My friend Phil Wels posted his 12 Egregious Sins of Skyward Sword over on his blog and I promised him that I would post something of a rebuttal.
This really isn’t a rebuttal.
First of all, I’ll agree, for the most part, with numbers 1 through 8 and 11. I don’t really see how you can disagree with them. I tended to just ignore those things for the most part and enjoy the game without really thinking about them until he brought them up.
I will, however, post my thoughts on the other three.
9. Ghirahim
He’s strange, I’ll give you that, and I kind of liked him because he didn’t really seem to be all there. Yes, he was not your standard “let’s all destroy the world” bad guy … but I guess I didn’t see that as a bad thing. He was a little goofy and just off, which I think added some color to the game.
Finally, when you find out that he was really nothing more than Demise’s sword, it all seemed to come together, in my mind at least. He brushed off Link because Link wasn’t really a part of this … he wasn’t supposed to be there. Much like a person brushes a fly off of his arm and doesn’t think much of it, so Link was thought of as well until the very end.
Overall, I like the “off” bad guy. He is not Ganondorf, however.
10. Wii Controls
Overall, I think that you’re either going to like them or you’re not and there really is no way around that. I had my fair amount of do-overs when attempting to navigate areas with my beetle or seemingly needing to get my bearings straight before I would aim at something, but I think that is the price you pay for working within 3 dimensions.
The ease of movement that a top-down game provides is lost when you both narrow the focus and add a dimension of movement (such as aiming or the beetle). It took me a while to figure out that I really needed to just make tiny little adjustments and if I did some big … I could expect failure very soon after.
The same could be said with all of the controls. While the Wii Remote Plus is good, it is not going to be as good as you want it … no current motion control system out there on any console is going to be. They are always going to be trying to guess what you wanted to do and sometimes they are going to fail.
Overall, I found the controls more than usable and a great step forward over Twilight Princess. One thing I am fairly certain of is that this is going to be the control scheme for the next batch of console-based Zelda games. Much like Z-targeting is now a “thing” for Zelda, motion controls are in that same category.
12. Item loss when “continuing” after death
You can always quit and then load the game over again. I like the added degree of difficulty if you decide that you just want to rush in again.
Maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.
In Conclusion
I know that Phil and I are going to talk some more about this game in the future, and I look forward to doing so. I know that I can always count on him to find things that I would otherwise have overlooked, and the things he listed were definitely annoyances that I had at different parts of the game.
It was just those three that I really had any quibble with.
