Zelda

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Critical Miss #33

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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. 

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask – Critical Miss #10

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What do you when you’re expected to make a follow up to what is considered to be one of the greatest games ever made? This is the question Nintendo had to answer after Ocarina of Time. The developers must have decided to create something that is familiar and different at the same time because they created The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. It’s impressive that Majora’s Mask was built largely on Ocarina of Time’s assets, but feels completely different, not only to Ocarina itself, but to all other Zelda games.

The main mechanic that makes Majora’s Mask click (pun intended) is the 3 day cycle and the clockwork schedules of the citizens of Termina, the game’s world. After 3 in-game days, about an hour in real time, the moon crashes into the clock tower, destroying Termina and erasing all the progress you’ve made. You can restart the cycle by playing the Song of Time and that allows you to keep important items and upgrade while losing consumables like rupees, bombs, and arrows.

This mechanic turns a lot of new players away because it adds constant tension to everything you do. A lot of players don’t like being timed and while it is frustrating to have to restart a dungeon or quest because you ran out of time, this mechanic works extremely well. First you can slow the flow of time by playing the Song of Time backwards. Second the game typically has ways to skip parts of dungeons or longer quests if you don’t finish in one cycle. Examples of this would be getting Kafei’s mask to skip talking to his mother and skipping the pirate’s fortress to get to the Great Bay Temple once you learn the tadpoles’ song.

The third reason the 3 day cycle works well is because it makes the world of Termina feel more alive. Unlike other action games, most NPCs in Majora’s Mask don’t just stand in their determined spot. Many walk around, have conversations with other folks, drink at the bar at night, or don’t open their shops until the next morning. Since this game was made for the N64, these schedules are rather limited and rigid, but even a little bit of movement from the characters goes a long way.

The story of Majora’s Mask is not focus on Link or his quest, like it was in Ocarina of Time, but on the world of Termina itself and the character’s who make it up. Termina is just more interesting than Hyrule in Ocarina. It’s more colorful and varied with a surrealist feeling to much of the imagery that helps foster a sense of unease and fascination. The character’s too are more interesting than they are in Ocarina, all live lives of contained sadness and frustration, lost and fear. I wanted to help the characters with their problems, not only for side-questing to acquire upgrades, but also to see where their story goes and what help, if any, I could provide them. This extends to the main antagonist, Skull Kid. I’ve always been interested in villains who are basically children that are granted unimaginable power and don’t know what to do with it. That’s why I find Porky from the Mother games and Tetsuo from Akira so compelling. Skull Kid being corrupted by the power of Majora’s Mask and crashing the moon into Termina fits the bill. He’s more sympathetic than Ganondorf in Ocarina because he’s just a lonely child that wanted friends.

In the beginning of the game, Skull Kid transforms Link into a Deku scrub, leading to him acquiring his first transformation mask, another new mechanic in Majora’s Mask. Link will acquire three masks in the game that transform him into a race from the Zelda series and grant him new abilities. The aforementioned Deku mask lets him shoot bubbles for an early ranged attack, skip short distances across water, and use launch flowers to shoot into the air and hoover across gaps. The Goron mask makes him hit harder and gives him a very fast rolling ability while the Zora mask grants Link the power to swim and attack underwater. These masks cut down on many dungeon specific items that where throughout the end half of Ocarina of Time because many of the uses for those are now rolled into the transformation masks. For example: the hammer needed to press heavy buttons is done with the extra weight of the Goron and the blue tunic and iron boots needed for the Water Temple are gone in favor of actual swimming as the Zora.

Majora’s Mask contains only four main dungeons, one of the lowest amounts for the series, but, much like Breath of the Wild, gaining entrance to the dungeons is a part of the puzzle. Every dungeon has a small section or side quest that has to be completed to learn a song to enter. Be it stealthily infiltrating a Deku castle or saving Zora eggs from pirates, the dungeons are only half of solving each areas infliction. 

That being said, however, the dungeons in Majora’s Mask might be the strongest in any Zelda game I’ve played. Woodfall is the perfect beginning dungeon with a pitch perfect balance of puzzles, rewards, and progression. Snowhead and the Great Bay Temple are both rather vertical in nature and require the use of the Goron and Zora masks respectively. The game culminates in the Stone Tower Temple which might be one of the most interesting and fun Zelda dungeons. The two central mechanic for Stone Tower is the use of the light arrows and flipping the dungeon upside-down to walk on the ceiling. The dungeons aren’t perfect, of course, and do have their moments of frustration. Falling down Snowhead leads to a long climb back up before getting the fire arrows, backtracking through the Great Bay Temple can be tedious do to clunky swimming controls, and having to flip Stone Tower no less than 3 times get all the fairies takes forever.

There are issues with Majora’s Mask and a lot of them stemmed from playing the game in a post-Breath of the Wild world. While that game felt fluid and smooth, Majora’s Mask feels very clunky at times. Watching a short cutscene every time Link transforms or travels through time becomes grating, even if you can quickly skip them. The main action button being contextual can lead to frustrating moments where you keep rolling into a block you mean to grab or grabbing a block you mean to climb. This also the Zelda game that made me realize how boring combat is in the games. I spent the time with the sword master learning the vertical, horizontal, and jumping slashes only to spam attacks when faced against an enemy. Even the final boss, Majora’s Mask and its multiple forms, was so mindless after acquiring the Fierce Deity’s mask that I had wished I had gotten it. 

Majora’s Mask has a lot of little issues, but a lot of little issues can mount up to big problems. Luckily, the game’s issues ever resulted in more than mild frustrated. The game is engaging. With its emphasis on the world and its people, limiting dungeons and items to focus on side quests and transformations, and its overall surreal and creepy tone, Majora’s Mask isn’t just an extremely interesting Legend of Zelda game, but an extremely interesting game in general.   

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild & Climbing and Freedom

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An open world game is at its best when it makes the player feel like they can go anywhere and do anything. They should feel completely open to the fun of the player. While open world games are not my favorite genre, I do enjoy them. I’ve especially liked the Fallout series, Witcher 3, Horizon: Zero Dawn to name a few, one thing all these games have in common is that I tend to get stuck on things. Whether it be on a piece of furniture in a building, a sign next to a wall outside, or simply a hole I could climb out of, I have gotten stuck on something or in some place where I had to fast travel out.

I was thinking about this issue many AAA open world games have as I recently replayed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and I realized this issue never occurred in that game. While it’s not my favorite game, I would be foolish to argue that it’s not a masterpiece. It’s a beautiful, pain-painstakingly crafted world that the player is set out into to explore. It manages to feel so much bigger than most other open world games. With much more freedom to the player and with more fun to be had in it, it feels more alive and moving than other games in the genre. This is due, in large part, to Nintendo deciding that the player should have the freedom to climb on particularly everything they see.

Breath of the Wild wasn’t the first Zelda game to introduce climbing, but it was the game to take it to its logical conclusion. In Breath of the Wild, Link can climb any surface, besides ceilings and the walls of shrines, as long as he has stamina left, which is indicated by a green wheel next to the character. This means the player can climb anything their heart desires: walls, mountains, trees, houses, flag poles, etc. This is the best part of the game for a multitude of reasons.

As the player plays through the game, completing shrines and collecting spirit orbs, they can increase their max stamina. This means that Nintendo had a way of subtly guiding the player through Hyrule at the start of their journey without any walls or locking areas off the map. Some mountains might be too high to climb with Link’s current stamina, encouraging the player to find a way around them, while things like towers, high hills, and flag poles are the best place for scoping out shrines and other points of interest. This guides the player with an invisible hand. It leads them away and around certain tall structure but towards others needed to get the lay of the land. The high mountains also hide some of the tougher mini bosses and harsher climates that require more preparation to deal with. It is smart to block new players from these challenges and let them discover them later in the game. It’s no wonder then that the fiery Death Mountain and frigid home of the Ritos are located in the north of Hyrule, the furthest areas away from where the player starts their journey.

When I said that some mountains are too high to climb in the early game, that’s not exactly true. There are a few small things the player can to ensure they can climb any height from the beginning of the game. First, and the more obvious one, is food. Some foods in Breath of the Wild can give Link extra buffs along with healing his damage. Some can provide extra stealth or defense while others can even increase the speed in which Link climbs and can replenish his stamina. A good combination of these food items will ensure Link can climb to the top of anything as long as the player has cooked enough food. The second thing a player can do to regain stamina while climbing is just stand. You can usually find little nooks in mountains cliffs that Link can stand on to regain stamina. This is trickier as a lot of time the places you can stand are extremely hard to find with only a slight difference in angle of the mountain side dictating where you can and can not stand. I’m not sure if this was an intentional decision on the developers part or not, but it reminds me of other small, secret techniques in Nintendo games they don’t show the player, but can help break the game. The most notable example of this is the bomb game in Super Metroid.

These ways to refill Link’s stamina to climb seemingly impossible mountains is important to Breath of the Wild because it adds the aspect that the game is best at: freedom. Simply put, Breath of the Wild is the most free and open open world games that’s ever been made. Being able to climb everything gives the world a true go anywhere, do anything feel. I was honestly surprised by how much the game still felt fresh during a replay. Climbing opens up an infinite number of subtly different paths the player can take that I traveled to Kakariko Village on my second playthrough taking a completely different route than my first.

Breath of the Wild’s is not the largest world in all of video games, but it damn well feels like it. That is do to the freedom climbing offers to the player. With games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, you know that some chunks of the map are inaccessible, be it behind an impenetrable mountains or buildings the layer can’t actually go into. There’s no areas like that in Breath of the Wild because, with the ability to climb everything, the player knows that every mountain is another vantage point, every ruin wall can be scurried over and hidden behind when a Guardian is aiming its beam at you, every flag pole or tall pillar could be hiding secrets at the top. There is nothing standing in the player’s way because they can just climb over it.

There is one area that the game takes away your ability to climb and that’s in the shrines. These shrines are scattered around Hyrule and act as tests to the players. Most are puzzle shrines which test the player’s ability to use the Seika Slate and other tools to solve problems. While these puzzles often don’t have just one way to solve them, they are more linear than the overworld, more focused and designed to test the player in a specific way. Naturally then, Link is unable to climb the walls in the shrines because most would be broken by that ability. I always find it telling what ability developers of games find important, or even overpowered, by what they will limit or take away to crank up the challenge. The reward for completing a shrine is a spirit orb, four of which can be exchanged for a heart or stamina piece, increasing health or stamina respectively. It’s no surprise that in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild increasing stamina is an equal reward to increasing health.