Collection essentials #525: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA)

The only completely original single-player Legend of Zelda adventure on the Game Boy Advance came rather late into the system’s life cycle. It’s a prequel to the multiplayer Four Swords, featuring the same antagonist, Vaati. Link finds himself teaming up with a sentient cap replacing the regular green cap that he usually wears. This cap is named Ezlo, and he has a head resembling that of a bird.

By and large, the gameplay here is very much like what you’d expect from a 2D Zelda game. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some twists. The biggest new feature is a power granted by Ezlo, the power to change size! Link can now shrink down to a size barely bigger than an insect. As you can imagine, this comes with many gameplay implications, such as being able to fit into really tiny spaces. Link must change sizes to suit each situation he comes across. This is cleverly implemented, and it’s really cool to see what are normally small enemies made larger than life, for example. The graphics are really well-done and nicely complement the size contrasts.

This game also introduces something called “kinstones”. They come in various colors, and two of them can fit together to make a whole. Many characters Link meets have one piece of kinstone, and Link can try and use one of an appropriate color to match and trigger a reward, making some kind of reward appear somewhere in the world for Link to go find. Kinstones seem like a neat concept, but…they get a lot of criticism, because they probably should have been implemented better. A lot of the fun of Zelda is exploring the world and finding rewards, but with kinstones it feels like they simply locked away a lot of these rewards behind an extra step that just seems rather arbitrary. A lot of the rewards don’t in and of themselves have anything to do with the character who you matched kinstones with, making them feel a little pointless.

I don’t have a ton to say about Minish Cap, in part because it’s been most of two decades since I last played through it. I got the copy shown in the photo above (box and everything) for my birthday from my late grandmother. I think my opinion on it is more or less a typical one, that it’s a very good game that’s worth playing, but not one that’s really in contention for the title of best game in the series. But of course, the Zelda series is legendary, so that’s not really a huge criticism.

Minish Cap may not be the most notable or essential Zelda game, but it’s still well worth playing if you like the series. You can play it for free now on Switch or Switch 2 if you have the Switch Online Expansion Pack. As all of the classic Zeldas, it is no doubt an essential piece in my collection.