Hey Skyward Sword is pretty cool

[Gaer]

It’s shit. Other than BoTW and Link’s Awakening. OoT and TP are both a whole lot of NOTHING.

 

[Ludendorkk]

Spoken like someone who never had the Hylian Loach pass from playground rumor to reality, smh

 

[Lokii]

One time I fished for two hours in the water temple and never caught a skull fish so as far as I'm concerned fishing can lump it

 

[Gaer]

Spoken like someone who never had the Hylian Loach pass from playground rumor to reality, smh

Of course I caught that. But there’s literally zero substance in either OoT or TP’s fishing. And that sucks.

 

[Bongo]

The real draw of Twilight Princess' fishing is the ludicrous detail that they poured into the conversations you can have with the NPC in the fishing hut because they had a bunch of people allocated to work on it at a time when the director was struggling to come up with enough work for them all to do.

 

[Ludendorkk]

Bongo's correct in that minigames are near-universally mechanically bad (and thus mini) and that the main criteria for their evaluation should be their aesthetic value

(You're responding way too seriously for a take I don't even really believe, Gaer :/ )

 

[Gaer]

You have to understand: Fishing is important.

 

[MetManMas]

Have you tried Majora's Mask 3D's fishing? It's completely inessential gameplay-wise, but it has a decent variety of fish to catch (12 is more than the usual one or TP's 6) and it promotes using your different masks and songs and stuff toncatch specific kinds of fish.

 

[Juno]

I finished this just now! I like it a lot! Some thoughts:

-Even ignoring how BotW would go to the complete opposite end of the spectrum as the next major entry, it's weird to see a Zelda as linear as SS is. The sky area is easily among the least interesting overworlds in Zelda games, largely because there's no incentive for you to randomly explore it since 95% of the time you'll just find a chest that can't be opened until you unlock the corresponding Goddess Cube. It feels very intent on seeing you through the main storyline.

-It's fortunate then, that the stuff in the main storyline is quite good. Both the pre-dungeon areas on the surface and dungeons themselves are strong and engaging, and like the best Zelda dungeons, tend to encourage you to think of the entire dungeon when solving puzzles. The Sandship and the Ancient Cistern are great at this. I feel like the whole quest to learn the Song of the Hero was unnecessary, but I won't complain about it too much.

-I mostly played with standard controls after giving motion controls a shot and finding they didn't work for me. I didn't ever quite enjoy combat and never completely stopped swinging the wrong way on occasion. I mostly made it work but it will never replace having actual buttons for combat. I liked the bosses at the very end though.

- I like the characterizations here. Groose going from "idiot who thinks he's the hero" to "has a crisis when he realizes he's just a side character" then finally "decides he's gonna be the best damn sidekick he can be" is real fun. Also Zelda has her own journey throughout the game while Link is trying to catch up to her.. Though unfortunately, it still ends up being "Save Zelda from the final boss" at the very end.

So yeah, overall quite good! Not among the very best of Zelda but definitely a solid and worthwhile entry.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

Glad you had such a good time with it.

I've been letting myself get distracted and haven't picked the game up in over a week. I really need to get back to things, because it feels like I'm really close to the end.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I've endured a lot of distractions, but I finally went back on the grind and made a beeline for the ending in the past few days. I love this game even more now than I did before now. What a wonderful entry to the franchise. SS has a great ending, but it'll never not be bittersweet to me since I'll always want to join Zelda/play as her on her adventures instead of seeing a montage during the credits. Someday. Still a fantastic game though regardless. Probably not my favorite Zelda from a gameplay perspective, but definitely as a sum total one of my top iterations. Esp when I'm a big history buff and just really enjoy this peek into what is essentially Zelda-Antiquity.

Nintendo put this trailer out recently for SSHD. I'm... not really sure who this trailer is for? It spoils like most of the game haha

 

[shivam]

i just picked this up, and holy shit, the control scheme is abysmal. my son was having so much trouble just getting a fucking potion to drink out of his pouch that he just gave up and started crying. And the fighting system is ridiculous. I can see the seeds of what became BotW here, but man, this game is not it.

 

[Bongo]

The game requires a higher degree of hand-eye coordination than nearly any other game, and that's not something the ESRB takes into consideration when determining age-appropriateness.

 

[Pheeel]

i just picked this up, and holy shit, the control scheme is abysmal. my son was having so much trouble just getting a fucking potion to drink out of his pouch that he just gave up and started crying. And the fighting system is ridiculous. I can see the seeds of what became BotW here, but man, this game is not it.

It is, it's so frustrating to me as apart from all the other QOL improvements they had the opportunity to fix what I found the most aggravating aspect of the original game, but the insistence on having the button controls map to the same configuration as the motion controls does not solve the problem at all for me. I rage quit earlier on because I could not fathom how I was supposed to do a fatal blow on a skulltula, and the game's on-screen prompt seemed to be telling me to to click the right stick which did nothing - I had to look online, and found out you're supposed to waggle it up and down like you're holding a wiimote - my response was "WHAT??" - it's seems so silly, why could this not just be a button click?

I find I'm constantly unequipping my shield during combat as I keep accidentally hitting the shoulder button that triggers the quick menu (also baffled by the fact that you can't equip shields in the actual menu, why??) Using the shield itself I also find incredibly awkward, having to constantly remember to click to hold it up instead of a button hold as I've been taught to do in pretty much every 3D Zelda. The fight against the first stalfos was a nightmare because of this, and I am really not looking forward to the Ghirahim fight which I remember being hellishly demanding on the Wii.

 

[Gaer]

Using R3 makes Link do a forward thrust, which is how you beat Skulltulas easily. You have to hit their underbelly.

And Shield Parry is so incredibly strong. It might take a bit to figure out, but it’s well worth the time!

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I 100% empathize with frustration over the steep learning curve of the controls. But tbh, a big part of that is just the normal brain-to-hand confusion that comes with learning any brand new, novel control style. Everyone when they first picked up a controller in their lives, struggled to keep Mario alive and to make jumps, or whatever was your entry to games. It takes the human brain time and lots of repetition to form muscle memory. And it can be extra confusing when you're so used to a default control scheme and your brain wants to use muscle memory to do something but you've got to be doing something else. I think that's normal. At the same time, that's kinda just how games work. I don't begrudge a novel control style because I think developers artificially box themselves into corners trying to fit their ideas into the rigid comfort zones of gamers muscle memories via other games. And it stops them from ever doing anything truly unique or boundary pushing; I'd like to encourage and at least appreciate devs who try to do new things, even if it isn't fully successful. Skyward Sword basically asks the players to learn how to walk all over again from scratch, and it's not going to be a challenge everyone is going to be up for. And I think that's fine, not every game has to be for everyone. But while I never got 100% comfortable with the controls in SS, I did learn eventually to become pretty competent with them, to the point where I was able to lay out the final boss in like 60 seconds flat on only the 2nd try. I found adjusting to the control scheme difficult, but manageable enough that by the end I felt pretty rewarded and accomplished that I'd managed to do so. It's unfortunate that not everyone got the same things as I did out of this game, but I don't think that makes this game inherently bad, just not for everyone.

 

[Pheeel]

Using R3 makes Link do a forward thrust, which is how you beat Skulltulas easily. You have to hit their underbelly.

Yeeessss, I know. I'm talking about when you fight them on the ground, you have to do a sword swipe to flip them upside down and then do a fatal blow to finish them off. You can't just stab them with R3 and that was the point of frustration for me, as nothing about "rapidly push the control stick up and down" suggests "killing blow" to me.

I honestly think it's not so much to do with learning a new control system and everything to do with those controls being awkwardly implemented and unintuitive.

 

[Bongo]

An upward slash flips the skulltula over. The icon for an upward slash probably looked similar to the icon for pressing R3.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

The controls in SS are pretty solid and responsive, and generally do what you tell it to do. It is definitely "unintuitive" because it's trying to emulate with a control pad something that was based on motion gestures, and doing so in ways that try to maintain the feel of the original game without just turning the game into a cookie cutter 3D Zelda game. The more you use them though and practice with it, that unintuitiveness disappears since you've learned what to do and begun to forge some muscle memory. The awkwardness is really just a matter of getting used to doing something brand new for the first time. I thought Halo 1's control scheme was beyond awkward when I first played it, having come from a PC FPS background. But now that control scheme is the gold standard for FPS games on console and everyone just accepts it as normal. I took like a month or two break in between the Fire Temple, and pushing through to finishing the game. Often, taking that much time off while playing a game is enough for me to forget what I was doing in the game and even forget how to even play it. But I picked it back up and became competent with the controls almost instantly.

SSHD could have done a better job of communicating the controls to the player, giving the player more means to practice the controls, and introduced mechanics gradually rather than all at once. However, that would have required drastic redesigning of the game itself, and that would betray its nature as a faithful remaster. And a lot of the changes the dev team made to SSHD, seemed to err on the side of not wanting to overburden the player with tutorials/tips/hand holding - and I imagine that's specifically to address charges that the original game on the Wii was overly obnoxious in doing too much of those things. Maybe SSHD over-corrected in that respect, but I never was bothered too much by it.

I feel like I might have said this before, so I apologize if I'm repeating myself, but I really really appreciate SS's gesture controls and its attempt to do something brand new. Specifically because of how the new controls themselves, represent the form of the video game reinforcing the game's themes. This is the origin story of the entire Zelda world, and the origins of Link as the chosen hero of Hyrule, fulfilling his destiny for the very first time. He's learning how to be a hero from scratch, putting together the Master Sword, and reclaiming the surface for the people of Skyloft to be able to return to the ground and found Hyrule. Our struggles with learning new controls for familiar actions mirror Link's struggles to learn how to be a hero for the first time even though the basic formula for this Zelda game is familiar territory for long time Zelda fans. Being able to raise your sword up over your head to initiate a charge attack is some really good attempts at immersive gameplay. In an ideal world, you could play SS with a full VR setup. But the Wii/Switch/Nintendo just isn't there yet.

 

[Pheeel]

I'm at the Ghirahim fight and as I expected it's an exercise in frustration. I don't even know how you're supposed to get past the first part of the battle in handheld mode, as it doesn't seem like you can move the sword quick enough using just the thumbstick. I know you're supposed to swing the blade around in circles so he can't anticipate which side your strike is coming from, but that just doesn't seem to work with the stick, it's not responsive enough. I'm going to have to give in and use motion controls, as I can't see another way past this Urghhhh.

 

[Gaer]

You hold your sword on one side and do a slash opposite.

What I’d do is hold the stick left and then slash from right to left, etc.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

I switched to the motion controls specifically for that fight, and then back again after.

 

[shivam]

The controls in SS are pretty solid and responsive, and generally do what you tell it to do. It is definitely "unintuitive" because it's trying to emulate with a control pad something that was based on motion gestures, and doing so in ways that try to maintain the feel of the original game without just turning the game into a cookie cutter 3D Zelda game. The more you use them though and practice with it, that unintuitiveness disappears since you've learned what to do and begun to forge some muscle memory. The awkwardness is really just a matter of getting used to doing something brand new for the first time. I thought Halo 1's control scheme was beyond awkward when I first played it, having come from a PC FPS background. But now that control scheme is the gold standard for FPS games on console and everyone just accepts it as normal. I took like a month or two break in between the Fire Temple, and pushing through to finishing the game. Often, taking that much time off while playing a game is enough for me to forget what I was doing in the game and even forget how to even play it. But I picked it back up and became competent with the controls almost instantly.

SSHD could have done a better job of communicating the controls to the player, giving the player more means to practice the controls, and introduced mechanics gradually rather than all at once. However, that would have required drastic redesigning of the game itself, and that would betray its nature as a faithful remaster. And a lot of the changes the dev team made to SSHD, seemed to err on the side of not wanting to overburden the player with tutorials/tips/hand holding - and I imagine that's specifically to address charges that the original game on the Wii was overly obnoxious in doing too much of those things. Maybe SSHD over-corrected in that respect, but I never was bothered too much by it.

I feel like I might have said this before, so I apologize if I'm repeating myself, but I really really appreciate SS's gesture controls and its attempt to do something brand new. Specifically because of how the new controls themselves, represent the form of the video game reinforcing the game's themes. This is the origin story of the entire Zelda world, and the origins of Link as the chosen hero of Hyrule, fulfilling his destiny for the very first time. He's learning how to be a hero from scratch, putting together the Master Sword, and reclaiming the surface for the people of Skyloft to be able to return to the ground and found Hyrule. Our struggles with learning new controls for familiar actions mirror Link's struggles to learn how to be a hero for the first time even though the basic formula for this Zelda game is familiar territory for long time Zelda fans. Being able to raise your sword up over your head to initiate a charge attack is some really good attempts at immersive gameplay. In an ideal world, you could play SS with a full VR setup. But the Wii/Switch/Nintendo just isn't there yet.

Yeah, that's well and good, but also renders the game entirely inaccessible for anyone with mobility issues, hand-eye coordination issues, or anyone else with an inability to move the controller in the exact goddamned specific fucking way the game demands in order for you to actually do anything. A villager picking up a sword can point the fucking thing at the sky whenever they want without having to hope and pray that their arm is at the exact vertical the game insists upon, unlike the player begging the thing to charge already. And i'd love to hear an in-world justification for why this villager learning how to be a hero can't swing a bug net.

 

[Gaer]

The game is far more accessible now with the option for button play.

I literally couldn’t play it at all beforehand.

It’s still not great but it would require Nintendo to essentially remake the game because being able to do these fine tune motion with the sword is the base design of all the puzzles.

 

[shivam]

Yeah, my point is that the fundamental design of the game was flawed from the outset.

 

[Gaer]

Every Wii owner basically begged for a Zelda game that used the Wiimote for “accurate” sword swings.

And Nintendo being Nintendo, they went all in.

With the re-release and the button-only controls, I was finally able to play it. I enjoyed my time with it quite a bit, too.

Though I am still bitter that the original game was completely inaccessible for me because I had the poor luck of being left-handed.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

Every Wii owner basically begged for a Zelda game that used the Wiimote for “accurate” sword swings.

Yep. And its immediate predecessor that inspired this, Twilight Princess, that was a Gamecube game that was delayed in order to have waggle tacked on and the world mirror flipped, was the most successful Zelda game since OoT and almost single handedly (along with Wii Sports obvi) made the Wii a success with pretty much universal praise. I don't really blame Ninty for what happened, it just didn't really play out like they or anyone else imagined.

 

[Purple]

What I most distinctly remember about what time I put in with Skyward Sword is how the muscle memory of literally every other game I have ever played in my life that used motion controls had trained me to hold my hands so completely still when not actively trying to do something that the "improved" Wii Motion Plus sensors would CONSTANTLY thing I had laid the controller flat on a table and recalibrate the gyroscope accordingly. Which, as I was in fact, holding it straight up and down caused rather immediate problems uh... basically every 2 minutes on the dot.

Also not a super great setup if you're left-handed, because we're breaking that tradition with Link and it actually super matters here.

 

[shivam]

i have tremors in my hands from hyperflexible wrists and not a lot of arm musculature, and this game exacerbates so so much of my innate weaknesses.

that said, the music is so good, and i'm starting to get the hang of it so i'm gonna keep going. but also fuck the tarzan rope swinging shit.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

The Tarzan rope swinging is big iffy as it usually requires you to adjust the angle you need to jump off versus the angle you probably jumped onto the rope, which isn't as easy to do with the button layouts. The thing I've found that works however, is slowing the rope down to a stop (I believe you can press B to hasten this process versus just letting your inertia die out), then once you're stationary, recalibrate by rotating Link until he's lined up with where you need to be jumping, then continuing the rope swinging until you've got enough built up inertia to make the leap. Doing that process is a little bit longer than what's ideal, but gets me a success rate of 99% which is a lot less annoying to deal with versus falling down a cliff repeatedly.