Typical scene from Skyward Sword showing your character, Link, running around his neighborhood on the floating island of Skyloft.
Skyward Sword wasn’t my first experience with a Zelda game. Back in the day I played Zelda for the Super Nintendo (“A Link to the Past”) and Gameboy (“Link’s Awakening”). I have fond memories of exploring the cartoony yet compelling fantasy world of Hyrule, slashing enemies, bushes, and ceramic urns, and getting caught up in the addictive storyline quests.
Screenshot from A Link to the Past, showing the top-down, 2D view.
Those old Zelda games had some tricky puzzles and fights, but the challenges were generally more fun than frustrating. Also, since my teenaged peers were playing the same games I could always commiserate about the hard parts or ask for advice when I got stuck. The main guy I talked about games with was Erik Peterson. Weirdly enough, Erik now works for Nintendo, on the “localization” side of things. That means he works with translators to modify the original Japanese versions of the games for the US market. He had a major hand in Skyward Sword, so getting to play “his” game on my Wii, 18 years after we had played Zelda as teenagers, was pretty special.
Here’s Erik talking about Skyward Sword with an interviewer at the E3 video games exposition.
Of course, me being friends with a guy who helped make Skyward Sword won’t stop me from saying what I really think about the game, which is “ARRRRRRRGH!” Skyward Sword was beautiful, clever, and challenging, but I also found it frustrating, tedious, stressful, and annoying. While playing it I alternated between feeling like it was an epic adventure and feeling like it was an unending series of tests and chores. By the time I beat it I definitely felt more like it was the latter, and I only stuck with it for that long because I was so MAD at it that I didn’t want to let IT win. Here’s a little more detailed review of the game, starting with my first impressions, then getting into my loves and hates.
First Impressions on Playing Skyward Sword:
1. It’s cute and cartoony- Not to the level of complete silliness like Mario Brothers or Donkey Kong, but enough to make me a bit self conscious about playing it as a 32 year old man. I like the visual style, though. Link looks like a badass little rock and roll dude with his sassy hair, pout and earrings. He may be short and pretty, but he’s still tough.
2. Although there is no voiced dialogue in the game, the characters make expressive sound effects like, “Mmm hmm,” “Aigh!” “Tee hee!” “Umph!” and “Muah ha ha!” In this they sound hilariously Japanese, which clashes oddly with their Anglo appearances.
3. I’m disappointed in the “letterbox only” aspect ratio, which wastes a lot of screen space and makes it hard to see things on my relatively small, non-HD tv. The red text in dialogue boxes is especially tricky to read. I wish the game had a setting so it would fill the whole screen in standard 4:3 aspect ratio. There may be some tech fix for this, but there wasn’t anything about it in the Skyward Sword instruction booklet, and I messed around with my Wii and TV settings for a while and could never get it right. Annoying.
4. There are a lot of cutscenes and a “directed” feel to the gameplay in the first part. Of course, the story is the main reason I’m playing the game, so I don’t really mind.
5. I do mind how the text loads slowly in text boxes. I’d rather it all load at once so I could read it faster. It’s not enough just to be able to speed it up by holding the A button.
6. The controls for navigating the 3d world are strange at first- especially the automatically panning camera angle and the “look around” feature. It takes me a while to get the feel of it, and I still get frustrated sometimes when the camera pans away from the monster I need to be fighting or something like that.
7. The 3d view makes navigation and puzzle-solving less straightforward than in the old 2d Zelda. With the old top-down view it was easy to tell where you were and where you could go, and you could clearly see all elements of a puzzle. In contrast, the 360 degrees of possible horizontal and vertical orientations in Skyward Sword make it easy to miss or fail something because you’re not lined up exactly right. It’s often hard to tell if something you’re attempting is truly impossible or if you just need to do it a little faster or slower or more to the left. For example- is that vine really out of reach, or did you just not jump quite right? The result is that I feel like I spend more time trying to figure out what’s going on and how things are oriented than I do interfacing with the puzzles as intended.
8. A weird change since I last played a Zelda game is that all the puzzle solutions and stuff are easily available on the Internet. This makes the “less straightforward” puzzles and boss battles easier to get through, but it feels like cheating so I tried to avoid looking. When I did get stuck and had to look things up I had a 25% rate of kicking myself, like, “Oh, I see! I should have figured that out myself.” But I had a 75% rate of, “WTF!? I’m glad I looked that up because there’s no way in hell anyone would logically get that from the ambiguous clues they provided.” The perfect example of the latter was a room in one of the first dungeons where they tell you that the stone eye above the door follows the tip of pointy objects. It’s pretty obvious that it will follow the tip of your sword, but then what? No matter how you mess around raising and lowering your sword or turning around and walking about the room slashing at things and poking in corners, the door won’t open. Only by using your Internet cheating skills could you possibly see how it’s done: By standing in just the right spot and rotating your sword tip in a small stirring motion you can make the eye self-destruct from dizziness. Even after you read exactly what to do, though, it’s still tricky to make it work.
Things I LOVED About Skyward Sword:
1. I love how swinging the Wiimote is directly connected to Link’s sword moves on screen. It’s fun to fight that way, and it makes threshing grass and hedges to look for jewels underneath even more satisfying than it was in the old Zelda.
2. I liked the characters and the story. There were some subtle details about the NPCs’ interactions with each other and with you that added emotional depth or below-the-surface humor. I liked all the little romances and romantic tensions. My favorite was flirting with Pipit’s mom.
3. Some of the dungeon puzzles are delightfully clever and “just right” in terms of difficulty. When I was in the right mood for them they were a lot of fun.
4. The game had truly difficult and intense parts that forced me to become a better, more focused gamer in order to get through. While the process was often frustrating, the emotional rewards of beating a damn hard boss like Koloktos, for example, were big. Several times I found myself doing a little victory dance in the living room after getting through a tough spot.
Koloktos, the Hindu teapot killing machine. FUUU...
Things I didn’t like and things I HATED:
1. The main problem I had with Skyward Sword, in addition to lots of minor problems, was the way it was structured like a grueling, multi-part test. The game designers seemed to have largely replaced the excitement of adventuring with the stress of anticipating the repeated labors and ordeals required to complete a pre-determined destiny. I have enough stress and pre-ordained labors in real life- I want my gaming to be an escape from that.
2. The worst ordeals in the game were the silent realms. Running helplessly from monsters and racing the clock to get through a mandatory obstacle-course maze is like my worst nightmare- seriously. I can’t think of anything more stressful or further from fun. And there are FOUR of them.
Silent Realm. Dear God, do I HAVE to do this?
3. Besides the silent realms, there were a number of other tricky, annoying, mini-games that you had to pass though to progress in the story. One of my least favorite was a mine cart roller coaster challenge, where you had to work the breaks and jerk and lean the Wiimote at just the right times to avoid falling off the tracks and having to go back to the start. I just don’t think these one-time, “test your reflexes” kind of things add any fun to a game that's otherwise more about story, puzzles, and strategy. I'd rather have blood drawn.
4. My second biggest problem with Skyward Sword was the contrast between the condescendingly excessive in-game help for some parts of the game, and the sparse and vague explanation of other important game elements- particularly those related to the controls. Like, who knew that to get the most lateral glide when diving through the air you have to counter-intuitively lean the Wiimote WAY forward almost to vertical, which you would think would just make you fall steeper? And there’s nothing in the instruction booklet or in your sparring hall lessons about the special moves like backflips and dodges that you need to do in certain boss fights. Or how when fighting Demise you have to do a fatal blow on him BEFORE the “do a fatal blow” words come up on the screen, because when it’s clearly telling you to do a fatal blow, you can’t land a fatal blow. Some of the puzzle instructions were also awfully vague and ambiguous. For example, written on a stone tablet in The Ancient Cistern is, “the secret order of this temple is Back, Rear, Back of the Right Hand, and Back of the Left Hand.” Huh? The order comes into play later when you have to strike different points on a rotating compass lock with your sword. It also relates in some way to a giant Buddha statue that fills the temple, but how it relates is clear as MUD. What’s the difference between "back" and "rear?" And does “back of the right hand” mean strike the right side of the lock, or the left? That puzzle was just a mess.
5. The over-stylized map is often hard to read, especially when you’re in a big outdoor area. Is that darker green patch a depression, a hill, a tree, or some bushes? Is that change in color something I can walk over, or an impassable wall?
6. The blue light beacons that you use to mark locations are almost the exact same color as the sky, so they work terribly in the flying parts.
7. The flying itself wasn’t awful, but I wasn’t a big fan. It was too slow and awkward and it mostly felt like a chore. There didn’t seem to be any rhythm to flapping to gain elevation- the bird would flap about once for every 5 times you “flapped” the controller. Also, it was annoying that if you ran off the edge of the sky island you could summon your bird to catch your fall, but not if you walked or stumbled off the edge, even though the cutscene in the beginning shows Link summoning his bird after he stumbles off the edge.
8. I wasn’t crazy about the shields and the shield-bash mechanics. It’s really unclear when and how you’re supposed to use your shield, and you have a disincentive to practice and experiment, because if you screw up you break the @#$% shield you have to fly all the way back to Skyloft to buy a new one. Plus, if you had upgraded your shield with hard-earned money and materials, you have to do all that again. Breakable shields for the loss.
9. There were a lot of things that were really annoying to try to do with the Wiimote. For me, swimming was the worst, and trying to use the spinning swim move to jump out of the water onto a platform was the worst of worst. Frustrating and annoying as hell. Why can’t I just climb up like a normal person would do climbing out of a swimming pool? Some of the worst parts of the game, in my opinion were the “try to do this stupidly simple thing that’s nevertheless incredibly awkward with the Wiimote” challenges. Like having to bashing X number of aerial targets in X number of seconds while riding your clumsy bird. Ack.
10. The side-element of catching bugs, feathers, and tumbleweeds with the butterfly net was annoying; especially with the net you start out with that can’t catch shit. Chasing elusive insects is not much fun in real life, and it’s less fun still in video games.
11. The aim with slingshots and arrows is lousy, with an unnecessary random element of inaccuracy thrown in.
Eh, that’s it for now.
