8/17/2023 0 Comments Nintendo life skyward sword![]() But it’s not as if the game has a pacing problem, or injected filler to pad out its prodigious length. The experience is often serene, almost meditative at times you’ll slowly poke through the forests and deserts and have time to take it all in. This is not the happy coincidence it would be in an open-world game Skyward Sword was meticulously designed this way by people who had enough time to agonize over the placement of every single bug. ![]() ![]() But what makes it feel more like a world than a set of levels is that you could be doing anything at once - you might notice bugs crawling near you while you’re fighting a reanimated corpse, and as soon as he’s dead again you drop what you were doing and set off to fill your pouch with more bugs. Skyward Sword is not an open-world adventure it is rather linear. It took Nintendo all of the ensuing five years to finish it, and somewhere along the line it decided that Skyward Sword would require the MotionPlus add-on for more precise controls. ![]() But what Wii needed was a game that was designed from the outset to use motion controls. Even as an afterthought, they worked well the game was a solid proof of concept that showed how motion could be integrated into a richer game experience than the Wii Sports mini-games. 2006’s Twilight Princess, which launched alongside Wii, was a GameCube game that had rudimentary motion controls grafted onto it in the final stages of development. This isn’t the first Zelda to make use of motion controls. But in creating the first game in the series designed around motion controls, the developers have taken the opportunity to ask themselves: What is truly necessary to make a game feel like Zelda, and what is just excess baggage left over from 25 years of clinging to tradition? World In Motion Skyward Sword is not the game to slaughter that particular sacred cow, as ridiculous as it sometimes seems when it’s dropped into an otherwise deeply serious moment in the story. There’s a certain comfort in knowing that every time Link opens a treasure chest, he’s going to hold the item above his head with a smile on his face while we all hum along to the familiar dah-dah-dah-DAH musical cue. The Zelda series is one of the most oddly ritualized in all of gaming there is a whole laundry list of things a Zelda game simply must have or else its fans would be utterly scandalized. What sets Skyward Sword apart is that its designers have truly rethought the Zelda framework, which has not changed much in the 25 years since the release of the first game. To be fair, these sorts of superlatives might describe any Zelda game. ( writer John Mix Meyer has put in 40 hours and he’s just about finished, but not quite.) As of this writing I’ve lost 30 hours to Skyward Sword and I still have more to do. The visual design and music are gorgeous, the gameplay varied and well paced, the script humorous. It has taken Nintendo five years to release a game in this series developed exclusively for Wii, and it delivers in every way possible including some you wouldn’t necessarily expect. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is not one of those games. Have you ever played a game that took forever to come out, only to find yourself wondering, “What the hell were they doing for all this time, anyway?”
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