They made wii play minigames out of Twilight Princess. This game just confuses me. Why use Twilight Princess to make a demo pack-in game for the Wii Zapper? Why does the Wii Zapper even need a pack-in game? The wii zapper is just a piece of plastic, this game is 100% playable without it. No particular features of the zapper are utilized in this outside of the pointer controls, but Wii Play already kinda existed to be a demonstration of the pointer controls.

The actual gameplay itself is just a bunch of rail-shootery light gun gamey missions that you do in a quick succession. The game really favors accuracy over speed as getting hit combos is the easiest way to get points by far, and missing one shot drops a combo. If you play cautiously and refine your run, getting platinum rankings on each of the stages is a cakewalk.

When I looked up the development of this game, thinking it was just a quick job to make a quick little pack in title for the wii zapper, I was even more confused with the development history of this game than I was with the actual game itself. Apparently this could have been a sequel to twilight princess, or some weird terminator-styled side story where they gave link a gun. Despite the empty-calorie feeling this game has in its own playtime, it's like an hour long to go through everything and the minigames still have a solid level of polish put into them so it doesn't feel like no care was put into it. Worth a shot off of curiosity alone, I'd say.

Beating every Zelda in timeline order 6.5/20:

Link's Crossbow Training boldly asks: what if the shooting gallery from Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask was fun?

I expected to just play through each stage once and call it a day but I was enjoying myself so much that I went ahead and got a platinum medal on all the levels. This game rocks and it's a shame more people haven't played it.

Link's Crossbow Training can currently be picked up for single dollars from just about any random retro game shop or eBay storefront. It's lost what little value it had at launch as a Wii Zapper pack-in, relegated mostly to a joke within the Nintendo community. But in reality this is a really well-designed and nuanced light gun game with the level of polish that you'd expect from a Nintendo EAD game. There's really no reason for Link's Crossbow Training to be reevaluated on a larger cultural level because it's such a low-impact title, but I do think it's an extremely replayable and fun entry in its genre. A lot more depth and density in the missions than I expected, and a lot more risk vs. reward in the combo-based gameplay than it appears. Definitely worth checking out, especially for how cheaply it can be found.