Skyward Sword was the worst Zelda I have played. We need to talk about this.

[SaviorX]

*************WARNING SPOILERS MAY LIE AHEAD

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, is a shell of a Zelda game. As I trudged on through 40+ hours, I was looking for a semblance of what made Zelda games great, and did not find it until the wee moments before the credits rolled. For the too long , didn't read version, just check the last 2 sentences.

What Exactly is Wrong with Skyward Sword?

Skyward Sword was frankly, a boring game. You keep going on in the hopes that the town will get better or the levels will appear more dark or the enemies will improve, but that is not the case. Sure, the controls are good, but as a result, enemies have turned into puzzles themselves, making even combat tedious. The combat moves that you eventually learn (a la Twilight Princess, and to a lesser extent Wind Waker) are gone here. This omission leaves sword swiping and ONE finishing move as the sole forms of attack outside of the MJ spin move. Even worse, there are maybe 1-2 enemy types that are even worth performing it on, making its use limited. And Lord help you if the diving stab just misses completely…

The story…uninteresting. No matter how much time passes, future 3D Zeldas will always be compared to Ocarina. In this case, it does not hold a flaming Deku stick to that game. In OOT, the world was in true danger, and evil was in flux. At night you are approached by undead skeletons and zombies in the future town that were creepy as hell, even to this day in my opinion. The jagged edges make them even more scary now…In Skyward Sword, the undead purple goblins look like Cartoon Network rejects at best and inspire no fear whatsoever except for during 1 rope-climbing moment. It is like the turned the Goblin into Zelda’s EEVEE. In Pokemon, you take a standard Eevee, and can turn it into a Vaporeon, Jolteon, Flareon, James Cameron, etc. In SS, One goblin is a Zombie, then a Timeshift Grunt, or a friggin, indigenous Aborigine cloth-wearing caveman.

When you fall off Skyloft into the unknown world below…you fall into the greatest vacation spot since the Garden of Eden! Poland Spring water, birds chirping, and all the ropes you can swing from (or hang from…*not funny Tak Fuji voice*) basically there is no threat. I was starting off my journey by catching butterflies and stuff. Not the cool spectral ones from Twilight Princess either, but bugs…like a cockroach.

You are trying to find Zelda, but she does not want to be found. It’s not like she was kidnapped. In fact, she found her own Link with better powers. You chase her down for a talk, but you cannot change her mind anyway. So, what the hell is Link actually doing looking for her? The game could have stopped 10 hours in with these words:

 

Link: “Yo headmaster, Zelda good, she just chillin with this old Sheik lady. They are looking for an amber house where Zelda can chill at when she’s done with classes and stuff”

After several boss fights, Zelda is probably not in true danger until the last 2 hours. But of course by then Link is officially strong enough with an upgraded sword (more on that nonsense later) and some Lon Lon………..I mean pumpkin soup.

In OOT Ganon tore the world apart. In SS, Ghirahim tore up the Skyloft shopping mall. My man is basically by the end revealed to be the same type of life form as Fi, but she couldn’t detect that? She could sure detect when my Wiimote batteries were low, and that’s beyond the fourth wall! You fight him several times in a similar manner. It is not like Ganon in paintings, and then one on one, and then as a Dino-Pig freak. This is Ghirahim in a pink blouse, then Ghirahim in a chrome thong, then Ghirahim with arrows that travel weakly.

In terms of a villain he is corny. In Final Fantasy 7, when you start out, you are in awe of the villain Sephiroth’s sheer strength. When you attack opponents, you take off maybe 22 Hit Points/ HP. As a character you probably had like only 100 HP yourself at the time. Sephiroth would attack the same enemy and cause like 9999 HP to evaporate and then you’d probably change your underwear.

In short, Ghirahim is bitch-made.

The world is plain. There are no hidden Mario posters, secret holes with random cows in them, shoot, nighttime is near useless in terms of function because you cannot explore much during that time. In the game you progress, but do not really know to what extent. But honest to God, there were times where I was playing and hoping that the end of the game was nearby, because there was no upswing. The environments were bright all the damn time. It was like the anti-Gears of War. That game makes me sick of grey and brown…Zelda makes me sick of the color wheel. The characters are uninspired too, plain and simple. Zelda as a series has been able to make it by without voice acting before, but with how poorly the characters carry on in this game, it is desperately needed.

I figure based on last Zeldas, at least the dungeons would give you some hard shit to deal with. Not in puzzle difficulty, but in aesthetic- like bullet holes in the walls and cinderblock rooms, stuff like that. Nope. The dungeons are shorter than the rainbows full of puzzles that you have to sludge through to get to them.*SIGH*

If the main game blows, at least the minigames would provide decent distractions, but no, they are one and dones. The music in forgettable too; SS didn’t even have an intro cinematic like OOT or TP. Music is part of the reason why OOT was so epic in scope despite graphical limitations and audio weakness. SS had nothing…maybe 1 or 2 good themes and that’s it. What the hell.

 

And the repetition of levels is corny. In Phantom Hourglass, I could understand, it is a handheld game. Shoot, even that game was pushing the limit with the backtracking. Upgrade the Master Sword!...but first go find my cat back at Skyloft. But SS is ridiculous (Perfect Strangers Balki voice.) Even the boss fights were repeated. Every time you boot up the game, the description of items you collect get repeated too! Dammit man…

 

And all the 10s awarded to this game really break my heart, because that puts it in the same overrated league as Grand Theft Auto 4; another series I loved but then immediately hated after an overrated entry released. It is like a 6/10 on a scale from 1-10. Ocarina is still king.