The hole in Lake Hylia is a shortcut that can be accessed through the Kakariko Graveyard. You're meant to use the water bombs to open the shortcut after obtaining the Zora Armor.
I remember discovering the shortcut as a kid and being really excited about it. Even as an adult now it still excites me. It's just really neat being able to get the zora armor and then immediately being able to go to lake hylia through there, and I love the way the force of the water pushes you out into the lake.
I think one reason you can justify the emptiness of lake Hylia with is the fact it was dried up and empty until "recently" so there's veen no time for flora and fauna to fill it. Meanwhile, the hole in front of the temple was filled with water even after the lake was dried up, so there's animals and plants there.
Still ironic that the Zelda games with under water areas are barren yet in BOTW, the game where you can't swim underwater, there's tons of life and flora you can't really see. Particularly in the ocean
Skyward Sword is probably the only one to consistently have nice floral sections underwater and it doesn't feel quite as barren either with the exception of maybe.. the water dragon's room. But even by the time you get there, you'll probably fixate on talking to her for the main quest stuff instead of exploring Edit: I take back what I said about the Water Dragon room, it's fairly nice as a home area for a bunch of the new squid/key race. If this was the least memorable underwater area in Skyward Sword for me, the game did underwater areas pretty well imo
@@overlorddante Underwater models are subject to way less scrutiny when you can't get up close to them. Plus, all other Zelda games are on extremely underpowered hardware compared to BotW, so BotW can afford to put really detailed flora everywhere.
I work at a hospital in the basement. There is one long hallway that is probably a quarter of a mile long, its almost always completely abandoned and on the weekends half the lights are turned off. Every time, I can just hear your echoing, "this place is weird," in my head.
@@JrIcifySeriously. I have already decided that if I'm there on the weekend and lights start going out one-by-one, I am taking a brisk walk out of the building.
God I love Twilight Princess's environmental design. It's like the entire world is a creepy empty liminal space that's had something removed from it. Some people probably find it boring or lazy as a result; I think it makes the tone 10 times more effective.
Twilight Princess always gives me similar vibes to Shadow of the Colossus. But it also feels 'fractured', like all the pieces don't necessarily fit together.
I love this game. It has a weird post-apocalyptic vibe. As though it's like, 100 years past a devastating conflict, and the world is just getting back to its feet.
The Ranch actually has a few reasons to pay it another visit. You can pet the goats, and even if you dislike the minigame, you can earn a piece of heart there. There's also a hidden underground cave (accessible through digging as wolf in the building) that cointains one of the few instances of Rare Chu (I believe there are only 3 or 4 in the entire game).
@@olivebunny I also found another cute detail: if you go to the room of the mayor of Ordon village, you'll find a brush on his desk. Since he's bald this means he uses the brush for his funny-looking mustache.
Twilight Princess has so many of these spaces. It sometimes feels like the whole game exists in a weird, half-remembered dreamlike state, that exists only in the moments between being asleep and waking up. Possibly fitting, given it's a game split between two worlds.
Twilight Princess is certainly very dreamlike in the sense that (and I say this lovingly) so much of the world feels like the suggestions of places and landscape rather than the thing itself? So much feels at least a little off in juxtaposition with the realism and scale they achieved otherwise. It's the kind of thing I never noticed until I was going around gathering poes and bugs, once i wasn't distracted by moving forward in the story.
I agree, and I also wonder if it unintentionally emulates actual fairy tales that one may imagine in their head by being so dreamlike and a lot of geometry/architecture not making sense... and there's so many areas and ideas that would be cool to see in the game, but we can't!
When I was a young kid I played this game but didn't have the video game savvy to realize I had to summon the hawk. So I spent tens of hours in the first part of the game walking around Ordon Village and minding my own business like I was any other resident. Definitely the most odd and unremarkable video game experience I've ever had. I have no idea why I spent so much time on it.
it took me so long to get out of ordon village too as a kid lol! except i did know you could call the hawk, i just didn't see the monkey at all.. whoops
I spent so many hours in ordon bro their my family, I always got too scared to burn the spider web to get through the cave into the lost woods, so I just hung out in ordon fishing playing with the frogs and playing with goats
I. Also got stuck in Ordon as a kid and just like. herded goats and fished for a very long time. Love how many people played twilight princess completely wrong. I was Bad At The Game and never finished it, was under the impression that I had to be at least 2/3 through the game considering how long it'd taken, and was later informed by a friend when I explained where I was when I got stuck that I was maybe 1/2 of the way through. It's very weird for me to see people playing in castle town because it felt like a world that couldn't have a city when i was playing in it and i never got to the city
We got our mom to try playing it, started a new save file. All she wanted to do was cut the grass and get hearts and rupees. We finally got her into the first dungeon, and she thought it was boring. Exploring dangerous and dark places to save the neighbor kids? Boring. Defeating the scary boss and saving monkeys? Boring. Walking around chopping grass with a training sword? "Money grows on trees in this game, I see why you all like playing these video game things!" She didn't like it when I came back from college with an entire LoZ essay in how rupees are crystallized Life Force, which is why the Minish tend to Hylians and life itself. She just wanted money, not adventure smh.
You mentioned the lonely feeling that the chasms give, and honestly that’s one of my favorite things about TP’s atmosphere. The Hyrule of TP is a kingdom in decline, and you can feel that in every corner of the game. The world is big, and barren, and lonely throughout. The land doesn’t have the vibrance that most Zeldas do, but it’s also not exceptionally hostile. It’s just… Lonely, and desolate.
Then BOTW and ToK is the opossite where everyone have a fresh start; People making new livehoods, jobs prosper, there is a strong community who encourages innovation with Zelda at the front of such movement... Twilight Princess is an incredible civilization that has entered a stage of stagnation of ideas. People heavily rely on the goverment public funds, the military starts to feel like anything but forceful recruitment to give the people a false sense of order, quite the fall for its OoT who knew how to arrange and guide their population. Its declined its felt worse with the miserable health system where medicines are lacking and doctors feel like they have to get into employment with unfinished education due to most likely poverty. Big signs of unemployment and the rise of informal jobs. It does feel like at any moment a system collapse should be happening. After destruction comes creation.
I swear this game is the most dreamy and odd game Ive ever played. I remember playing it when I was 14. I got it on the wii, and I played it during winter. I felt to isolated playing that game. Isolated from the world because it was winter and isolated in a video game, at the most depressing time in my life when my parents were going through problems. And it just is INGRAINED into my head as just a WEIRD GAME I played at a very WEIRD time in my life. One of my favorite games of all time by far.
It's worth noting that the ranch SHOULD feel odd. It's the furthest point from the rest of Hyrule and is up in a mountainous area. It should feel oddly isolated, so it's lucky that the tone of the game design just works so well for that location. I also don't understand why that big chasm bordering Hyrule field didn't simply show the water at the bottom of it. At least half is the chasm is simply the Zora River. So show it!
You should definitely do a Part 2 for this area with the later game areas. Gerudo Desert is massive and has a ton of empty spaces, the path to Snowpeak is desolate AF, the lost woods leading to the Temple of Time are super weird…. And the Twilight Realm Palace is also like something out of a dream. Would love to see you find more cool areas in the later game!
Man, Gerudo Desert in TP is the most disappointing aspect of it. It's so devoid of anything and lacks any of OoT's desert's mystique. Sure, TP's desert is larger but OoT's version obscures it with sandstorms and just makes it feel like there could be so much more OUT THERE on the farthest known fringes of Hyrule. TP's desert is just this wide open space squared off by obvious fence cliffs, a few rock outcroppings, a 100 level cave and the temple. I was looking forward to seeing the Desert Colossus and the Gerudo Fortress but noooo.
i have a save file perpetually soft locked in snow peak, i don't remember what caused the lock but i sometimes come back to that file and pretend link has a domestic life in the mansion.
Twilight Princess was my favorite game to search for stuff like this as a teenager. I for example tried to find fishing spots in places you would not necessarily look, like the dungeons. Turns out you can find fishing spots in about half of the dungeons, multiple in the first two (including the boss room, at least in the original Wii version).
I've literally thought about 2:25 every time I go back to an old game. I was replaying a Fallout 3 DLC the other day and found a nothing NPC in a cave at the edge of the map, stared at them thinking "how often do people even see you these days?"
Lake Hylia being so dead makes a lot of sense, though. When you start the game, as far as we know it's been nearly empty for a while, with only the lake temple entrance still having water over it. Depending on how long the bed was dry, there's a good chance there just wouldn't be any life other than fish coming from upstream. Also that would be a lot more annoying to handle map and model wise.
There were a bunch of things I never thought to look at, especially the weird PNG mountains ?? I think Twilight Princess the the perfect candidate for these types of videos because it feels a little overly ambitious with a huge world but several areas were there just wasn't any way to fill it one of my favorite places is the path from zora's domain to snowpeak
I think you have to take Twilight Princess as a product of its time. In the time before the releases of Skyrim and GTA V, video game developers were boasting about their _sizes_ of the game. Back then you had these weird comparisons (our game world is 22.4 square kilometers, that's 5 more than the competitor's world!). Naturally, Zelda wouldn't be exempt from it, and therefore TP has these huge areas with absolutely nothing in them. Thankfully, a long series of mediocre open worlds between 2013 and 2017 made the industry change, and now they're more focused on making fun worlds instead of gigantic ones (mostly).
I thought for sure he would cover the Snowpeak area! Especially with all the weird little areas you can get to while snowboarding and the beautiful music. Probably too late into the game, and he didn't get to it.
@@daniel_361 Twilight Princess is also designed around using a horse. It makes a lot more sense to make the world bigger to accommodate the speed of the horse rather than slow it down to make it fit into a smaller one. I really doubt they were focused on world size comparisons, rather than just wanting to make the game feel like a grand adventure across Hyrule in a way no other Zelda game had done before.
i always thought kakariko in this game fit the “unremarkable and odd” bill. like, the entire village. it’s just got a strange feel. the inn with the weird ramp outside leading up to the second floor and the sign that says “do not jump across this gap” on it especially gives that unusual vibe
The village is also huge and only has 3 residents (originally). 2 of whom have their own culture, which fits the village, but with no one else around. Even in OOT Kakriko had a number of native npcs.
I'm kinda miffed that they went for an American wild west aesthetic instead of the traditional medieval aesthetic for the town. OoT's Kakariko is so much more fleshed out with secrets and lore.
15:15 There is actually a building in castle town behind the people sitting at tables, climb a bunch of stairs and go out on the balcony and you can go into first person there too; the whole building is also odd and remarkable in itself and was expecting to see it when I heard castle town
I like it too but isn’t it funny we don’t have much of a choice!! Unless we click off the video which I’d never do since twilight Princess is the greatest art ever made
I know what you mean! I like it when people do that in ASMR too lol the like "may I touch your hair if that's alright with you? Okay? Okay great." So many tingles lol
I have to agree. I was thinking that while watching, as well. When he asked, "wanna see another weird place?" it occurred to me how used to the average video format I am, that I found it weird that somebody would show common decency in a presentation. I think that says more about the state of media than it does this channel in particular, but that's a different story entirely. Anyway, it was nice. At around the point where he asks I was thinking of watching something else. But it was kind of like, "oh, since you were so polite, I suppose I'll stick with you for a while more."
I feel like it needs to be looked at on CRT, my feeling is that a little bit of pixel blending and softening made it blend into the background better and look more natural when it was designed.
I love the way you look at the actual spaces in games. Most people have a very utilitarian aproach to the spaces in games, except for places where the intended purpose is exactly to marvel at a vista. But I really identify with how you really seem to savor every single nook and cranny. I didn't grow up with Zelda but I remember doing this in some of the games I played, just finding an unremarkable corner that someone had to model and taking in the vibes. I feel like I did this a lot in Soul Reaver 2.
I have to admit, I started playing Spyro recently and watching Austin has made me just appreciate being in the space. I haven't just appreciated a space in 10 years. Speaking of, we gotta get Austin to play some PS1 3D platformers. They have oddness and unremarkability down to a science.
twilight princess always felt like it had huge, lord of the rings esque ambitions that translated super awkwardly onto a gamecube dev kit. It feels like they really strained against the limitations instead of working with them like they usually do, but it just adds to the incredibly stank vibes of the entire game and makes it super intriguing and memorable imo.
Memorable in a bad way imo It tried to be a bigger and better ocarina of time as well as a proto breath of the wild at the same time and failed on both counts imo Not only that but the art design was awkward as well. 3D Zelda was really in this strange transitional stage between majoras mask and BOTW. None of them were bad games but they feel like half realized, heavily flawed creations when you put them beside masterpieces like OOT, MM and BOTW
@@Marchochias TP walked so that Skyward Sword and BOTW could run. It was the first big transition out of old fashioned Gamecube and Gameboy graphics into something more realistic, both in art style and in gameplay. I concede it doesn't have the best graphics by LoZ standards anymore, but the dark, gothic style still fills a niche pleasure. I wish Nintendo would revisit this style in the future.
@@Bell52c I love the art style of TP and want them to revisit it too. but I actually disagree that it was the first time they tried to do realism. OoT was doing realism. it was just quite limited by the fact that it was on the N64. but it still had incredible atmosphere, and some dang creepy stuff in it, too. in large part, nintendo was going for the OoT atmosphere with TP, which Aonuma talked about in interviews with Iwata.
I adore this series as a whole, but this video in particular feels perfectly tailored for me. I felt like the only person in the world who did this in Twilight Princess, and it feels so cathartic to finally see someone else appreciate those inconspicuous little pockets of the world as much as I did as a kid. ❤ Wonderful vid, keep up the good work!
@@grammarmaid Geez, can't a fungi admire architecture without being accused of being stuck in bricks, nowadays? We toads have other interests too, you know!
I absolutely love how existential these odd places videos get. Like that segment staring into the farmers eyes and relating him to numbers on a disk was gold.
The main room of Hyrule Castle also just feels extremely weird. You come in from the main doors & it’s an immediate dead end room with nothing there except for a small wooden staircase in the middle, with only 3 steps leading to nowhere. Then you have a bunch of balcony’s but only 1 has a door (which leads to another weird room) with the other ones being inaccessible besides using the claw shot. The whole castle just makes zero sense in general & feels like a weird fever dream?
And it gets worse when you consider the layout of the castle rooftop at the beginning of the game. Also, have you you tried going into first-person view from the balcony just before the Ganon encounter and zoom at the horizon? Twilight Princess and its broken setpieces gave me the itch that Breath of the Wild finally allowed me to scratch (especially the snowpeak summit where you couldn't see anything below, while OoT Death Mountain at least had the courtesy to give you a glimpse of Kakariko Village lightning up at dusk)
@@HellPeYou can actually see the rooftop from the beginning of the game in the eastern courtyard of Hyrule Castle (or western courtyard if you're playing the Wii version). If you look up you can see the scaffolding, towers and doorways that you crossed as wolf link.
My headcanon is that Ganondorf used magic to make the inside of Hyrule Castle to have no sense nor logic to make the access to the throne room more difficult
The thing about Lake Hylia that always struck me as odd is there's no path down to the lake for Hylians and Gorons. Link gets down there either by water, dropping from the bridge, flying, or that cucko mini game.
Zelda games are chok full of worlds that don't work, or over-stretched contrivances. It makes me not a fan of playing, but I enjoy looking at them as art.
That did always bother me as a kid. Like, HOW are people supposed to come down here??? There's almost no way to do so besides the cucco method. There's no road at all. The only option i could see would be to travel all the way north to zoras domain, travel by boat down a long and extremely dangerous river, and then drop down a waterfall just to get to it... I absolutely adore the world of twilight princess overall, so this oddity always stood out as quite bizarre to me.
There's even talk of a path to Gerudo Desert from Lake Hylia being blocked, which is why you have to use the canon. Except no such path physically exists in the game. But since it's mentioned, canonically it exists. You might, then, assume that such a path also exists from Hyrule Field to Lake Hylia.
Twilight Princess is just unremarkable and odd places the game. And I'm saying that out of love, because this is still probably my favorite Zelda game. I remember actually going back to see what was in that water in the boss room of the forest temple when I was younger, and I was so surprised when I found the weird white void in there.
Similar to the Water Temple's boss room. I love standing at the bottom after you defeat the boss, looking around, and just marveling at the sheer scale of it and wondering why - in the context of the world - would anyone put forth all the effort into constructing such a vast space. It also gives me time to soak up the SPECTACULAR post boss music theme that I always have to stick around and listen to :D
God I love this series! I feel like you could easily do a dozen more episodes on just Twilight Princess there's so much empty space in that game from Hyrule Field to all those one-off areas like the hidden village where you meet Impa. Anyway, keep making videos they're always a highlight!
The bottomless pits in the forest temple freak me out so much for some reason lol I am glad to see them get some attention Twilight Princess has really good environments. I love Ordon Ranch. The entirety of that opening village sequence left such a big impression the first time but also sort of sets a bar for "livelihood" that the rest of the town-like areas never live up to which is unfortunate
It's interesting that that big botomless canyon in Hyrule Field is even featured on the title screen, always gave me weird vibes. Another place that always fascinated me was Link's basement. Great video, I love these videos.
I love Link's basement, cause it feels like there should be more in there (but also not..?), and also in the original Wii version I liked to scare myself by looking at "Dark Link" in the mirror with all the lights off.
Just went through something really rough, and while I was initially processing it I had this video going. Something about how calm and peaceful it was, how genuine the emotions were, really resonated with me and made me feel less alone. Maybe that’s silly, but genuinely, thank you.
Hi! I teach media at a school for neurodivergent kids grades 6-12 and I showed this video as an example to my Content Creation class. They died laughing everytime you use the flip transition and now I am affraid they will use that transition in all of their videos. When I explained your other series on video game unemployment rates, they wanted me to reach out and ask if you have any professional credentials regarding census calculations or mathematics. This never occurred to me, but is fairly on brand for our class. Anyway, great work and great video. Thanks on behalf of your new young fans at our school.
ZERO PROFESSIONAL CREDENTIALS. I was kind of a bad student because I was too anxious to turn in my homework. But I like learning and researching things so I’ve done a lot of reading about the real-life Bureau of Labor Statistics and I actually visited their building in Washington DC but they wouldn’t let me in because they said it was really boring inside and I wouldn’t want to see it. Shout out to the youth. Rock and roll.
I grew up with the GameCube version of the game exclusively, so whenever I see footage of Twilight Princess that has been flipped (wii/wiiu hero mode) it automatically takes on a level of uncanny for me. I’ve played Twilight Princess more than any other Zelda, so to see extremely familiar maps made unfamiliar with just that simple change shifts the vibe of the whole game for me. I also feel like you could make like four of these videos out of just Twilight Princess, and I would immediately watch all of them. I love this series a lot, keep it up.
I remember hearing of people trying to find the beta forest and such. It made me really look at all the odd cliffs and ends you could reach in this. Something about opening up and going to the oddest out of the way places in this game just hits different it feels more special and tucked away.
I was obsessed with finding the beta forest! It's such a shame that game rumours like that can't really exist anymore, because it sure added so much more mystery to Twilight princess
@@Lemon_squeeYes! The Triforce rumors for OoT caused me to do the same for that game back in the day, as well as dive into magazines and such for more beta/early screenshots.
This was the first Zelda game I ever played and I bloody love it. I used to sit in the hot spa on top of Kakariko Village and deperately try to imagine the feeling of the warm relaxing water.
When I was little, I used to revisit boss rooms in Twilight Princess once they were safe after beating the boss just to kind of get lost in the design. The different areas in TP always felt really special to me, even the parts of them that seem unremarkable and odd, so it's nice to see you point out specific areas I can remember just looking at and appreciating.
As a kid I would go to a children’s museum that had a forest themed play area, and you mentioning the indoor/outdoor vibe of the forest temple reminded me of it ❤
As a video essayist myself I must say a improvised jazz essayist is the coolest thing ever lol also great concept of showing these weird places in game worlds, would love to see you do this with dark souls 1! I love that world and the little weird places throughout it
I watched your videos a few months ago they’re good I forgot about them until now thank you. I’ll make dark souls content in about 8 months. Would you like to loosely keep in touch by commenting on each others videos every few months?
love the way the waterfall looks from below, and bonus points for it lagging the game. thats real power, in a game, when something slows down time with its sheer weight
Yes two or three 4-secondish clips of the area at the end of each segment would be very cool to immerse ourselves in the oddity of the place before we move on.
6:09 woah, I’ve never played Twilight Princess but I immediately thought of the river section in RE4. Man, I got SO close to emulating it, but my pc isn’t powerful enough to be a GameCube. It played through the whole introduction just fine, then catastrophically chugged as soon as I left the village. That was such a bummer
I’ve been going to sleep to a commentated twilight princess speedrun for the last month or so, excited to see these places again in a new context, and to return to them later having contemplated what would otherwise be missed
i definitely think a good stylistic idea for this series going forward would be to start and end each segment with moments of ambience so the audience gets the chance to feel out the area before you talk about it, then when you're done we get to sit with it again after hearing what you've said
love these videos, feels good to see someone else mention these kinds of places. all of TP feels so... translucent. like things exist just because, it's almost liminal, which I guess fits the theme of twilight. I'd love to see a two hour long video on just this game
Thanks Austin. I would gladly listen to longer improvised philosophical jazz riffs from your mind. I feel lucky to have come across this channel in the last few years. Always looking forward to whatever you come out with next. I’d love to see more longer series like 100 deaths or less, though I’m sure those series take a lot of work to edit/film especially considering an effort/views ratio.
The space in front of Hyrule Castle is also weird at some point in the story where its clear and sunny in Castle Town and then when you walk toward the space it starts pouring rain the moment you cross the threshold iirc. Twilight Princess is my favorite Zelda. I could walk through the map and experience it for hours.
That's like how it suddenly starts raining when you approach the back of the cemetery in Ocarina. Always freaked me out!!! D: Also we share great taste in favorite Zelda games :D
This whole game always gave me eerie uneasy vibes. I remember watching my big brother play while I read the game guide to him and it was like watching a creepy movie
I can't decide if the townspeople being completely oblivious about the state of the castle is really funny or really unnerving. It kinda fits thematically with how they interact with the twilight realm. They go about their lives thinking things are mostly normal, except they have actually become spirits.
I learned so much as a kid from this game. Being there for my friends, and when I thought I couldn’t do something I thought of tp link and i got a irl buff. The Zelda series is so special. To be able to play and experience such a masterpiece at such a young age and actually understand it is so awesome.
Dude! I used to go back to the second spot in this video all the time during late game because that whole room always gave me such a vibe. I’d pretend to live there and I’d just leave my tv on in that spot and relax to the ambience.
I always loved the backgrounds in this game. Especially the hills around Ordon for some reason, something about them just feels so cozy and I wanted to walk around on them.
That, and they're on the total fringes of Hyrule and I always love those frontier places where anything could conceivably exist beyond the borders of the known land. The hills and the forest on those extreme edges of the map are just filled with so much wonder!! :D I always love standing on the bridge spanning the chasm leading from Ordon to Hyrule field and looking up the canyon towards the stark grey hills and just wondering what lies beyond ... ~
12:00 At the bottom of the pond where you get the zora suit at the kakariko graveyard, there is a rock you can explode to expose a tunnel that warps you to lake hylia. That "butthole" is the exit of that tunnel.
This entire game has such a weird feeling. Like it only wants you to see a very set path while in motion. The facade falls as soon as you stop and take a look.
I really really love twilight princess and I think one of the reasons why is because of its graphics. I don't think it would benefit from another revamp. The low quality textures and sound mixed with the story and gameplay give it this weird half-liminal half-alive feeling that I haven't got from any other game. It's like a vibe that would be nearly impossible to recreate. Everything looks diluted. One of my favorite places in the game is in the snow area on the way up the mountain. There are just some random places that are out of the way but have no use.
It just dawned on me that I've been watching since the Eggbusters/GoNintendo days. And it's really cool to see you still goin, but also finding success on the platform. Nice to see.
Technically a reason to go back to Ordon Ranch. There's a heartpiece if you herd fast enough and also some buried rupees in the shed by the mailman who appears there.
The chasm in that part of Hyrule field actually lines up perfectly with the Zora river on the map. You traverse these areas several times throughout the game
@@DarkMirria1 With them being so thin I'd be inclined to say earthquakes splitting the land open. Erosion would make something much wider unless there happened to be a long, deep, and thin area of soft rock
The thing about Lake Hylia being so empty has a bit of an unintended lore aspect. Just hours or days ago in-game the entire lake was drained, and its likely it had been that way for days in-game. So anything that had lived there- fish, plants, etc.- had died long before Link got there and fixed it. The fact that one small fishing spot with a few fish is a miracle considering the utter environmental disaster that had befallen it. The fish probably made their way into the lake from the underground connection with the pond from Kakariko graveyard, meaning there is a chance for recovery, tho it'll probably be years if not decades before that happens. Kinda adds to the grimness of the atmosphere of the game. On the surface things look alright, but look underneath and you can see the damage done by Ganondorf's meddling.
9:26 always loved the music for night in this game and here it really fits the bizarre feel of looking over a bottomless pit thats naturally in the world
That last bridge area reminds me of when I went to Nagoya Castle in Japan. It's a pretty popular tourist spot so in the main area, it's incredibly noisy. But there is a side path you can go down that leads to a bridge, and there a gate and a bunch of sandbags. You're far away enough that all the sound of tourists is dampened enough to be ignorable (it was also raining when I was there, so that probably helped. The gate has an info plaque, so it seems intended for you to be there. But despite being overcrowded, basically, no one was there. Anyways, thanks again for this. I've been loving this series. Just a really simple, fun, and unique idea.
Twilight Princess is basically "Unremarkable and Odd Places: The Game." Everything, from the overworld maps to the individual rooms in dungeons, feels like they made it, filled it up with enemies and decorations, then tripled its size but just spread the objects around instead of adding more.
Twilight Princess was the first game I played as a kid that made me feel like I was in a waking dream, and it absolutely captivated me. Like it was a Place with a capital P. But I never realized until now that the feeling it gave me was at least partially a result of this weird emptiness stuff. It’s one of the most common criticisms people make of the game. And yeah, you can tell the execution wasn’t quite there. But it’s interesting to think of it as a stepping stone in the history of game design. They were still figuring out what would eventually become the open world concept, adding more places for the player, as you say, to “walk through the loading screen.” Everything feels bigger and closer to boundless even if there isn’t a lot going on. And maybe it’s the nostalgia talking, but I do love how liminal Twilight Princess feels. It suits the story and the tone.
When I was younger, I used to walk around in game worlds trying to appreciate the work that the designers put into the game. I didn’t want to miss a fish or a butterfly. Glad to see that there’s a channel dedicated to appreciating the little and unremarkable things in games. It brings me back to the old days where games were magical to me.
One place that seemingly nobody ever goes because there’s no reason to go is the upper level of Hyrule Castle town in the main square. There’s people to talk to and a Goron shopkeeper if I recall.
Yay! My favorite video series of yours, on one of my favorite games. Warms the soul (Also that underwater booty hole is the shortcut between the Kakariko Graveyard and the Lake)
Maybe the reason they left Lake Hylia so empty is because it was all dried up by Zora’s Domain freezing over? Only the deeper bit with the Lakebed Temple still had water and so still has plants when the whole lake was refilled. Still would’ve been nice to see some kind of plants though since the lake wasn’t really dried up for THAT long.
i'm honestly surprised you didn't talk about the hyrule castle foyer. it's massive and creepy with the flute of the castle theme whispering in your ear, and for some reason the only way to exit the room and get further into the castle is to clawshot your way higher with the chandeliers
I think the goron up on the secret house balcony mentions that hes the only one who has noticed the giant twilight prism over the castle. I think the idea is that the people in the town are so wrapped up in their lil weird lives that they dont even look up to notice. Or perhaps its just hard to see over the tall walls unless you own property that is higher up
Austin is the only person on the planet who would ever notice the discrepancy between a tiny mountain image and the rest of the area. Great stuff as always.
love this video! the outer rim of the lakebed temple (where the bridges are) and the brief climb just inside the boss room of city in the sky always gave me this vibe, too. gonna watch the whole series now 🔥
this game has a special place in my heart, but for a weird reason. hear me out, back when it came out, I was 17 and had to move out of my home becasue my mother was an abusive alcoholic. It was short notice when I moved, so I moved in with a family friend who unfortunately was a low level Yakuza. It was good at first, but all kinds of weird and dangerous shit was happening in his house while I was home. So, I would play this game and lock myself in the room while I could hear people fighting, taking drugs or doing heaps of bad stuff. So, Id be locked in my room for up to 12 hours at times and I had cans of food hidden under my bed and Id pee in bottles and play this zelda game and studying English textbooks which kept me sane and I felt safe playing it for a year that i lived there, so I wont ever forget every point of this zelda
@@any_austin not all dude! That was like 19 years ago. Fortunately Zelda Twilight princess dominates my memories from then. Thanks for your response. I have a million crazy game related stories But this was most appropriate as I used to sit in a boat in the fishing area for hours to Escape my reality
Yes! I always felt staring into the twilight barrier shielding the Hyrule Castle and just being around that empty area next to the center of Castle Town is just soooo weird. I'm glad I'm not the only one. For me it always gave me like some kind of strange existential dread feeling being around in that area.
9:51 the stark lack of any aquatic life in the lakebed makes me feel like I'm looking below the surface of the Dead Sea. For there to not be a single fish or plant, aside from the token fishing weed, suggests there's a hydrogen sulfide vent spewing into the water, killing anything that might live there. The bubbling bootyhole really hammered this theory home for me
I really like this series because, well... it's the kind of stuff I like to do myself when playing video games. Checking out weird, out of the way things just out of curiousity and consider what it could be in-universe. It's also why I love Immersive Sims so much, because those are filled with this kind of stuff and encourage exploration. Would love to see a video on a Hitman, Thief, Tomb Raider or Dishonored game. Any of the games in these franchises, really.
The hole in Lake Hylia is a shortcut that can be accessed through the Kakariko Graveyard. You're meant to use the water bombs to open the shortcut after obtaining the Zora Armor.
Oh wow I completely forgot water bombs existed
Yup this is correct
@@SECONDQUESTand they look like weird fish
I remember discovering the shortcut as a kid and being really excited about it. Even as an adult now it still excites me. It's just really neat being able to get the zora armor and then immediately being able to go to lake hylia through there, and I love the way the force of the water pushes you out into the lake.
@@silentdrew7636who knew Thom Yorke was such a big Twilight Princess fan?
I think one reason you can justify the emptiness of lake Hylia with is the fact it was dried up and empty until "recently" so there's veen no time for flora and fauna to fill it. Meanwhile, the hole in front of the temple was filled with water even after the lake was dried up, so there's animals and plants there.
Still ironic that the Zelda games with under water areas are barren yet in BOTW, the game where you can't swim underwater, there's tons of life and flora you can't really see. Particularly in the ocean
Skyward Sword is probably the only one to consistently have nice floral sections underwater and it doesn't feel quite as barren either with the exception of maybe.. the water dragon's room. But even by the time you get there, you'll probably fixate on talking to her for the main quest stuff instead of exploring
Edit: I take back what I said about the Water Dragon room, it's fairly nice as a home area for a bunch of the new squid/key race. If this was the least memorable underwater area in Skyward Sword for me, the game did underwater areas pretty well imo
@@overlorddante Underwater models are subject to way less scrutiny when you can't get up close to them. Plus, all other Zelda games are on extremely underpowered hardware compared to BotW, so BotW can afford to put really detailed flora everywhere.
@@SoIstice yes. I'm saying it's unfortunate to finally have beautiful underwater landscapes but we can't explore them
@@ar.ninetysix They're actually seahorse jellyfish people
I work at a hospital in the basement. There is one long hallway that is probably a quarter of a mile long, its almost always completely abandoned and on the weekends half the lights are turned off.
Every time, I can just hear your echoing, "this place is weird," in my head.
Oh I'm glad I'm not the only one who has this happen.
Culvert
You should sabotage the connections on the lights so they'll flicker
@@JrIcifySeriously. I have already decided that if I'm there on the weekend and lights start going out one-by-one, I am taking a brisk walk out of the building.
A quarter of a mile? Like a whole lap around a track stretched into a straight line? I want to see that
God I love Twilight Princess's environmental design. It's like the entire world is a creepy empty liminal space that's had something removed from it. Some people probably find it boring or lazy as a result; I think it makes the tone 10 times more effective.
More NPCs would completely negate that feeling, I think. It feels as if each area stopped loading partway through, so that only enemy mobs spawned.
I’ve always thought of it like this and didn’t know quite how to explain it. I’m glad someone else sees it the way I do!
there was a lot of content removed from the game during development.
@@chuychongas Like?
Im a pretty glad about it too. The feel of twilight princess empty ness does feel very liminal space like. It totally sets the mood
Twilight Princess always gives me similar vibes to Shadow of the Colossus. But it also feels 'fractured', like all the pieces don't necessarily fit together.
I was just thinking the same thing
Fractured is a perfect word to describe this games world
that is such a good comparison!!! similar gloomy atmosphere and empty world
Low key absurdist or surrealist horror game
I think you would all enjoy Dark Souls 2, it has a very similar vibe.
God I love going back to Twilight Princess every so often. That game had a powerful vibe that nobody's captured since. Straight magic
I love this game. It has a weird post-apocalyptic vibe. As though it's like, 100 years past a devastating conflict, and the world is just getting back to its feet.
The Ranch actually has a few reasons to pay it another visit. You can pet the goats, and even if you dislike the minigame, you can earn a piece of heart there. There's also a hidden underground cave (accessible through digging as wolf in the building) that cointains one of the few instances of Rare Chu (I believe there are only 3 or 4 in the entire game).
One thing I found out recently is if you go to the ranch as a wolf and approach the sad man, the goats will defend him by attacking you
@@tmsplltrs that's so wholesome 🥺
@@olivebunny I also found another cute detail: if you go to the room of the mayor of Ordon village, you'll find a brush on his desk. Since he's bald this means he uses the brush for his funny-looking mustache.
@@tmsplltrs Amazing
@@tmsplltrs His name is Fado.
Twilight Princess has so many of these spaces. It sometimes feels like the whole game exists in a weird, half-remembered dreamlike state, that exists only in the moments between being asleep and waking up. Possibly fitting, given it's a game split between two worlds.
Man that is the most apt description I never could have come up with to describe this game world :)
Almost like the game exists in Twilight! :p
Twilight Princess is certainly very dreamlike in the sense that (and I say this lovingly) so much of the world feels like the suggestions of places and landscape rather than the thing itself? So much feels at least a little off in juxtaposition with the realism and scale they achieved otherwise. It's the kind of thing I never noticed until I was going around gathering poes and bugs, once i wasn't distracted by moving forward in the story.
I agree, and I also wonder if it unintentionally emulates actual fairy tales that one may imagine in their head by being so dreamlike and a lot of geometry/architecture not making sense... and there's so many areas and ideas that would be cool to see in the game, but we can't!
When I was a young kid I played this game but didn't have the video game savvy to realize I had to summon the hawk. So I spent tens of hours in the first part of the game walking around Ordon Village and minding my own business like I was any other resident. Definitely the most odd and unremarkable video game experience I've ever had. I have no idea why I spent so much time on it.
it took me so long to get out of ordon village too as a kid lol! except i did know you could call the hawk, i just didn't see the monkey at all.. whoops
I spent so many hours in ordon bro their my family, I always got too scared to burn the spider web to get through the cave into the lost woods, so I just hung out in ordon fishing playing with the frogs and playing with goats
I. Also got stuck in Ordon as a kid and just like. herded goats and fished for a very long time. Love how many people played twilight princess completely wrong. I was Bad At The Game and never finished it, was under the impression that I had to be at least 2/3 through the game considering how long it'd taken, and was later informed by a friend when I explained where I was when I got stuck that I was maybe 1/2 of the way through. It's very weird for me to see people playing in castle town because it felt like a world that couldn't have a city when i was playing in it and i never got to the city
I did that at as well, but it was because I didn’t know the difference between starting a new game file and continuing the same one until I was like 8
We got our mom to try playing it, started a new save file. All she wanted to do was cut the grass and get hearts and rupees. We finally got her into the first dungeon, and she thought it was boring. Exploring dangerous and dark places to save the neighbor kids? Boring. Defeating the scary boss and saving monkeys? Boring. Walking around chopping grass with a training sword? "Money grows on trees in this game, I see why you all like playing these video game things!"
She didn't like it when I came back from college with an entire LoZ essay in how rupees are crystallized Life Force, which is why the Minish tend to Hylians and life itself. She just wanted money, not adventure smh.
You mentioned the lonely feeling that the chasms give, and honestly that’s one of my favorite things about TP’s atmosphere. The Hyrule of TP is a kingdom in decline, and you can feel that in every corner of the game.
The world is big, and barren, and lonely throughout. The land doesn’t have the vibrance that most Zeldas do, but it’s also not exceptionally hostile.
It’s just… Lonely, and desolate.
Like the UK!
@@timotheataeLOL
Then BOTW and ToK is the opossite where everyone have a fresh start; People making new livehoods, jobs prosper, there is a strong community who encourages innovation with Zelda at the front of such movement...
Twilight Princess is an incredible civilization that has entered a stage of stagnation of ideas. People heavily rely on the goverment public funds, the military starts to feel like anything but forceful recruitment to give the people a false sense of order, quite the fall for its OoT who knew how to arrange and guide their population. Its declined its felt worse with the miserable health system where medicines are lacking and doctors feel like they have to get into employment with unfinished education due to most likely poverty. Big signs of unemployment and the rise of informal jobs. It does feel like at any moment a system collapse should be happening.
After destruction comes creation.
Really puts the twilight in twilight princess
The whole game gives the vibe of being inbetween two states
I swear this game is the most dreamy and odd game Ive ever played. I remember playing it when I was 14. I got it on the wii, and I played it during winter. I felt to isolated playing that game. Isolated from the world because it was winter and isolated in a video game, at the most depressing time in my life when my parents were going through problems. And it just is INGRAINED into my head as just a WEIRD GAME I played at a very WEIRD time in my life. One of my favorite games of all time by far.
Funny, I also played this for the first time during the most depressing isolated time of my life
Same here
It's worth noting that the ranch SHOULD feel odd. It's the furthest point from the rest of Hyrule and is up in a mountainous area. It should feel oddly isolated, so it's lucky that the tone of the game design just works so well for that location.
I also don't understand why that big chasm bordering Hyrule field didn't simply show the water at the bottom of it. At least half is the chasm is simply the Zora River. So show it!
Maybe is so that Players dont try to swin in there
@@tuliobednarczukpecinemisko5606 bah! We still pitch ourselves off of ledges out of curiosity anyway!
Right
You should definitely do a Part 2 for this area with the later game areas. Gerudo Desert is massive and has a ton of empty spaces, the path to Snowpeak is desolate AF, the lost woods leading to the Temple of Time are super weird…. And the Twilight Realm Palace is also like something out of a dream. Would love to see you find more cool areas in the later game!
Man, Gerudo Desert in TP is the most disappointing aspect of it. It's so devoid of anything and lacks any of OoT's desert's mystique.
Sure, TP's desert is larger but OoT's version obscures it with sandstorms and just makes it feel like there could be so much more OUT THERE on the farthest known fringes of Hyrule.
TP's desert is just this wide open space squared off by obvious fence cliffs, a few rock outcroppings, a 100 level cave and the temple. I was looking forward to seeing the Desert Colossus and the Gerudo Fortress but noooo.
i have a save file perpetually soft locked in snow peak, i don't remember what caused the lock but i sometimes come back to that file and pretend link has a domestic life in the mansion.
Twilight Princess was my favorite game to search for stuff like this as a teenager. I for example tried to find fishing spots in places you would not necessarily look, like the dungeons. Turns out you can find fishing spots in about half of the dungeons, multiple in the first two (including the boss room, at least in the original Wii version).
It’s a shame you can’t register the piranha in the lakebed temple, but you can catch them!!
I've literally thought about 2:25 every time I go back to an old game. I was replaying a Fallout 3 DLC the other day and found a nothing NPC in a cave at the edge of the map, stared at them thinking "how often do people even see you these days?"
seems like a lonely fellow.. maybe a stranger of the mysterious variety?
@@ethanbaileylol2283ossibly the loneliest person in all of fallout 3
@@JrIcify he has a son and therefore got bizay. Not forever alonely
What the kid in Point Lookout?
@@qwopiretyu Yes!
Lake Hylia being so dead makes a lot of sense, though. When you start the game, as far as we know it's been nearly empty for a while, with only the lake temple entrance still having water over it. Depending on how long the bed was dry, there's a good chance there just wouldn't be any life other than fish coming from upstream.
Also that would be a lot more annoying to handle map and model wise.
Yeah it really does make sense in context
There were a bunch of things I never thought to look at, especially the weird PNG mountains ?? I think Twilight Princess the the perfect candidate for these types of videos because it feels a little overly ambitious with a huge world but several areas were there just wasn't any way to fill it
one of my favorite places is the path from zora's domain to snowpeak
I think you have to take Twilight Princess as a product of its time. In the time before the releases of Skyrim and GTA V, video game developers were boasting about their _sizes_ of the game. Back then you had these weird comparisons (our game world is 22.4 square kilometers, that's 5 more than the competitor's world!). Naturally, Zelda wouldn't be exempt from it, and therefore TP has these huge areas with absolutely nothing in them.
Thankfully, a long series of mediocre open worlds between 2013 and 2017 made the industry change, and now they're more focused on making fun worlds instead of gigantic ones (mostly).
I thought for sure he would cover the Snowpeak area! Especially with all the weird little areas you can get to while snowboarding and the beautiful music. Probably too late into the game, and he didn't get to it.
@@daniel_361 Twilight Princess is also designed around using a horse. It makes a lot more sense to make the world bigger to accommodate the speed of the horse rather than slow it down to make it fit into a smaller one. I really doubt they were focused on world size comparisons, rather than just wanting to make the game feel like a grand adventure across Hyrule in a way no other Zelda game had done before.
i always thought kakariko in this game fit the “unremarkable and odd” bill. like, the entire village. it’s just got a strange feel. the inn with the weird ramp outside leading up to the second floor and the sign that says “do not jump across this gap” on it especially gives that unusual vibe
The village is also huge and only has 3 residents (originally). 2 of whom have their own culture, which fits the village, but with no one else around. Even in OOT Kakriko had a number of native npcs.
@@tomwells5698 I believe most of the residents were killed/ turned into shadow beasts during the twili invasion correct?
@@burnsideex5949 Just searched it but yeah. As a kid thought it was weird nobody was there. Still quite dark
I'm kinda miffed that they went for an American wild west aesthetic instead of the traditional medieval aesthetic for the town. OoT's Kakariko is so much more fleshed out with secrets and lore.
15:15 There is actually a building in castle town behind the people sitting at tables, climb a bunch of stairs and go out on the balcony and you can go into first person there too; the whole building is also odd and remarkable in itself and was expecting to see it when I heard castle town
I’ve completed this game 4 times and I just barely noticed that building on my last play through. It was nice to see castle town from a new angle
I'm grateful you always ask permission to take us to these odd places. It makes the trip more comfortable and pleasant
I like it too but isn’t it funny we don’t have much of a choice!! Unless we click off the video which I’d never do since twilight Princess is the greatest art ever made
I know what you mean! I like it when people do that in ASMR too lol the like "may I touch your hair if that's alright with you? Okay? Okay great." So many tingles lol
I miss the consent forms from before lol
He doesn't have my consent I'm leaving
I have to agree. I was thinking that while watching, as well. When he asked, "wanna see another weird place?" it occurred to me how used to the average video format I am, that I found it weird that somebody would show common decency in a presentation. I think that says more about the state of media than it does this channel in particular, but that's a different story entirely.
Anyway, it was nice. At around the point where he asks I was thinking of watching something else. But it was kind of like, "oh, since you were so polite, I suppose I'll stick with you for a while more."
I'm glad you gave a shout out to most bizarre landscape asset in all of Zelda, the weird floating molten cabbage used to represent Death Mountain.
I feel like it needs to be looked at on CRT, my feeling is that a little bit of pixel blending and softening made it blend into the background better and look more natural when it was designed.
Ye
I love the way you look at the actual spaces in games. Most people have a very utilitarian aproach to the spaces in games, except for places where the intended purpose is exactly to marvel at a vista. But I really identify with how you really seem to savor every single nook and cranny. I didn't grow up with Zelda but I remember doing this in some of the games I played, just finding an unremarkable corner that someone had to model and taking in the vibes. I feel like I did this a lot in Soul Reaver 2.
i did it in sonic adventure’s hub worlds
I have to admit, I started playing Spyro recently and watching Austin has made me just appreciate being in the space. I haven't just appreciated a space in 10 years. Speaking of, we gotta get Austin to play some PS1 3D platformers. They have oddness and unremarkability down to a science.
twilight princess always felt like it had huge, lord of the rings esque ambitions that translated super awkwardly onto a gamecube dev kit. It feels like they really strained against the limitations instead of working with them like they usually do, but it just adds to the incredibly stank vibes of the entire game and makes it super intriguing and memorable imo.
Memorable in a bad way imo
It tried to be a bigger and better ocarina of time as well as a proto breath of the wild at the same time and failed on both counts imo
Not only that but the art design was awkward as well. 3D Zelda was really in this strange transitional stage between majoras mask and BOTW. None of them were bad games but they feel like half realized, heavily flawed creations when you put them beside masterpieces like OOT, MM and BOTW
@@Marchochias TP walked so that Skyward Sword and BOTW could run. It was the first big transition out of old fashioned Gamecube and Gameboy graphics into something more realistic, both in art style and in gameplay. I concede it doesn't have the best graphics by LoZ standards anymore, but the dark, gothic style still fills a niche pleasure. I wish Nintendo would revisit this style in the future.
@@Bell52c I love the art style of TP and want them to revisit it too. but I actually disagree that it was the first time they tried to do realism. OoT was doing realism. it was just quite limited by the fact that it was on the N64. but it still had incredible atmosphere, and some dang creepy stuff in it, too. in large part, nintendo was going for the OoT atmosphere with TP, which Aonuma talked about in interviews with Iwata.
I adore this series as a whole, but this video in particular feels perfectly tailored for me. I felt like the only person in the world who did this in Twilight Princess, and it feels so cathartic to finally see someone else appreciate those inconspicuous little pockets of the world as much as I did as a kid. ❤ Wonderful vid, keep up the good work!
In the contrary I searched what felt every inch looking for heart pieces. I refused to use the fortune teller because I was stingy.
Typical opinion from a guy who spends all his time trapped within Princess Peach's castle walls!
@@grammarmaid Geez, can't a fungi admire architecture without being accused of being stuck in bricks, nowadays? We toads have other interests too, you know!
I absolutely love how existential these odd places videos get. Like that segment staring into the farmers eyes and relating him to numbers on a disk was gold.
The main room of Hyrule Castle also just feels extremely weird. You come in from the main doors & it’s an immediate dead end room with nothing there except for a small wooden staircase in the middle, with only 3 steps leading to nowhere. Then you have a bunch of balcony’s but only 1 has a door (which leads to another weird room) with the other ones being inaccessible besides using the claw shot. The whole castle just makes zero sense in general & feels like a weird fever dream?
And it gets worse when you consider the layout of the castle rooftop at the beginning of the game. Also, have you you tried going into first-person view from the balcony just before the Ganon encounter and zoom at the horizon? Twilight Princess and its broken setpieces gave me the itch that Breath of the Wild finally allowed me to scratch (especially the snowpeak summit where you couldn't see anything below, while OoT Death Mountain at least had the courtesy to give you a glimpse of Kakariko Village lightning up at dusk)
The people resposible for the design of the dungeons sometimes forgot to make something that feels functional even for a regular person.
@@HellPeYou can actually see the rooftop from the beginning of the game in the eastern courtyard of Hyrule Castle (or western courtyard if you're playing the Wii version). If you look up you can see the scaffolding, towers and doorways that you crossed as wolf link.
My headcanon is that Ganondorf used magic to make the inside of Hyrule Castle to have no sense nor logic to make the access to the throne room more difficult
The thing about Lake Hylia that always struck me as odd is there's no path down to the lake for Hylians and Gorons. Link gets down there either by water, dropping from the bridge, flying, or that cucko mini game.
Yeah i always found that super bizarre! Like normal people have to come down from the treacherous Zora River, then leave via cannon.
Zelda games are chok full of worlds that don't work, or over-stretched contrivances. It makes me not a fan of playing, but I enjoy looking at them as art.
That did always bother me as a kid.
Like, HOW are people supposed to come down here??? There's almost no way to do so besides the cucco method. There's no road at all.
The only option i could see would be to travel all the way north to zoras domain, travel by boat down a long and extremely dangerous river, and then drop down a waterfall just to get to it...
I absolutely adore the world of twilight princess overall, so this oddity always stood out as quite bizarre to me.
There's even talk of a path to Gerudo Desert from Lake Hylia being blocked, which is why you have to use the canon.
Except no such path physically exists in the game. But since it's mentioned, canonically it exists.
You might, then, assume that such a path also exists from Hyrule Field to Lake Hylia.
Twilight Princess is just unremarkable and odd places the game. And I'm saying that out of love, because this is still probably my favorite Zelda game. I remember actually going back to see what was in that water in the boss room of the forest temple when I was younger, and I was so surprised when I found the weird white void in there.
Similar to the Water Temple's boss room. I love standing at the bottom after you defeat the boss, looking around, and just marveling at the sheer scale of it and wondering why - in the context of the world - would anyone put forth all the effort into constructing such a vast space.
It also gives me time to soak up the SPECTACULAR post boss music theme that I always have to stick around and listen to :D
9:20
Calling the Zora Domain a “Glorified Aquarium” is PROBABLY hate-speech against Zoras.
God I love this series! I feel like you could easily do a dozen more episodes on just Twilight Princess there's so much empty space in that game from Hyrule Field to all those one-off areas like the hidden village where you meet Impa. Anyway, keep making videos they're always a highlight!
The bottomless pits in the forest temple freak me out so much for some reason lol I am glad to see them get some attention
Twilight Princess has really good environments. I love Ordon Ranch. The entirety of that opening village sequence left such a big impression the first time but also sort of sets a bar for "livelihood" that the rest of the town-like areas never live up to which is unfortunate
It's interesting that that big botomless canyon in Hyrule Field is even featured on the title screen, always gave me weird vibes.
Another place that always fascinated me was Link's basement.
Great video, I love these videos.
Spheal!!
The basement is another good one! So odd that such a dark, obscure place should be right in Link's house.
I love Link's basement, cause it feels like there should be more in there (but also not..?), and also in the original Wii version I liked to scare myself by looking at "Dark Link" in the mirror with all the lights off.
Ye
15:15 Learning that you can look up at the sky in Hyrule Castle Town in Twilight Princess is the kind of stuff I subscribed for. More please!
Just went through something really rough, and while I was initially processing it I had this video going. Something about how calm and peaceful it was, how genuine the emotions were, really resonated with me and made me feel less alone. Maybe that’s silly, but genuinely, thank you.
Hi! I teach media at a school for neurodivergent kids grades 6-12 and I showed this video as an example to my Content Creation class. They died laughing everytime you use the flip transition and now I am affraid they will use that transition in all of their videos. When I explained your other series on video game unemployment rates, they wanted me to reach out and ask if you have any professional credentials regarding census calculations or mathematics. This never occurred to me, but is fairly on brand for our class. Anyway, great work and great video. Thanks on behalf of your new young fans at our school.
ZERO PROFESSIONAL CREDENTIALS. I was kind of a bad student because I was too anxious to turn in my homework. But I like learning and researching things so I’ve done a lot of reading about the real-life Bureau of Labor Statistics and I actually visited their building in Washington DC but they wouldn’t let me in because they said it was really boring inside and I wouldn’t want to see it. Shout out to the youth. Rock and roll.
I got chills when you walked onto the bridge infront of Hyrule Castle. It's freaky.
I grew up with the GameCube version of the game exclusively, so whenever I see footage of Twilight Princess that has been flipped (wii/wiiu hero mode) it automatically takes on a level of uncanny for me. I’ve played Twilight Princess more than any other Zelda, so to see extremely familiar maps made unfamiliar with just that simple change shifts the vibe of the whole game for me.
I also feel like you could make like four of these videos out of just Twilight Princess, and I would immediately watch all of them. I love this series a lot, keep it up.
I had the opposite! I grew up with the Wii version, and playing the Wii U version was so strange.
12:22 the fact that i remember this random spot is so funny to me, i really been to every nook and cranny of this game when i was a kid
I remember hearing of people trying to find the beta forest and such. It made me really look at all the odd cliffs and ends you could reach in this. Something about opening up and going to the oddest out of the way places in this game just hits different it feels more special and tucked away.
I was obsessed with finding the beta forest! It's such a shame that game rumours like that can't really exist anymore, because it sure added so much more mystery to Twilight princess
@@Lemon_squeeYes! The Triforce rumors for OoT caused me to do the same for that game back in the day, as well as dive into magazines and such for more beta/early screenshots.
This was the first Zelda game I ever played and I bloody love it. I used to sit in the hot spa on top of Kakariko Village and deperately try to imagine the feeling of the warm relaxing water.
When I was little, I used to revisit boss rooms in Twilight Princess once they were safe after beating the boss just to kind of get lost in the design. The different areas in TP always felt really special to me, even the parts of them that seem unremarkable and odd, so it's nice to see you point out specific areas I can remember just looking at and appreciating.
As a kid I would go to a children’s museum that had a forest themed play area, and you mentioning the indoor/outdoor vibe of the forest temple reminded me of it ❤
As a video essayist myself I must say a improvised jazz essayist is the coolest thing ever lol also great concept of showing these weird places in game worlds, would love to see you do this with dark souls 1! I love that world and the little weird places throughout it
I watched your videos a few months ago they’re good I forgot about them until now thank you. I’ll make dark souls content in about 8 months. Would you like to loosely keep in touch by commenting on each others videos every few months?
@@any_austin yes, that would be wonderful.
I didn't exactly need the existential dread within the first 3 minutes but thank you for helping me wake up
love the way the waterfall looks from below, and bonus points for it lagging the game. thats real power, in a game, when something slows down time with its sheer weight
You really are the embodiment of improvised jazz and im here for it.
Yes two or three 4-secondish clips of the area at the end of each segment would be very cool to immerse ourselves in the oddity of the place before we move on.
You ever watch a video and think, "ah, this content is weird." I love videos like that. Thanks for the new video!
6:09 woah, I’ve never played Twilight Princess but I immediately thought of the river section in RE4. Man, I got SO close to emulating it, but my pc isn’t powerful enough to be a GameCube. It played through the whole introduction just fine, then catastrophically chugged as soon as I left the village. That was such a bummer
I’ve been going to sleep to a commentated twilight princess speedrun for the last month or so, excited to see these places again in a new context, and to return to them later having contemplated what would otherwise be missed
I was hoping someone would mention TP speedruns in here. I swear any% gives me mild anxiety every time I see any of the Hyrule Field chasms now.
i definitely think a good stylistic idea for this series going forward would be to start and end each segment with moments of ambience so the audience gets the chance to feel out the area before you talk about it, then when you're done we get to sit with it again after hearing what you've said
love these videos, feels good to see someone else mention these kinds of places. all of TP feels so... translucent. like things exist just because, it's almost liminal, which I guess fits the theme of twilight. I'd love to see a two hour long video on just this game
Thanks Austin. I would gladly listen to longer improvised philosophical jazz riffs from your mind. I feel lucky to have come across this channel in the last few years. Always looking forward to whatever you come out with next. I’d love to see more longer series like 100 deaths or less, though I’m sure those series take a lot of work to edit/film especially considering an effort/views ratio.
The space in front of Hyrule Castle is also weird at some point in the story where its clear and sunny in Castle Town and then when you walk toward the space it starts pouring rain the moment you cross the threshold iirc.
Twilight Princess is my favorite Zelda. I could walk through the map and experience it for hours.
That's like how it suddenly starts raining when you approach the back of the cemetery in Ocarina. Always freaked me out!!! D:
Also we share great taste in favorite Zelda games :D
This got surprisingly deep
That Goron mine bit just before the boss chamber is my favourite little place in the whole game.
This whole game always gave me eerie uneasy vibes. I remember watching my big brother play while I read the game guide to him and it was like watching a creepy movie
'The Gaping Maw of Mother Nature's Indifference' kinda strangely resonated with me
definitely need a part 2 for the weird places in the gerudo desert, snowpeak, and other progression regions.
For me the most unremarkable and odd place is the area where you howl to the Hero's Shade. So eerie
0:48 you come back later to get the heart piece that is rewarded from herding the goats.
I can't decide if the townspeople being completely oblivious about the state of the castle is really funny or really unnerving. It kinda fits thematically with how they interact with the twilight realm. They go about their lives thinking things are mostly normal, except they have actually become spirits.
Abzu has some incredible Sky Boxes and probably has some Odd and Unremarkable Places.
I seem to remember at least one deep sea canyon sort of area with some distinctly odd, video gamey geometry to it.
If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Easily your best one yet. Great commentary, the mountain pic discovery got me
I learned so much as a kid from this game. Being there for my friends, and when I thought I couldn’t do something I thought of tp link and i got a irl buff. The Zelda series is so special. To be able to play and experience such a masterpiece at such a young age and actually understand it is so awesome.
Bruh
Dude! I used to go back to the second spot in this video all the time during late game because that whole room always gave me such a vibe. I’d pretend to live there and I’d just leave my tv on in that spot and relax to the ambience.
in a way, you really were living there
I always loved the backgrounds in this game. Especially the hills around Ordon for some reason, something about them just feels so cozy and I wanted to walk around on them.
That, and they're on the total fringes of Hyrule and I always love those frontier places where anything could conceivably exist beyond the borders of the known land.
The hills and the forest on those extreme edges of the map are just filled with so much wonder!! :D
I always love standing on the bridge spanning the chasm leading from Ordon to Hyrule field and looking up the canyon towards the stark grey hills and just wondering what lies beyond ... ~
12:00 At the bottom of the pond where you get the zora suit at the kakariko graveyard, there is a rock you can explode to expose a tunnel that warps you to lake hylia. That "butthole" is the exit of that tunnel.
This entire game has such a weird feeling. Like it only wants you to see a very set path while in motion. The facade falls as soon as you stop and take a look.
I really really love twilight princess and I think one of the reasons why is because of its graphics. I don't think it would benefit from another revamp.
The low quality textures and sound mixed with the story and gameplay give it this weird half-liminal half-alive feeling that I haven't got from any other game.
It's like a vibe that would be nearly impossible to recreate. Everything looks diluted.
One of my favorite places in the game is in the snow area on the way up the mountain. There are just some random places that are out of the way but have no use.
It just dawned on me that I've been watching since the Eggbusters/GoNintendo days. And it's really cool to see you still goin, but also finding success on the platform. Nice to see.
Technically a reason to go back to Ordon Ranch. There's a heartpiece if you herd fast enough and also some buried rupees in the shed by the mailman who appears there.
And the postman is hiding in the barn.
The chasm in that part of Hyrule field actually lines up perfectly with the Zora river on the map. You traverse these areas several times throughout the game
So it’s supposed to be part of the river but the water hasn’t returned.🤔
@@DarkMirria1 It is part of the river. It's just in a deep chasm
@@isaac_aren That’s what I said. How and or why did it become such a deep seamlessly bottomless chasm?
@@DarkMirria1 With them being so thin I'd be inclined to say earthquakes splitting the land open. Erosion would make something much wider unless there happened to be a long, deep, and thin area of soft rock
@@isaac_aren Do you think (hypothetically) it could be possible for it to return to it’s original hight, as in a reverse? The river I mean.
The thing about Lake Hylia being so empty has a bit of an unintended lore aspect. Just hours or days ago in-game the entire lake was drained, and its likely it had been that way for days in-game. So anything that had lived there- fish, plants, etc.- had died long before Link got there and fixed it. The fact that one small fishing spot with a few fish is a miracle considering the utter environmental disaster that had befallen it. The fish probably made their way into the lake from the underground connection with the pond from Kakariko graveyard, meaning there is a chance for recovery, tho it'll probably be years if not decades before that happens.
Kinda adds to the grimness of the atmosphere of the game. On the surface things look alright, but look underneath and you can see the damage done by Ganondorf's meddling.
9:26 always loved the music for night in this game and here it really fits the bizarre feel of looking over a bottomless pit thats naturally in the world
There’s something about that theme, it’s kinda haunting but relaxing I love it
Yeah...I also felt slight apocaliptic vibes playing it, but I never formed this thought completely
That last bridge area reminds me of when I went to Nagoya Castle in Japan. It's a pretty popular tourist spot so in the main area, it's incredibly noisy. But there is a side path you can go down that leads to a bridge, and there a gate and a bunch of sandbags. You're far away enough that all the sound of tourists is dampened enough to be ignorable (it was also raining when I was there, so that probably helped.
The gate has an info plaque, so it seems intended for you to be there. But despite being overcrowded, basically, no one was there.
Anyways, thanks again for this. I've been loving this series. Just a really simple, fun, and unique idea.
Twilight Princess is basically "Unremarkable and Odd Places: The Game." Everything, from the overworld maps to the individual rooms in dungeons, feels like they made it, filled it up with enemies and decorations, then tripled its size but just spread the objects around instead of adding more.
That mountain at 7:27 is only in the HD version. The original texture is much darker and more "Gamecube-like."
4:57 Ha, the water changed back to purple - like it was when the boss was alive - for like a frame or three. That was interesting to see.
Twilight Princess was the first game I played as a kid that made me feel like I was in a waking dream, and it absolutely captivated me. Like it was a Place with a capital P. But I never realized until now that the feeling it gave me was at least partially a result of this weird emptiness stuff. It’s one of the most common criticisms people make of the game. And yeah, you can tell the execution wasn’t quite there. But it’s interesting to think of it as a stepping stone in the history of game design. They were still figuring out what would eventually become the open world concept, adding more places for the player, as you say, to “walk through the loading screen.” Everything feels bigger and closer to boundless even if there isn’t a lot going on. And maybe it’s the nostalgia talking, but I do love how liminal Twilight Princess feels. It suits the story and the tone.
When I was younger, I used to walk around in game worlds trying to appreciate the work that the designers put into the game. I didn’t want to miss a fish or a butterfly. Glad to see that there’s a channel dedicated to appreciating the little and unremarkable things in games. It brings me back to the old days where games were magical to me.
One place that seemingly nobody ever goes because there’s no reason to go is the upper level of Hyrule Castle town in the main square. There’s people to talk to and a Goron shopkeeper if I recall.
Yay! My favorite video series of yours, on one of my favorite games. Warms the soul (Also that underwater booty hole is the shortcut between the Kakariko Graveyard and the Lake)
I play your music when I'm hosting game nights at my house. Its popular.
Hey thanks
Thank you for doing this for Twilight Princess. It's probably tied with OoT as my favorite Zelda game.
Maybe the reason they left Lake Hylia so empty is because it was all dried up by Zora’s Domain freezing over? Only the deeper bit with the Lakebed Temple still had water and so still has plants when the whole lake was refilled. Still would’ve been nice to see some kind of plants though since the lake wasn’t really dried up for THAT long.
i'm honestly surprised you didn't talk about the hyrule castle foyer. it's massive and creepy with the flute of the castle theme whispering in your ear, and for some reason the only way to exit the room and get further into the castle is to clawshot your way higher with the chandeliers
I think the goron up on the secret house balcony mentions that hes the only one who has noticed the giant twilight prism over the castle. I think the idea is that the people in the town are so wrapped up in their lil weird lives that they dont even look up to notice. Or perhaps its just hard to see over the tall walls unless you own property that is higher up
Austin is the only person on the planet who would ever notice the discrepancy between a tiny mountain image and the rest of the area. Great stuff as always.
love this video! the outer rim of the lakebed temple (where the bridges are) and the brief climb just inside the boss room of city in the sky always gave me this vibe, too. gonna watch the whole series now 🔥
This game was my playground for so many years, its really fun to see your perspective on these little areas that feel so familiar and strange
9:38 Jesus Christ, that line goes hard. Definitely keep the commentary on these 🙏
this game has a special place in my heart, but for a weird reason. hear me out, back when it came out, I was 17 and had to move out of my home becasue my mother was an abusive alcoholic. It was short notice when I moved, so I moved in with a family friend who unfortunately was a low level Yakuza. It was good at first, but all kinds of weird and dangerous shit was happening in his house while I was home. So, I would play this game and lock myself in the room while I could hear people fighting, taking drugs or doing heaps of bad stuff. So, Id be locked in my room for up to 12 hours at times and I had cans of food hidden under my bed and Id pee in bottles and play this zelda game and studying English textbooks which kept me sane and I felt safe playing it for a year that i lived there, so I wont ever forget every point of this zelda
Whoa I hope you don’t still currently have to pee in bottles and hide from a bunch of traumatic stuff that’s crazy
@@any_austin not all dude! That was like 19 years ago. Fortunately Zelda Twilight princess dominates my memories from then. Thanks for your response. I have a million crazy game related stories
But this was most appropriate as
I used to sit in a boat in the fishing area for hours to Escape my reality
Yes! I always felt staring into the twilight barrier shielding the Hyrule Castle and just being around that empty area next to the center of Castle Town is just soooo weird. I'm glad I'm not the only one. For me it always gave me like some kind of strange existential dread feeling being around in that area.
maybe that's why the guards don't go there...
I love these unremarkable and odd places vids. Especially Zelda/Nintendo
9:51 the stark lack of any aquatic life in the lakebed makes me feel like I'm looking below the surface of the Dead Sea. For there to not be a single fish or plant, aside from the token fishing weed, suggests there's a hydrogen sulfide vent spewing into the water, killing anything that might live there. The bubbling bootyhole really hammered this theory home for me
I really like this series because, well... it's the kind of stuff I like to do myself when playing video games. Checking out weird, out of the way things just out of curiousity and consider what it could be in-universe. It's also why I love Immersive Sims so much, because those are filled with this kind of stuff and encourage exploration.
Would love to see a video on a Hitman, Thief, Tomb Raider or Dishonored game. Any of the games in these franchises, really.
I always thought it was just me! :D