The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

If Majora’s Mask is not quite as perfect as I remember, then Skyward Sword is not remotely as bad.

 

This is the one where Link and Zelda are schoolkids in the colourful village of Skyloft, which sits on a chunk of floating rock above the clouds. Friends since infancy, they roam the skies on (quite ugly) birds and fend off the aggravations of the local bully, Groose, and his sycophant pals, until Zelda turns out to be the chosen avatar of “the Goddess” and Link the hero destined to help her. The surface world of Hyrule is believed to be a myth until both our heroes fall down to it, and Link is gifted a magical sword to aid him in his travels.

 

It’s an interesting, if only very minor, twist on the formula. The decision to move away from the regular Hyrulean model is a good one in principle but I’m not sure that high school melodrama was the way to go. Groose and his friends are charmless and irritating, and I’m not sure how to feel about a storyline in which a bullying adolescent sex-pest gets a redemption arc and becomes invaluable to the hero in the end. (Seriously, fuck Groose.) Although I am one hundred per cent behind a Zelda who repeatedly tells him off to his face – a Zelda who actually gets to have a personality beyond reserved, long-suffering nobility.

 

The story after that, though, is basically business as usual. Evil is coming, Link and Zelda have to do their respective jobs to defeat it. Link’s job is to roam around, fetching items and treasures and defeating evil. Zelda’s job is to hover about in a chunk of crystal.

 

It’s a formula that’s been used so often that the game designers now seem determined to twist themselves into knots trying to carve a definitive timeline out of all these contradictory iterations. In Skyward Sword’s case, the quest is presented as an origin story of sorts, I guess because it was the 25^th Anniversary game and they wanted to be fancy, but I can’t take seriously any attempt to knit all these games together into a coherent whole. I would love it if the games all had compelling stories, but really, that’s not why we’re here. See princess, rescue princess, fin.

 

Everything that’s good about Skyward Sword is nevertheless festooned with caveats – this is really great, but…

 

The dungeons are, as ever, full of interesting new ideas and clever new obstacles and tools that, on this replay, have surprised me all over again. Using the flying bug to scout ahead or force an enemy to lose his footing on a tightrope, or stepping in and out of timeshift zones to make your way across the sand in the mining facility, it’s all wonderful stuff, but there’s just not enough of it. I was shocked to finish Skyview Temple and the Earth Temple as fast as I did, and I remember from my first time the bitter disappointment of realising I have to return to these regions again and retread a lot of old ground. There’s little expansion later in the game – the regions you open up in the first half are small, and they get slightly bigger. That’s it.

 

Previous games (A Link To The Past, Ocarina Of Time) hinged on a midpoint where a different, altered world opened up – the Dark World, or the future version of Hyrule – and allowed you to move between them, with changes in one affecting the other. Majora’s Mask went for depth rather than breadth, and though the game world was relatively small, you had a lot to accomplish in it. Twilight Princess and Wind Waker both stuck mostly to the same world, with small excursions to the Twilight Realm in the former and to the submerged Hyrule in the latter, but their overworlds were just so much bigger than Skyward Sword’s.

 

Aside from Skyloft itself, there’s just nothing much to do in the clouds, and aside from working your way to the temples, there’s not much to do in Hyrule either. You’re dropped down there, you follow a path to the dungeon, you go back to replenish your supplies in Skyloft. There’s no Mogma village full of sidequests, no Kikwi community, no colony of busted robots in Lanayru who need your help. It is, one might say generously, a very economically constructed, very streamlined game. It’s huge fun, but I felt a bit shortchanged.

 

Nowhere did I feel this more keenly than in the repeated battles against The Imprisoned and Ghirahim. There’s simply no need for you to have to fight The Imprisoned more than once. Yes, Impa tells you that the seal is weak and always breaking, but as boss battles go, it’s a tedious slog, and when the moment comes that you realise you’re going to fight him again, it’s enough to inspire a player to go for a nice long walk. Boss battles should be difficult, that’s why it feels so rewarding when you complete one. Forcing the player to do the same thing over and over is just lazy, not to mention cruel. An optional side-quest from the Thunder Dragon – presented as a reward!! - even offers you the chance to fight them all again in order to win a shield. It’s padding, and insultingly obvious padding at that.

 

Dividing the surface into disconnected regions makes the game feel even smaller: in Twilight Princess, you could travel from the mountains down into the Zora kingdom, slip down a river into Lake Hylia, follow the same road all over Hyrule. In Skyward Sword, if you want to go from one part of Hyrule to another, you can’t uncover a handy tunnel or river or be shot out of a cannon. You have to go to a statue, be blown back up to the sky, summon your bird, find your new destination and drop into it all over again. Why not just have the ability to warp from statue to statue?

 

(Was Breath Of The Wild conceived in response to the complaints about how limited the potential for exploration was in Skyward Sword? “You want freedom, we’ll give you freedom!”)

 

Actually, considering that flying is the big thematic sell of the game (as sailing was in Wind Waker), its application is pretty limited. Why do you have to drop through the clouds instead of just fly down on your bird? You could then fly from one region of Hyrule to another, or make use of your bird as another tool in your adventures, just as Epona and the King Of Red Lions had uses beyond just travel. Also, it is immensely frustrating not to be able to control where you land when returning to Skyloft. Time and again I guide my hideous bird over some temptingly secluded spot and jump down hoping to reach it, only for the game to send me to the bazaar instead. If you can’t even fly where you want to to explore hard-to-reach places, why bother with the birds at all? It’s the most poorly-devised mode of transport in all the Zelda games to feature one. The bird doesn’t even have a name, poor sod.

 

Graphically, the design is gorgeous, colourful and quirky, but the actual execution leaves a lot to be desired. The intended effect (if I recall correctly) was supposed to render the game world in watercolour-esque dabs and washes, but anything more than Link’s arm’s length away just looks blurred in a way that’s painful to look at. Gaze upon the glory of the Goddess statue in Skyloft, or the majesty of the Lanayru desert, and squint. The design gets wasted, which is a real shame. Too many games strive for hyperreality, so it’s doubly unfortunate that Skyward Sword aimed for something so beautiful and fell short. (I actually remember emailing Nintendo’s European helpdesk when the game was originally released, asking if there might be something wrong with my game disc, as I couldn’t believe the eye-watering blurriness was intentional. Nobody replied.)

 

I mentioned earlier the sword that aids you in the game, and I used the word “aids” quite wrongly. Fi beats out all comers as THE most intrusive, the most irritating sidekick figure in the series (at least, of the ones I’ve played. Maybe there’s someone worse out there but I doubt it). It feels as though every time I take a step, she hops up unbidden and forces me to sit through three screens of advice I didn’t need. She is the queen of stating the painfully bloody obvious. Enter the temple in Faron Woods and she pops up instantly to advise you to explore it. (Thanks for that.) She repeats the content of conversations you literally just finished having with someone else, and all the while you’re hammering the button yelling I KNOW PLEASE LET ME PLAY THE FUCKING GAME. She jumps in with clues about puzzles without being asked, when the point of the game is to at least try to enjoy figuring it out yourself. Sometimes she sings, and her face when she does is horrifying.

 

Over-exposition is a major flaw in the game - every character just talks SO much, taking pages and pages of dialogue you can’t skip to impart information that could have been given in one, or better yet, not given at all. The game really does a lot of unnecessary hand-holding early on. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve snapped, “oh for God’s sake I get it I get it move on” while hammering a Next button that doesn’t respond.

 

Even still, I could forgive a lot if only the control system wasn’t so awful, and this is why I spent years thinking I hated the game. The Wii motion control system was always twitchy and unreliable, and better suited to simple games like Wii Sports Resort - forgiving games that didn’t depend on split-second reactions or, um, accuracy. If the Wiimote misread your movements on Wuhu Island, it wasn’t a big deal. If you’re midway through a pitched battle in Skyward Sword, down to your last two hearts, and you can’t get your Wiimote to register a downward strike correctly, that matters. It’s great that the game recognised the limitations of the motion control and gives you an easy way to re-centre the Wiimote as you go with a single tap, but it boggles the mind that nobody thought, “you know what, if we’re having to address flaws during the game like this, maybe we shouldn’t be using the motion control at all? Maybe it was an experiment that failed?”

 

Nintendo apparently just would not give up on the Wii motion controls. I get the idea. When the Wii first came out and it was suggested that you could just swing your arm as if you were wielding the Master Sword, that idea was intoxicating. It promised such total immersion in the game that I couldn’t wait. Twilight Princess dabbled in it a little but Skyward Sword dives headfirst in, and I can only hold my breath and try to live with it. (To cross geek streams with one of my other obsessions, it’s like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s frequent revisits to the Mirror Universe or the world of comedic Ferengi politics. I don’t get the appeal and I wish the show would stop trying to make fetch happen.)

 

That Breath Of The Wild still utilises motion controls in some shrine puzzles shows, I guess, an admirable belief in the potential of this technology. Motion controls simply don’t give the kind of precise control necessary to enjoy these games. They make the experience frustrating. In Skyward Sword’s flying sections, the level of difficulty is high purely because it’s impossible to get the control to do what you want. It’s not that the game is tricky or requires good timing or observation or reflexes, it’s only hard because the Wiimote makes it hard.

 

It’s like trying to play tennis with your wrists duct-taped together – challenging for all the wrong reasons. Wherever a task required motion control, it became impossible. Fighting Ghirahim and other monsters that rely on precisely directed sword-strikes is a nightmare when the game simply doesn’t do what you tell it to do. As for playing Link’s harp – bluntly, it’s horrible. Literally all you have to do is swing the remote from left to right in time to the rhythm, and yet the game never seems to register your movements correctly. I’ve been reduced to yelling at the screen in sheer frustration. The game is easy, it’s just the control system that’s hard. I’ve played this game on multiple Wii consoles, so I know it’s not just that I have a busted Wiimote.

 

Furthermore - and this is a really personal gripe - I find that the motion controls actually reduce my absorption in the game. As I mentioned before, I love the idea of swinging the Master Sword around, but the reality has always been (for me) that the more physical activity was required, the more I was taken out of the game: I lost the illusion of being immersed in the game world, instead feeling rooted in my own living room, with my own arm tiring and my own wrist aching after holding the Wiimote in an unnatural way for hours on end, flapping it to make my bird fly. I want to get lost wandering in Link’s world, and the less I am reminded of my own reality, the more absorbed I am in his.

 

The item selection system is weirdly overcomplicated, too. I remember reading once that the original dream Nintendo had was that you would only ever need one joystick and one button to play any game; Skyward Sword opts for the exact opposite, with a function for every button. This is hugely impractical with the Wii remote: the way you hold the remote when playing actually conceals some buttons and leaves others out of reach, unless you have a dislocated thumb. Really, the limitations of the Wii remote are exposed by the fact that the nunchuck attachment has a joystick. If the Wii remote was really all that and a slice of toast, the joystick would be obsolete.

 

Previous Zelda games depended on a central pause screen from which you could access your items, maps, everything. The game stopped, you chose what you needed, you unpaused and carried on. Skyward Sword, again forcing you to use the Wii remote, has you choose your items (bomb, potion, arrows, whatever) using the Wii remote while the game carries on. And the Wii remote responds no more reliably on the item screen than it does during play, meaning that in the middle of a pitched battle, I’m accidentally sprinkling mushroom spores or deselecting a shield when I wanted to fire an arrow. The whole interface seems to add nothing to the game except an artificial layer of difficulty.

 

I’m still partway through my replay of this one, and I’m settling in to the controls – the game isn’t as unplayable today as it was yesterday – but still, I would kill for an updated version of Skyward Sword with HD graphics and an ordinary, button-and-joystick-driven control system that didn’t require me to flap or slash or anything else. Let the joystick determine the angle of my sword. If I’m going to lose in battle, let me lose because the adversary is lethally difficult and requires precision timing, not because the Wii doesn’t recognise it when I do a horizontal slice. (Also, I have to wonder how alienating this control system is to players with disabilities or medical conditions. I’m relatively able-bodied and I find that the swordplay and flying make my wrists ache, I can’t imagine how someone with arthritis would cope.)

 

Honestly, with a better control system I would love this game. A lesser Zelda game is still a better game than most. Skyward Sword still has its share of innovative puzzles and intricate dungeons, delightful new gadgets, moments of invention and inspiration. The citizens of Skyloft, the shopkeepers and random passers-by, have character to spare. It’s unfortunate that the world above the clouds is limited but it’s a charming environment for what it is. There are tons of collectibles that can actually be used to upgrade and repair armour and shields, or to mix potions – and though I’d forgotten it, the idea of the stamina-meter originated here before popping up in Breath Of The Wild, and it adds a welcome new layer of difficulty when climbing or running. And Ghirahim is a memorable new adversary, a creepy harlequin ninja prone to temper tantrums, even if he does end up being a stooge of a version of Ganon just as Zant was.