The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is endlessly familiar. It is a video game that goes where many, many other video games have gone before. It is resolutely faithful to the tradition laid down by its ancestors. It is fantastically fun and suprising and tough-in-a-good-way, just as a video game should be. Still, it is so comfortable and so familiar that you may find yourself forgetting that it is new and not one of the greatest hits of fifteen years ago. It is like an old hat you keep around because it has moulded to the shape of your head. This is reasonable, for the game itself is about an old hat.

Like all the games in the Legend of Zelda series, this one stars an elf named Link, who dresses like Robin Hood but is younger and has pointy ears. Link lives in a magical land called Hyrule, where disputes are settled with magic and swordplay, and where the fate of life itself frequently rests on his own considerable bravery and derring-do. The Zelda games are the purest and loveliest kind of fantasy: They are about monsters and castles and sorcery, but more importantly they are about the sweet conceit that a child can save the world.

As The Minish Cap begins, Link is hanging out with Princess Zelda. They go to a town fair, where they chat with merchants and take in the sights, and then they go to Hyrule Castle, where an evil magician named Vaati comes along and turns the princess into stone. His motivation for doing so is less than clear, but poor Zelda plainly needs rescuing, and that is enough motiviation for Link. Because he is a villain in a video game, Vaati is also good enough to explain that he plans to collect all the pieces of an ancient magical artifact, which will give him absolute power to go along with his absolute corruption.

So we (as Link) set off into the forest, hoping to thwart Vaati and his evil plans. Before long we run into a friendly talking hat, which leaps onto our head and begins making helpful suggestions about what we should do and where we should go next. Among its first friendly suggestions: that we should jump onto a magic log, which will shrink us down to teeny-weeny size and allow us to meet and confer with the local fairies.

Officially, the little people are the "Minish" and not fairies, but facts are facts. The Minish live among the flowers. The Minish wear cute little caps, some of which talk. The Minish mean well but conduct themselves with a jolly spirit of mischief. The Minish are fairies. Q.E.D.

Now that we are small, we can crawl through the little hollowed-out logs that dot the landscape, making our way to places in Hyrule that regular-sized Link never new existed. We discover treasures and dungeons and monsters, all smaller than insects but all terribly impressive in our current state. We wander into dungeons and try to puzzle our way from one room and one floor to the next.

There are hidden floor switches that unlock doors. There are treasure chests that yield magical keys. There are amulets that heal us and jewels we can use to buy swords. There is a vase that works like a vacuum cleaner, allowing us to suck up monsters and blow them out of our way. There are one-liners from the talking hat, only a few of which will make you want to shoot the TV. The presentation here is confidently old-school, with 2D graphics and hand-drawn pictures and a top-down approach to the map.

The very first Zelda game, which was released 18 years ago, looked like this and played like this. It is a tribute to the people drawing the pictures and writing the code that the new one feels so alive.