A Satirical Look at 10 Things Wrong With Skyward Sword

1. I don’t like the Wii.
Here it comes—the old “The Wii doesn’t do HD and Zelda doesn’t have voice-acting” argument. Let’s put another paragraph between this one and the one where I moan about the Wii not having high-definition graphics.It just feels odd that it’s 2011 and one of the biggest games of the year has graphics like this. I played most of it on an LCD HDTV through component, and the smoky warbly jaggies were nauseating. I plugged it into a mammoth CRT for a bit, and I enjoyed it a little bit more, remarking at one point (aloud, to no one (so lonely)) that “It’d be just like playing a GameCube game, if it weren’t for this dumb controller!”

2. Seriously, why isn’t there voice-acting?
And why doesn’t this game have voice-acting, again? The “fans” moan like deflating gazelle carcasses whenever the words “voice-acting” and “Zelda” are brought up in the same sentence. I bet they’d even moan peremptorily if someone said “It’d be cool if Zelda Williams did voice-acting in a game”.

3. The writing is pretty bad.
To those same people who say voice-acting in games is always bad, I will also say that writing in games is bad, too. Zelda: Skyward Sword’s sentence-to-sentence writing is some of the worst I’ve ever seen in games, and I’ve seen a lot of games. Here is one screenshot I took with my phone. I would have taken more, though the Herculean task of removing the remote strap from my wrist every time I wanted to take a photo with my phone would have stretched six hours of play-time into thirty.

5. “It gets really good about six hours in.”
Around the time where the game sends me on the third fetch quest revolving around teaching the player how to use the “Dowsing” ability to search for some laundry list of objects, I told a friend I was bored.

“How long have you been playing?” he asked. I told him I’d been playing for three hours, at which point he said “It gets really good about six hours in.”

You know what else you can do in six hours? You can watch There Will Be Blood twice, and then sit and think about it in the dark and silence for 44 minutes.

6. Please pick an art direction already.
The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, despite being a game that I don’t personally care for very much, was the best thing that ever happened to video game graphics. The oceanic depth of expression in characters’ animations and faces was nearly breathtaking. Wind Waker’s visual style was fruit-turgid with blinding confidence. It was clearly the work of a talented group of people being trusted to do what they loved doing in a way they loved doing it. It was a visual style pieced together lovingly from fragments of ideas seemingly as they occurred to a person who was (and is) probably a Real Artist. The more picturesque moments of Wind Waker can be stood up alongside the best offerings of the legacy of comic books or animation, hand- or computer-drawn. Played on a mammoth CRT television, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker makes all LED HDTVs beg for forgiveness.

Then there was Twlight Princess, which looked . . . sorta real, though sorta not? And Now here’s Skyward Sword, which looks sort of like a cartoon…though not totally! It has some textures on the ground that look sort of real…-ish. Skyward Sword looks like someone taped together five different unsuccessful, unheard-of PlayStation 2 RPGs. Then—every now and again—there’s a character who has a darn good face, and I kind of hold my breath for a microsecond, and wonder how cool this whole game would look if it were a Wind Waker style where everyone were a little bit taller and thinner.

7. The same old lock-and-key dance.
Zelda’s game design manifesto is to be all about questing through dungeons full of things you can’t do. You slog until you find an item that will help you do the thing you previously couldn’t do. Like, maybe it’s The Hookshot, which lets you pull yourself over to far-off ledges. It would be cooler if you had a Spider-Man level of freedom. You don’t: you can only grapple over to specific types of panels. So that’s the thing: you get this item, and then you go back to a room where there’s a ledge you couldn’t reach before. Now you grapple over to it, and continue the dungeon.

In summary, in Zelda games, new items are “keys”. They “unlock” the “door” of “impeded progress”. They are the situational “currency” used to “purchase” “more game content”—in the form of progress through the game.

8. I just don’t care about the Motion Plus.
Nintendo, I’m sorry: I just don’t care about the Motion Plus.

I thought I did—that’s why I bothered playing this game. I thought that Skyward Sword would be the first Zelda game to be “about” “technique”. I wasn’t expecting the game to be God Handly in its difficulty or demand of precision. I just wanted something with some teeth. It could have been all molars and I wouldn’t have cared. I am just tired of these games’ difficulty gumming at my ankles. I want at least gentle rows of molars on my forearm. Is that too much to ask? Couple those gentle molars on the forearm with some thoughtful dungeon design—aside from the lock-and-key parts, they sure are unrelenting in their thoughtfulness—and there’s me: shirtless on a sofa with a huge maniacal grin on my face, swinging my white-plastic-shackled arms around in the dark like someone the police are going to bust in on any second now with Mag-Lites and shotguns.

9. The default follow camera angle is too high.
Oh! This is a good one. The camera angle floats just a bit too much higher than Link’s shoulder than would have afforded optimal forward visibility. I’d recommend lowering it a half a virtual meter and angling it up a couple of degrees. This would make it especially easier to look up—which is, unfortunately, so often where objectives are located in a game boasting three-dimensional environments.

I call this the “default” camera angle, though there is unfortunately no other one. The player can’t freely control the camera, understandably because Nintendo wants to make a game that doesn’t put off shy players with too many buttons. The viewer shouldn’t have to work to direct a film he only wants to watch, for example.

10. I hate the stamina meter.
The stamina meter in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the absolutely stupidest thing I have seen in a video game in many years.

I could write about it for ten thousand words. I am going to practice restraint.

Being that it only appears while Link is running, and being that it appears literally just to the left and bottom of the middle of the screen—where the character is—this crayon-bright interface intrusion floats over a ground which is whipping by the player at higher than a walking speed. So there it is: steady as it goes, punching a neon hole in my retina for six seconds every nine seconds of the game.

Being that the environments are occasionally expansive to a point of fault, you’ll be running a lot. You’ll be seeing this stamina meter a lot. They probably could have called this game “The Legend of Zelda: The Adventure of a Guy with Half of a Cartoon Lime Floating Outside His Body”.