So broskis, I did what I promised I would do. I started replaying Skyward Sword, figuring that it's been five years since its release, and I ought to like it now. I also figured that it would make for a good warm up in the run up to the launch of the new game this year.
I was right, Skyward Sword wasn't as bad as I remembered.
It was worse.
No, seriously, I think I remember liking a lot of things far better than they really were, I think I excused a lot of flaws simply in an attempt to like (something about?) the game.
Just an hour and a half in, so I just got the Goddess' Sword. Haven't even gotten into the first dungeon yet, but:
+ The music is as great as I remember it being
+ Generally, the writing is snappy and witty, and probably one of the better examples of Nintendo dialog
+ I'm actually perfectly fine with the slow start- it's annoying to have to wade through it to get to the fun, but it's a world building exercise, and I can appreciate world building from a storytelling perspective
That's the good stuff. Literally everything else is terrible:
- The motion controls. I'm sorry, they are inexcusable. They are badly designed, and they have no business being the central primary control scheme for a game as sophisticated as Zelda is. They either flat out do not work (this doesn't happen too often, but it happens- not a concern to be had with button based inputs), or there is lag when they work, or they register my input wrong. There is nothing that they do that regular controls would not have done better, yes, including the sword combat that Zelda fans won't shut up about. Simple analog/button movements would have achieved the same result, required finesse on the player's part, and actually been accurate and reliable, which motion controls are not, not for combat.
- Moving away fromthe combat for a second, let's consider the fact that I have to use motion controls for just about every action in the game. Why is rolling mapped to waggle? Why do I have to fly using the Wiimote (going as far as to control the direction I want to go in by using a uber sensitive Wiimote that registers even the slightest inadvertent tilt as a change in direction)? Why are my dives controlled by the Wiimote? Rolling? Throwing things?
- The graphics are bad. There is no getting around this. I know what the artstyle was intending to go for, but sorry, the Wii's lack of oomph completely does it in. The game looks muddy, things look undefined, and the entire game looks sterile, empty, sparse. I think the Wii U Zelda game is basically what Nintendo was trying to achieve with Skyward Sword's art, but failed to do
This is just the starting, so the real game (and my real problems) haven't even begun to show up yet- as I recall, I remember being frustrated by the lack of an overworld and exploration, I recall hating the repeated fetchquests, I hated the motion controls tacked on to even more things, such as swinging, balancing yourself on a log, fitting a key in a lock, etc etc; I hated the repeated tutorials (only ran into each tutorial once in this playthrough), and I hated just about everything that wasn't the story, the music, or the dungeon design- pretty much everything else was terrible or held back by a misguided attempt to take a tech demo, a great tech demo but a tech demo nonetheless, and then shoehorn it into a game far more sophisticated than something that primarily motion controls can handle.
I'm willing to change my mind on Skyward Sword- god, I hope I do. I remember that I hated Twilight Princess upon release, and then played it in the run up to Skyward Sword, and that changed my mind on the title, and I adore that game today, and I want that to happen for Skyward Sword. But this isn't a good start.
Right now, Skyward Sword isn't even a good game done in by poor controls, considering that the entire game is designed around the implementation of said controls, it's just a poorly conceived, badly thought out game.
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