The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is a culmination of Nintendo’s past all rolled into one product built from the ground up by a developer refusing to fully conform to modern standards. In what ways? Well, it’s more than raising the graphics bar; that’s for sure. Skyward Sword has a tough torch to carry; the anticipated ‘true’ follow up to one of the most highly acclaimed games of all time: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Before we start we start discussing Skyward Sword in depth, let’s talk a little bit about what Ocarina of Time represents. It wasn’t a perfect game but, at the time, it was one of the best. There was nothing else like it available anywhere else on the market and it introduced gameplay mechanics the entire industry copy to this very day. Every other ambitious developer took a look at Ocarina, broke it down and updated it dramatically; taking the foundation and updating it to modern standards. This didn’t happen overnight of course; it happened over the greater half of a decade. Modern games like Star Fox Adventures, Beyond Good & Evil, and more recently Darksiders beat Zelda straight out of the water.
As a result, when you go back and play Ocarina now, it just doesn’t hold up in comparison; it feels incredibly antiquated. Instead of innovating upon on the foundation Nintendo originally created, Nintendo simply added a few gimmicks to the established dungeon & wandering formula and created 3 identical products over the course of eight years that sold well and were received well at the time, but they played the formula pretty safely and they didn’t take any risks.
Skyward Sword represents the first major update to the formula this franchise has seen since then; a fact Nintendo has firmly stated interview after interview for the past couple of years. So the big question arises: Is Skyward Sword better than Ocarina? The answer to that question is a firm yes, but so is just about every other Zelda clone available right now on the market. The question that’s REALLY being asked here is: How much of an update is Skyward Sword?
In effect, it’s Ocarina of Time 1.5; they’ve finally built upon the existing foundation, but not very much. It is a very engaging game, but an inconsistent one; and it’s also a game too firmly entrenched in the past. Now that doesn’t make Skyward Sword a bad game, and on the contrary it is one of the best first party games available on Wii. All of the mechanics fulfil the promises the Wii commercials made five years ago, but it also looks as if it was made five years ago. Skyward Sword would’ve been considered as a technically amazing and revolutionary experience, even without its other faults, if it came out at the beginning of the Wii’s lifecycle and not at the end.
Every utility in this game uses the Wii remote, from the menus through to swordplay. Every sport you saw in Wii Sports Resort - from fencing to bowling – is represented as some tool you obtain in Skyward Sword, and for the most part, all of it works very well. Although the swordplay isn’t fully 1-1 as one would hope, combat feels a LOT more engaging than ever before. With rare exception, you will have little frustration with the controls. With the advent of Kinect and Playstation Move however (which are both technically leagues ahead of Nintendo’s Wii remote) you might end up wishing you were using a Move controller – which has a LOT less lag than a Wii motion plus – or even no controller at all; which is achievable with a Kinect. Skyward Sword fulfills the five year old promises of the Wii, but those promises are bare to the potential of the competition; once you’ve played a game like Kinect Sports it’s difficult to move back to a controller.
The REAL problem with Skyward Sword however, technical qualms aside, is that it is a very inconsistent experience. There wasn’t a whole lot of attention paid to the details and it shows. For example, with the notable exception of the last dungeon and the final boss, nearly all of the dungeons and bosses in this game are absolutely stellar. They are easily the best parts of this game. These are places you will want to explore, and the bosses are a pure extension of the mechanics used in the level. Sadly between every dungeon and boss there are a variety of required and repetitive fetch quests you have to complete to even enter those locations.
Let’s just say for a minute that these boring quests weren’t there to artificially extend the length of the game. The fetch quests are the only thing in this game that feel like an extension of Ocarina of Time; a tribute to the exploration of the title. Although the Zelda games have always been traditionally linear in terms of the main story, there have always been multiple towns and a huge field to explore and discover secrets within. Much of that has been removed and streamlined in Skyward Sword, you only have one town in the entire game. The Sky, the exploration region of Skyward Sword, is relatively much smaller than the Great Sea, Hyrule, or even Termina. Skyward Sword even tells you exactly where to go next and how to play the game, even when you don’t want to hear it.
It’s a bit of an identity crisis. There is a half of Skyward Sword that wants to acknowledge the future of the franchise, but there’s the other half that wants to celebrate the old, but it makes the entire experience completely inconsistent. It can’t be nailed down to just one aspect of this game because it extends to the entire experience; from the music, to the level design, to even the quests themselves. There isn’t even voice acting in Skyward Sword, which is a real shame, since the cutscenes are so very well animated. Then again, there aren’t that many cutscenes to watch, since most of them are at the beginning, the middle, and the very end. Keep in mind also, that this is a 30 hour game. Fifteen hours is without any character development is a long time to wait before the story gets moving again. It’s a real shame, because the story starts out with such incredible momentum and energy, and it all comes to a grinding halt once the tutorial is done and does not even briefly pick up again until the midway point and the very end of the game; it’s all inconsistent.
There are moments in Skyward Sword that will make your jaw drop in awe and will make you say: “This is the kind of experience I’ve been waiting for.” Then you’ll beat the boss you were fighting against or you will finish the dungeon you were exploring, and you’ll get to another boring fetch quest and you’ll remember why this game is a 7, and not a 9, out of 10. Skyward Sword is not a bad game, but it is a sequel that tries to both acknowledge and break free from the laurels of its predecessors.
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