Among home consoles, the library of the Wii is not particularly well-regarded. I consider it to be underrated in several respects. This is especially true in regards to cats. Judged purely on the quality of the cats it offers, the Wii is probably the greatest home console in history.
I’ve chosen three titles from its library as my next three cats of the week. Up first: launch title The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Nintendo EAD, 2006).
Tucked away in an unassuming corner of the Twilight Princess map is a village called, fittingly enough, the Hidden Village. The first time you visit there, you have to snipe a bunch of bublins in a spaghetti-Western themed sequence that’s of absolutely no interest to us here. On subsequent visits, though, the village is filled up with lonely alley cats, in a delightful turn of events.
Link can turn into a wolf in Twilight Princess. Mostly, this allows him to smell things. It also, though, allows him to talk to other animals. This becomes important in the Hidden Village, as these lonely cats are in dire need of being talked to—so much that it becomes a sidequest.
I don’t know what heaven is like but if I had to venture a guess it would involve the ability to talk to cats, and some sort of impetus to talk to a whole lot of them. As it turns out, cats have utterly miraculous things to say.
There are twenty cats in all, all of which drop these sorts of delicious, insightful bon mots. And the icing on the cake is that, throughout this all, the game re-plays the same faux-Morricone score that it used for the first quest, lending the excitement of an old West shoot-out to our conversational aims.
After you’ve finished the sidequest and turned back into your standard Link form, all twenty cats are still quite friendly with you. Catch their attention by walking by, and they’ll quickly form a crowd around you, mewing. If only herding cats could be so easy.
If you need to brighten your day, I’d recommend watching the footage I captured of the entire sidequest. It is pure uncut kitty heroine.
This series will return next week with some more deep cat cuts from the Wii library.
Intermittent Mechanism 