A bit of a drop-off down to your more usual middling game adaptation jank.
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Akira Himekawa
Translation: John Werry
What They Say
Once upon a time, wizards tried to conquer the Sacred Realm of Hyrule. The Spirits of Light sealed the wizards’ power within the Shadow Crystal and banished them to the Twilight Realm beyond the Mirror of Twilight. Now, an evil menace is trying to find Midna, Princess of the Twilight Realm, and the fragments of the Shadow Crystal to gain the power to rule over both the Twilight Realm and the World of Light.
Link awakens in the Twilight Realm, in the form of a wolf! Here he meets Midna, and she escorts Link to Hyrule Castle where none other than Princess Zelda bestows a question upon him—if the world is to be saved from the encroaching darkness, Link must recover the shards of the Shadow Crystal. The task will be long and difficult, and Link will need to use new powers he doesn’t know he has!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
This time around, we actually open on a young Zelda seeing back to when the “demon thief” was imprisoned into the Twilight Realm (making this a flashback within a flashback, by the way), so… even if you haven’t played the game itself, if you’re at all familiar with the series, you should know that it’s pretty clear where the plot is heading, even if that’s not a huge surprise. Oh, and she gets a mysterious warning about how she must not look into the shadow because it will look back, before we jump back to the present. So we get a depressed Zelda who clearly feels responsible for what happened to the kingdom. If nothing else, it’s at least nice to see a little of the titular character for the series, even if she doesn’t actually get to do much here.
We then rejoin Link… as a wolf… in a cell… with a little demon imp, Midna. Which would be much more mysterious if the start of the manga didn’t spoil who Midna really was, but whatever. Link’s freaking out and Midna asserting control naturally follows, which is largely just so-so. But then Midna leads Link to Zelda, and the moment is a pretty nice one for all three characters involved. It just flows well and makes for a nice scene.
Then from there, the back half of the book more or less goes to the events of the first dungeon from the game. And it’s here that… well, things get into that awkward video-game adaptation territory proper, where things just feel off because this stuff wasn’t inherently made to be a standalone story. So we get a story about a boss monkey terrorizing other monkeys with a magic boomerang, because he’s tainted by evil twilight junk. And it’s frankly about as exciting as that sounds, which is to say… not very much. And it’s also a shame in that the whole actual temple is just cut out, so it’s more just Link running into the woods, fighting a monkey, and then suddenly a big plant monster gets summoned and he fights that too. It’s all not terrible per-se, but it’s definitely just plain not especially worthwhile and the kind of thing you’d expect from one of these adaptations, which is a shame, as the series was doing pretty well in the first volume.
In Summary
While the first volume really knocked it out of the park for a videogame adaptation, I… can’t quite say that this time around. The first half holds together okay, though outside of one real solid scene, it’s nothing too exceptional either. But then in the back half the first “dungeon” of the game is covered (without the whole dungeon part), and it’s just the sort of bland, kind of awkward thing you’d expect from something trying to adapt a part of a game that wasn’t just pure story. It’s not terrible, but it’s… also not very good, either. I still have some hope that maybe later volumes will manage to make such things a little more interesting. But at least for now, this is a definite step down from the first volume into more so-so territory, so perhaps waiting and seeing how the series progresses further would be a good move.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: August 8th, 2017
MSRP: $9.99