Also known as, fuck you, not another rupee!

Warning, strong language concerning Annoyances with a Capital A.

This is a blog about me playing Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap. In short, I decided to go back and play Minish Cap. I then decided to go and rant about Minish Cap. I was bored, I had a gba emulator, need I any more reason?

While playing (and thoroughly beating) the game, two thoughts started growing in my mind. The following is a sarcastic rant on those thoughts.

For the first thought, the title says it all. Seriously, Minish Cap, what the hell? Why are you so stingy with those little hearts?

You can kill dozens and dozens of enemies and not get any heart drops - not a single one. The greatest danger in this game doesn't come from bosses, or even strong enemies. It comes from those weak, annoying enemies that always die in one or two hits. They are essentially poking you with a dull stick, doing an infinitesimally small fraction of damage compared to your health as a whole, and it is death by a thousand papercuts. You take a tiny hit here, a bit of damage there and then all of a sudden HOLY SHIT IM DYING BEEP BEEP BEEP SHUT UP YOU GODDAMN HEALTH INDICATOR, which is when you realize that you've gone through an entire dungeon without refilling a single health icon because none have appeared AT ALL. This mostly applies to inside dungeons. At least outside, you usually have grass to cut or something. Except Mt. Crenel. Pretty much nothing drops health here, there are giant nigh-unavoidable rocks while climbing, goddamn hopping enemies, and you have to progress through this area when you have like 5 max hearts. Did I mention that this area is also filled with enemies masquerading as rocks, and that you can't tell if its an enemy or a rock until you are too close to react to the suddenly-appearing-and-fast-moving rock crab THING? Oh well, at least dungeons have pots, right? I mean, that *is* the point of pots in dungeons in the LoZ series - you break them for a heart here, a rupee there - right? Going through a dungeon, keep your health filled by random acts of ceramic destruction… wait, no. Hearts in pots? Hah! In Minish Cap, pots drop nothing. Except the occasional bombs or arrows when you already have the maximum amount of bombs and arrows. And sometimes rupees. But hearts? Outside of pots that are specifically tagged to drop hearts every time you break them (pretty much only found in the room unlocked by the boss key), you can forget about it. You can smash pot after pot after pot, and unless you are a lucky bastard, it's usually easier to exit the dungeon, and find some grass to cut or something. I've played pretty much all of the zelda games, and compared to the others, Minish Cap is downright stingy when it comes to hearts.

Which brings me back to my second thought. I've said it once in this blog, but let's recap:

Fuck you, not another rupee!

In most zelda games, rupees have a use. There are items to buy, fun minigames to play, and rupees remain useful at least somewhat throughout the game. Which is great, because rupees drop abso-fucking-lutely everywhere in zelda games. You find them in potsgrasschestsbushestreesrocksspidersbats and a crapload of other places too. Rupees are so plentiful that if Hyrule started using folding currency, you'd never want for toilet paper. This holds true for Minish Cap - in this game, you'll have so many rupees you won't know what to do with them. And when I say that you won't know what to do with them, I do mean that you literally won't know what to do with them because there is nothing to do with them. You will constantly have the maximum amount of rupees without even trying. The amount of rupees that exists in chests alone far outweighs any possible amount of purchasing - and this is not including the chests that magically appear when you fuse kinstones with everyone.

What can you do with rupees in Minish Cap? Aside from a few areas where Deku Shrubs run an extortion ring, pretty much zero. There's a Hyrule Town Shop, a "dream arcade" that costs only 10 rupees and you'll only ever play it once (for a piece of heart), a pastry shop with stale bread that gives you kinstones (which you'll already have loads of), a double-or-nothing gambling game (oh look, spend rupees to get more rupees… maybe…) and a guy who sells picolyte (which is used to find more rupees).

Now to be fair, there are 3 'useful items' in the Hyrule town shop - a Big Wallet, a Boomerang, and a Big Quiver. You could definitely spend money on those items. Except… the Big Wallet is actually only one of 3 wallet upgrades, the other two of which can be gotten for free pretty much around the same time as the Big Wallet becomes available for purchase. In fact, I find it a point of interest that of the three items mentioned here that I marked as 'useful', one is an item that simply lets you hold even more money, and in fact I only mentioned it because its so freakin' cheap. Now, the boomerang - an actually useful item. This is actually worth buying. It is basically the only thing in the game worth actually spending money on. And that is saying a lot considering that this section of the blog is about how you always have way too much fucking money. Finally, the Big Quiver is pretty much useless purchase because unless you are an absolute arrow whore, you'll never run out of arrows because a) the bow is a shitty weapon that has a hideous firing delay which leads to b) an abysmal rate of fire coupled with the fact that c) the quiver starts with a 30 arrow capacity and finally d) pots and grass drop arrows faster Flash Gordon on crystal meth, you'll pretty much never need to spend 600 rupees on this. In the end of the game, the bow becomes slightly less shitty when you get the light arrows and a butterfly magically upgrades it to shoot faster, but it still sucks, and its the end of the game where 99% of the arrows that you'll ever fire have already been fired. So thats a purchase that you'll only buy because you have 999 rupees already, and literally have nothing else to spend money on.

And as far as the picolyte, what picolyte does is make things drop quicker. Except that picolyte is A) expensive which isn't a problem only B) it only lasts for a short-as-hell time and C) it is also useless - you'll pretty much guaranteed to always have full rupees, bombs, and arrows, and loads of kinstones. This leaves only 2 useful picolytes. Green helps you find mysterious shells, which are absolutely useless because you can only use them to buy figurines which are also absolutely useless. As in they don't do anything. The other is red picolyte which helps you find hearts, only its always (and I do mean always) more worth it just popping a fairy in a bottle. In other words, green picolyte is also useless, and so is red picolyte. In fact, the only thing really worth buying (except for the boomerang, maybe, and the aforementioned Deku extortion) are Red Potions from Syrup the Witch, which ought to alleviate the problems mentioned in the first half of this blog, except that those bottles are always filled with fairies because of, you know, the faeries raising you from the dead and all. Plus keeping faeries in jars is cool, and not at all horribly sadistic.

The end result is that rupees are ridiculously plentiful, and fucking useless to the point of which there are several enemies that exist solely to reduce the amount of rupees you have. They do pretty much zilch damage to anything except for your wallet. One of them pretends to be a rupee to lure you close and then it swallows you, draining 20 rupees every second. Another is a red crow that if it hits you (and they are fast), you can easily lose over 100 rupees. And you won't even care.

Bonus thought:

Kinstones. They are these little halves of coins that you 'fuse' with random people, and it makes 'lucky' things happen. Everybody has them, everybody wants to fuse them… Seems straight-forward enough… But upon closer inspection, you can't help but think are these people all idiots or something? Everybody has these kinstones, and they are supposed to be really lucky, so why the devil aren't they fuzing kinstones with each other? Apparently, it is because they are as lazy as fuck, and never ask each other if they have a matching kinstone, even though A) they are so freakin popular and can be found pretty much anywhere and B) everyone is always talking about them. Hell, the entire purpose of most of the population of NPC's is so that you have more people to fuse kinstones with.

Now, to be fair, most kinstone pieces are not rotationally symmetric, and as a whole you always find left-handed kinstone pieces, while all of the NPC's have matching right-handed kinstone pieces. This means that you can always fuse with the NPCs - for gameplay reasons. However, it still brings up the question of why… You might think that maybe the townsfolk are just oddly biased in the handedness of the kinstones that they find, but then you realise that a great amount of the kinstones that you find come from robbing said townsfolk. In one case, I opened a chest, and then pretty much instantly used the resulting stone to fuze with its up-until-mere-moments-ago-owner. And in another case, some guy says he dropped half of his kinstone in the Inn, and you go grab it (and fuse stones with him) which makes me wonder why the fuck he didn't fuse the stone himself earlier before he lost it. Gah! So we are just back to the townfolk either being too stupid to live, or downright lazy.

At least it was fun. I liked the older Gameboy LoZ games more, though.