Comparing Skyward Sword: The Overworld

As I did in my article last week, Comparing Skyward Sword: Game Introduction, I will be comparing a major element of Skyward Sword to previous games in the series and take a look at how it measures up. This week I shall discuss the game’s actual world.

In my article, Overworlds: The Land Between, I applied some of my own terms to a few different styles of overworld travel, and the ones that are particularly relevant here are “transportation overworld” and “wilderness overworld”. Wilderness is where the overworld is a fully realized, dynamic area that you actively traverse and battle across, utilizing the gameplay at its fullest. Transportation is very different, and these are overworlds where you go from area to area instead by switching to a different type of gameplay – a form of transportation – that you use while traveling. Transportation overworlds in particular are somewhat infamous as of late, whereas wilderness overworlds are practically romanticized. Some, including myself, regard wilderness overworlds as objectively superior due to them having richer gameplay with much more depth.

In the past I’ve speculated that Skyward Sword would contain dual overworlds, a transportation one in the sky and a wilderness one on the surface. Now that the game has released, I’ve found that this speculation is both true and false.

The game’s Sky is a transportation overworld. This area can only be traversed by mounting your bird and flying from island to island, with large colorful beacons indicating the three surface regions, or provinces, that you can also dive down to in the same fashion as the floating islands. Meanwhile on the surface, each of the regions is quite large and contains many individual areas. The land overworld resembles a wilderness, but it also resembles a hub overworld, in that it has a single main area with entrances to sub areas.

Discussing the Sky first, this overworld is both better and worse than transportation overworlds that have come before it. The Wind Waker was infamous for its slow sailing that made it take forever to travel, and I in particular have criticized it for feeling like an incomplete element, something that was too empty and too unfulfilling to be such a major element of the gameplay. Skyward Sword improves some of these issues while simultaneously making others worse. In Skyward Sword, the Sky is small and the flight is speedy. There are lots of little islands, but they’re not divided by nearly as much distance, and the flight speed of the bird is much faster and is magnified by flying through special rocks that allow you to move even faster. Fast travel is easy, so those problems have been handled. On the other hand, the sense of it feeling incomplete is somehow magnified.

The islands in The Wind Waker were often very empty, containing a single chest or a single rare enemy with a special item drop. These islands, however, were often unique and had something interesting to do on them. In Skyward Sword, this is true only for a handful of the islands, mainly Skyloft and the minigame islands. The rest of the islands are little more than rocks with a Goddess Chest on them. The Goddess Chests and the Goddess Cubes are Skyward Sword’s answer to The Wind Waker’s Treasure Charts. While engaged in the game’s more traditional Zelda gameplay, you’ll find a Treasure Chart or a Goddess Cube, and then with that you can head into the game’s transportation overworld to collect the now-revealed treasure. In The Wind Waker, this was an element largely done at sea; the islands served other purposes. In Skyward Sword, 90% if not more of the islands are entirely built around this mechanic. They serve no other purpose. At the very least Nintendo could have allowed you to find other things on these islands or made the Goddess Chests themselves somewhat harder to obtain. Nintendo has reduced the issue of how long it took to travel, while magnifying the problem of how little purpose it serves.

Then there’s the surface world. Once you descend into one of these regions from your bird, you find yourself in a complex, dense area with lots of stuff to see and do. While your initial journey through these areas may be largely linear as you follow the plot, there are other things to find in these areas, so they have plenty of depth, and they are also filled with lots of enemies and other hazards. These strongly resemble wilderness overworlds, but they differ from them in other ways. The individual provinces each contain 4-5 actual areas, with one being the central area connecting the others. While the areas are all filled with lots to do, the fact remains that each region has a hub that you use to access the other areas. This is a combination of the two different concepts of a hub overworld and a wilderness overworld, and in that it feels like a combination of Ocarina of Time and A Link to the Past.

What confuses me is that the areas don’t connect to each other directly. When you first enter one of the land regions, it’s when you’re diving down to Faron Province and first land in the Sealed Grounds. Within this area, you fight a handful of enemies and go through some story sequences before finding your way to Faron Woods nearby. This section of the game is incredibly familiar to any Zelda fan, because throughout the series you find yourself finding an entrance to a new area and venturing into it. The feeling of exploration and discovery is wonderful. Skyward Sword continues to do this within its surface areas, but it seriously begs the question: Why you can’t do this between regions? Why isn’t the overworld more intertwined? Why is each region secluded? I don’t see any reason. It would have taken no real effort to add these connections, and they would have made the world feel more whole and complete (not to mention removed the hub feeling entirely, which also lacks any true merits of its own even if it is often acceptable).

I do not understand why Nintendo only connected these land regions through the Sky. It doesn’t actually enhance the gameplay. I will agree that it isn’t offensive in any serious way, but it’s also hard to argue it has any good reason to be that way.

The Sky literally functions as one of the warp systems that are traditional in Zelda. In Twilight Princess, at any time you can call up the warp screen, select from one of several pre-determined warp points, and go there. For the most part this is the same in all other Zelda games, even dating back to the original Legend of Zelda. In Skyward Sword, as soon as you drop to one of the surface regions, you’re immediately given the map screen and you must choose a landing point. This functions exactly the same. Why didn’t Nintendo utilize the Sky overworld as a warp system instead of the only means of travel?

At this point it sounds like I’m saying the overworlds were terrible, and I’m honestly not. The fact is that the implementation of the wilderness elements is incredible, and Nintendo actually did truly design the overworld areas to feel like a dungeon. Enemies are everywhere, and puzzles and other challenges are constantly presenting themselves. Unlike The Wind Waker, every land region is vast and compelling. There are issues with the grand layout of the overworld, definitely, but in terms of the actual construction of the areas themselves, they are grand and nearly flawless. These are some of the best land overworlds in the series. The Sky, as well, is a serious step up from its predecessors if you rule out the empty pointless islands, because the islands that were handled well are fantastic. It’s also important that the Sky does exist, because of how brutal the surface areas actually are. It allows there to be a casual area gamers can go to if they want to relax while they play. If they had added more to it, it would have been even better.

The fact is that Nintendo’s high production values have reached an all-time high here, while their design concepts have only improved marginally. There are still many design mistakes within the overworlds of Skyward Sword, as there were in Twilight Princess and The Wind Waker, but what they do have has been polished to near perfection. When writing about the overworlds on paper, they sound awful, but playing them in the game, they’re far better. Still, they could have been greater if they had eliminated more of the flaws, and like most of Skyward Sword’s flaws, it’s unusual that they exist in the first place, as many of them correspond to keeping things that many people complained about, or removing things that are standard issue in any Zelda game or any video game in general. I can’t help but wonder if Nintendo’s attempt to really switch things up in this game caused them to rethink things that shouldn’t be rethought.

At any rate, Skyward Sword certainly has one of the more unique worlds of the series. In its combination of many styles of travel, it has an overworld not quite like anything else in the series. It has many flaws present, probably more than it should have had, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable. These are concepts I would like to see Nintendo expand on and polish in the future. Skyward Sword’s overworld is certainly enjoyable.