Board 8 > I know I've been gone a while, but did anyone else absolutely love Skyward Sword

(+) Yeah! (+)

I feel it's ten years too late frankly. Sometimes the controls urk me and I felt the 6th/7th dungeon could have been better after how good 1-5 were, but the game is just leaps and bounds better than TP and WW. It's on level with OOT and MM and LTTP, everything felt wonderful and as if they worked hard on it. If you don't abuse potions and carry like 4 of them, the hero mode is actually quite challenging too. Sidequests are abundant, although nowhere near MM since a lot are fetch quests, but they tried new battling with the motion controls. I felt that too was nice, and absolutely loved the hub world kinda FFX style of an overworld.

I'm unsure what board 8 thought or thinks of this. I remember being so preposterously hyper for TP and then being let down with a "good' game. And this game I never even though about it or followed it since I had 7 months of military schooling when it was released and just... after getting a full non rushed christmas break playthrough in just now... my goodness. It's wonderful.

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*~Swift~*

I thought it was absurdly fun, yes.

Groose da man.

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B8 I think is rather middling.

Some loved it, some didn't.

I think it epitomizes the direction Zelda has gone in for the past 10 years, that I don't like, but it did it better than the things before it.

So...good but not great I guess.

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i started it a few days ago and only just got the 'real' sword

based on the little i've experienced, it certainly seems very unique - anticipate having a lot of fun just playing it

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yea like you said, it feels like it's definitely ten years too late. as though it took them too much "trial and error" if you call B+ style games like WW and TP errors, to get this ya know?

still a wonderful experience.

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*~Swift~*

You either love the game or you hate it

The more I think about it, the more I hate it.

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From: SirDiemsma | Posted: 5/30/2012 10:00:02 PM | #004

i started it a few days ago and only just got the 'real' sword

based on the little i've experienced, it certainly seems very unique - anticipate having a lot of fun just playing it

ah you're early on. the first dungeon i think sets the pace for how glorious the game is. from the area it's located in to the theme for the dungeon itself everything has a wonderful atmosphere to it.

the soundtrack is just friggen godlike

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Best Zelda

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excited

and yeah, the soundtrack already feels very... i think ambitious might be the word. reminds me a lot of FFX.

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I loved it, but it's probably the most polarizing Zelda game ever made. It's the only console Zelda game that has a 1/10 detailed review here (not even Zelda II has that).

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that's a lot of what i felt about this game. two different animals in the end, and i feel FFX sans the ending was a bigger and better masterpiece, but you'll soon see there's a lot of "ambitious" things nintendo tries.

*teeny tiny spoilers* A darker theme, finally a "true" connection for story in the series, recurring villain (in terms of appearance, throughout your troubles and trials), a hub style overworld instead of your typical hyrule, etc.

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*~Swift~*

I loved it, but a bunch of stupid flaws make me put it below TP for me (but I love TP, so SS's still my #3 3D Zelda)

Dungeons 4 & 5 were amazing, dungeon 3 was really great too but I didn't like Gust Bellow's use as blowing sand away from floors so that drops a bit.... but the outside world leading up to Dungeon 3 was amazing enough to make up for it. Lanayru's one of the greatest Zelda areas ever, god bless Timeshift Stones. Also really loved dungeon 7, it was very unique and retro-Zelda-y, and collecting the triforce was just plain awesome. Final boss battles were also incredibly awesome.

SS Zelda is now my favourite Zelda character (used to be Midna)

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I don't like to use the word "magical" to describe video games or any other media because I think doing so makes people sound silly, but if I were a sillier person I would certainly describe SS as such.

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KokoroAkechi posted...

You either love the game or you hate it

The more I think about it, the more I hate it.

This is it for me.

Good controls and combat, best Link and best Zelda, dungeons were good.

Too many little flaws built up though. The game had a lot of questionable decision making made by the developers. They wanted to find a way to increase the journey, to make it longer, and filled it with s*** it didn't need.

Really bogged it down imo. Too many silent realms, too many repeat boss fights, the dungeons were too linear to the point where going back to an older area was boring, too much filler with stuff like that tadnotes, and retrieval of items. Stupid things like text popping up everytime you got an item used for upgrades, among other things. Oh yeah, Fi, she was annoying.

More I think about it, the more it irks me, because it could have been amazing, instead it was just mediocre.

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No

Fi sucked
Final boss sucked

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Fi is the worst sidekick in the history of gaming.

To think that Navi was so hated......... Fi just takes annoyance to a whole new level.


HEY, THERE'S AN 80% CHANCE YOU'LL FIND THE BOSS KEY INSIDE THE BOSS KEY CHEST. YEAH, THIS IS THE 4TH DUNGEON SO YOU'VE SEEN A LOT OF THESE BY NOW, BUT I THOUGHT I'D JUST POP UP AND TELL YOU

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Skyward Sword is one of an extremely small number of games I've played where the core of it is amazing, inventive and inspired, and everything else is frustrating. If it had been given a good editing I'd have liked it a lot more than I did.

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these are all fair complaints. There's a lot that's annoying about Fi but the subtle slice of humor written into her script is just good. there's so many times im all "please dont pop up" and then so many im all "rofl"

I'm an easy person to please I guess.

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*~Swift~*

Yet to play it. Probably later this year.

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For some reason, I thought Fi was funny.

Also I almost died against the final boss (literally had two hearts left, so another hit and I was dead), and I didn't have a shield. I literally just kept dodging his attacks for five times and hit him each time before putting in the finishing blow. Felt great.

edit: also, I feel like the game would be better without motion control, not because they're bad, but because it would give Nintendo more time to focus on the actual gameplay elements, and make the game itself less annoying.

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Majora's Mask won GotD. Deal with it.

Wonderful game. One of the best Zeldas. It has its flaws, but they're all pretty minor compared to the phenomenal core experience. It both finally masters motion gaming and gives you a really well-designed core journey, with one of the best and most emotionally affecting stories not only of the series, but of the entire generation. Perfectly paced, with tons to do.

I loved it, but there were niggles. Fi was really annoying from a gameplay perspective (though I did like her character), and there were a few other things that frustrated me a little that I can't remember. But despite that, I never really felt like my experience was worse.

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Sorozone posted...

KokoroAkechi posted...

You either love the game or you hate it

The more I think about it, the more I hate it.

This is it for me.

Good controls and combat, best Link and best Zelda, dungeons were good.

Too many little flaws built up though. The game had a lot of questionable decision making made by the developers. They wanted to find a way to increase the journey, to make it longer, and filled it with s*** it didn't need.

Really bogged it down imo. Too many silent realms, too many repeat boss fights, the dungeons were too linear to the point where going back to an older area was boring, too much filler with stuff like that tadnotes, and retrieval of items. Stupid things like text popping up everytime you got an item used for upgrades, among other things. Oh yeah, Fi, she was annoying.

More I think about it, the more it irks me, because it could have been amazing, instead it was just mediocre.

This, in essence. At its core, Skyward Sword is an amazing game. The combat is a lot of fun, and the mini-worlds are quite a blast to explore the first few times. There are a lot of cool side characters, bosses are tons of fun, Groose is the man, and it brings in quite a few things that are new and cool like upgrades and flight.

But there are just tons of stupid things that bog it down.
- Flight controls are the worst.

- Such an empty overworld. Like Twilight Princess, the game hypes you up for those big dark areas you can't explore yet, but when you go there... there's just like one thing to do and it's all useless empty space. Outside of the three ground worlds, what's there to do in the sky? You have the town, you have the inn, and you have a few mini-games spread out far away from the hub, plus random rocks with treasures and heart pieces. Link is all about exploration, and there's nothing to really explore. You just travel to an interesting looking rock that takes five minutes to fly to, see if there's anythign there, then come back later in the game when you've hit the right purple block.

- Again, positive note, underworlds are awesome. It's just sad that the dungeons (outside second desert one) are rather forgettable. And you have do a bunch of **** again in the same underworlds to access the next dungeon. And then a third time to get a key item (**** tadnotes. The mountain was cool, as was desert, but **** tadnotes).

- Combat with the sword was cool. Arrows, too, and bombs had a cool new use. And Beetle is the best new item ever.But what good were the rest of the items outside a few puzzles or progressive movement. Whip doesn't do anything, Clawshots don't do anything, Bug Net does nothing, Gust Bellows does nothing, and Slingshot has its uses but Bow's always better. For regular combat, you have Sword, Bow, and Shield as your only real options most of the time, with Beetle and Bomb for more specialized occasions. It's really uninteresting after a while. Even Twilight Princess had some extra items like the Ball and Chain. Even the original Zelda, where main items you got were a Raft and a Ladder (which would be where Digging Mitts and Fireshield Earrings are today), had a Candle that let you burn things.

- Upgrades were cool, but were somewhat sloppy. Same with medals. Obvious it's Zelda, you can't go broken tier, but there were so few interesting medals in the game and the upgrades were so few that bug collecting and item farming meant nothing after a certain point. Maybe it's because I spent a lot of time making sure I had enough bugs/reagents to have if things got crazy, but it just felt like so much time wasted.

- Minigames sucked.
- Tracking and backtracking sucked.
- All the town side characters not having anything to do after the opening sucked.

Probably more. Haven't played in a while.

Also I really wasn't a fan of the hub world, or just the world in general.

Skyloft was cool...Yep, that's about it. Too empty. Had occasional treasures and treasure chests, and the like, but that being my incentive gives me absolutely no purpose to revisit them. I'm not asking them to make every area revisitiable each and everytime, but they could improve upon it.

Also, really wasn't a fan of the "each area is a small dungeon" type thing they took on the areas below the sky. Like I said in my earlier post, just made things too linear, had no real sense of exploration. Sand sea was awesome, but once again, nothing in it, and you really didn't get to "explore" it because the questline lead to each explorable island.

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Oh yeah. Fi. Worst character in Zelda history. The worst. Don't even say Navi is worse. There is an 85% probability Fi is the worst character in Zelda, and Navi doesn't come close to that.

I'm in the absolutely hated it camp. Worst Zelda I have played.

My problem was that it was waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy too long, and it was so obviously artificially lengthened. There is zero reason that I need to return to the same areas over and over again to find ridiculous items. And also the final item that you get for completing even more fetch quests for the friendship crystals? A wallet that has zero purpose because you can't buy anything that costs that much.


The bosses were the greatest of any zelda I have played, but I just started to hate it more and more the longer it went. By the time that I got to the 3 songs pieces I never wanted to play it again. I purposefully selected no on save the game after I beat it so I would never become insane enough to want to play hero mode.

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From: Mega Mana | Posted: 5/30/2012 10:25:51 PM | #022

Beetle is the best new item ever

yessir


but yeah, SS really great game, but also the most flawed 3D title.

I'm kinda glad that way though since it makes my ranking easier since TP and SS are really close at the top for me >_____>

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Oh and the text popping up every time


I actually on my last few plays started playing it where I would instantly turn of the game every time text popped up. It made the game more enjoyable.

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hahahaha ok i got ya

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*~Swift~*

http://www.awkwardzombie.com/index.php?page=0&comic=122611

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I was actually surprised at the length of SS...... it was shorter than I was expecting. >_>

I beat it before the game was actually released!


oh yeah, and playing through the game again is also pretty annoying because stupid slow unskippable text-speed...... and it's REALLLY silly when there's like 2 or 3 times in Hero Mode where the NPC will say "you've probably heard this before though, right?".... I mean why can you only skip old text so few times? blehh

but still, I beat the game 3 times

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pretty disappointing, given how amazing Twilight Princess was

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lol i remember one time in Cosmo's stream he was talking about this glitch in SS where it opens the menu, shows an item's quantity go up by 1, then closes the menu, and if he was a beta tester they would have caught it.

Fi is just terrible. I don't even ask her for advice since she doesn't say anything useful.

There are also only 6 different bosses, and you fight 2 of them 3 times, and one twice. The main bad guy replaces the last dungeon boss for two of the 6 dungeons with bosses (the last one doesn't even have one... so it's not even a real last dungeon). I mean I thought it was incredibly lame that there was no real final dungeon where you could like feel the tension building as you got closer to the final fight.

The bosses you do fight are pretty cool. Especially Koloktos. But overall I'd still say not as good as Ocarina or Twilight Princess.

Flying sucks. It takes too long to get anywhere and it's ultimately really boring. Oh and There's sailing too

Those Tadalongs or notes or whatever they were called...I thought silent realms were bad... but that made me almost want to stop playing.

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also



the best

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tadtones weren't that bad, but there definitely bad and there was absolutely no reason for them. i actually liked Silent Realms though.

From: GrapefruitKing | #031
pretty disappointing, given how amazing Twilight Princess was
I'd say the opposite. Pretty surprising, given how average Twilight Princess was.

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Majora's Mask won GotD. Deal with it.

I haven't read this whole topic, but yes, I praised it very highly during the time it first came out, when B8 was hating on it. I loved how it took the Zelda formula in a new direction, which made it more like MM than TP. Obviously if you're a slave to the OoT formula and hate anything that departs from it in any way, you will prefer TP to MM, and thus you will not like SS, but if you just want a great game where the ITEMS ACTUALLY GET USED AFTER THE DUNGEON YOU ACQUIRE THEM IN, then SS is great.

The fact that they had a new director (Fujibayashi) who was perfectly confident taking risks with a franchise as sacred as Zelda was the key to success. You can tell he was making the game that he wanted to make. He didn't want to be limited by the past Zelda games or anything like that. Of course, several of his risky design decisions failed in execution, but the vast majority (at least 80%) of the risks paid off surprisingly well. That is a mind-blowingly high success rate for risks, as far as game design goes, and that is what really impressed me.

Anyways, this post maybe focused too much on game design philosphy as opposed to the actual game, but the bottom line is that you can really tell that a serious amount of passion went into developing this game. And lastly, 90% of complaints about the game are objectively wrong. That is, they are criticizing a good design choice, and if I had more time, I would write dissertations explaining why all of you are wrong.

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foolm0ron posted...

And lastly, 90% of complaints about the game are objectively wrong. That is, they are criticizing a good design choice, and if I had more time, I would write dissertations explaining why all of you are wrong.

Major complaints:
*Incredibly slow, unskippable text
*Relentless hand-holding (Fi popping up to give unsolicited advice constantly)
*Annoying flying controls and a needlessly huge yet empty overworld in the sky

More minor complaints:
*Fighting a boss twice with minimal changes
*Fighting the most annoying god damn boss in the game three times with endless unskippable cutscenes throughout the middle of it
*Unnecessary loss of control during overly long cutscenes for minor things like a wall being broken by a wall
*The fact that time continues passing during these cutscenes, so if you're falling toward and ground or holding a bomb, you'll hit the ground/have the bomb blow up in your hands with no ability to stop either

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SS I thought was pretty good. At its funnest (3rd and 4th dungeons for example) it was really amazing. I didn't find the controls too bad either, except at certain instances during flying and especially swimming. The combat was pretty clean.

But I hated the bland, uninspired overworld, terrible fetchquests, and small technicalities like unskippable text and cut scenes. The boss fights are some of the best around indeed, but most of the dungeons themselves were very underwhelming. The pre-dungeon stuff was also pretty bad and the silent realms sucked.

I vastly prefer Wind Waker and Twilight Princess.

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I really liked Skyward Sword. I thought Nintendo made a lot of good moves with the game. But I also agree that Nintendo made a lot of dumb moves or they didn't go far enough with their new directions. A lot of the added stuff like the sidequests and the weapon upgrading seemed kind of pointless.

I am a huge fan of Silent Realms, though. Those things got pretty intense. Boss Gauntlet is a good idea, but they could have went farther with it, as per usual. Tadtones...I actually liked the Tadtones. For a short while. It went on for way too long.

I also liked a lot of the dungeons and items. Beetle, the best. It's also the best one to upgrade, because Beetle without the speed-up button is painful.

As for the other Zelda games, I loved Wind Waker and thought Twilight Princess was really average. I was especially upset at how Twilight Princess's items were so...useless. There were so many good ideas for the items and almost all of them were just used in their dungeon. Skyward Sword kind of used every item quite a bit. I liked that section where you lose your items and you have to go on without it. Kind of tedious at first, but you get to realize how good some of the items are, which I approve of.

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From: foolm0ron | #037
I haven't read this whole topic, but yes, I praised it very highly during the time it first came out, when B8 was hating on it. I loved how it took the Zelda formula in a new direction, which made it more like MM than TP. Obviously if you're a slave to the OoT formula and hate anything that departs from it in any way, you will prefer TP to MM, and thus you will not like SS, but if you just want a great game where the ITEMS ACTUALLY GET USED AFTER THE DUNGEON YOU ACQUIRE THEM IN, then SS is great.
You realize MM is by far my favorite Zelda right?

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I'm not a big fan of the new items in SS either. You might not really use the items in TP a lot, but they were neat to use. I find using the beetle and blower extremely tedious (especially the blower). The whip kind of fun, but just about pointless in combat which leads me to another problem. Why could they not give you like a hammer or something. The hammer (or ball and chain) in other zelda games are great.

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Chrono1219

SS was great. I wouldn't say it's on the same level as the N64 Zeldas, but it's still the best thing Nintendo did with the Zelda franchise these past 10 years or so.

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DON~!

I really liked it, though yeah, it gets in its own way too often. I'd say dungeons 3-6 were amazing experiences, and somewhere after dungeon 2 through the cutscenes after 6... just perfect pacing and dungeon/world design.

I like the overall philosophy of the motion controls - keep the gamer active, keep the gameplay dynamic. There are a lot of problems with the details, though, big enough problems to keep the game down on their own. But I think the game is pretty weak until after the second dungeon, and the bits between the 6th and 7th dungeon are pretty awful, so there's enough of an issue outside of the motion controls that keeps it away from being a "best Zelda game" contender.

10 years, nah. It's a few years late, though - this really needed to come out around the time WSR/WM+ came out.

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