Review: The Legend of Zelda - Skyward Sword
There's never a chance for a massively-hyped game to meet its expectations; at a certain point, the audience begins to assert wishful, largely implausible, ideas into the upcoming title which are lofty at best and misguided at worst. Skyward Sword is a major victim of this phenomenon, but there's much more to say than that it just didn't meet fan expectations. All the elements were there: an orchestrated soundtrack; a style which denied Twilight Princess its dark and edgy legacy; enough time had passed for fans to fully appreciate Wind Waker and Nintendo knew this very well; technology had finally come to a point where swordplay could finally come into its own; and of course, the promise of a story which predated every game in the series. Ganon was nowhere to be found in pre-release information, and the story promised a gripping narrative about destiny and the relationship between Link and Zelda. The pieces were set and all Nintendo needed to do was deliver.
They didn't.
Skyward Sword contains an artistic depiction of the backstory recounting a violent conflict between an unnamed Goddess and the hordes of evil. As a twist to the established lore of the three goddesses leaving behind the Triforce after creating the world, the Goddess is given the Triforce to protect from the forces of darkness. Out of desperation, the Goddess breaks off the land and sends it into the sky before leading the battle to quell the horde.
As much as I genuinely enjoy this backstory and what it brings to the plot, there's already a flaw to be found: it's pushed back to the attract mode of the game and is never explicitly shown in the main game--by attract mode, I'm referring to its placement on the game's title screen if the player chooses to not start the game immediately. While The Wind Waker also had its backstory tied to the attract mode, it also played after the player began their game just to ensure the player didn't miss the important story.
Since this three minute scene was apparently too long to show in the game's formal intro, Skyward Sword cuts its inclusion in the main story and wastes a significant amount of time introducing the player to the world and characters of Skyloft, the land in the clouds which forms the central hub of the game. Players are given near-constant exposition dumps which are largely unnecessary; if a story was given negative marks for telling its audience rather than showing, Skyward Sword would have a negative score before the player even received their sword.
For example, Gaebora explains to Zelda the importance of their culture's connection with the birds of the sky, the Loftwings, and the unique nature of Link's red Loftwing which is the only one of its type. Of course, none of this is information the player explicitly needs; Skyward Sword merely treats the player like they're idiots and over-explains much of its world through expository dialogue. Link, in turn, seems like a dopey fool while everyone is explaining the world he's apparently lived in all his life. Furthermore, Link is treated like his own character rather than a vague player-insert: multiple scenes show Link articulating his thoughts and moving his lips, but the characters around him repeat what he's trying to say and it comes off like he's a deaf-mute that the other characters are trying to interpret. A dialogue tree appears in a few cutscenes and allows the player to give Link a certain attitude, but it's not used often enough to matter and has no lasting impact anyway.
There's also the undercurrent of nostalgia which seeps into every aspect of Skyloft and its citizen's designs. For instance, Gaebora is clearly a reference to both Kaepora Gaebora, the helpful owl of Ocarina of Time, and Rauru the Sage of Light. His nature as the guardian of the Goddess Sword and head of the Knight Academy add parallels to Rauru, but in doing so it creates an annoying mix of both important lore establishment and pointless nostalgia.
The same could be said of the final encounter between Link and Demise, which desperately needed more time to develop. I don't mean half a dozen fights with The Imprisoned, I mean a fully-fleshed out character arc between the two. Hell, any character arc with Demise would have been preferable to his appearance at the very end of the game--just look at Spirit Tracks, where Malladus is revived and given time to develop while the players run around for no reason. But the more disappointing element of Demise is that his callbacks to Ganondorf are completely unnecessary; the player can clearly see that he's a massive, big-nosed demon with flaming red hair, so any further references to Ganondorf are wildly unnecessarily exposition. As an aside, if you own the fantastic Hyrule Historia art book which released alongside Skyward Sword (later for the Western release) there's a description of Demise's red hair serving as a connection between him and Ganondorf. If the player was supposed to infer this from his design, then there's no reason for it to be stated explicitly within the game.
Even when the game finally takes a step back and allows the player to begin exploring the world, Fi makes her appearance just in time to begin nagging the player about every last detail. I feel like Fi is the Navi that older players remember Navi to be like: a constant annoyance who never stops interfering with gameplay flow. Fi's interruptions are far worse than anything Navi ever did during the entire duration of Ocarina of Time, barging in to remind players that their health is low, their controller batteries are low--probably the absolute most immersion-shattering dialogue I've ever seen in a video game, and she does this despite the fact that a massive red indicator appears on screen to show players their battery is running low--she even appears to remind players how to use items which the game literally just stopped the player to explain.
I didn't mention much of Midna when I reviewed Twilight Princess, but that's because I always thought Midna was purely serviceable. She's a great character and one of the more memorable companions in the series, but if I stopped to talk about every memorable character these reviews would be even more tl;dr than they already are. Fi is such a worse character in comparison that I cannot believe she could have been preceded by such a perfectly-executed companion like Midna. Midna, for her part, rarely interrupted the flow of the game and often only spoke up to make a brief comment about the story. Like Ezlo of The Minish Cap, many of her main interactions require the player actually press the dedicated companion button. I simply don't understand why Fi would butt in to every single conversation when previous companions had been handled so well. The developers tried to fix what wasn't broken and made the game worse as a result.
The sheer amount of exposition drags the plot to a screeching halt on numerous occasions, but it eases up at an inconsistent pace. At times the player will go for several hours with only Fi occasionally chiming in to annoy Link about information he already knows, but for a small stretch of time near the beginning there's almost nothing in the way of some brief exploration. After the player is forced to watch several minutes of cutscenes--which can't be skipped until the second playthrough, taking a step back from Twilight Princess and its immediately unskippable cutscenes--they are allowed to roam around Skyloft at length. Surprisingly, there is not a single tutorial for using the sword for the entire game despite it easily being the most complex gameplay mechanic.
Not that the sword is annoying to use, mind you--it's just complex. Other systems in the game are not so much, such as the hamfisted use of motion controls in nearly every aspect of the game. The simple act of picking up and throwing a rock or bomb should not require the player to move their entire arm when a button press would do just fine. The sword is understandable because the main focus of Skyward Sword is on sword combat, but to go so far down the deep end with everything else is enormously tedious.
I strongly dislike the removal of advanced sword techniques as seen in Twilight Princess; I wasn't happy about the unnecessarily complicated additions of many of the techniques when compared to The Wind Waker, but removing them entirely is wasted potential in a game that is based entirely on sword fighting. Even the ability to run and swing the sword is removed, and that was such a small and useful improvement that I thought the developers would be crazy to remove it. Of course, now cutting bushes goes back to the slow and laborious pace before Twilight Princess, and a particularly intense run through a crowd of enemies slows to a crawl and destroys the urgency of the scene. All it required was the ability to slash and run and I don't understand why it was removed.
That is to say nothing about Skyward Sword's horribly underutilized instrument, in this case being the harp used by Shiek in Ocarina of Time--more pointless nostalgia, and this time it's outright completely wasted. The harp requires the player strum the instrument in the air, but it is only ever used to play the songs to open the Silent Realms. Even the unintuitive flute of Spirit Tracks has more use than the Goddess Harp--and why go back to the weird Adam West Batman naming convention like Spirit Tracks? Goddess Harp, Goddess Cubes, Goddess Shield, Goddess Sword--stop it.
But the main combat mechanics of the game are mostly solid, with the sword more or less following the player's movement. I noticed the game being too sensitive at times, misinterpreting my arm reorienting its position for a swipe. This actually is a problem when it comes to fighting many of the enemies as they follow precise patterns, often punishing the player for striking the side that's being blocked. On the other hand, players can now use the shield as a parry to catch enemies off-guard; more than any other mechanic in the game this is the one detail which I utterly adore as it rewards players with good timing and careful observation.
The shield will stay raised after the player parries, fixing one of my complaints with Twilight Princess and its stupidly simplistic blocking mechanics. To counteract the new shield mechanics Skyward Sword introduces a durability gauge for the shield as well, which depletes if players block without parrying. The shield (and other items) can be upgraded with treasures similar to Spirit Tracks, the shield being customized to block specific damage and the items gaining new abilities. A shield with infinite stamina can eventually be discovered by the player, but it's a late-game addition that should have been introduced much earlier.
There's not much to say about treasures since they work mostly the same as Spirit Tracks, and they still annoy players with descriptions every time they're picked up. It's more like picking up different rupees in Twilight Princess, popping up whenever a player loads their file again, but the similar mechanic of picking up rupees has been removed as a result. It's a weird half-step and part of me wonders if the developers actually knew why people complained about this detail in the first place since it's right here in a different form.
Before the player can retrieve their sword, they're forced into a series of busywork which could have been excised from the game without anything being lost. It's mostly there to introduce Groose, the headmasters of the Academy, and the relationship between Link and Zelda but naturally, these characters typically have their personalities told to the player rather than shown. If the game had started after finding the red Loftwing and left the player to discover things on their own, it would have been all the better for it. All the first hour or so accomplishes is giving the player a tutorial on how to open a map despite the map icon blinking on the screen and doesn't even force players to learn how to use a sword, so aside from some needless character building there's nothing to really lose by cutting the game up to the point when the Wing Ceremony begins. Really, if you get a chance to play Skyward Sword in the near future just assume the game began at the Wing Ceremony and tell me if you thought anything would have been lost--given how long it takes, I think you'll end up agreeing.
I feel it's incredibly short-sighted to give this incarnation of Link a hat simply because it kicks The Minish Cap after already taking its place as the first entry in the series. The Minish Cap has become one of my favorite games in the series after playing it for this retrospective, so outright making an attempt to subvert that game feels like a cheap blow. Furthermore, having all the knights wear a loose hat while flying across the massive sky doesn't really sound look a good idea. Unless those things are stuck on tight, I can't imagine them staying on the head for too long. Aside from that, the new armor-like appearance of the signature green outfit clashes heavily with the goofy hat, so the design would miss nothing if it were removed. I like the redesign of Link's tunic and even love his cadet outfit, so to have such a small nitpick that's so bothersome is hard to avoid.
A much bigger nitpick is the horribly linear design of the second third of the game. I completely understand opening up the surface over time as it gives the story a sense of progression, but the second time around should have allowed players to approach the Silent Realms in any order. I'd be far less annoyed at this specific series of events was accompanied by a fun overworld full of distractions, but the sky is a far cry from The Wind Waker's enormous Great Sea with its multitude of islands full of things to do. It was pure laziness to make most of the islands contain just a simple Goddess Chest or a short challenge followed by a Piece of Heart, and I'm not alone in thinking Skyward Sword would stand up to the best of the Zelda games if its overworld was simply more engaging. There's also the obvious problem that the surface areas don't seem to connect naturally and part of me wonders if that's why they're separated by the sky, but some matter of cohesion should have been considered. If the entire map had been fleshed out, even the parts that couldn't be reached, it would have helped in developing the setting.
The sky is not the only negative close comparison Skyward Sword has to The Wind Waker, the other major comparison being the art style. I appreciate that Nintendo tried to return to a cartoonish look in order to give the game a more timeless look, but it never truly stands out when compared to the hard-edged shadows of The Wind Waker. The depth of field which kicks in to mimic the style of impressionist paintings is unique, but it blurs too close to objects and looks way blurrier than it should. On a high-definition TV, The Wind Waker still looks as good as it did when it released. The same can't be said of Twilight Princess, but Skyward Sword doesn't go far enough.
Forcing players to return to the three surface areas in a slightly different order is insulting and there was no reason for the developers to force a set order, especially since the plot is taking a step back to allow players to explore each surface area. I recall an interview years ago with Eiji Aonuma discussing the nature of the overworld and one of the major ideas he mentioned the team was going for was creating an overworld which seamlessly transitioned into the dungeon, and aside from the seamless part I feel Skyward Sword does this well. The dungeons are all well-designed, but like Phantom Hourglass and Twilight Princess the dungeons have a more-or-less designated path thanks to the one-key limit.
My advice would have been to create a hub tying the three areas together and cut the sky entirely, which would create a seamless action-oriented Zelda unlike anything the series had seen yet. I'm of the firm belief that Zelda should offer a great deal of exploration, but Skyward Sword has a decent amount of trails off the beaten path which could have allowed for an experience somewhat like Final Fantasy X--less of a giant world to explore, more of an intimate path on a smaller scale which took players on a tour of the setting. The half-step of an empty overworld in the form of the sky and a detailed pseudo-dungeon on the surface, much like the half-step of the art style, damages the game but this time the damage is far more severe.
I'm glad the final third of the game allows players to approach the three surface areas in any order, but in a baffling turn two of the three areas are full of new mini-games that are horribly out of place. For the volcano, players need to run through a long stealth section to climb up the mountain--this might be the first area the player visits after fully upgrading the Master Sword, so to have it leave their hands immediately afterward is a cheap turn. For the forest area, the player is forced to swim and collect a series of small collectibles with poor swimming controls tied to the motion controls. A gameplay design that's been criticized since its popularity in Superman 64 should never find its way into a Zelda game, and even if it only lasts for a few minutes it's still too much to ask the player to navigate through rings and still take itself seriously. I hate to say it, but the developers should have known better.
The story reaches a fever pitch after Zelda locks herself away to strengthen the seal on Demise and I appreciate that the three zones are short to match the frantic pace, and the constant attacks by the Imprisoned further increase the tension as the seal weakens. There was no reason to force the players to participate in all of these fights though since it only incrementally increases in difficulty with each encounter; instead of creating a sense of urgency it just causes a deal of annoyance.
I haven't mentioned Ghirahim yet because I was working on the idea that an exceptional character in a Zelda game doesn't require much discussion, but Ghirahim is possibly the most fantastic villain in the entire series. He's flamboyant and powerful, constantly appearing to taunt Link and hound him on his quest to find Zelda. He sings his own theme song and steals the spotlight in every scene he appears in. In short, he's awesome.
Like all good rival characters, the game contains several encounters with Ghirahim to give the player an idea of their own progression. One of the best examples of a good rival character is Vergil from Devil May Cry 3, and the formula for his boss fights are possibly the best way of implementing a character with this type of arc: in the first encounter, the player is barely able to fight for their life. In the second, the characters are interrupted and their duel is postponed. In the third, the hero finally overcomes and defeats their long-time rival.
Skyward Sword follows the same formula perfectly, but fails on the execution by introducing Demise at the last second. It's an amazing encounter and one of the best outright final boss fights in the series, but there's no connection between Demise and Link. I'm fine with the boss fight, but it should have been built up better--I'd have also liked to see the relationship between Ghirahim and Demise in full given that they serve the same role as Fi and Link, and having Demise get annoyed or tired of Ghirahim's attitude would have been an amusing reversal.
If I had been asked before this retrospective what my biggest gripes of the game were, I'd have said Fi and the sky, no rhyme intended. Having played through the entire series outside of the multiplayer spinoffs, the most egregious flaw of the game is how it attempts to upturn everything about The Minish Cap even when it's unnecessary. I already mentioned the hat, but look at it like this:
The player is given a normal sword before meeting their magical companion, who knows more about the world than the player and predates the events of the story. After recovering a magical sword which can cut down evil (and shoot out beams of light), the focus of the story shifts to upgrading the sword's power to defeat the villain. The final encounter brings the characters closer together, but it's bittersweet as the companion bids farewell to Link and all of his future incarnations, but despite this tearful parting gives the future incarnations of Link a small gift.
The problem with Skyward Sword, in this instance, is that I was glad to see Fi leave while I felt genuinely sympathetic toward Link and Ezlo's separation. The small detail of giving Link something as small as a hat gives the story a grounded, more emotional touch. Imagine that the first story in the entire Zelda series was over something as trivial as a magic hat and an aggravated little mouse person--it makes that game seem so humble and heartwarming that I can't feel anything but the deepest respect for it.
Compare this to Skyward Sword which offers a bombastic story offering no humility whatsoever and nothing as small and beautiful as the exchange of a hat; in fact, Skyward Sword diminishes the importance of Ezlo's parting gift with Link for no reason at all. More than the irritating dynamic that Fi pushes on Link, the fact that there was nothing emotional symbolizing their attachment makes the story feel less meaningful. It's for this reason alone that I can't help but feel even worse about the game than I did on launch, which is really saying something.
This is one of the first big-budget titles which I didn't have a honeymoon period before my opinion of the game soured; for titles like Bioshock Infinite and Mass Effect 3, I needed a second playthrough before the flaws started to unravel and my feelings took a negative turn. Skyward Sword left me cold and angry before my first run even ended, and to this day I've never finished my Hero Mode playthrough simply because I can't bear to sit through anymore of the game than I have to.
Verdict
Skyward Sword is a game that forgets its goal too often, with mechanics designed for a Zelda and its world designed for an action game. I wanted to fall in love with this title, its gameplay mechanics and its characters, but like Spirit Tracks it's designed to annoy every step of the way. Fi won't get out of the player's face long enough for them to even stop and take in the game, and the linear design seriously hampers its replay value. For example, there was no reason for the Sacred Flame portion of the game to be as linear as the tablet quest. The best I can say is that its swordplay, when it's not stuck on Simon Says, is generally rewarding and Hero Mode makes for a fun second playthrough since the player can skip the entire story. The side quests are fun as well, but they're stretched out too long across the narrative for them to be engaging. Skyward Sword is heavily in need of a touch-up in the vein of Wind Waker HD, but like Twilight Princess I highly doubt that the developers could fix the glaring issues embedded in the core of the game. An absolute shame, and a disgrace to the Zelda franchise.
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