As the youngest sibling of three, with my brothers being twins, I didn’t seek out what games to play but was happy with the treasures my brothers had found instead. Since my brothers are older than me, they usually knew what games were good, which ones to buy, and I simply played whatever they had brought home. Luckily for me, I liked their treasures, and they let me play them too, even when I accidentally deleted their save file in Super Mario Sunshine.
But that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t dream of playing certain games, too. It was the early 2000’s and it was easy to use a image search engines to look up characters from video games. I remember thinking that Din, Nayru, and Farore from the Oracle of Seasons and Ages games looked very different from Ocarina of Time, wondering if they could be the same as the trio who created the Triforce. I also remember seeing a teeny-tiny Link in what looked like a clover forest.
Fast forward roughly eight or so years and I owned my first smartphone. The technology was new to me, and it felt wrong to press flat buttons and application icons on the screen without getting any feedback, except for a tiny sound effect. A part of me missed having real buttons to press, but I quickly got used to the screen.
Applications are a big feature with smartphones, and I initially didn’t have that many installed. However, my brothers had already done some preparations before I received it, and one of the apps worked as a game console. Curious, I opened it to see what games my brothers had installed. The Minish Cap was there, and it might have been one of few installed games, but if there were, I don’t remember them at all and they didn’t matter; all I could think of was the Hero with a funny little bird hat I had seen from the promotional art when I was a kid, and the Hero I had bought in the shape of a pin years ago at the nerdy bookstore in Old Town.
My smartphone quickly became a handheld console instead. I remember following a very lively Princess Zelda back into town and Hyrule Castle, that the Picori Sword held an important role in the ongoing festival, and meeting Vaati a lot earlier than I thought I would. The adventure had just begun but I had one small problem or, well, two, actually. The first being the touch screen; I was still getting used to pressing buttons with no feedback which led me to missing raising the shield to take cover when I was so sure I had indeed pressed a button, and the correct one, too. My fingers also had to stay on the screen the entire time or else Link would stay still in an idle animation, which meant that a small part of the screen was blocked from my view by my fingers.
The second problem was perhaps the biggest: the app drained the battery, fast. This meant that I played the game for a little while before I had to charge the phone again. It was a small reminder that my phone was, after all, a phone and not the game console I pretended it to be.
I played the game. I charged the phone. I waited paitently and checked for the battery percentage to be full before starting the app to play the game again. And this worked for a while as I made my way out of Hyrule Town, met that mysterious bird-hat Ezlo, even some Minish. I think I even managed to defeat the Big Green Chuchu as well. But it was when I got back to Hyrule Field when I felt that this wouldn’t work much longer.
Since the app drained the battery so quickly and I kept recharging it, the phone was almost constantly hot. And I don’t mean that it was just warm, it was hot like a slice of buttered toast, hotter than it would be from running other apps. My palms could feel how dangerously hot it was, and since I didn’t want my new phone to break immediately, I thought it was best to uninstall the app. So I did, and my small progress got deleted as well.
It’s been more than 10 years since I played The Minish Cap, and I’ve yet to finish it. To be honest, I don’t know if I ever will. But since I have the goal to play all the Zelda games at least once, I haven’t given up yet. Some day, one day, when I have the time and means to, I’ll definitely give the game another go, get to save all my progress, and maybe then will I fully understand why this game became such a fan favorite.
