HaruKazuhira wrote:Thought I'd try and revive this thread with the talk of Skyward Sword on Switch being shared around the last couple days. I know this game is something of a mixed bag amongst most fans. Always got pretty heated whenever it was brought up back in SOMN lol. But personally I'm pretty biased towards it tho. It had that handheld Zelda touch but experienced on a console.
A revisited port on Switch could help iron out some problems but I don't think it would change the overall game much. Something that excited me is the potential of enhanced visuals. Since I felt it never really translates as well as it should have on Wii.
I know I've probably said as much before, but I love the hell out of Skyward Sword.
I think it's the best controlling 3rd-person game I've ever played. And not even in a net-gain, rounding-up way: I'm not sure what small knack I luckily stumbled on to that others missed but I found the motion controls consistent and near-flawless. More than that I found the feel of them gave the game an analogue, sometimes near-expressive playfulness that hasn't been bettered. Breath of the Wild might have had more systemic and exploratory freedom, but in the second-by-second, degree-by-degree embodiment of Link (or the Beetle, or a bomb etc) I think Skyward Sword feels better.
And I know I already wrote an (apparently quite unpopular) article about it (
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017 ... f-the-wild) but though I love BotW I do feel its environments and spaces felt (if not looked) a little homogeneous by the end due to the consistent possibilities throughout (climb anything! fly anywhere! everything looks like hills! etc) - whereas Skyward Sword's hyper-focused and specific requirements actually gives it more meaningful difference in feel (the sand-sprinting of the desert compared with the water-pirouettes of the submerged forest compared with the stripped-back binaries and hide-and-seek panic of the silent realms etc) and a feeling of singular enclaves in a wider, unknown world.
In a similar way its environments each had a distinctive Zelda theme running throughout, baking them into the feel of the environment and making them feel more discreet, separate and thus giving it more of a variable tempo compared with BotW omni-present silence and environmental sounds (its way some of my favorite places in it are Korok Forest, Ganon's Castle and so on, where you get that familiar Zelda feel of a cordoned-off space with its own specific ever-mood).
And the music in Skyward Sword was
the gooseberry fool. BotW has a great, soaring theme that is only used in the final battle and thus doesn't feel as much like a familiar swell of a motif that you've grown used to. Whereas variations of (e.g.) Skyward Sword's Fi's theme are used throughout and so feels like a gut punch when they recur at the end.
And so on, and so on. Don't get me wrong (and also, don't get me started on its lovely pastel-painterly art style) I don't think Skyward Sword has it all, nor is it perfect (I certainly get why it's Mario-style of toy-box levels as opposed to open, explore-able world felt like a step backwards). But I always feel a little sad that somehow people didn't gel with its Motion Controls (maybe my new, Zelda-packaged-in Motion Plus controller helped I don't know) or whatever and didn't get to enjoy it as much as I did.
The possibility of it coming to Switch - perhaps tweaked and streamlined and more accessible for a new audience - makes me really
Edit: I'd actually love to re-play this regardless to see if my opinion changes at all post-BotW and so on...