The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword struggles to soar and stalls too much for its own good.
Skyward Sword begins like most traditional Zelda games. There's a moment of tranquility, usually with an ongoing celebration or ceremony. In Skyward Sword's case, this celebration is known as the Wing Ceremony. Our iconic hero Link is in training to become a Sky Knight, riding the back of giant bird known as a Loftwing. Link and other Sky Knights in training compete against each other to win a special prize from Zelda, a Sail Cloth. All this takes place on a floating island known as Skyloft high above the clouds. After Link wins the Sail Cloth from Zelda and is promoted to Sky Knight, he takes off on his Loftwing with Zelda for a joyride when out of nowhere, a tornado whisks Zelda off her bird sending her tumbling beneath the clouds. Now Link's adventure begins to find Zelda and learn his true role as Hero of Legend.
The biggest selling point of this particular Zelda game is the 1:1 motion controls thanks to the Wii Motion Plus. Now, you can move Link's sword realistically, and the combat will rely heavily on how you swing your sword. Horizontal, vertical and diagonal slashes, along with forward thrusts all play their part if you want to take down your foes effectively. For the most part, the controls work well, but they are far from perfect. One particular boss battle, Lord Ghirahim, requires you to slash at him from the opposite angle he's anticipating. The Wii Motion Plus is a bit too sensitive, so when you bring your sword over to the other side to prepare a slash, it might register that motion as a slash itself and cause Ghirahim to defend. Thrusts may not register properly and holding your sword high in the air to charge up a Skyward Strike might take a few tries before you get it. When you really need to rely on these motion controls and they end up not performing as advertised, it makes the game more frustrating than need be.
The Wii Motion Plus is also used to control Link on his Loftwing. By tilting the controller left, right, up and down, Link can steer his avian companion. Jerking the controller up and down makes them gain altitude, and pressing A causes them to lunge forward for an attack. The problem with these controls is they don't always work as well as they should. You have to really be gentle with the titling of the controller to make the bird fly the way you want, and not everyone is blessed with a steady enough wrist for that kind of precision articulation. You can actually break the controls by flapping too fast, causing the bird to get confused and steer wildly to the left or the right. Nintendo should have learned from Factor 5's mistake with Lair and made it an option to use the analogue stick for flight controls. The controls work great for skydiving, however, and it's an exhilarating experience to plummet through the air and open your Sail Cloth at the last possible second.
Perhaps the biggest nuisance with the motion controls is aiming. Instead of using the infrared to aim at the TV screen, it uses the 1:1 of the Wii Motion Plus. This means that whenever you're aiming a weapon, or merely looking around, the game will take whatever position your controller is in and use that for the center. This causes problems for players who hold the controller at rest, because when they go to aim, they'll find their reticle moving wildly off the mark, requiring them to press down on the d-pad to recenter. It's something you have to recondition yourself to do, but it's annoying nonetheless.
Speaking of annoyances, Link's new adventuring companion Fi is a major one. This android-like spirit possesses Link's sword and offers him information regarding enemies and his environment. The only problem is, she offers an incredible amount of useless information as well. When you're low on health, she'll tell you need to replenish your hearts as soon as possible. She also seems to constantly want to tell you your batteries in the controller are low. If you're playing with rechargeable battery packs that don't hold their charge very well, this will become very grating on the nerves after a while.
The minor annoyances continue to pile, as you're told numerous times what kind of crafting item you've picked up. You already know what a jelly blob is, what an amber relic is, a monster horn and claw is. Not only do these text screens pop up constantly, they also take you out of the game to show the items being put into your inventory. There is no need for that! It's a very distracting thing that should not exist in a game of this generation. Crafting also doesn't play a big enough role as it should, as it only enhances your equipment ever so slightly, and some of the items are too scarce to warrant the time spent looking for them.
If you really want to hunt for crafting materials, you can use Skyward Sword's dowsing feature. Dowsing is self-explanatory. Point your sword to look for a material, or another mission-based objective. Watch as the arrow points to your destination and listen for the frequency of the pings to increase to indicate your proximity to your target. The system works well, and really makes looking for things such as Goddess Cubes easier. Goddess Cubes are half buried cubes that need to be struck with with a Skyward Strike in order to unlock its corresponding treasure chest high up in the sky.
One of Skyward Sword's offenses is not utilizing its massive world well enough. There is a giant expanse underneath the Cloud Barrier that begs to be explored, but you're only given access to three realms. They are cliche themed forest, desert, and volcano regions. Instead of Nintendo being as creative as they can be by offering you more regions to discover, they make you revisit each of them two more times. Even the smaller islands peppered amongst the sky seem like a paltry sum to adventure to. The game feels far more empty than it should.
Enough of the complaints. Now it's time to talk about Skyward Sword's strengths, and this has been a constant staple of the entire franchise. The dungeons are still excellently designed. Each one does a great job incorporating its theme into the aesthetics and every new tool Link finds along the way gets put to wonderful use. There are, however, no extremely challenging dungeons, so it won't take you very long to solve them. What is fun, though, is that the dungeon key is a three-dimensional object that requires you to manipulate it with the Wii Motion Plus.
After you figure how to put the dungeon key into the lock, it's on to a rewarding boss battle. This is another area where the franchise shines in, as each boss is wonderfully designed. Taking a minute, letting them attack you, and trying to analyze their weak points is half the fun of these battles. As with the dungeons they reside in, they all make great use of the new equipment and weapons that link finds therein. If for some reason, you can't discover a way to fight one of these bosses, Fi is always there to help, provided your batteries aren't low... After you help the Thunder Dragon in the Lanayru Province, he'll offer you the ability to revisit each boss battle if you feel the need to fight them again.
There are just two complaints regarding bosses, however. The Imprisoned is a boss that appears from a broken seal at the bottom of a spiraled pit near the Sealed Temple. Over the course of the game, you'll fight him two more times. Although each occurrence is slightly different introducing a new element to the fight, it just feels like more padding to an already padded game. By the third and final battle with the Imprisoned, you might find yourself growing very tired of the game at this point. Lastly, the final battle at the end of the game is very anti-climatic. It's not very befitting of a battle between an almighty evil entity and the Hero of Legend, and it is actually over when it feels like it's just getting started.
In this day and age of next generation graphics, Skyward Sword is impossible to impress on a technical level thanks to the Wii's outdated hardware. Because of this, Skyward Sword's visuals rely entirely on artistic direction. Thankfully, the artistic direction is superb. The overall look of the game has a great balance of realism and cartoony charm. The use of color is excellent, and the special effects are just perfect for a Zelda game. The subtle rushing of air ruffling Link's clothes really make you feel like you're falling. Bombs exploding and enemies poofing into plumes of smoke have that classic Zelda style to them. As with most Wii games these days, it just leaves a lot to the imagination of just how much better it could have looked had Nintendo incorporated more powerful hardware into their Wii.
The one facet that Zelda has never faltered in is the audio. The soundtrack stands to be one of the best composed soundtracks in any Zelda game. The harp is the most prominently used instrument in the game, and as such is an instrument Link uses himself. Along with a full orchestra of other instruments, the music is always very beautiful to listen to, and some of the best tracks are found in the dungeons. The game also packs a soundtrack CD so you can listen to any of these melodies at your leisure. The sound effects are classic Zelda from bomb blasts to Link hitting his head on a tree, to the clanging of his hook shots. The only irritating thing about the game's audio is Nintendo still insists on using grunts, moans, gibberish, squeals and other vocal expressions to voice their characters. In this generation when adventure games in general have become so much greater in scope than Zelda games, it really is time for Zelda to evolve and become fully voice acted.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword obviously has tried a few new things. Its structuring and formulaic pace, however, have kept it trapped in the past like the Temple of Time in this very game. Zelda loyalists will have no problems forgiving the game's many faults, because they'll simply be thankful to finally play another console Zelda after six years. Those growing tired of Zelda games, or those who simply want to see the series grow, won't have that luxury and all the annoyances and contrivances will surely become off-putting. Plus, no matter how you look at it, the Wii Motion Plus controls simply aren't perfect, making it hard to argue that motion gaming will ever become the decided upon future. The Legend of Zelda franchise honestly needs to evolve to keep up with the bigger adventure games of this generation, but it never will if Nintendo continues to remain complacent and think that only the Zelda loyalists need to be appeased.