Hello again! I know I know the blog posts haven’t been coming in much, but I’m gonna make it up today with a good ol’ game review. I’ve been playing some great and some not so great games that I’m excited to write about. But for today, I’m gonna be talking about my review of a Wii classic, Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword.
I first played this game a few years back well after the game’s initial release. on the Wii U when I rented it from GameFly.
I first started getting into the Legend of Zelda games in highschool. I remember playing the original Zelda game on an emulator on my phone and being obsessed with it. The amount of exploration and sense of adventure from a game that came out over 40 years ago was amazing to me. I played that game every day every chance that I could and after finally completing it I was hooked. Over the years, I’ve played several of the big named Zelda titles, such as Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, and of course Breath of the Wild.
The first time I played Skyward Sword was several years ago. I had heard of Skyward Sword for a while, but didn’t know much about it besides that it was a Wii game and that it uses motion controls like a lot of other Wii games at the time. The game was always pretty expensive even years after its initial release, so I never played it during the Wii era of gaming.
However, I realized that my Wii U was backwards compatible with Wii games and so I decided to rent it from GameFly to try it out. I dug out some old Wii controllers and got to playing and let me tell you it was truly something else!
Being able to attack in the game with the swing of my hand in real life was so cool to me. I’m personally a big fan of motion control games. When done right, they can add an extra level of immersion to a game that can make you feel more connected to the world than a simple button press on a controller.
So, I can’t tell you how many times I felt the thrill of excitement when fighting a boss in this game using my own two hands. And just like the original Zelda game I was obsessed and played that game for weeks on end.
Well Nintendo re-released the game last year on the switch. Since I enjoyed the game so much the first time, I decided to reactivate my old GameFly account and rent the game again to see if it still held up.
Setting the Stage
The game is set as the first Legend of Zelda title in the series. Link lives in a floating town called Skyloft high above the sky just living a normal everyday life. The game actually starts with a Loftwing creature delivering a letter from Zelda to him forcing him to wake up from a dream he’s having where he’s facing off against a monster known as Demise.
From there, you start controlling Link and the game takes you through a pretty long tutorial to get used to the motion controls. So far, it’s about the same as I remember, but nothing super exciting is happening at this point.
You then complete some tasks to prepare for a Loftwing flight tournament, including fighting some monsters, rescuing your own Loftwing, and listening to a bunch of dialogue from Zelda who, just like Link, just appears as a normal village girl.
Zelda talks about the Goddess who defeated a horde of evil on the surface level below and raised this town up from the sky as she sacrificed herself to seal the evil away.
Fast forward, Link wins the tournament, Zelda gets cast away from a tornado to the surface world, and Link acquires the Goddess Sword, a weapon entrusted to a hero chosen by the Goddess with a spirit guide inside the sword to help guide the hero on a journey to defeat the great evil of the world, Demise.
And just like that, the real story begins! Link sets off on this quest to search for Zelda and become the Hero of Legend we all know and love.
Initial Impressions
I was excited to play this game again and get back into the swing of things. The game was released on the switch as an HD version of the game, so for the most part the graphics are just about the same as when I played it on the Wii.
But knowing how HD re-releases are, I wasn’t expecting much improvements on a game that came out 10 years ago. But that’s not what I’m here for anyway. I’m here for those sweet sweet motion controls I remembered loving.
So, after a few hours of a dragged out tutorial and storyline, I finally start learning how to fight and get into my first dungeon. The game was fun. I enjoyed swinging my switch controller around killing off enemies and solving puzzles. It was also nice to ride my Loftwing through the sky by using the motion controls and exploring the small airborne islands of Skyloft. But I’ll be honest it wasn’t as great as I remembered it being.
There were definitely some highlights for sure. The dungeons seemed very well thought out, the world was interesting, and the boss fights were just as intense and engaging as I remember.
However, there were several things that caught my attention that I didn’t really notice the first time I played this game and the more I played the game the more those things became apparent and frustrating to deal with.
The Controls
Motion controls are definitely fun, but they’re certainly not perfect either. You’re always going to face that problem where you move your controller and the game doesn’t quite do what you think it should do.
Skyward Sword was the first Legend of Zelda game to incorporate motion controls during a time where motion controls were new and popular. I think the developers did a decent job making the controls as fluid as possible and, during my first playthrough, I didn't have any complaints.
Although after 10 years where technology has significantly improved, you start to notice the inconsistencies and even some of the flaws in making virtually almost every movement in the game driven by motion controls.
For combat, this game requires you to make some fairly specific movements to defeat enemies. You can’t just swing your controller around like crazy and expect to plow through enemies.
Monsters will hold up their swords to block incoming attacks from certain directions. So, when you fight against an enemy, you have to look where their weakness is before attacking.
Some enemies will require you to swing your sword up, down, left, right, diagonally, or straight on in order to defeat them, which requires very deliberate motions from the player. I think this was a good call from the developers because it causes you to be more intentional with your attacks. Having the player swing their controllers around frantically for every encounter would just cheapen the overall experience.
However, this calculated approach can sometimes be frustrating due to a lack of communication from the player and the game. There were many times when I tried to attack a monster using a horizontal action, but the game interpreted it as a slight diagonal attack causing them to sometimes block an attack that wasn’t meant to be blocked.
Now I can sometimes get away with this when fighting normal enemies, but it really starts to backfire when I’m fighting bosses like Ghirahim who can block my attacks with a surprising amount of accuracy. This can make encounters like boss battles annoying because you’re taking damage or dying when you feel like you shouldn’t.
The other part of this problem is that when you’re causing so much movement to go on at the same time the motion controls sometimes need to be recalibrated. The game makes recalibration simple by just pointing out the screen with the Joy-Con and pressing a button, so the controls can be recentered.
However, after the first few times you do this, it starts to get old because it almost feels like the game is fighting against you. It’s not so bad that you can’t play the game, but it is an annoyance you have to power through sometimes.
With the re-release, the Switch offers the option to play the game through normal button controls for those who have maybe outgrown the days of motion controls. This can definitely help you perform more accurate attacks. However, when I tried it, it was almost too accurate and made Link feel more like a robot performing very methodical motions.
So, while attacking enemies was no problem, I felt more disconnected from the game since the game was built around the mechanics of motion controls.
Even when you’re not actively attacking enemies, the motion controls can still feel a little clunky. The best example of this would probably be when using the bow and arrow. When you equip the bow, the camera switches to first-person and you aim a reticle while holding down on a button to draw an arrow. When you hold down the trigger, the reticle automatically zooms in to help aim at targets that are far away.
Trying to aim a bow with motion controls is, as you can probably imagine, very unstable. The reticle is constantly shaking and while I can typically hit my targets most of the time it definitely does not feel like I’m using a bow compared to combat where I feel myself swinging around my sword.
Overall, the motion controls are something that takes time to figure out and get used to. Even when I got to the end game, I was still trying to get a feel for the controls as I had to quickly land attacks and defend blows from the final boss. The motion controls could be worse, but leaves something to be desired especially after a decade since the game was released.
Story and Pacing
The story for this game is interesting. Since this takes place as one of the very first adventures in the Legend of Zelda timeline, there’s a lot of build up for thematic themes and the connection between Link, Zelda, and Ganon that we’ve all grown familiar with in past games.
Unlike other games where Link has been the hero known to defeat evil alluded to in other titles, in this game Link is establishing that hero legend. We get to see the early states of iconic places like Faron woods and Eldin Volcano before they were widely populated and developed. We also get to see the first occurrences of time in the Legend of Zelda series and even how the Master Sword is created.
We get to experience becoming the Hero of Legend rather than just fulfilling something that already exists.
Through this journey, the player gets to meet interesting characters and interact with items both familiar and new to the Zelda series. All the quests, dungeons, and relationships Link makes during this adventure lead up to one of the most epic final confrontations as Link battles Demise is his true evil form.
Now all of this sounds like the recipe for a great and awesome Zelda story and should be an iconic title in the series. And on paper this should be true.
However, the game works against itself with its dragged out pacing and tedious task completion to deliver an underwhelming experience to the player.
One of my biggest gripes about this game that I painstakingly noticed on my second run was that the game takes longer, like a LOT longer, than it needs to be completed.
For a good while, the game kinda holds your hand throughout the game and makes sure you take things slowly to understand the mechanics and the world around you. This also rarely gives you the opportunity to go out into the world and see what it has to offer.
When you first start the game, this kinda makes sense because this is the first game to heavily use motion controls and for some people this is the first Zelda game they’ve ever played. However, I constantly felt that the game was holding me back and not for any particularly good reason.
I get that in some games the developers want to pace the player, so they don’t see everything that the world has to offer to them all at once. And I’m 100% for this idea. I mean that’s how you create an engaging story.
However, for this story, it takes its sweet time trying to develop key points in the story and establish main characters. The story goes on about how if Demise is freed from its ancient prison that the world won’t stand a chance and yet the game causes you to slowly gather up relics and complete trials to advance this story with a seemingly critical timeline.
This made me frustrated because I felt like I should be further along in the game than I was, but the game kept throwing more and more things to accomplish first before I could get to the good parts.
Every time I got to a key part of the story, I basically learned I wasn’t powerful enough and had to go back out into the world to gather more powers, complete more trials or do these random side quests to get to where I needed to go.
This caused me to backtrack into areas I had already visited to get something I couldn’t get the first time around and sit through lines and lines of expository dialogue from characters.
Now I’m not against re-exploring parts of the world. It’s a staple in the Zelda series that players will have to eventually go back to old areas to discover new passageways that they couldn’t get to the first time.
I appreciate that in the Legend of Zelda games because it shows just how in depth the world is. There’s always that spark of wonder when you go back to a place you already visited to discover something new and hidden away because you got a bomb to blow up a cracked wall or the hookshot to traverse a gap that was too far to jump across.
However, I didn’t feel that same thrill of exploration as I did in past games. It just felt like I was constantly going from point A to point B, to point C, and then back to a new part of point A. It didn’t really feel like I was exploring new terrain or discovering something new because the game was telling me exactly where to go.
There are 3 main segmented areas which make up the world in this game. Each time I came back, I found a new section that I hadn’t visited before, but it just felt like an extension of the world I was already familiar with rather than something brand new. This made the world feel more disconnected compared to other games where you had an open overworld to explore.
So, having to go back to these places felt more like a chore than a chance to discover something new about the world. I had to revisit each place 3 times to pick something up or complete some task and it just felt like something else that I needed to do.
Even getting to these places can sometimes be a hassle. Unlike other Zelda games, there’s not much of a fast travel system here, so I typically have to get to these far off destinations myself.
There is a way to fast travel to certain locations, but it’s pretty inconvenient.
To fast travel I need to ride on my Loftwing across the sky to one of three surface level entry ways. The bird that I ride is pretty slow even if you’re using the boosts, so it takes a little time to fly to these areas.
Once you get there, you skydive into the hole in the clouds and have the option to drop at a bird statue you discovered in that area. Then you can go and do whatever you need to do there.
However, if you then need to go to a completely different area you have to go to one of the bird statues and fly back up to the sky and do the whole thing all over again. So, when you’re having to revisit these places constantly this mode of travel can be very tedious.
On top of that, there are some other quests you can do to gather materials to help with the main story that can also suck up your time. Some of these quests might involve a cool mini game that you can play, but often it’s just fetching something for someone.
I felt like a lot of this game was just me being a glorified errand boy collecting stuff for people and eventually advancing the story until I hit yet another wall that I had to work around.
This game’s main flaw is that it gives a lot of unnecessary filler content to drag the game out. Travel, mundane task completion, and even over explained dialogue can make the game more annoying than fun.
I consider myself a pretty patient person and don’t mind playing a game that might take me a long time to complete. I’ve played plenty of games like Skyrim and Breath of the Wild where you can literally pour hours upon hours into these games and still feel like you’re getting something out of it.
With this game, however, I felt like I was hitting my breaking point and being the completionist that I am, I couldn’t just walk away from it even though there were times where I really wanted to.
At the end of it all this game took me about 50 hours to complete and I feel like I could’ve done it in half the time. Unfortunately, once you hit the half-way mark, you’re just looking forward to the game ending.
There are some highlights to the story. You can get to explore some relatively interesting areas and the boss fights are really cool, but it’s bogged down by all the tedious task completion and sluggish pacing that those moments aren’t appreciated as much as they could be.
When I finally completed this slog of a game, I got a little bit of a sense of accomplishment by defeating Demise and saving the world, but I was honestly just relieved I reached the end and I could play games that I could enjoy a lot more.
Final Thoughts
It’s interesting how repeatedly playing a game can change your perspective on it. For some people, they may hate a game on the first run, but then come back and it becomes one of their favorite games to play. Or they might really enjoy it at first because it’s fresh and new to them and then later on realize the game’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.
I definitely fall into the latter on this one. There were some fun moments in this game that I remembered on my first run, but I couldn’t help but notice all the flaws and hurdles this game expects you to deal with. The uneven pacing makes the story feel watered down and underwhelming and the filler content just makes you feel like you can’t make any significant progress in the game.
While the motion controls aren’t perfect, they can be fun at times whether that’s attacking an enemy or using the beetle item to scout the world and pick up hard to reach objects.
I think this game has potential, but it needs a lot of fat trimmed to make it enjoyable. Sure it would be a shorter game, but it would be a constantly engaging and much more memorable experience which people like myself would constantly come back to.
Having played this game again, I can say that I’m glad I rented it because this will probably be the last time I pick up Skyward Sword again. I know when I say this, it makes it sound like I think this is the worst game in the world, but I really don't think this is a bad game.
The game has some fun moments that I remembered loving, but after my second playthrough some of that nostalgia wore off and I recognized the flaws of the game that hinders Skyward Sword from being a great addition to the series.
For those of you who might’ve been curious about picking this up, I think this game has something to offer, it's just going to take a while to get to the parts you’ll appreciate.
Honestly, unless you’re a hard core Zelda fan who’s determined to play every game in the series, I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to pass this up. If you got the Zelda inch, I would highly recommend playing other titles, such as Wind Waker or Link to the Past which offer a much richer and enjoyable experience.
Well that’s my spiel for today. Feel free to comment below if you want to add to anything or if you had a completely different experience playing this game. Until then, I’ll see you guys next time.
Dean Willms
~Gamer. Designer. Friend.
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