It’s not as big as you think 

I feel like Twilight Princess Hyrule Field definitely makes itself seem bigger by having all the important locations in the middle of the map (aside from the Faron region) and then having Hyrule Field stretch around the outskirts of the rest of the map, and allowing you to circle the entire way around without encountering a loading screen if you take the right paths. It's kinda like how Lon Lon Ranch took up a good portion of the middle of Ocarina of Time's Hyrule Field.

If you look at the detailed Hyrule maps, the infinite death pits in the Elden province are where the Zora river flows. So when you are in the bird flying minigame up the river, you are technically going through those big dark chasms.

The size gives it verisimilitude. TP's Hyrule Field is basically the smallest possible size they could get away with and still have it feel like you're actually travelling between different locations.

Personally, I liked the world's size for making Epona actually necessary to use. In Ocarina, Epona is quite literally just a side quest and is not necessary to finish it. In Twilight Princess, she is necessary and plays a role in gameplay and setpieces. Also, Twilight Princess' cave systems and hidden puzzles (like the ice puzzle in the Lanayru province) make it so fun to explore, even if the stuff in between isn't the most amazing.

What a great episode of "Austin says some stuff about a game I've never played" 10/10

Having played Twilight princess at launch on the wii, I was in awe walking through Hyrule Field for the first time. I was very satisfied with the amount of secrets as the game kept you coming back to discover new things like puzzles, chest, and heart pieces, as you progressed in the game and obtained more items. There doesn't need to be an overwhelming amount of things to do like skyrim to be considered good. I like that the game lets you breathe and enjoy the beautiful scenery, music, and backdrops of the world in between quests and dungeons.

TP's Hyrule Field felt so impressive back to me back in the day. I loved watching the shadows of the clouds pass by as I ran around on horseback. I'm a fan of the dollhouse approach that makes the world feel bigger than it actually is - in fact, I think it would be good if more games returned to world maps around this size.

The best part of Hyrule field in twilight princess is just seeing it progressively open up more and become more active especially around castle town (like the goron and malo mart stuff and small things like agitha going out to get bugs). That is one of my favorite parts of tp and makes it feel like you're really making a difference. Otherwise yeah it's just big for big.

Generally, I prefer smaller, more detailed world spaces over larger empty ones, but the latter can be advantageous. It can give more focused moments additional room to breathe, like a quiet moment right after a high-emotion scene in a movie: You have extra downtime to ruminate on story beats or wind down after an intense bit of gameplay. It can also help to convey how desolate a setting is - Shadow of the Colossus is a great example. Overall though, I'm glad we've mostly moved past the phase of games needing to sell you on how big their world is.

“If you think it’s bad, say you think it’s bad, and keep talking” - good advice for everything

The indiscernable difference between it being bigger and smaller that you're looking for is the fact that if it was smaller, having a horse wouldnt be nearly as exciting. And given how much the game wants you to ride your horse, and given how much of an improvement that is from ocarina of time's horse riding (and majora's and wind wakers travel combat), Id say hyrule field succeeds in doing what it set out to do. I remember being a lot more into the riding in twilight princess and it making for great moments that wasnt offered in the other games. Botw has this too of course, but because there are a lot of areas you have to climb and since you can teleport near everywhere, and since the horse movement is also pretty automatic (you hardly control the damn thing) it doesnt really feel like a game very friendly for horse combat or riding. If you're not a big fan of horse combat or whatever thats fine, I think that does answer your reason of "its bad/good and this is what that means". For a game about actual exploration, I'll give botw points for that, but for a game that kind of centers around set-piecy, cinematic moments, Twilight Princess uses what it does have very well. I think they ultimately choose to achieve different things

I'm definitely in the camp that a slightly-too-big world with lots of walking and looking at stuff makes a game more engaging. I like when the game encourages learning landmarks and efficient pathing and punishes forgetting to do something while you were there. I also agree that the goodies you get in a game are more exciting when there's a little scarcity. I'm currently replaying paper mario, and I love how they kept all the numbers small. You do 1 damage for most of the first chapter, so it's awesome to be able to double bounce and do 1 damage twice. When you can finally do 5 damage in one hit you feel like a god. You can hold like 10 or so items, and only buy/sell/find one of one thing at a time, and only a different few things each part of the map, so it's worth figuring out what you like to carry and where to find it.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone so nonchalantly tear into a video game like this

It really tries to recapture that feeling of walking into OOT's Hyrule Field for the first time. Just a sense of overwhelming openness, designed to make the player feel small. If that's the goal, then I don't think every corner of Hyrule Field needs to contain curated content. My biggest complaint with games like Skyrim is that you can't walk ten steps without tripping over something significant. Let the world breathe.

My favourite part of the overworld in Twilight Princess wasn't the overworld itself, but the handful of bombable walls that led to LOOOONG cave systems. They seemed to go on forever, you had to go carefully and check that you've investigated every intersection, and as far as I remember everything in them was optional--just rupees, heart pieces, potions, etc. It harked back to that feeling of pure exploration from the very first Zelda on NES.

I personally like twilight princess way more than BOTW. It just has so much more character. It doesn't have as much "stuff", no doubt, but its limitations almost makes the game have a more mysterious and intangible air about it. The art, sound design, locations, and characters also feel so much more inspired to me. Its genuinely intriguing to me which is part of why I love it, but I also love the characters, the vibe, the temples, and the minigames. Something about BOTW ironically felt more empty and shallow to me, like nothing really had significance or consequence. I felt like BOTW allowed me to be lazy and find a way to cheese the puzzles. I realize this is a very unpopular opinion haha

I just beat this game 100% for the first time. I… agree. The biggest sin is locking so many objects to nighttime and then not giving the player a way to change the time, forcing them to check their phone for 6 minutes until the Poe appears

Finding Poe spirits, collecting goldenbugs, and having the mail man sprint along the quiet plains of Hyrule and break the tension just to give me a letter are good memories I’ll never forget from this game. :) Thank you Austin.

I’m glad you pointed out how terrible Death Mountain looks. To this day I still don’t know what I’m looking at

I remember when this game came out a lot of the excitement was tied to Epona being a really integral part with the new horseback combat mechanics as well as her having more story relevance. I think it makes sense that they purpose built Hyrule field for her and I personally recall it feeling more like a path that loops around the map than a big empty space.

I dunno I've always really liked TP and its environments. It can be a bit big but it overall feels like it was designed as a slower experience compared to other games. It's cool to take a few minutes to enjoy a ride from Ordon to Kakariko. It's cool that you can loop around the entire field with no loading zones.

Twilight princess is the most cinematic of the Zelda games. So just like a movie, the game uses the slow parts to build up tension that is relieved in a sudden burst, creating intense feelings that stick with people for a long time. That's why you'll find so many people nowadays saying that Twilight Princess is the best Zelda game.

I've been replaying Twilight Princess recently and realized that the dungeons are really the game's strong point. I still enjoy going through the field but remember how I felt first playing it, realizing it's actually a bunch of smaller fields that make the whole map feel bigger overall. But after playing much larger games I see now how quick it is to get across these fields and it seems like there may be some graphical illusion that makes them look a lot bigger.

Thank you for playing this game and keeping me from dropping money into my broke janky wii just so I could play this one more time. My favorite locations were Snowpeak Mountains (for the vibes) and the city in the clouds (for the anti-vibes) and I'm glad you gave them some recognition. I may not like your point on Hyrule Field as it hurts my boomer nostalgia, but you're right about one thing...we all fetishized Midna at some point in our lives.

yes! i love your closing thoughts here. why are we all so fixated on being the judge of art goodness when all that does is shrink the discussion to a boring yes/no question. tell me how you feel when experiencing the thing, try to articulate why it has that effect, point at things and ask if they're weird! make your art critique into art in and of itself. not everything has to be a quantification.

I don't know how much I would like it now, but back when I was playing this on my Gamecube I loved the open horseback stuff. It felt epic, and the horseback fights with Moblins was so cool, it reminded me of Lord of the Rings. Twilight Princess was a blast.

Just woke up from a 10 year coma. Glad your channel hasn't changed!

This was a really nice video, it helped me think about how perspective and environmental design make us believe the size of the playfield in a game is bigger than it actually is.

Twilight Princess is basically Liminal Spaces The Game before Liminal Spaces were an actual topic

This is beautiful. We need an unremarkable and odd places for twilight princess!

The weird thing to me is how little I remember of this field. I just remember it was exactly like I always dreamed zelda could be, right down to the horseback combat stretching across the field. I think it's because it's so empty and not very interactive, compared with the previous fields where you had a lot of like.. hey go roll into that tree, cut that grass, see if there's a secret bomb spot.

PS: I started writing this comment before I finished the video. Being big gives you a feeling of freedom that gives you a break in between the cramped dungeons. I think something that you're really neglecting to note is the horse. (Ya I know you did now) I mean if you could only ride your horse at top speed for like 10 seconds before you hit a wall, or if your horse was only slightly faster than walking, it would feel a lot lamer. To be honest, when warping is in the game, it's not like you're actually having to run through these fields constantly anyway (like you basically have to do in wind waker), so honestly, it functionally serves more of a way to make the game feel like it isn't all locked in doors. Personally, I actually have a lot of fond memories riding and running through these fields. For me it kinda has the chill vibe of a car ride. Who knows, maybe I'd be sick of it if the whole game was riding though this field, but since it's basically an optional activity, it really just lets you have a nice victory ride after clearing a dungeon you've been stuck in forever. I also never really went into the game expecting it to be realistic, so maybe that played a role. In case you are wondering, Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild are a toss up for my favorite game of all time. Some might be surprised to hear that, but as amazing as BotW's world is, I did kinda miss the aesthetically diverse and difficult dungeons from TP; that's a big part of Zelda for me.

Twilight Princess's overworld suddenly becomes populated with content once you get the Master Sword. Poes and hidden grottoes pop up when they previously didn't appear before. The problem is that the Master Sword unlocks fast travel and the main quest will have unlocked most of the portals up until that point...so there's no reason to explore the overworld again when this new content materializes into existence.

It feeling large invokes a specific feeling of a grand adventure, even if it's barren

Twilight Princess sticks in my mind because it came out as the exact same time as Okami, which is a mind-blowing, incredible game that also featured a wolf on its cover. Although now a beloved classic, at the time Okami came out it did so poorly in sales the studio shut down. I have always thought it is because people were only going to buy one "wolf" game ta a time, and Twilight Princess had the big Zelda name. Not that I hate it, actually it also sticks in my mind for the soundtrack and some really unique areas, but it is nothing compared to the beauty of Okami.

I feel like there's literally no other channel that's talking about and appreciating games in the same way that we see here. I love it.

I don't know if it's just because I'm high but this episode felt like the most ranty stream of consciousness. Like it made sense and felt totally abstract at the same time

I'm so happy for this hard hitting 16 year old journalism.

I remember fighting the bulblin king in that really cool horseback combat section being one of the high points of twilight princess. I remember one of the low points of twilight princess was when I went back to the area you fight him in, a weird outcropping of empty land seemingly surrounded by bottomless pits, and realized that it was just a boss arena with no value beyond that single set piece.

7:05 "Twilight Princess is a very boring game, but its moments of excitement are a lot more exciting than the least exciting moments in the game... which can sort of make a game like Twilight Princess for certain people stick in your memory a little more deeply than Breath of the Wild." You caught me red-handed - I'm that kind of person. I have to admit that I love TP in spite of its obvious flaws.

You know, the gorges actually make me think of something I hated in BoTW, which is the northern section of the map. I don't really like bottomless pits in level design, anyway. You look at a death pit and know there's nothing down there, but then get irritated because instead of having _nothing_ down there to explore, the game could have had _something_ instead? Invisible walls actually bother me far less in games than using canyons/gorges/bottomless pits to indicate the limit of the world.

One thing I really disliked about Breath of the Wild was the pattern of the shrines. You have to activate it, enter, and go down the elevator. At the end, you talk to the character, get the same item, and teleport out. Some of this is skippable, but it really doesn't make sense to repeatedly put the player through the same little scenes over and over, especially if it's not to serve as a loading screen. Somebody mentioned how you can warp in Twilight Princess so you can experience the large fields once or twice if you want. You don't get stuck in the repetitive, useless pattern of traveling through them over and over if you don't want to.

I bet there was pressure for the developers to make the game feel larger to look good up against the open world fad starting to catch on at the time. Note the comparison to Shadow of the Colossus.

It's so great seeing you make another video on my favorite game of all time! Funnily enough, at the time of this upload, I'm replaying Twilight Princess for like the 100th time haha. I'm very bias but TP's Hyrule Field is still my favorite - I love the music, all the locations, and everything you can do in each part of the field.

The "Flat cutout" of Hyrule Castle made me think, "Let's not go to Camelot, it is a silly place." But for real, most of the unconvincing distant landscapes are artifacts of this being a game originally designed for Gamecube where you would be playing in 480i resolution and those objects didn't need to be detailed because they were supposed to be blurry and distant. The HD remake of Twilight Princess didn't actually do much besides put more detailed textures on everything and make it run in 1080p.

It does remind me of how Morrowind felt like a much larger world just because of how slowly your character moved for much of it, and as you become more powerful and more swift the world becomes smaller and smaller. If Link was really big but his movement speed didn't scale up to that, it'd still feel big

Windwaker felt a lot bigger, maybe it was just harder to navigate...at the time Twilight Princess seemed really big

Crazy how twilight princess has just as empty of an open world as ocarina, but it’s art direction and (seemingly) vastness makes it so much better to navigate.

Some of my favorite parts of your videos is watching them on the clock so we both get PAID. ALSO SUPPORT THIS MANS PATREON SO HE CAN MOVE SOMEWHERE WITH BETTER INTERNET AND BRING BACK THE CHILL ZONE AND SHOW US COOL PLACES IN FLIGHT SIMULATOR

The fences on the wooden bridge are 2+ meters tall. That makes me believe they literally enlarged the map after they designed it

For me the field is only memorable because of the things that take place in it, not the field itself. King bulblin fight, the freaking mailman run up to you with his eyes bulging out of his head like he's in the vacuum of space, catching bugs for a girl, some other interesting fights, and of course the Zant and Ganondorf fights I'll never get that mailman out of my head

“Here’s a nice cardboard cut out of Hyrule castle. Zoom in on that. That’s a classic.” 😂💀 The deadpan voice is chef’s kiss.

In a world of highly scripted video essays, there's something refreshing about hearing someone just ramble about something that interests them. With the caveat that the person has to be naturally entertaining enough that the viewer does not get tired of hearing them repeat themselves and stumble around. For me, austin strikes this balance.

You're a brave man. I once called TP boring on r/Zelda and I got death threats for 3 days.

The phrase if you think it's bad say it out loud and then keep talking is a phrase I think should be used more often.

I think Hyrule field in tp serves the same purpose as the ocean in Wind Waker. You’re meant to experience it on horseback, and the map just gives you a playground to run through, simulating travel across the countryside the same way wind Waker, and even phantom hourglass, simulate seafaring.

I would describe this video as "borderline incoherent" but also probably "my favorite thing I've seen you make"

I'm about to finish twilight princess for the first time (might get all the bugs and any left over side quests first so I've been putting it off for a few weeks) but I've never played a game before that annoyed me so frequently but was still so addicting and enjoyable. I've heard people talk about how a certain amount of jank can be charming and I definitely think that applies here, playing this game makes me so nostalgic for when games weren't so polished and perfect. I'm kind of hoping BOTW2 goes in a darker direction like this game and majora's mask did, based on the trailer I think it will but for some reason I can't get very hyped for it? I think I just got so tired of BOTW and just wanted a fresh, clean slate type of experience but I really hope it blows me away! Awesome video, I can't believe I never played TP sooner, I just love almost everything about it

Getting this post notification on my phone while doing homework was so wild I closed my computer

I remember buying a Wii back in the day so that I could experience the largeness of this field in glorious 480p

I mean, Breath of the Wild is also a dollhouse surrounded by bottomless pits, just with over a decade of hardware advancements to stretch out how big and intricate of a dollhouse your could make.

That's what she(Zelda) said.

I played Twilight Princess as a kid, and it's the Zelda game that had the strongest impressions on me. I never completed the game, although I think I only had like the last area left after the sky place, not sure. I distinctly remember the chickens in the sky, and the desert atop the plateaus beyond the horizon that you need a canon to reach. My childhood memories vastly misconstrued the canon. Like a vague thing I was sure was real. Like I knew the canon was real, but it had this puzzling vagueness about it in my memories. I think there is something so dreamy and impressive about launching oneself over the impenetrable border walls of videogames, revealing a completely new location and atmosphere. It was the foundation for so many fantasies and dreams. (And later when I played Mario64 on ds, I'd end up dreaming the same of the outside castle, and that waterfall beside it. I wanted to go up beyond the waterfall. And also to see what was ontop of the roof and behind the castle). I had many dreams that merged various places together. Some vague dreamy mishmashes. Places that puzzled me while playing, or seemed suspicious, my subconscious would make up secrets there for me to find. Such a peculiar game. The characters, the atmospheres, the artstyle, the sounds... the chicken people. Sus.

Breath of the Wild really just...bored me? I felt like it was a game that punished me for playing it with the durability system (not exactly level design) but it means I spent most of the game avoiding fights so the world felt very samey as a result.

I think, as I grow up and spend more time on larger games, I find that I don't have the same emotional connection I had as a child to the neat little things you find in a smaller world or smaller areas. No idea how to explain, but maybe an example will help? In The Witcher 3, I came across a beautiful garden with wooden lattices, it appeared to be very old and storied (as it was partially falling apart, I think) but I kind of just rushed through it, looking for The Next Thing. Meanwhile, as a child, I recall spending time in the room at the entrance of the Forest Temple of OoT, just hopping from tree to tree and enjoying the ambience. I still think about that garden though, so maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace at the time. Maybe I just spend too much time watching Austin's "weird and unusual places" videos.

I feel like the Zelda worlds keep expanding in both size and features that they maintain almost the same amount of density. I wonder if they might benefit from not expanding in size as much, and filling the empty space with more content. Imagine TP with BotW's tree and monster density, or the holes in OoT being BotW-style Shrines instead of the same grotto every time.

I appreciate seeing these more one off videos. Series are great too, but keeping different content in as well keeps things fresh. Also it makes sense given the game is literally about Twilight, but TP's sunset/sunrises are simply gorgeous

Breath of the Wild thinks Twilight Princess is positively adorable.

I wonder how much the size of Twilight Princess' Hyrule Field had to do with the beta Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time (as seen in the Giga Leak, iirc). Maybe the devs saw it as a chance to do what the N64 just couldn't handle. Your concept of them just blowing up an actually small thing very nicely sums up that early OoT field's feel for sure. Thanks for articulating that, and for this video!

i dont really find the game boring except for the section where you go find the book pages that was a little slow could it have had more quests and depth to the field sure but the devs were pressed for time for and it still came out as one of my favorites of all time

5:46 Death Mountain looks like goddamn cabbage and I fear I'll never be able to unsee it again.

Breath of the Wild is all open world, environmental puzzles and physics, and has much much less in terms of story and dungeons, whereas Twilight Princess is almost the opposite, having loads of story, dungeons and minigames and probably the best open world in terms of scale they could make at the time with the limitations they had.. I think people need to respect the level of bespoke content Twilight Princess has. Plus, I quite like the haunting loneliness and melancholy of the TP overworld as well, it goes with the theme of Darkness & Light being two sides of the same coin, and a world where sometimes things are just meant to be negative and not necessarily have a happy ending.

what I think is kinda cool is that the emptiness of the field makes the field seem bigger. If the field were smaller it would be denser, with more things to do. But because they enlarged something small essentially, it makes the field more barren, thus creating the illusion that it was big.

I always felt that the field in Twilight Princess was very tedious, but I kind of feel that way about most of the ‘boring hub’ areas in zelda games. Good video.

love how austin just gets distracted by random things mid sentence hes just like me

I think it’s a lot more fun that the field is big initially but feels a little smaller when you get your horse. The difference in the initial slow toil vs barreling through it all later is a fun contrast.

I remember being excited about the possibly of having a scene where Link fights alongside an army against an army of monsters and maybe that was the reason for the size of the map. Never happened but it could have.

Hyrule Field is neither too big nor too small. It's precisely as big as it means to be.

Great video. One thing I found engaging about TP Hyrule Field was the emptiness for setting the scene of a world that has been stripped away- that extra moment of contemplation especially without the horse - just listening to the music and feeling how empty it is in comparison to the vibrant small community you start in. It really made the switch from environments and gravity of the world being unpleasant

You're so right, I wish people would waste less mental energy on "good" and "bad" games and just open themselves up to what a game is offering

I think the only reasons Hyrule field is so large is for the final battle arena and that one protect the cart mission that plagues my childhood.

In Red Dead Redemption 2, you actually spend the majority of the game in an area that was one of those cheap, deceptive far off regions that gave the illusion of size in rdr1. I find it very strange to go back to rdr1 now and look at New Hanover, Lemoyne and the north half of West Elizabeth before they really existed

Babe, wake up, Any Austin posted something related to things I enjoy

I agree with your philosophy on criticism and analysis of games.

One of the reasons Hyrule field is so large is because mechanically it had to accommodate the final chase/fight on horseback. It also needed to be expansive and somewhat barren for the story to feel more impactful. Twilight Princess is very linear and it is very focused on building atmosphere and characters. Midna’s lament wouldn’t feel impactful if the way to get her to Hyrule Castle was super short. You spend quite a lot of time in wolf form as well, which is faster than Link but slower than Epona. Having quadrupedal motion changes the perspective of distance while maintaining the sense of scale that the world has. Hyrule field in general is there to give a sense of scale to the world. It’s the connection to other regions and one of the zones you traverse a lot. BotW doesn’t need to do scale like that because it literally has much farther view distance to begin with. BotW needs to also put much more rewards into the overworld to get the player to move around and explore, because the story is not linear and frankly it there’s a lot less focus on it. Twilight Princess is very theme park while BotW is very sandboxy, outside of the great plateau there’s not really a push towards a specific directive. Compare that to TP which 90% of the time has a clear directive to get to a specific place and fulfill a specific objective. They’re really not comparable.

You know, everything is bigger in Texas. Maybe Hyrule is secretly Texas.

The 12 Angry Men reference really caught me off guard, that was hilarious

this just sounds like you've been filtered by BoTW. TP Hyrule Field was very much impressive for its time with a scenic atmosphere, and you make it sound more desolate than OoT's.

To me, it was made in a way where you would race through it with Epona in mind, like a giant straightforward highway. It's not anything like BOTW or TOTK. Yes, it's lacking in detail, and it's really just green fields, some water, and gray, stony areas. And one interconnected pathway.

death mountain is a ball for some reason. maybe they wanted it to be the moon, but I noticed this when using an infinite double clawshot code.

Horse riding feels like something you're actually doing so you can cross features sections of lands that you are just meant to ride through meanwhile I will have much less patience for walking through an empty space with nothing in it. The speed does play a big part in it.

The concept of measuring something not in units of length but in time is something I do a lot in videogaming. The experience of the player comes in a change in surrounding/environment. How much time that takes makes a big difference. I bet you could remember a time in a game where your movement speed is greatly reduced (ie stuck walking) when in a beautiful/impactful area. Now imagine all the different speeds you could have available; some players would zoom right by without even noticing. This must be balanced with how much time it takes to cross an area because time is a fundamental resource the player has limited access. The result is to think of a space in terms of time, and to make the time they spend as entertaining as possible. I think all games try and balance this issue of exploring a "space". weather that may be an actual map or the 64 squares of a chess board, the rate of exploration is commonly more important than the space to be explored. I really like these videos you make. it makes me feel less crazy knowing im not the only person thinking of these kinds of things while playing games.

Something Twilight Princess did that unfortunately hasn't really returned are the hidden caves that lead to actually pretty sizeable areas- not talking about the Cave of Ordeals. One of the caves expands on the Iron Boots from the Goron Mines, another uses the Ice Blocks from Snowpeak, and so on. They have Heart Pieces and other rewards. Hoping these mini dungeons reappear in future titles, plus minibosses, would make exploration more rewarding.

This video is not-so-secretly really smart. Your views on game aesthetics always leave an impact on me.

I feel like only someone who played Twilight princess 5 years after it’s release could possibly think it’s a boring game

I really really really like the ending note and that's why I'll keep coming back to this channel. It's so tired to just say a game is bad. It's like, okay...? Are you implying that I shouldn't play it? What are the greater implications of it being bad? And what do you think about it beyond that?? Cheers Austin

I’m so glad people are finally realizing Twilight Princess is just a really sophisticated illusion

and suddenly i want to play twilight princess (again)

The default of botw is that little twilight princess claw shot pit but then it also has even bigger more standout-y moments like the dragons and mazes to replicate that same experience of excitement that tp has

to be fair, breath of the wild even has death planes at the edge of the world.