Toward the Sky

It took me three years to get around to finishing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

In itself, this is hardly noteworthy — for me.  Off the top of my head, the longest it’s ever taken me to finish a game was seven years for Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete, which I bought around Christmas of 2000, and finished sometime around January of 2008.  If I ever manage to beat the final boss of Breath of Fire IV, which I bought around the same time, that will make the record, I think.  I wonder sometimes if I have a very selective type of ADD, or ADHD, or something.

But most of the time, it doesn’t take me this long to get around to finishing a Zelda game.  Most Zelda games occupy a rare spot in my mind, up there with Halo or Metal Gear Solid or Mass Effect.  These are games which, once begun, I tend to play exclusively until completion.

But there were several points during the game where I was compelled to set the controller down and go play something else.  It was that, or throw my hands in the air (and the controller through the TV, in all likelihood), and scream to no one in particular “Oh, this is bullshit!”

Interestingly, it wasn’t because of the much-vaunted (or much-lamented, depending on who you talk to) motion controls.

*             *             *

Let’s talk about the motion controls for a bit, though, because from what I’ve seen that seems to overshadow most discussion about the game.  It’s kind of the Big Thing with Skyward Sword and I want to get that out of the way up front.

Skyward Sword presents us with the realization of a fantasy, or at least a lot of blue-sky speculation, that I believe a lot of people had about Twilight Princess back when speculation about the Wii and Twilight Princess was all we had.  There was this idea in some corners of the internet that with motion controls, every swing of the remote would correspond to a swing of the sword, moving in the same direction, with the same speed, that the player moved.  Of course, the reality was much different.  But Skyward Sword makes this (somewhat) possible through the more advanced motion sensors and accelerometer of the Wii Motion Plus.  For some people, this probably ought to be filed under the category of “Be Careful What You Wish For”.

There is no simple button combination you press to strike one way or another.  Swing the remote horizontally, and Link executes a horizontal attack.  Swing it vertically, and Link attacks upward or downward, depending on how you swing.   Thrust forward, or slash diagonally, and Link does those as well.  He holds his sword at whatever angle you’re holding the remote; there is literally a one-to-one correspondence between the remote and the sword.  At first, it’s sort of neat.

It quickly gets difficult.

Combat used to more or less boil down to pressing the attack button when the enemy was not defending, to continue pressing it until the enemy was dead, and to let up occasionally when the enemy was defending itself (if it was capable of such a thing).  Bosses and a handful of other enemies (mini-bosses and Darknuts, mainly) typically took a little more thought, but the rank-and-file bad guys have traditionally been relatively simple to dispatch.

Skyward Sword makes every enemy a puzzle. 

Enemies may block high or low, left or right.  You learn quickly to attack from the side opposite their defense.  Your own defense is less than assured.  All of your shields can take damage, and eventually break, under the strain of constant abuse.  The Hylian shield is the exception to this, but it’s found late in the game, is completely optional, and frankly, if you have the skills to earn it, you can probably pretty safely do without.  Now, if you can manage to time a shield thrust just right, no damage will be done to the shield.  Of course, failing in this shield thrust results in getting hit.  And the enemies in Skyward Sword can punish you brutally.  This is the first game in the series to start you off with six heart containers instead of the usual three, and it only feels generous until you start fighting enemies. 

And then (if all of this wasn’t enough) if you’ve been simply blundering along, relying on blind luck 

and persistence to carry you through, the first boss will annihilate you.

So that’s combat in Skyward Sword:  Learn, or suffer.

I may be overselling it a bit.  It takes a measure of getting used to, for sure.  But Nintendo made sure that the controls weren’t just a gimmick.  They are central to the game.  You can’t scrape by on luck.  You must learn, or you will get nowhere.  And ultimately, it works.  By the end, I had only two real problems with the motion control scheme.

The first problem was mainly just me.  When it gets down to the wire, I tend to get a little panicky and flustered, which resulted in me more than once just wildly swinging the remote when even just a little bit of clear thinking would have gotten me through.   And that’s a thing you learn quickly with Skyward Sword: you need to be on the ball pretty much all the time.  Even minor enemies require a little bit of thought.  Take slimes, for instance:  If you attack one with a horizontal strike, that will split it into two slimes.  But because it’s a horizontal cut, that means one of the two is directly on top of the other.  When it falls onto the one below, the two merge, and now you have one slime again, and meanwhile have dealt no damage.  You have to attack them vertically.  Also, some Deku Babas now have a four-part jaw, which can open either horizontally or vertically, and you have to attack along the line of the jaw’s opening to deal any damage.

The second problem was with the controls, though.  While they never once, in my play through, failed to track motion correctly, the “neutral position” did tend to wander a bit.  That is, I would hold the remote control forward, while Link would hold his sword out to the side.  All motion would correspond completely to how I moved the remote, but would be offset in proportion to the initial difference between how I held the remote and how Link held the sword.  Now, if this only occurred during sword fights, it wouldn’t be so bad.  The neutral position does tend, over time, to wander back to true.  But it becomes especially frustrating with swimming and flying, which are done by angling the remote.  Thankfully, this can be fixed.  You can go into the menu at any time and recalibrate the remote.

The overall experience I had with the motion controls was positive, if not completely enthusiastic.  Put more simply, while it was a fun experiment on the whole, I definitely don't want Nintendo doing this for every Zelda game.  Skyward Sword was an interesting divergence, but should not be the way of the future.  But when it worked, it worked phenomenally.  The final few battles of the game were some of the most exhilarating I’ve ever fought through because of it.

*             *             *

So if it wasn’t the sharply divisive motion controls that brought me to a halt so often, what was it?

Well, Skyward Sword has a few segments where you’re looking for magical energy to upgrade the Goddess Sword, which is the weapon you have for most of the game.  To do this, you enter into a kind of spirit realm, and must search for the Goddess’s Tears.  The spirit realm segments are taken from actual areas of the main game, except certain points are closed off here and there to make navigating more difficult.  You have no access to your equipment or weapons in this part of the game, and must traverse the terrain with just the basic maneuvers available.  This would be tedious all on its own – I tend to dislike hunt-the-widget challenges in general, because I invariably get down to a final two or three widgets which are hidden in infuriatingly clever spots, and run around in circles trying to find them.

Skyward Sword makes this worse by imposing a time limit.  From the moment you leave the starting point, you’re pursued by enemies who will “kill” you in a single blow.  If you collect a Goddess Tear, the enemies revert to their starting positions for two minutes.  Each Goddess Tear you collect restarts the countdown, but if you run the timer down or manage to trip the alarm in another way, the enemies will begin chasing you again.  If any of them strike you, you’re returned to the starting point, and have to collect the Goddess Tears all over again.

So the game takes a task I already find tedious, and ups the ante by making it stressful.  There is no part of these sections of the game which I enjoy.  The game makes you do this four times in all.  What was especially frustrating was that the last of these collectathons should have been the easiest, since unlike the others, it takes place in an area you’ll have visited countless times prior.  But since it was so long since I’d actually played the game, it was just as bad as the rest because my memory of that area was fuzzier than it would normally have been on a straight run through.

These parts of the game were why I took so long to finish it.  Pretty much everything else was highly enjoyable.  But these particular parts of the game, I found infuriating to the point where I had to stop playing because I couldn’t keep my composure any longer, and the thought of going back to them was actively repellent.

“You feel betrayed,” my wife told me, when I tried to explain all of this.  “This is a series you’ve been playing since you were a kid, and enjoying all the time, and now it’s doing something you hate.”

She’s right, mostly, but I feel like maybe “betrayed” is putting it a bit strong.  “Disappointed” or “let down” might be a better description, but at any rate “deeply unhappy”.  I play games to relax and have fun, not to get stressed out and made to do tedious, frustrating tasks over and over again, from scratch, as punishment for even a single mistake.

But this is probably less a problem with the game itself, and more a problem I personally have with the game.  I have spoken to people who like these segments, after all, and to the best of my recollection, none of them were mental patients.  Not at the time, anyway.

*             *             *

So that’s the bad, then, in a nutshell.  The motion controls (which people in general seemed pretty divided about), and the bullshit collectathons, which I personally hated, but which may be someone’s cup of tea, at least.

How’s the rest, then?  Barring these two specific things, how does Skyward Sword stack up, broadly speaking?

When it comes to long-running game series, it’s difficult to think about them in a vacuum.  What they do right and wrong, and what you (or I, anyway) tend to like and dislike about them has a context, a frame of reference, derived from things the series has done well or poorly in previous installments.  The longer the series, the more of an issue this becomes.  I was going to say “the more of a problem this becomes,” but I’m not sure it’s a problem really, so much as it’s just a kind of … thing.

Let’s overlook this failure of articulation for a moment, and move on.

So when you have a massive video game franchise spanning multiple video game systems and dating farther back than the birth of a sizeable portion of your fan base, it can be risky to go mucking around with the established structure, mechanics, and lore of the series.  A strange thing happens when people become fervent fans of something: they begin to identify with it.  And any changes they dislike, whether they be additions to or subtractions from the original formula, tend to be unwelcome.  And that’s putting it kindly.  Not that Nintendo seems to be worried about this overmuch.

There are people who have been declaring each new Zelda game since (and including) Majora’s Mask to be a failure, and a harbinger of the death of the franchise.  That was back in 2000.  And yet, somehow, here it is plodding gamely along in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Fourteen, reliably turning a profit for Nintendo all the while.

This is the most curious definition of “failure” and “franchise death” I have ever seen.  And there certainly have been changes. 

In this outing, Link is more athletic and maneuverable than he’s ever been.  The roll maneuver has been done away with.  Among other things, this tremendously improves on the series soundtrack which, since Ocarina of Time, has largely consisted of “Hup!” *thump* *thump* *thump* “Hup!” *thump* *thump* *thump*, at least if you wanted to get anywhere in a hurry and had no access to a horse.  Instead, Link sprints for short stretches.  He can run up walls for a couple of steps before hopping up to grab a ledge, and can hang from these ledges to avoid notice, groping his way along them, hand over hand.  He also spends a lot more time climbing and swinging from vines and ivy.   We’re not quite dealing with the levels of parkour present in, say, Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, but it’s still nice to have a different set of maneuvers, and Link seems to navigate the landscape more smoothly.

Said landscape, by the way, is completely gorgeous.

The artwork in Skyward Sword strikes a nice balance between the more realistic look of Twilight Princess and the cel-shaded cartoony look of Wind Waker, and has an overall sort of Impressionistic look to it.  Or so I’m told.  I don’t know enough about art to say for sure on my own authority.  But, look, it looks beautiful, even playing on an HD TV, where the picture quality is (unavoidably) sort of jagged and awful.  The artwork allows for more realistic figures to stand together in the same environment as more fantastical structures and landscapes and creatures that are wildly improbably or frankly impossible in reality, and still look coherent and internally consistent.

Part of the reason this style seems to have been chosen was to facilitate the sword-fighting mentioned above.  With the bolder colors and more pronounced, cartoony animation, and less intricately detailed designs, it’s easier to tell how the enemies are posed and to telegraph their movements.

The world itself is a bit smaller than some outings, and honestly more linear, but denser with secrets and things to do.  As opposed to the emptiness of Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule Field, or Twilight Princess’s main overworld or, God help us, the ocean from Wind Waker (which I get weirdly nostalgic about, even as I remember its tedium), all of the areas you visit seem to have a purpose other than just being big so as to contribute to the world’s sense of scale.  Each location hints (some more strongly than others) at a place which once had a purpose in the larger context of the ancient world.  There is a bit of emptiness to the hub world in the sky where Link nominally lives, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it could be, and can be navigated with relative speed and ease.  At any rate, it doesn’t take much time or hassle to get to the interesting areas.

Another common complaint leveled against the Zelda series in recent years is that the various tools you unearth are, much like keys, useful only in the dungeons where you find them.  Skwyard Sword happily averts this.  You will frequently be called upon to use your tools (this is more true of some than others) throughout the adventure.  At first, this was actually disorienting to me.  I’d gotten so used to finding an item, using it in the one dungeon, and then promptly forgetting about it (barring items with some combat utility, like the bow and arrows) that I kept getting thrown for a loop by the constant need for older items.  It didn’t help that, putting the game down for long intervals here and there, I tended to forget the varied uses of some of the game’s tools. 

So that’s another nice thing about Skyward Sword: it keeps you on your toes a bit, demanding that you keep in the forefront of your mind a good working knowledge of everything you can do with the tools at hand.  The first major tool you get, a sort of remote-controlled metallic bug, can be used to scout out difficult-to-reach areas, grab items from far off, hit switches, and even drop bombs.  The gust jar can be used to blow sand off of surfaces to reveal items, but can also be used as a sort of jet to propel you along on hanging platforms.  In addition, many of these items can be upgraded in town, to increase their power, range, and duration of use.  This includes your shields, which helps to offset their destructibility somewhat.

Another nice change is the way bosses are handled.  For a good long while now, the typical pattern of most Zelda bosses has been pretty much a three-step process.

1.       Use the item you found in the dungeon to expose the boss’s weak point.

2.       Mash the attack button repeatedly, until the weak point is no longer exposed.

3.       Repeat.

While this is still true to some extent, in that you need to use the dungeon item to expose the boss’s weak point, getting to the boss and actually doing any kind of damage often requires some skill with using the sword, or other mastery of the motion controls.  The particular pattern you need to follow, while still being mostly logical, seems a bit less blatantly telegraphed.  Like combat in general, this helps to avoid the motion controls becoming some kind of gimmick.  Nintendo clearly took the idea seriously and integrated it into the core of the game, and you have to likewise take it seriously yourself, and learn it.

*             *             *

So in addition to making substantial changes to the mechanics of the series, Skyward Sword also delves into the deeper background lore of the series.  In fact, it sets out to tell the origin story for the whole series.  Amusingly, the whole thing calls back to a conflict even further back in the past, which isn’t elaborated upon much.

The Zelda history/mythology/legendry, whatever you want to call it, has never been terribly complex.  It’s seemed pretty variable and flexible over the years (to the point of seeming just plain inconsistent at times), but the main beats and the major elements are all there.  Skyward Sword purports to give us a foundation for all that’s happened so far, to explain what set this recurring conflict into motion.  But The Silmarillion, this isn’t.

We begin with two deities:  the demon Demise, who seeks to conquer the world and destroy all who stand in his path, and the goddess Hylia, who seeks to stop Demise and protect her chosen people.  How the triple goddesses of the Triforce fit into all of this is alluded to and implied more than explained outright, which I personally think was the right call.  The vagueness helps it all retain a certain sense of mystery.

In the end, Hylia managed to seal Demise away, but before doing so, led her chosen people to escape by way of her magic.  This escape involved taking their town away into the sky, where it remains today.  It is called Skyloft.  The people there have basically forgotten that there ever was a world on the surface.  There, many young men and women train to be knights at the knight academy.  When they graduate, they are given a particular set of clothing to wear, with the color varying every year.  The cut and color for Link’s year should look familiar to most series fans.

In Skyward Sword, Zelda is not a princess, but she is the daughter of the headmaster of the knight academy.  Predictably enough, she finds herself imperiled by the forces of Demise, who have not been sitting idly by since his imprisonment.  She is in short order plucked out of the sky and left stranded on the long-forgotten surface world.  So it falls to Link, chosen champion of the goddess, to save her.  To say that Zelda is more than she appears to be is to state the obvious.

Relatively early in his travels, Link runs afoul of Ghirahim, who is an agent of some sort for Demise.  Ghirahim seems to strike a fine balance between sinister and foppish.  He teases and mocks Link, which backfires on him spectacularly, but he ultimately serves as a kind of nemesis.

Aiding Link on his travels is Fi, the spirit within the Goddess Sword which Link is given on his search for Zelda.  Fi seems to be a mostly mechanical being, imparting advice on where to go next and initially quite dispassionate on anything not immediately related to the quest she shares with Link.  Most of the time, she just reminded me of Midna from Twilight Princess (one of the only things most people can unanimously agree that Nintendo got right with that game), except not as amusing or as interesting.  She’s not a bad character, but she’s not as good as Midna, and is tied into the mechanics in unfortunate ways.  She will, for instance, inform you that you are low on health and need to seek hearts, as if the constant, irritating chime that always accompanies dangerously low health needed clarifying.

The world in many ways makes me think of the original Legend of Zelda.  Like the first game in the series (perhaps deliberately as a tribute to the origins of the series; Skyward Sword marked Zelda’s 25^th anniversary, after all) the world is largely abandoned, and most of the people you encounter wandering about it do so at some degree of peril.  The abandonment heightens the sense of mystery.  You see various statues and structures built by a long-vanished people for purposes which never seem quite clear.  Odd gazebos and fences give certain sections of the woods an almost park-like feel, albeit run-down and overgrown.  The mining facilities in Lanayru province, now a desert, speak of a fascinating, highly advanced past, which you glimpse here and there, in bits and pieces.

Done correctly, I tend to prefer this to endless exposition.  I’d rather not know, sometimes.  The wondering is almost always more fun than the knowing.  Granted, the world doesn't have quite the hostility of, say, Shadow of the Colossus (itself based to some extent on the original Legend of Zelda in this respect).  It’s a Nintendo game, so it’s going to be a little more friendly, a little more cozy.  Ironically, while Shadow of the Colossus's world felt more threatening, it was completely safe to traverse, barring the colossi themselves.  Skyward Sword, meanwhile, is bright colorful, and full of things trying to kill you.

Yet at the same time it feels abandoned, Skyward Sword does get across a sense of ancient mystery and loss.  Alone in the wastes and the wilderness, you have the feeling that there was something here, once.  Something great that is now lost, left largely to the keeping of the monsters that roam seemingly at random, and of which the civilization of Skyloft and its people is but a dim shadow.

*             *             *

Taken as a whole, I thoroughly enjoyed Skyward Sword.  There were sections that frustrated me, but this is less because they seemed unfair and more because they explored game mechanics that I dislike.  For the most part, I enjoyed myself.  I can see where the motion controls would be a hurdle for some, and while I didn’t have too much problem with them beyond the one or two hitches I mentioned above, I can see others not caring for them much.

Aside from that, I feel like Skyward Sword did nearly everything else pretty much right.