9.3 i would say
To explain, in my system, a 9 is a perfectly fulfilling game with no significant flaws (or at least something extra to cover up for those flaws), but a 9 does not strive to go above and beyond. Anything below a 9 is flawed, and the question is merely "how severely?" anything above is a game that goes above and beyond, and while it may not be flawless, the things it gets right are really gotten right to the point that the game is more than "perfectly fulfilling"
Skyward Sword falls in the low end of "Above and Beyond" because there was a lot of stuff new and inventive that really worked to astound and amaze me. Combat in general and some boss fights in particular (love you, Koloktos), as well as really amazingly designed dungeons, an interesting item upgrade system (though underutilized, as many would argue), it really worked to rethink the 3D Zelda paradigm. Story and characters were generally very well executed
Pacing is really the only thing holding this game back. Some of the fetch-quests were viciously pointless (like that damned Robot escort mission, or the Water Dragon's challenge for her part of the song), and that detracted from things, though the poor Water Dragon Song portion was made up for by very invigorating challenges for the Fire and Thunder dragons. The very beginning was painfully slow, and i do agree that there was no point in sending you back into the thunderhead multiple times. The Imprisoned fights were a neat idea, but bungled in execution, mostly because the Imprisoned could sometimes fall over in ways that made it impossible to get to the top of his head in time.
Other problems are mostly minor, such as the slow text speed and the fact that they removed the feature whereby if your wallet was full, you would return any rupees to the treasure chest.
Here was a game that made great strides forward with a few little steps back, but the strides overshadow the flaws to the point that you still end up with a game that goes above and beyond, though not to the degree that it perhaps could
Though if i do score this a 9.3, i'm going to have to dig into the "My Games" section of my account, because i'm not sure if that's what i gave it there...
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
