Skyward Sword has apparently become the most reviled game in the Zelda series.
Although it was extremely well received by critics, it was clear from the outset that
a lot of players were rejecting the game and it failed to sell half as much as Twilight
Princess.
The easy answer is to blame the game's motion controls, but beyond that it wasn't the
game the series needed at the time.
Nintendo knew they had to innovate more after feeling bored by Twilight Princess, but weren't
willing to commit to a full reboot and didn't have the hardware to expand things on a technical
level.
Instead, they chose to arbitrarily rearrange certain parts of the Zelda formula.
One of their biggest experiments was to treat the overworld more like a dungeon; Normally
Zelda connects its areas with a large hub that players will traverse over and over again,
with a few quests and secrets emerging as the player explores.
The landscape visibly changes as you travel and everything is interconnected in a way
that feels like a living dynamic world, even in the ancient N64 games.
Skyward Sword splits its overworld up into three separate areas that don't connect
or transition into one another in any way.
Aside from a glimpse of death mountain on the horizon, these segments could be on a
different planet from one another.
The formula for exploration is that you enter each area from a closed off starting point,
then navigate a path with obstacles and enemies until you loop back around and unlock a shortcut,
which lets you avoid the path you just took forever.
In that sense, the world is disposable; most areas only have meaning as a brief resistance
to your progress.
Once you reach a warp statue, even more of the world is discarded to never be traversed
again.
When the game tries to force you to revisit areas, it doesn't feel natural because the
world was structured around narrow obstacle gauntlets that don't lend themselves to
free exploration well.
Everything feels like a video game level rather than a world.
Even the day and night cycles found in every other 3D Zelda are absent, unnaturally locking
time in place while exploring.
Linear, obstacle filled gameplay works in a dungeon where you've committed to remain
in an enclosed space until fulfilling your goal of defeating the boss- it's a short
burst of more intense gameplay you and get rewarded with items at a regular pace to keep
you motivated.
In the overworld, you don't really know where your goal is, how much more space you'll
have to explore to get there, and there aren't any items to keep you interested as you go
along.
The overworld should serve as a complement to the intensity of dungeons where you can
explore freely and do whatever you want.
Extending dungeon gameplay into the overworld doesn't feel right.
The one area of the game that does allow for open exploration is a total disappointment.
The sky is even more barren than Wind Waker's sea and only has a few islands worth visiting,
and it takes a lot of flapping to get to them.
The bulk of the game's side content is on Skyloft, which has a few majora's mask style
quests but not enough to drive the whole the game in the way that clock town did.
The staff's energy may have been better spent either filling the sky with quests or
on filling Skyloft, instead of attempting both and coming up short.
Normally when a Zelda game releases, the reputation of the previous entry improves.
It's called the "Zelda cycle;" A lot of people criticized Wind Waker at its release,
but after the snoozefest that was Twilight Princess people came to appreciate the amount
of style and character the game had.
Likewise, after Skyward Sword people began to appreciate just how competent Twilight
Princess was as a standard Zelda game.
The same has not happened with Breath of the Wild, which has only made Skyward Sword's
faults more glaring.
It's unbroken overworld is by far the most open and interconnected in the series, with
dynamic weather and temperature systems so detailed that they change with altitude.
Right from the start, there's such a wealth of things to do and see that it's hard not
to get distracted and forget where you were even traveling in the first place.
Zelda stemmed from Miyamoto's childhood exploration of the outdoors, and no game captures
that spirit better than this; An entire gamesworth of content can be had while ignoring the main
quest.
I don't want to say that BotW's approach to exploration is better than Skyward Sword's
in every way, but I struggle to come up with a single way in which it isn't.
The combat is another victory for BotW.
For the record, the idea of swinging a sword around has obvious appeal.
Red Steel 2 executed the concept perfectly before Skyward Sword released.
You had a variety of attacks to perform with various motions that all felt satisfying and
reliable to execute, and the way you used them to engage enemies felt unlike anything
that had been done on a controller before.
It was like a game from the future, with a totally new kind of gameplay that worked well
enough to make an otherwise mediocre game feel like a breakthrough.
Skyward Sword somehow fucked this up.
To make use of 1:1 motion, almost all combat in the game involves directional swings delivered
at just the right time.
Even the pettiest enemies have a directional weakness.
The freedom to move your sword in any way you want was negated by the requirement of
always having to swing in a specific direction.
The Ghirahim fights open up a little and end up being the best examples of motion enabling
something compelling and new to happen; The rest of the time, combat uses motion as a
shallow gimmick.
The hardware itself also wasn't up to the task; the bamboo cutting game is a race to
see how fast you can get your controller to lose calibration.
The sensor bar was needed to cancel drift, which is probably why Red Steel 2 worked so
much better; as a first person shooter, the remote will naturally be pointed at the bar
during gameplay.
A lot of players seemed unaware that Skyward Sword used the bar at all, which may explain
why some people had better experiences than others.
There's been some rumbling about Skyward Sword HD coming to Switch, but the controls
would likely end up being worse without having a sensor bar to recalibrate with or a magnetometer
like the Wii U had.
Breath of the Wild manages to find much more compelling ways to deepen combat while using
a regular controller.
The influence from other modern games can be seen in the new layer of stealth mechanics
and bullet time attacks.
Players can use a wide range of weapons with different advantages and weaknesses, and the
physics based gameplay lets you attack enemies with with the environment or even a piece
of scrap metal.
All of this is far more interesting than directional swinging.
There are hundreds of little improvements that make Breath of the Wild the better game,
but it has major shortcomings of its own.
The rebooted open world gameplay is so successful that it's easy to gloss over the more mediocre
elements, but as the hype wears off those weaknesses become easier to see.
And in the same way that Botw improves on Skyward Sword's weaknesses, Skyward Sword
succeeded where BotW failed.
BotW only has four dungeons; that by itself isn't a problem.
Majora's Mask only had four dungeons, and it's objectively the greatest game ever
made and has Tingle in it.
But Majora's dungeons were the culmination of an entire quarter of the game; as soon
as you enter each area, you begin working through a series of challenges that will lead
you to the entrance of the temple.
Each temple reflects the culture of its area and stands apart from the others with a distinct
atmosphere.
They're further separated by their heavy use of different forms, and halfway through
a new item will be put to creative use to unlock the remaining puzzles.
Like the temples themselves, the bosses are all unique monsters with totally different
designs and fights.
Breath of the Wild's dungeons aren't the culmination of anything; in fact, they equate
to a fraction of the time you'll spend collecting iguanas.
In spite of the game's vast amount of content, they actually seem shorter than usual and
while the lack of items can lead to some interesting flexibility in the puzzles it also leads to
solving things a way that doesn't seem right but that sort of works anyway, which isn't
the most rewarding feeling.
They all share the same sheikah technology aesthetic and aside from their emphasis on
elements like water or fire are basically the same temple.
The player is likely to be bored by this aesthetic before even setting foot inside the first
dungeon because it's also used in the 120 shrines throughout the game.
The biggest sacrifice made while transitioning to a vast open world is that the dungeons
and shrines are a copy and paste job and lack the character Zelda dungeons should have.
Not only did Skyward Sword have more dungeons, but they were far more creative and memorable.
The ancient cistern is based on Akutagawa's short story "The Spider's Thread," in
which the Buddha is strolling along a lotus pond in paradise when he sees a sinner in
the blood pools of hell through the water and casts a spider's thread down for him
to escape with.
The narrative quality and the contrast between paradise and hell make for a dungeon unlike
anything else in the series.
Link uses a time shifting stone to revert a desert back into an ancient ocean and boards
a drifting vessel where time continues to shift between the boat in its glory days and
the ghost ship it's become.
The final dungeon is a gigantic sliding puzzle that has Link rearranging the rooms themselves.
Even the less ambitious dungeons have a distinct character and mood that sets them apart from
the previous dungeons in the series.
The same applies to the bosses.
Ghirahim is fucking nuts and every second he's on screen is the best second of the
game.
Having something that resembles a sword fight with a human enemy is a welcome change of
pace from gigantic monsters, but Skyward Sword does well in the monster department as well.
Koloktos is a haunted Buddhist statue that has to be dismantled piece by piece using
its own gigantic sword.
The boss of the sandship isn't fought in the boss room at all, and instead tears the
ship apart in the lead up to the actual battle.
Echoing one of the most memorable moments in Metroid II, a giant scorpion is uncovered
in the sand of an old mine.
Now that you've seen all of these, here are Breath of the Wild's four bosses- can
you tell which one is which?
Just like the dungeons themselves, the bosses feel like the same basic enemy copied and
pasted with a different elemental twist each time.
The all have the same exploitable eyeball weakness are can be fought with fairly similar
strategies.
Even Ganon himself is an offshoot of this design.
The lack of ingenuity in the temples and bosses is fairly pathetic compared to the designs
in Skyward Sword.
And now I'd like to talk about rain.
Making it a little harder to climb in the rain makes sense.
Making it nearly impossible, even with the full climbing suit, is a terrible choice in
a game based on free exploration.
If you get caught in a storm while climbing a structure you basically have three choices-
give up on all your progress and go do something else, which is unappealing right on the face
of it, set up a campfire if you can, or just stop playing for five to ten minutes.
Absolutely none of this is fun, but at least this happens every now and then.
I appreciate what the game was trying to do with weapon durability- you're always foraging
and procuring supplies from the landscape, and it leads to battles with mops and other
weapons you would never use if you had some unbreakable sword.
But you shouldn't be able to burn through your whole inventory in a single battle.
Swords should only be breaking this fast on the great plateau, when the game is acclimating
you to the mechanics.
The balancing takes the fun out of the weapons; the weak ones are unsatisfying and ineffective
and you can never use powerful ones without feeling like you're wasting them.
Upgrading a weapon in previous games was one of the most rewarding feelings in the series.
In BotW it's like a team of scientists engineered the precise opposite of that feeling in a
lab.
Skyward Sword also had a durability mechanic, but it's easy to forget because it was so
rarely an issue.
Shields only took damage when failing to counter, allowing skilled players to avoid breakage
entirely.
Had Botw done something similar and only doled out damage when swings were blocked, the system
wouldn't have been such a drag on gameplay.
SS also opened up every item in the inventory for upgrades in exchange for collectibles;
I would have liked having a character like this in BotW who could repair your broken
weapons for a price.
That way, you could upgrade and invest in them just like your armor, and you'd still
have chances for foraging in the down times when your sword of choice was broken.
Travel is also a mixed bag.
It's handled better than most open world games I've played thanks to great ideas
like the glider, which is so natural that I find myself trying to use it in past Zeldas.
But there are a lot of areas with no horse access and no good alternatives for fast travel-
by the time you find a sand seal in the desert, you probably could just run to your destination,
and it's there that the stamina meter becomes a major frustration.
Skyward Sword's tight environments matched well with that game's stamina meter and
there were always refills scattered around, but BotW's stamina wheel feels pitifully
outmatched by the scale of the world.
There were a lot of missed opportunities to provide better gear for travel; the stealth
suit allows slightly faster running, but only at night.
The zora armor barely swims faster than default and is only useful for swimming up waterfalls.
Something akin to Majora's zora speed with the full outfit on would have made the suit
extremely useful the whole game.
The story is my final point of comparison and it's an interesting one since the games
share the same basic plot; some form of Ganon is on the verge of causing the extinction
of humanity when Zelda intervenes to seal him away with her powers until the chosen
hero is able to appear decades later just in time for Zelda's seal to fail and for
Link to face and ultimately defeat the threat and spare the remnants of humanity.
In spite of sharing the same premise, the difference in presentation is gigantic.
As someone who has complained about story derailing gameplay before, I can appreciate
that BotW starts off with next to no introduction before turning the player loose.
It's the same kind of laser focus on gameplay that Nintendo had in the 2D era.
But as the game goes on, it's hard not to feel like something is missing.
The Legend of Zelda is just that; a legend, or fairy tale.
It's inevitable that there's going to be some storytelling built in, and I'm not
averse to that if it enhances the gameplay.
It doesn't take much; even the silent Super Metroid had a narrative that boosted the drama
of the ending.
Skyward Sword's introduction didn't need to be as long as it was, but it succeeded
in setting up the characters and their relationships; I cared by the time that Zelda was sucked
down to the surface because the game took the time to forge a connection with her character,
and that connection makes Link's transition into the hero all the more compelling.
Part of the appeal of video games is to escape the complicated stupidity of the real world
and to become an unfailing hero on a simple, righteous mission, because in real life morality
is cloudy and I'd be doing this.
Luckily, Link isn't an alcoholic and we get to experience his transition into the
hero as the real adventure begins, and we see the relationships established in the introduction
develop as the game goes on.
We learn about the main threat both directly and indirectly, making its reveal in the final
fight more interesting.
Ganon has been presented differently in each game; in Ocarina of Time, he was a manipulator
who cheated his way to world domination, while in Wind Waker he was humbled to the point
of being sympathetic.
Demise turns out to be a conquering barbarian so bored of slaughtering humans that he's
intrigued by the thought that Link might actually pose a threat to him.
Once the threat is eliminated Link has to part ways with several characters, and this
is where the payoff of the storytelling is clear to see.
Even if you found Fi irritating in the game, it's hard not feel a sense of sadness watching
her character effectively die.
The conclusion is satisfying thanks to the story, an abridged hero's journey that enhances
the game in a way that feels appropriately matched to the gameplay.
If you were to summarize Breath of the Wild's story, it would be: "Link, fuck around until
Hyrule is saved."
There's not much drama or impact to anything that happens.
The only real plot comes in the form of memories involving characters that are long dead and
that Link can't do much for in the present.
Everyone who was asking for voice acting got their wish with something resembling a bad
anime dub.
The ultimate value of these scenes seems to be to remind the player that Ganon is a bad
guy, but that's already hinted at by the fact that everyone is dead.
The best storytelling is done through the world itself.
You never feel more heroic than when saving a random character from harm, and it's interesting
to piece together what happened on battlefields by observing the aftermath.
But even here, there's only so much that can be done without any real music or story
structure to build on the idea.
Skyward Sword has a moment where an ancient robot is brought into the present by a timeshifting
stone.
Unable to leave the time bubble, he asks Link to travel to his house where the player sees
the rusted remains of his family and images of what his life used to be like.
It's an unexpected and memorable moment made possible by the the structured story
leading up to it and the prominent soundtrack.
Link didn't just aimlessly wander in without context.
In another example from Breath of the Wild, players come across the ruins of Lon Lon ranch.
Anyone who's played oot will feel some kind of impact seeing the familiar landscape in
ruins, but the game doesn't seem to know that.
There's no reaction from the soundtrack, as if it may as well be another random pile
of bricks.
Past games would have memorable themes to give every area a certain character.
Botw only has music like this in the towns, while the world is mostly silent with the
same piano jingles playing no matter your location.
I appreciate that the impressionist soundtrack suits the broken nature of the world and that
it would probably get annoying to hear the same song for 20 minutes while climbing a
mountain, but there are times when the game needs some emotional impact that the detached
score doesn't provide.
The weakness of Botw's storytelling is exposed by the ending.
After preparing for it the entire game, it's incredibly climactic to storm into Hyrule
castle and fight a path to Ganon.
It's one of the highlights of the game, maybe even the whole series.
But it's hard not to be a little disappointed when Ganon turns out to be another robot monster
without any development.
You may as well swap him with one of these guys.
Skyward Sword ended with intense, one on one swordfights with villains that had some actual
character.
Breath of the Wild ends with a giant pig letting you shoot it in a field.
It's a fun spectacle to end the game on, but there's no substance beyond that…
you'd really have to try to get hurt by this thing.
Once Ganon is dead, there's nothing left to work with.
Zelda and Link just kind of stand there and it ends… spoilers.
The time Skyward Sword spends on story pays off by making the gameplay more dramatic and
delivering a satisfying conclusion.
Botw's approach is fine if you take it as an extremely simple story of a good guy killing
a bad guy, but in that case you don't need all these scenes, and I don't think I'd
have missed much if I skipped most of them.
The Zelda staff has a history of taking fan feedback to heart, often to the point of overcorrecting.
And BotW may have been another overcorrection; like Ocarina of Time, it founded an all new
way of playing Zelda, but unlike oot the content on top of that foundation isn't particularly
strong when you really examine it.
It's the kind of game that leaves so much room for improvement that it could be rendered
obsolete by a good sequel, and for me that means bringing back more of the old Zelda
magic.
And Skyward Sword just happens to have the kind of content BotW was sorely lacking.
So if the Zelda staff is still listening, it would be a good idea not to make SS seem
so toxic that they avoid touching it at all costs.
And it would be good not to give Botw's shortcomings a free pass in light of all the
great things it accomplished.
I give Skyward Sword 7 twerking Tingles.
It's heart is in the right place and it has some great moments, but it was a transitional
title where Nintendo still hadn't figured out what the series needed yet.
Botw gets 8 durians out of mask salesman.
It has the best core gameplay in the series, but needed more time to sort out everything
else.
Here's hoping the sequel achieves just that.
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