#can’t remember if I mentioned but I also beat wind waker recently

[bilestat]

I FINALLY BEAT SKYWARD SWORD

[sage-nebula]

Years ago I might have rated Skyward Sword higher, but I replayed it recently and while I might rate it higher than you it's definitely not one of my favorites. Personally I wish they would have focused on more actually clever things with the motion (I will always remember spinning the spider around to expose it's weakness! I loved that!) and like most people wish they stopped at one Imprisoned fight. What did you feel were its weaknesses?

The gameplay. 100%. Skyward Sword is unplayable for me.

I love everything else about it. The music is gorgeous, the characters are wonderful, the art style is beautiful, and the story (aside from not calling Hylia a demigoddess like she should be) is fantastic. There is so much about it to love . . . 

. . . if it was an anime, or a manga. But as a game? It fails horribly.

1.) The motion controls are NOT 1:1, even with Wii Motion Plus. And if Skyward Sword were designed like any other Zelda game, where you could hit monsters any way you pleased and they would take damage, that would be fine! But because Nintendo was so confident that they had 1:1 motion controls, they decided to make every monster—even ones as basic as Deku Babas—into puzzle monsters where you had to hit them a precise way at a precise time or your attack did no damage. And you know what? That’s bad game design even if you have absolutely perfect motion controls. Because let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that the controls were 1:1 with the Wii Motion Plus, as advertised, and my problem was that my coordination was poor. In that case, the game is still unplayable, because it means that people without perfect coordination for whatever reason (maybe they just never developed those skills, maybe they’re disabled in some way) can’t play the game. For a series as wide-reaching as Zelda, it’s a problem if you’re cutting off a huge portion of players from being able to enjoy it. And on that note . . .

1.5.) The motion controls were MANDATORY. I understand that Nintendo has been in love with motion controls for a long time, and I accept that. But you should be able to turn them off. Like, they’ve put them into just about every big budget game they’ve released the past couple of decades. The Splatoon games have them, Breath of the Wild had them, and so on. But in each game, you can turn them off. Hell, even though Breath of the Wild does require them in a couple shrines, those shrines aren’t required to beat the game. To 100% it, sure, but not to beat it and get a full experience out of it regardless. So for Skyward Sword to require the motion controls to the point where you’re not even given the option to turn them off (which, again, makes sense given that they based even insignificant monsters around them) is terrible. It’s terrible for people who don’t like them, but it’s absolutely HORRIBLE for people who are disabled and thus can’t use the motion controls. Skyward Sword’s motion controls are a huge middle finger to disabled folk, and that sucks.

As a side note? I was much younger when I played Skyward Sword than I am now, and in much better health. But even back then, I could only play for a couple hours before I got winded because of all the damn sword swinging I had to do and whatnot. This is why I think it’d be unplayable to me now; I’m not healthy enough for a damn video game and that sounds like it should be an oxymoron, but it’s not.

2.) Once again, the dungeons are too damn long. This was a complaint I had about Twilight Princess as well, but it bears repeating here. Whether it’s because of my ADHD or otherwise, I just can’t handle dungeons that take hours to complete. Breath of the Wild was, pardon the wordplay, a breath of fresh air in that sense. Finally, the dungeons were a reasonable length again. But in Skyward Sword they were not. They were insanely long and full of goddamn motion control puzzles, which made them feel like a chore x2 (because they would already be a chore due to the length, but the miserable motion controls made it even worse). Games should not feel like a chore to play, but Skyward Sword still did.

3.) Fucking EVERYTHING was a puzzle, though. So I’m going to elaborate on this a little more in a second, but basically Skyward Sword didn’t have an overworld. Skyward Sword had a hub area (the sky), and then several puzzle dungeons that led to even longer puzzle dungeons on the surface. The Faron, Eldin, and Lanayru areas were extremely small areas filled with puzzles that you had to complete just so you could get to a dungeon with more puzzles. There was nothing to explore in these areas, nothing to see, because you were too busy solving puzzles so that you could go solve more puzzles. And I hate that! I get that puzzles are a big part of Zelda, but you know what, exploration should be too. Exploration is what the series was literally founded on, even if the limitations of the NES meant there really wasn’t that much to find. So to have a game basically be nothing but dungeons, especially for a person like me who isn’t jazzed about dungeons in the first place, was a huge buzzkill.

4.) There really was NOTHING to explore. So, to elaborate on what I mentioned in the previous point: Aside from the surface area basically being nothing but dungeons (dungeons that you had to backtrack through five billion times), the sky was empty. It was just completely empty. There was nothing there. You had Skyloft, the Pumpkin island, the roulette island, Beedle’s ship . . . and that was it. Oh sure, there were other floating rocks here or there, but there was nothing on them. There was nothing to do. And considering this followed Wind Waker, where there was so much to discover in the ocean, so many different islands that had secrets and people and cabanas and minigames and whatnot, it was a massive disappointment. Nintendo showed us that they could give us huge areas to explore, they just deliberately chose not to for a 25th anniversary title. What this meant is that you had nothing to give you any breathing room between dungeons. Because again, the surface areas before the actual temples were basically little mini dungeons. So whereas in past Zelda games you’d have little sidequests and places to explore in-between dungeon crawling, in Skyward Sword you really didn’t have that. So not only could I not breathe because of all the physical exertion, but I also couldn’t breathe because the game gave you no time to rest. Goddess Din give me strength.

5.) The backtracking was INSANE. My god, another reason this game could have benefited from more areas was so that you wouldn’t have to keep exploring the same damn areas again, and again, and again, and again, AND AGAIN. The Imprisoned fight you mentioned was bad enough, because that wasn’t a fun fight and so to have to do it something like three separate times was miserable. But it was also miserable that there was literally nothing to this game below the clouds or above them, so they just had to keep inventing fetch quests to send you back to the same areas time and time again. Seriously Nintendo? At least Twilight Princess had more places for us to go, even if they looked boring. You couldn’t even give us that for the 25th anniversary title. Smh.

All in all, the gameplay experience of Skyward Sword is just absolutely miserable. From the forced motion controls to the fact that it’s nothing but dungeons pretending to be a map, I had to force myself to keep picking up the Wiimote because playing it felt like doing a chore akin to mowing the lawn. Which sucks, because as I said, I love the story and the characters to pieces. Fi’s farewell makes me cry every time I rewatch the scene on YouTube. But while story and characters do carry weight and are important to when it comes to Zelda games, ultimately, Zelda games are still games and therefore gameplay is paramount. If a game is not fun to play, then it has failed as a game. And unfortunately, Skyward Sword is one that failed as a game, perhaps because Nintendo invested so much time in the story and characters that they forgot they were supposed to be making a video game instead of an anime. It is what it is.