Link’s Crossbow Training (Wii)

The Legend of Zelda series didn’t have many spin-offs before Link’s Crossbow Training, but a confluence of factors all came together to inspire the creation of this light gun title. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess team wanted to create another game with that title’s assets, series creator Shigeru Miyamoto had expressed interest in the first-person shooter genre, and the Wii Zapper peripheral that posed your Wii Remote like it was part of a submachine gun was due to be released. While only parts of it would play like a first-person shooter, Link’s Crossbow Training ended up having the benefit of preexisting assets to make visual variety easy to achieve, a well-loved franchise to drive sales, and a peripheral that it could easily be packed in with while still solid if sold separately. While the Zapper certainly makes for the better play, both control types work well for this simple light gun game.

Link’s Crossbow Training has a few frills to it that make it so your tasks aren’t as basic as pointing and shooting. Using your Wii Remote and Nunchuck, your bread and butter is definitely the simple task of pointing at something and pulling the trigger, but with the Z button you can also zoom in, something especially helpful as many target ranges go pretty far back. It’s never required thankfully, but that extra touch of accuracy never hurts to have. Something else to help in select situations is just how the crossbow can be fired. Usually it’s as simple as pressing the button once to fire, but if you hold down the button, Link will charge a bomb arrow, and firing that will cause a small explosion in an area, either taking out multiple targets or doing more damage in the enemy shooting ranges. The control stick even gets involved in some levels, turning Link’s Crossbow Training from a fairly standard on-rails shooting game into one with a decent bit of variety.

With 9 levels consisting of 3 missions each, there are certainly quite a few challenges. The game separates them into three main types, those being Target Shooting, Defender missions, and Ranger missions, although this oddly doesn’t account for the Boss levels. Target Shooting is definitely Crossbow Training’s most straightforward and expected mode, the screen panning about as targets appear for you to shoot at. Hitting them in the bullseye earns more points, gold targets are worth more but are rarer, and blue X targets aren’t meant to be shot. In every mode, the more hits you get in a row on your designated targets without missing will cause a multiplier to increase, and each level has medals that reward you for getting a certain amount of points across its three missions. Platinum is the highest requirement, always sitting at 80,000 for a level, but the target missions are a surprisingly easy way to get points towards that goal if you can keep up a multiplier, and in my own experience, I’ve even got around 79,000 points on a good run of just one of the target missions. Area variety is strong enough in these missions that they don’t feel too standard, and some missions like the one with the Gorons who spin before revealing the targets make it a slightly different task. It’s still the most basic mode this game has to offer and probably the least captivating one for it, but it is an ace in the hole if you want to earn a level’s medal and the other options are a bit too difficult.

Defender missions are probably the least interesting of the three, mostly because it involves Link standing in place and you rotating the camera around to shoot enemies as they try to approach and hit him. These missions mostly just throw a bunch of the same enemy at you, not really feeling like a test of accuracy or reaction time as the enemies are slow to strike and rarely attack if not on screen despite the radar giving them leave to do so without it being unfair. Power-ups that will give you automatic fire crop up in these missions a lot, but if you want to maintain a multiplier to get a decent score it’s risky to try and use them to good effect. Some are more smartly designed than others of course. There’s one where you’re on top of a carriage that feels nothing like the others as you shoot at tons of enemies pursuing you, there’s an assault of winged creatures called Kargaroks that feels more like a more creative Target Shooting mission with living targets, and the Defender mission on the Sacred Grove has the puppets you’re shooting spawn in arrangements similar to targets as well. But you also have some slow ones like waiting on Moldorms to pop out of the sand to shoot and the Aeralfos mission where they fly about and are incredibly adept at blocking arrows with their shields. While Target Shooting was mostly typical light gun fun, Defender feels like a mix of good and bad ideas that are sort of loosely clumped together despite their different approaches to the idea.

Ranger missions are where Link will put his feet to use, the player given the task of hunting down 25 of a specific enemy type in a fairly detailed area. While there are certainly some straightforward areas here, these feel like the most consistently interesting of the mission types, all of them taking place in unique areas with the player scouring the scenery for where their prey might be hiding. In both Ranger and Defender, enemies can strike at you to remove points and end your multiplier, but in Ranger the enemies are much more aggressive, can fire at you from range, and at times, it can even seem like you’re playing a portion of the adventure game Twilight Princess instead of just its spin-off. While not fitting under the Ranger tag, the two boss fights certainly seem to add to this feeling that there’s more to Crossbow Training than just shooting targets, although one is certainly better than the other. The Darknut fight with a powerful armored knight has a few issues with hit detection, in that shooting him in one spot at one time will do no damage but it will work later in the battle. It’s definitely meant to keep you from shooting him down before he has time to really do anything, but the other boss quite wisely only has a few weak spots so that your shots are consistently effective as long as they are aimed well. These fights give out tons of points for beating the boss in time though, so even though the Darknut might end your multiplier for successful shots constantly, it’s still better to focus on winning to get your high score.

A few common elements exist across all modes and in the weird outliers like the delightful Fruit Balloons game. Doing enough in a game, like hitting most every target, killing a certain amount of enemies, or beating a boss, will award you a Triforce Piece, which gives a huge boost to your end points. The medals are your only real goal, with levels easy to unlock since they just require the 20,000 bronze medal that even novice players should be able to earn. There are even little extra things to shoot in every level to earn a few extra points, and shooting them won’t affect your multiplayer so it’s a great way to spend any downtime while waiting on targets. One thing that is in every level that could have been done away with sometimes or just been adjusted is a timer. While some missions definitely require a timer to find a good end point, it could be more interesting to have more drawn out boss battles, more difficult missions where you try to avoid damage, or games that end based more on what you’ve done rather than the fairly standard countdown. Its presence is most likely to ensure that the three missions to a level are snappy and easy to repeat as well as ensuring that players don’t spend forever lining up shots, but many missions move along at a set pace automatically anyway. It rushes some of the better missions while others drag out since they have little content to fill that time span.

The timer also ensures that you’ll be able to see all of Link’s Crossbow Training in basically one sitting. After that, it’s all about trying to get the best medal, setting personal high scores in practice mode, or competing with other people in an alternating multiplayer mode. The assets from Twilight Princess ensure that the missions all are visually distinct and constantly shifting in style and location, but the short length definitely makes it feel like there could have been more to the game. If each individual mission perhaps had a set high score to beat outside the medal quest or if levels had different difficulties there might be more reason to keep playing Link’s Crossbow Training, but you can only dip a spoon in a shallow bowl of soup so many times, and you’ll likely still be hungry after.

THE VERDICT: Link’s Crossbow Training brings the quality music, visuals, and area design over from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess to make a Light Gun game with a lot going for it. Even though the game groups them under three designations, the missions are diverse and mostly complement the multiplier-based scoring system, but there are a few bad eggs, especially under the Defender mission category. With a few limiters like a timer it won’t adjust to better suit a mission type and some shallowness thanks to the level structure making the quest for high scores a bit too tipped towards mastering easy missions and writing off difficult ones, Link’s Crossbow Training can’t quite rub shoulders with the best light gun games, but it’s an excellent show of the Wii Zapper and one that nails the basics of what a light gun game needs while adding a few nifty ideas of its own.

And so, I give Link’s Crossbow Training for the Wii…

A GOOD rating. A bit more polish, a less rigid adherence to the timer, and some more content would push Link’s Crossbow Training into being a light gun game to remember, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth a skip by any means. The Legend of Zelda trappings go a long way in ensuring that your tasks are always interesting even if it’s shooting round targets that pop up out of nowhere, and the shooting with or without the Wii Zapper is as good as you can hope for out of a Wii game. The arcade-style layout of multiple missions in a level does lead to the devaluing of any single mission, but the missions are mostly well-designed and the annoying ones almost forgivable because you can make up for them score-wise with their companions.

Link’s Crossbow Training was not developed as a full-price title due to those factors that came together to lead to its creation, so it was unlikely it would have ever hit any greater heights than where it landed, but if you just want things to shoot on your Wii, it definitely lives up to that task and doesn’t just phone in its action like some other light gun shooters.