalf hats actually change depending on their element -- Ice Wizzrobes's hats are frozen over, whereas Fire Wizzrobe has a small bonfire in place of a hat. Minish Cap doesn't quite utilize fire or ice gimmicks like some other Zelda games do, so the two elemental Wizzrobes' effects basically affect speed -- Ice Wizzrobes freeze Link in place, while Fire Wizzrobes will cause Link to get so hot that his speed increases, which is an interesting debuff. 

Minibosses:

Madderpillar: We're entering the realm of the mini-bosses and bosses now, and we'll be listing all the minibosses in rough order first! While I do still think that the Minish-sized enemies are severely under-represented, there are at least an almost-even split between regular-sized bosses and Minish-sized bosses. The Madderpillar is our first miniboss, and it's... it's a huge cartoon caterpillar with extremely large snake-like eyes, and a huge Caterpie-esque nose that shoots out string at you. As the miniboss of the Deepwood Temple, the way to beat the Madderpillar is more or less similar to other worm bosses in 2D games, though Link needs to first hit the Madderpillar's clown nose first before hitting the heart that appears on the other end of the Madderpillar's body. Madderpillars will later constantly show up as minibosses in other Minish dungeons.

Big Blue Chuchu: An upgrade over the very first dungeon boss (who we'll cover later), the Big Blue Chuchu is a regular-sized Blue Chuchu fought as a Minish. Again, this is the sort that I want! The Chuchus are adorable and laughably easy to defeat as a big ol' Hylian, but when you're tiny they suddenly become bosses! Not a whole ton to say about this one, it's basically a repeat of the Big Green Chuchu fight below (which we'll cover there) except this big blue boy intermittently emits electricity. 

Dark Nut: The Dark Nuts (parsed as two words only in this game) show up several times both as dungeon and overworld minibosses, and there are two variants -- a greenish-metallic one and a white-and-red one. Being broad-shouldered and having a cape, these Dark Nuts, once more, take cues from their Wind Waker counterpart. I don't really have too much to say about the Dark Nut, though -- they're pretty standard humanoid enemies that hit a bit harder and have shields, but they're not really all that interesting to talk about. Which is a shame because...

Ball and Chain Soldier: ...every other miniboss afterwards are humanoid enemies. I suppose there's a neat theme that all the recurring enemies are elite minibosses, but it also leaves me very little to talk about. Good ol' Ball and Chain Soldier is such a classic in 2D games that I don't mind it showing up here. 

Red Dark Nut: Oh, hey, it's the Dark Nut again, but it's red! In addition to its fancier shield, the fight against reddy here is a bit more complicated because he can knock you off of the platform, just like the ALTTP Moldorm boss. Otherwise, eh. All these humanoid minibosses will show up in the final dungeon, which I suppose is a nice touch. 

Black Knight: Also basically a Dark Nut with black armour, this one is just straight-up called 'Black Knight', and he shows up with two Red Dark Nuts as the penultimate enemy of the game. It sure is a knight!

Bosses:

Big Green Chuchu: With that out of the way, we get the bosses! The boss of Deepwood Temple, as spoiled by Big Blue Chuchu up there... is a Big Green Chuchu! Again, you've been spending time as a regular-sized human beating up Chuchus with impunity, but when you're the size of Thumbelina they suddenly become a threat! Again, I really love the manic-looking eyes and huge dumb grin of the Wind Waker variant of the Chuchus. The fight here is kind of funny -- Link uses the Gust Jar to keep blowing on the Chuchu's lower body, causing its top-heavy head to fall over and exposing its noggin to Link. 

Gleerok: The boss of the Cave of Flames, Gleerok here is an interesting one! Its name is a pun on the original Legend of Zelda boss Gleeok (who's a three-headed dragon) but in practice, Gleerok resembles Trinexx or Turtle-Rock more, being a giant turtle with a rocky shell and a serpentine head. Gleerok lives inside a lava pool, though, and I really like the contrast between its pale white-and-blue serpentine head and the massive volcano it's got on its back. 

An interesting mechanic here is that you need to flip the Gleerok's lava shell off and around, exposing the yellow bit on its shell for you to beat. Being a lava boss, Gleerok can also cause the lava pools around him to expand and contract during the fight. Not too interesting as a fight, but definitely a very pretty and well-themed boss. 

Mazaal: An interesting one! Mazaal backstory is that it's actually a weapon constructed by the Wind Tribe to repel enemies. It's a vaguely Aztec-inspired robotic head and (not seen in this figurine) two giant arms, making it look like a variant of Ocarina's Bongo Bongo of sorts. The head and arms are detached from each other, and Link needs to hit the weak points on the arms to cause the head to fall down, and then hit the head to properly damage Mazaal by shrinking down and going into that robotic mouth. 

And when we are shrunken down, we actually get to see Mazaal's... 'true' form? I think? Or maybe it's the equivalent to antibodies? It's a huge angry floating eyeball with a robotic hat and two pincers. This mini-Mazaal will be the one that boots Link out of Mazaal to continue the human-sized fight. Later on, Mazaal gains the ability to shoot shrinking beams as well. A bit of a weird one, but pretty unique!

Big Octorok: Just like the Big Chuchus, the Big Octorok is a regular Octorok you fight in the Minish dungeon of Temple of Dropletes -- though this Octorok has some flowers and plants overgrown on its body. Big Octorok ends up swallowing the plot device called Water Element, allowing it to control ice and freeze itself and the area around it to protect itself from Link's attack. The bulb of the flower ends up being the weak point Link needs to beat up, which begs the question... is it part of this Octorok's anatomy? Or is it some sort of symbiotic or parasitic plant, which is why hitting it causes the Octorok to take damage? I think between the ice powers and the ability to suck Link does make Big Octorok a lot more interesting than it actually is. 

Gyorg Pair: Oh man, yeah, I remember these guys. The Gyorg Pair has nothing to really do with Majora's Mask's Gyorg, other than being fishes. The Gyorg Pair are a pair of giant manta rays that live in the clouds, acting as the dual boss of the Palace of Winds. The female Gyorg is a giant, airplane-sized one with eight eyes, while the male one is the smaller one that flies around the female with four eyes spread across its body. Real manta rays don't actually have this extreme degree of sexual dimorphism, and it resembles anglerfishes more than anything. 

The fight involves trying to solve a puzzle with the Gyorgs' eyes which open and close intermittently, but the simple fact that the Gyorgs are flying over the skies of Hyrule and the fight involves Link jumping back and forth mid-air from the larger female onto the smaller male does make the Gyorg Pair fight a lot more dynamic and memorable than it is. 

Vaati: My original writeup for this was a lot longer and I realized I'm just elaborating on how the boss fight goes and Vaati's many sorcerer-style atttacks. That's not really what this article is all about! I'm supposed to be reviewing monsters! Vaati, the final boss of the game, is fought in multiple forms, because of course a Zelda boss has multiple forms. The first form is Vaati Reborn, which is... it's a pretty generic evil J-RPG humanoid overlord. The interesting bit about this fight is Vaati is almost invulnerable, but a swarm of tiny eyeball-creatures that float around him causes the giant eyeball on his cloak to open. Wonder if this is supposed to represent anything, or if it's just a neat game mechanic? 

The second form is Vaati Transfigured, which still looks somewhat solid with tiny bat wings and a giant pair of horns. Just like before, the lesser eyeballs (shown here) are the weakness. I do like that the final boss form is a giant eyeball instead of a humanoid for sure! Vaati's final form is Vaati's Wrath, where apparently his form has been so destroyed that he's not even a solid sphere anymore but rather an amorphous mass of fog. This form is especially based on Dethl/Nightmare from Link's Awakening, being a giant eyeball with orbs trailing behind him and sometimes forming claws -- though the figurine doesn't show the long claw-hands. The arms have little Minish doors that Link needs to sneak into. 

Anyway, I always never have too much to talk about these final form enemies in a J-RPG game, since they always felt pretty... samey to me? They certainly look imposing, and in Vaati's case I appreciate that the final form is the giant amorphous demon-blob instead of the tired trope of a humanoid demon king or whatnot, but Vaati himself is kind of a very flat character so I can't really get excited for him. 

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Anyway, that's Minish Cap done! As I mentioned before, it's visually one of my favourite Zelda games. I'll be doing a bunch more Zelda in the near future -- I've never done A Link Between Worlds either, and I'm about halfway through Skyward Sword and will be excited to talk about that. I'll probably do a bunch of other shorter games in the near future as well, maybe I'll do a Metroid one? The problem with Metroid is that I've never actually completed a Metroid game other than Metroid Prime 3... depending on how I feel, I might start one of the Final Fantasy games in the near future as well. We'll see. 

At some point late next year I'll probably do either Final Fantasy IX or XII, depending on which one I like to play more. Things are going to probably slow down quite a bit in the first couple of months next year, but the reviewing monster segments will probably still update rather periodically.