Review: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is an action-adventure game for the Nintendo Wii. It was developed by Nintendo and Monolith Soft.

Link and his creepy fish lips standing in Skyloft before he gets his uniform. That's Zelda behind him.

Link and Zelda are best friends in Skyloft, a town that floats in the sky above a cloud bank that blocks any sign that there is an earth below it. One day Link are Zelda are flying around on giant birds when a tornado knocks into the unknown world below. That night, Link discovers a magic sword inhabited by a spirit named Fi, who tells Link that Zelda is safe and alive and Link has to go get her because she is important. Link sets off to the world below to find Zelda, and deal with the demonic influence threatening everyone.

In the game, you start off in Skyloft before descending to a part of the world. There are three parts, the forest, the volcano, and the desert. You go to one of these areas, where you explore, fight monsters, and collect a piece of equipment, like a slingshot or magic earrings. Then you go into the dungeon in that area, where you fight more monsters, collect another piece of equipment, solve puzzles related to that piece of equipment, and fight a boss at the end. Finally you return to Skyloft and unlock the next area.

All the equipment you find use the Wii's motion control in some way.

That is the first part of the game. In the next part you return to the first three areas, where a new section has opened up. You travel to that new section and repeat the same explore/gather/new equipment/dungeon pattern of the first part of the game.

In the last section of the game, you go back to those areas again, except you do not discover a new place and you do not get any new equipment.

It is all quite formulaic and boring.

That feeling of boredom is helped by how uninteresting the areas are. Forest, volcano, and desert are only going to be interesting to someone who has never seen a fantasy adventure before. The forest and volcano are pretty linear too, while the desert has the disadvantage of being a desert most of the time. And there are hardly any people to interact with; Link’s world is an empty void save for a couple of isolated groups. All you have is Skyloft for any towns you may want to explore.

The desert has some time travel elements to it, which makes it the most creative area.

Combat is based around moving the Wii remote to swing Link’s sword, and swinging the nunchuk to move Link’s shield. There are two kinds of enemies: ones who can be killed by the equipment you pick up, and ones you fight with the sword.

Sword fighting is glitchy and problematic. The sword will not always move with the remote, often you will not do anything and Link will just start aiming his sword to the left or the right for no reason. The shield-nunchuk is unresponsive, which is bad when you have a second to parry.

The sword fights themselves are pretty crap. The game makes a big deal about being able to hit enemies from all sides with your sword-remote swinging, but enemies you fight with your sword can block everything, and the only way to hurt any of them is to parry their attack by swinging the shield-nunchuk at the last second, stunning them and giving you a chance to flail the remote like a crazy person.

There is not much story beyond Link chasing after Zelda who keeps going to different temples for some vaguely explained plan to save the world, then Link going to power up the Master Sword for some equally vague plan. It gets a little better near the end when things start getting serious, but not by much. The only interesting character is Link’s asshole neighbor Groose, who is the only one who has something resembling a character arc. The story is slightly more interesting if you are a Legend of Zelda fan, because it goes into the series’ back story, but on its own it is boring.

Meet Ghirahim. He's an effeminate stereotype that serves as Link's primary antagonist. 

There are two things you can do to pass the time besides the main quests. You can collect junk from dead monsters to improve your equipment, especially your shield, and you can unlock chests hidden in the sky around Skyloft for cash to buy more equipment and pieces of heart to increase your health. The chests are pleasant enough to find, but the item collecting is annoying since you will often have more junk than you need.

The game also thinks that you, the player, is pretty stupid. Fi will bother you whenever your battery is running low or you are almost out of life, even though there are flashing red indicators on your screen pointing those things out already. She will also state the obvious a lot, but will not give you helpful information on tough boss fights.

Despite all that I played through the entire forty hour game, completing as many sidequests as possible to add as much variety to the game as possible. Even though the controls were frustrating they were not so broken that I could not complete anything, even the boss fights that were just sword fights. And even if the levels were repetitive the puzzles were challenging but not unfairly so.

Skyward Sword is an okay game; I would call it just barely fun. But it has so many problems that drag it down to mediocrity when it could have been so much more memorable.