Helpful Tips For Playing Skyward Sword

1) Don’t sweat the back story. This new Zelda has no meaningful storyline connection to other Zeldas. (I’m sure someone will tell me it does; but to the extent that it does, it’s not noticeable). Nothing bad will happen to you if you don’t know what happened in the other 25 years worth of Zelda games. And not much good will come from knowing what did.

2) Make sure you’ll have room to stand up. You can play this game primarily from a seated position, though you’ll need to sit up, not slouch, when you’re in a sword fight. Gotta have room to make slashes that are clearly in one of eight directions. But you’ll only ever need to stand for one thing: bowling bombs. You won’t need as much room as you would for Wii Sports Bowling, since you don’t have to swing your arm out to bowl them, but you definitely need to drop your hand low and then flick forward. If you want to lean forward in your chair or couch, drop your hand to the side of your leg and flick without getting up, that might work too.

3) Pick a hand to hold the Wii Remote. Link will only hold his sword in his right hand and his shield on his left arm. There is no lefty switch for him. You, however, can switch which hands you hold the Wii Remote and Nunchuk in. The game requires that you swing the Remote in any of eight main compass directions, so make sure you hold the Wii Remote in a hand you can accurately and swiftly do that with. Many enemies are only vulnerable for a short time as they keep changing their guard patterns, so you have to be able to strike precisely and fast, from the correct angle. You just cannot afford to be clumsy. I’m left-handed but was comfortable playing with the Remote in my right, as I usually do.

4) Don’t worry, you can turn the controller overlay on the right side of your TV screen off. They give you the option an hour or two into the game.

5) Pay attention to your surroundings. Read the signs in the game’s main town of Skyloft. Learn where people live. Visit their homes at day and night. At first this will seem overwhelming and pointless. There are a lot of people in that town! But the game slowly doles out sidequests opportunities for nearly every one of the residents. The sooner you familiarize yourself with these folks, the sooner you’ll be capable of picking up the cues that they have sidequests available—and the sooner you will have a sense of who can help with said sidequests. You’ll know a character has a sidequest available when you see an orange word balloon hovering over their head.

6) Help Kukiel’s mom. The game throws the first sidequest in your face, after you first exit the big temple in Skyloft. There’s a lady waiting to tell you about a problem. Her kid has gone missing, so help the lady out. The conclusion of her sidequest will teach you how the game’s sidequest system works, what you can get for doing them and how they benefit you. Do note that there’s no quest log. You will have to remember which sidequests you have active. If you forget, go to the stone near the sword-trainer’s dojo. The stone is one of the game’s hint systems and is used to access a list of videos that show how to solve a lot of the game’s quests. If you started a sidequest, a video showing the solution will probably be in there. I’m not recommending that you ruin the fun and watch the solution, but looking through the listings of opened quests there will at least help you remember which ones you started but have yet to complete.

7) Don’t waste your time with the multiple hint systems. If you put the game to the side for a while, do ask your AI companion, Fi, to remind you what your objective is, but her “hint” and “rumors” interaction options are for people less good at video games than you. The aforementioned stone that includes video tips is nice to have in the game but I doubt you’ll need it more than once or twice, if at all. The fortune teller in the game’s main bazaar is mostly skippable, but eventually he’ll help remind you which bugs exist in which regions of the game. That’s useful knowledge.