Flying High, Falling Fast

I’ve said before that I’m a more casual fan of the Legend of Zelda series. I’ve liked every game I’ve played from the illustrious series, but they are not in my favorite games of all time. However, I do want to play through all games in the series, though, both the good and the bad. That brings us to Skyward Sword. Released for the Wii in 2011, this is one of the most divisive games under Zelda’s name. The contrarian in me went into the game wanting to love it. While there are a lot of good things in it, the game has a counter to everything there is to like. This is one of the most mixed experiences I’ve had with a game in a long time.

One of the best aspects of Skyward Sword is the art style. It is bright, colorful, but not super cartoony. It’s like a good mix of the more realistic proportions of Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask and the colors and cell-shading of Wind Waker; it fits a Zelda game perfectly. The characters in the game are all bold, goofy, and memorable. Their charm instantly made me more interested and care about them, especially Zelda and Link themselves. Never before has their relationship been so fleshed out. They are best friends with some romantic feeling growing inside them. It gives Link a more personal reason for risking his life to save Zelda and gives the player strong context for the adventure. The character Grouse even has a nice character arc throughout the game, starting as a mere high school bully and turning into an honorable fellow trying to help Link however he can. The world of Skyward Sword is a pleasant and beautiful one to exist in, but it would be nice if there were more things to do in it.

A thick layer of clouds separates the two parts of Skyward Sword’s world: the surface and the sky. The surface is divided into the Faron Woods, Lanayru Desert, and Eldin Volcano. These are the areas where you will spend most of your time looking for and exploring dungeons, but in between dungeons you will have to return to the sky. To put it bluntly, the sky is too big, too empty, and traveling across it feels way too slow. Since you can see everything in the distance, travelling to a destination is a matter of pointing your bird at it and watching it sluggishly get closer. The first few times I flew in the game, it felt exhilarating until I realized how little nuisance is needed to control your Loftwing. Besides Goddess Chests that appear in the sky, there’s nothing to find in it. There are only a few memorable islands worth exploring in the sea of cloud including Skyloft, the main hub, the rest are just floating rocks that neither pique interest or act as an obstacle to avoid.

So flying above the clouds is not terribly engaging or fun, but what about below them?  Since there are only three main areas you will explore below the clouds, the world of Skyward Sword feels rather small, especially since you will revisit these areas at least three times each. Areas sometimes change, like the Faron Woods being flooded at a point, or there will be all new areas to explore for a dungeon entrance, but it doesn’t help the game world feel any less small or tedious. Often to find a dungeon, you will have to use Fi’s dowsing abilities to find things. This process gets very tiresome and repetitive after the first few times. Same with the strange stealth sections when doing a Goddess Challenge to get a new piece of equipment. There are even times the game makes you run through the entirety of a section you’ve already played in order to progress—most egregious of this would be the 3rd trip to Eldin Volcano where you lose all your items and have to sneak around enemies to get them back. Once you get through all the tedium and nonsense and actually get inside a dungeon, though, is when the level design of Skyward Sword starts to shine.

Dungeons are always a highlight of any Zelda game because they blend the gameplay loops of exploration, puzzle solving, and combat. Skyward Sword is no different since the dungeons are probably the best part of the game. Each has unique gimmicks and different visuals, despite taking place in similar areas. From using special stones to shift time in certain areas, lowering and raising a central statue, and dropping water in lava to create platforms, all the dungeons offer something new and interesting to play with. These are probably the most balanced dungeons in series too, with puzzles being tricky and clever, but never too obtuse to feel unfair. The loop of finding a new item in a dungeon, discovering ways that new tool opens new paths and lead to the boss, and using the item against that boss is as strong as ever. The bosses themselves are also a blast. Blowing sand away to reveal Moldarach, pulling the arms off of Koloktos to use its own weapons against it, and pushing Scaldera down a ramp to weaken it; every boss is interesting and fun to fight. That is, when the game is not reusing bosses, which it does a lot. Ghirahim and Demise will both have to be fought multiple times throughout the game. While Demise is always a pretty lame fight, Ghirahim has the nugget of a great fight in him, but it hindered by the games controls.

Being released on the Nintendo Wii, Skyward Sword makes heavy use of motion controls. This is why opinions on the game are so mixed amongst Zelda fans. I played the recent HD remaster on the Switch where it can be played without these motion controls. Instead of waving your arm for a sword slash, you just flick the right stick; instead of thrusting the nunchuck forward, you click in the left stick for a shield parry; and instead of aiming the bow or slingshot with the pointer, the right stick is again used. These controls work about as well as they can, but they still feel unresponsive and clunky. This is especially true when using or selecting items, where the difference between clicking the right trigger and holding it down is seemingly a matter of microseconds, causing the item selection wheel to pop up in the heat of battle when you were trying to aim your bow at an enemy. These controls have a trickle-down effect on the rest of the game, adding to the sense of tedium and clunkiness that is present throughout, but especially in combat.

Much like flying around the overworld, combat in Skyward Sword is something that starts off feeling thrilling until fatigue quickly sets in. Since you can attack in eight directions at any time, you have more freedom than in any other Zelda game. Enemies will block your attacks and this encourages you to feign to create openings to hit them. This helps every enemy encounter feel unique, challenging, and engaging since you are not just waiting for an opening and spamming the attack button. That would be great if spamming the attack button wasn’t more often than not the easiest way to break an enemy’s guard. Even Ghirahim, whose whole deal is he will grab your sword if you don’t feign attacks, goes down pretty easily if you just spam sword swings in different directions. It is a shame because I can see what the developers were trying to do, to make every fight require attention and skill and patience to beat, but it’s not fleshed out enough, the enemy AI not smart enough, and the controls not refined enough to require players to get good at it to survive. I probably died more times in Skyward Sword than any other Zelda game, but it always felt like the result of poor controls rather than any lack of skill.

Like I said at the beginning, playing through Skyward Sword is the most mixed experience I’ve had with a game in a long time. I didn’t hate the game, there is a lot of fun that can be found in it, but for everything good the game has, there is something negative that hampers it. It was ambitious to make a game that relies almost entirely on motion controls, but I can see a more enjoyable game buried here that would be alright if it had standard Zelda controls and mechanics. Even that wouldn’t have fixed everything with the game though. The world design and progression throughout the game is just tedious and slow and extremely bloated. The search for the Goddess Flames or the Triforce, could have easily been cut and the game wouldn’t have lost anything important. But I still had fun during parts of the game. Skyward Sword is still a Zelda game and still rather good as far as AAA games go, but it is the Zelda game that I have the least interest in revisiting anytime in the future. I played through it once and that’s enough for me.