1. Introduction
2. Aesthetics
3. Audio
3-1: Music
3-2: Sounds
4. Story
5. Gameplay
5-1: Controls
5-2: Difficulty
5-3: Gimmicks
5-4: Stage design
6. Conclusion
1. Introduction:
The Legend of Zelda series is one with a venerable history. It has consistently produced highly-rated and popular adventures for a very long time and always seemed like the kind of series that can never go wrong. This has been mostly true until the Nintendo DS came out and two less-than-stellar Zelda titles came out with poor controls and underwhelming gameplay despite strong artistic concepts and very fine ideas. Then, there was the case of Twilight Princess, which seemed botched and uninspired. It was a decent title, but one expects more than “decent” from a Zelda game. Playing it on the Wii however lowered the “decent” rating to a “mediocre” rating due to adding poor controls to its list of frustrations. I believe that the franchise was growing stated of late and that it needed a wind of change. Is Skyward Sword this wind of change or is it naught but a pestilent fart in our general direction?
2. Aesthetics:
I can only explain the general look of this game this way: It is a mixture of the cartoony graphics of Wind Waker and the realistic designs of Twilight Sword. The developers stated their intent at making this game look like an impressionist painting, and they do well in that regard. The characters are detailed enough to satisfy those who hated Wind Waker’s design, yet cartoonish enough to get creative with its animations. The characters are very expressive and I must say that I was quite pleased to see Link exhibit emotions without the need for any narrative to demonstrate it. Character design is fairly well done, with Link’s light green tunic being closer to his Ocarina of time design, yet sporting a discrete chain-mail not unlike Twilight princess. Zelda herself looks completely different but it is not an appearance that I find averse. She looks younger, more innocent. Yet, it fits with her character’s in-game personality and role quite well. While there are few NPCs in Skyward Sword, some look rather normal (usually more serious character) and others, completely whacky. It is a nice entertaining mix that I do not object to at all. The world is very colourful and detailed despite being merely textures. You will only notice graphical flaws if you stop and look for them. Enemy design is neither better nor worse than in other Zelda titles. However, you will notice less variety in the kinds of enemies in game. It is a very nice-looking title artistically.
3. Audio:
3-1. Music:
Several tracks in this game are orchestrated, finally. This is something everyone wanted and it really helps drive home the concept of an epic adventure. Some old classics return, but for the most part, most tracks are fresh and new. Not all songs are memorable however, but quite a few are. Overworld music tends to be rather bland and repetitive after a while, and dungeon music is pretty much your usual ambiance music from other Zelda games. The flight music is quite epic and so are the boss battle themes in general. Event tunes generally prevail at making you feel the emotions they want you to feel. It’s a good soundtrack overall. I was ready to lower its mark in the event where there would not be any orchestrated music. Since part of it is and part of it isn’t, it’s quite good but could be better.
3-2. Sound:
This game uses sound cues everywhere, and I am not kidding. You get a sound cue if your wallet is full, if you have a full bomb bag, if you have five hearts or less when drowsing for something, when your Wiimote battery is almost depleted, name it. The most noteworthy one is the inclusion of the sound-cued sword strikes from Wind Waker. They are a welcome addition. However, the sound cues can become grating at times. For instances, in this game, you lose more health when hit. So you are more likely to be at lower health. The fact that it start constantly beeping at five hearts can becoming rather annoying. Also, whenever Fi, the spirit of the Skyward Sword wants to talk to you, the sound cue will never stop until: 1) You indulge her, 2) The thing she wanted to tell you has become irrelevant. This by no means ruins your experience, but if can be a bit of a bother.
4. Story:
The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword boast a story, and I don’t mean just a narrative separate from the dungeons; I mean an actually story where Link, Zelda and other key characters actively participate. It is a story that tells much about the history of Hyrule, and rather than being presented through a long monologue only to stop talking about it for a long time, it is paced throughout many points of progression, never feeling too heavy, yet often feeding you with more bits and pieces of the storyline. In a sense, this holds your interest for longer durations. However, it does come at a price: The game is much more linear and this is very apparent in the stage design. Mr. Aonuma and his team really didn’t want you to access certain areas until you had triggered specific scenes. You are following a straight route from the beginning to the end with little room for interpretation or plain old fooling around and discovering new things. It is by far the most interesting Zelda Story in quite a while, but now you must be wondering: I can just watch a “let’s play”, so is the gameplay any good?
5. Gameplay:
This is where Skyward Sword gets mixed results. On one hand, Skyward sword has many great concepts while on the other, it is plagued with many annoyances that render the gameplay tedious for no reason whatsoever.
5-1. Controls:
Skyward Sword used the Wii Motion Plus accessory with the promise of providing a full 1:1 motion capture experience. I will start by saying that this is quite possibly the most precise motion experience the Wii has to offer. However, this is not 1:1. The game pretty much follows your movements with a minimal but still visible amount of lag. However, if you perform an action such as slashing with your sword, the Wiimote will approximate that motion, thus Link cannot for example do a curved slash. Also, no matter what length you swing, Link will always swing at the same width.
Also, while it is not explicitly explained in game, you are supposed to hold your Wiimote tilted to the side for best results. Holding the Wiimote like one would for a shooter game like Metroid Prime 3 would generally result in Link slashing diagonally. Save yourself some pain and heed this warning. The Wiimote is also too sensitive, meaning that at times, you will attempt to reposition your sword to the other side of your body, but Link will frantically slash like a madman. This get especially frustrating when you are facing a foe with electric attributes or weapons and you constantly damage yourself due to Link no responding as he should. There are already Ocarina codes for hackers out there that allow you to edit your controller sensitivity to your liking, but it will never fully fix the problem.
As a whole, the motions are more responsive that your average Wii game but do not replace buttons in terms of precision. While the motions will often go in the general direction you tell them to, it will sometimes happen that Link will not do what you tell him to or will act against your will. Sometimes, the Wii Motion Plus will go haywire and Link will act as such.
The problem expands to the pointer, where you constantly need to push the down button on the D-pad to put your pointer back on the middle of the screen. It will happen almost every time you need to bring the pointer to the screen and gets somewhat worse if you are not pointing at the middle of the screen when you activate that map, item, or travel phase. It is fairly bothersome because you cannot expect to pull off an item and quickly use it in battle. Thus it will often result in players only using the sword in combat.
Despite the weak reliability of motions, the idea of requiring certain kinds of slashes to defeat foes is interesting, although this could be easily achieved by pressing A and using the Joystick, an input that existed in Ocarina of Time. It is regrettable that one can waggle through most enemies and decimate them. Other positive additions include the ability to temporarily dash using a stamina meter. It allows fast movements and the ability to run a few steps up walls, which creates interesting puzzles. The only problem is that the meter takes a very long time to refill and makes the ability to run a bit less interesting. Being able to roll bombs and upgrade items, shields and potions is also very interesting but I would like to see this system become more complex. Skyward Sword is full of great ideas executed poorly.
Finally, there are no left-handed controls; something even Wii Sports Resort was able to include. There is no excuse for this, and if you are not willing to put in the extra effort to accommodate the left-handed, just stick to traditional controls.
5-2. Difficulty:
The game is harder than your average Zelda, and there is a hero mode that increases the difficulty once the game is cleared. Hackers can most likely download save data if they are impatient. Enemies do more damage, taking an average of a full heart per hit. Bosses can be positively challenging as well since they are puzzles in and of themselves. However, if you die, it will probably be due to your Motion plus going crazy at an inopportune moment or Link moving against your will. You are not likely to feel that your death was due to your own mistake. I have actually died three times on a relatively easy timed-boss battle because I was wrestling with the Motion Plus losing its axis no matter what I did. After shutting down the system and opening it again, it fixed the problem for about five minutes.
Some things like not losing a heart when falling in a hole makes parts of the game extremely easy.
5-3. Gimmicks:
This game is like a very long and in-depth Wii Motion Plus tech demo. It finds every opportunity to make use of motions in every possible situation, to a point where there is so much that you You can spend a whole hour never touching a single button. Combat, flying, catching bugs, swimming, rolling, twirling, aiming, using items (most of the time), using special keys, falling, it is a Wiimote overload. What is saddening is that everything Motion Plus can do within the scopes of this game, classic controls can do better. There was no instance of using motions where I thought “hey, I couldn’t do this on a classic controller”.
Since Z-targeting does not make your ranged items lock on to targets, and aiming will most likely result in losing your middle axis, one would almost never use them in true combat. Z-targeting is only good for the sword and shield and out of combat, for the bug-catching net. The gimmick gets worse when most sidequests are minigames that make you repeat that same dull motions over and over again. Bug-catching could be less –demanding in terms of quantity since it is a rather boring aspect of the game when not done within the context of catching those you run into while advancing the plot.
The game has a tendency to force motions at every turn when another, better option could easily be available. Too many gimmicks make this reviewer frustrated, an emotion one should never feel while playing a game.
5-4. Stage design:
The stage design is both good and bad. On one hand, you have puzzles even out of the dungeons, which really will please the avid puzzle fans out there. However, this comes at a cost of having no overworld whatsoever, needing to travel back to a hud in the sky and to dive down to a level like in Super Mario 64. It could have been acceptable if there were more than just three levels for most of the duration of the game. Having to revisit these areas over and over and over again becomes a grating chore. The “grand world of Hyrule” below feels laughably minuscule. There are very few NPCs to interact with below the clouds, many “fetch and bring back like a good dog” sidequests. It’s good that you get to know some NPCs better as the story progresses however, but the world is so small and unpopulated that it still feels unnatural. The temples are creative, yet very linear. The puzzles are unlike anything you have seen in other Zeldas before, which adds a surprise element, but they are sadly very easy and if the answer is not right in front of you, take a few steps forward in the dungeon’s linearity and the answer will jump into your arms like a lost Nintendog looking to please its casual gamers.
Really, the great aspect is that you may be pleasantly surprised with more varied puzzles but I do wish they did not spell out the solution to you. Another positive aspect is that you now get to use most of your items in dungeons, so you don’t just solo a dungeon with the item you found within the temple anymore.
You will spend a lot of time doing puzzles in Skyward Sword, so if this is what you like most of a Zelda game, you will get your wish.
6. Conclusion:
My review may seem harsh to many but I have also enumerated about as many good points. The grade was brought down due to the fact that Gameplay was the worst aspect of Skyward Sword and it counts for much more than aesthetics and sound. And yes, I have seen the response Gamespot has gotten for its attempt at integrity. As I have said earlier, The Legend of Zelda’s past iterations have with a few exceptions, been ranging from very good to stellar, so this review takes this as a basis for comparison. I would like to point out though that. Whether you like it or not Skyward sword has many continuous annoyances and design flaws, and I cannot in my right mind give it a perfect grade. I am fully aware that I could get lots of hate from it and you know what? Just go ahead, give me your worst. I can already see some of you going:
Heck, I've even been called "petty" on various occasions for disliking elements from this game. You could claim that I am a Sony or Microsoft fanboy. However, I do not own any Microsoft systems and my acquisition of Sony systems is recent as a response to the Wii’s motion fad. You could say that I am biased toward hating motions, yet have played the game in its entirety and would have eventually gotten used to it. I could not have gotten paid since this review was made on an amateur blog. Yep, you got nothing on me. That fanboy mentality for every Zelda game has to stop. If you are going to get mad every time a Zelda game gets less than 9.5 out of 10 and are convinced that no Zelda can possibly be flawed enough to get less than that, then why are you reading reviews in the first place?
It’s an okay game. The story is its main selling point, but the gameplay is rather underwhelming. I would rather have watched someone play than deal with the frustrating aspects of the gameplay. Get it if you are a very dedicated Zelda fan and for some strange reason, you like motions.
Positive:
Great artistic style.
Some memorable audio.
More difficult than average Zelda title.
Original stage design
Great Story
Original puzzles
Negative:
Unresponsive controls.
Constant need to adjust Wii Motion plus
Little exploration
Linear stage design
Gimmicks overload
No left-handed support
Laughably easy puzzles
7/10
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