Is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga, 58 chapters, 11 volumes
Run	2016–2022 · completed
Community score	AniList 8.0
Where to read	VIZ Media — official

Overview

Video game manga adaptations have a rough reputation, usually treated as glorified novelizations that add little to the source material. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, adapted by the creative duo Akira Himekawa across eleven volumes, is one of the exceptions. It follows the same basic beats as the 2006 game, Link's journey through a world half-swallowed by a shadow realm called the Twilight Realm, guided by the mysterious imp Midna, but it uses the comic format to do something the game structurally couldn't: slow down and actually develop its characters.

What it does well

The biggest improvement is Midna. In the game she's a great character conveyed mostly through action and a handful of cutscenes; in the manga, Himekawa gives her real interiority, and her relationship with Link becomes the emotional spine holding the whole adaptation together. That shift matters, because it turns what could have been a straightforward dungeon-crawl adaptation into a story that's actually about something: trust, sacrifice, and an unlikely bond between two people from worlds that are supposed to be enemies.

Zelda herself also benefits, getting more agency and screen time than she usually gets in a mainline game, and the manga is smart about restructuring the open-world pacing of the original into something that reads well as a serialized story rather than a level-by-level walkthrough. The art is a strong match for the material too, capable of handling both the game's melancholic, twilight-drenched atmosphere and its bigger action set pieces without either one undercutting the other.

Where it falls short

The manga is still fundamentally bound to the game's plot structure, which means anyone who's played Twilight Princess already knows most of the major story beats going in — the character work adds depth, but it doesn't reinvent the shape of the story. Some of the game's dungeon puzzle-solving, which is a huge part of its identity, gets compressed into quick sequences that lose some of that satisfaction in translation. And newcomers without any Zelda background may find a few worldbuilding elements assumed rather than explained, since the manga leans on the series' established lore.

Verdict

This is genuinely one of the better video game manga adaptations out there, elevating its source material's character work rather than just illustrating the plot beats. Whether you're revisiting the game's story with more depth or coming to it fresh as a fantasy adventure, it holds up well on its own terms.