Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: An opinion!

FINISHED LEGEND OF ZELDA: SKYWARD SWORD! 40 pounds very well spent! Skyward Sword, for me at least, is one of the best action adventure games. It is the longest. By the time I killed of the last boss my playtime was nearing 50 hours! And this is NOT an RPG! 

The story was pretty good, esp. the fact that most Zelda games are about the game play and it gets the most attention, but Skyward Sword had a riveting plot. Sure it kept things simple and still used the “Save the Princess’ theme that is synonymous with Zelda games, but the way the story was told was very interesting. There were quite a few cut scenes that had good amount of cinematic flair and kept things moving along. There is where the devs have done a great job in juggling story exposition and game play considering the long play time. For the game to be this intriguing right till the end, esp. for a game plays heavy series like Zelda was remarkable. I loved the fact as it’s an origin story; I didn’t feel as if I was being weighted down by Zelda’s past. This has to be Nintendo’s most story focused game to date.

The characters were pretty decent too. While Link was once again a blank slate and the many of the NPC were rote, but the real stars of the show were Zelda, Fi and the villain Ghirahim. Zelda side stepped the whole damsel in distress cliché and showed her as a strong willed and brave girl, but still retaining the fragile and vulnerable nature of a damsel. Unlike the tom boy version of Wind Waker or the coward type in Spirit Tracks, here was Zelda who, while staying innocent, was standing up to the evil that threaten to destroy the world  and fought it out, in different ways, along with Link. Man I would love to have a girl like Zelda. And did I mention she was quite the cutie!

Fi is Zelda’s very own Cortana! While Cortana had spunk…..amongst other…..assets, Fi was a ‘master’ of stating the obvious made her pretty memorable. At least she wasn’t as annoying as the fairy in Ocarina of Time (played OOT for 3 hours). Ghirahim takes the place of the series regular villain, Ganon and is pretty menacing….in a…queer…kinda way. I have never seen Ganon, but Ghirahim did decent job in me hating him all the same. Had fun beating his ass!!

The game play was a bit of a mixed bag, for me at least. The level designs and puzzles were amazing and very creative. Puzzles found in Lanayru Desert were nothing short of awesome! The entire game world was like a big puzzle which was fun; although a bit of normal exploration would have been good. But for me the most divisive aspect of the game was the use of the Wii Motion Plus, esp. how it was implemented in combat. At first it was fun, using precise attacks to dispatch enemies, but as the game started to get more tough and enemies attack pattern started to change, I started to find the precise waggle to be annoying to the point of almost hating it. My arm would tire very quickly which could had become a deal breaker for me if the game would had been a notch tougher. But during boss battles I would be cursing Miyamoto-san for put Wii Motion Plus in the game. So while it was fun for a while, I am glad and relived that the usage of the device had come to an end!

The thing which really impressed me was how much the game kept on offering in terms of game play. Right when I thought that all of the game play had been displayed, there would be something new.!

The production values were great! The game looked like a Claude Monet’s painting! The colors were bright and vivid and while due to hardware constricts the game textures were blurry but that played right into the hand of Nintendo and the end up giving it a unique artistic touch. The sound track was….okay I guess, but the main theme which used the classic Zelda’s theme arrangement with the new theme was just great! I like the new Zelda theme more than the classic one though. All in all while the production values could not beat the ones found in Super Mario Galaxy 2, Skyward Sword sits very cozily as one of the best looking and sounding games on the Wii.

Ok so now I am putting on my critics cap and nitpick the things I did not like about the game:

I did not like the monsters and enemy designs.  I felt that maybe the artists of the game were a tad lazy. While I appreciate game design that are aimed at a young crowd, but the ones found in Skyward Sword were just not good. I will cite one example: The Imprisoned. Here was a horrendous monster whose sight made me shudder a little, but then I saw its hands and feet! I mean..LOOK AT IT!!

In this day and age where voice acting has become so important in games, to stay so rooted the past ended up hurting Skyward Sword. Nintendo kept the game voice less which I just do not understand. The game would have benefited from voice acting if they had British actors!

The most damning feature of the game was back tracking. No, not your typical back tracking here, but visiting the new environments in the same location..3-4 times was not good thinking. A game that is as lengthy as this, there should had been locations to go to. I just couldn’t fathom reusing the same locales. EVEN IN THE LAST DUNGEON!! I had to deduct a few points.

So in the end I will still rank Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword as quite an amazing game. Having so much content in a game whose genre is action adventure was quite bewildering. The story was decent and the game play was solid as ever. Sure there were a few things that I did not like, for which I will be chastised by long time Zelda fan (this is the first Zelda game I have finished) but I still have loads of fun. My play time at the end was 49 hours and 32 mins. My ranking: 9 out 10!