What have you been playing lately?

Hi guys I am slow, but I finally finished Skyward Sword. My opinions are mainly the same as Conn's, but far less positive. I'll list some points, anyway, just for the hell of it.

-Visually it's nice and many character and enemy designs are clever and fun. Jagged edges, however, have not been this plentiful in a Zelda game since the N64 days, which is rather disheartening. All in all nice, but it could be better with higher graphical capabilities.

-Music was horribly boring and bland with only a handful of memorable themes. Orchestration was nice, but if the songs are bad to begin with then there isn't really anything that nice-sounding instruments can do to fix that. Pretty much the worst soundtrack in the series, not a single other Zelda game had a more forgettable and dull soundtrack!

-Controls were good in theory, horrible in execution. Re-centering the Wiimote wasn't really a big deal for me, pressing the down-button whenever I took up an item became almost second-nature by the end of the game. Directional slashing, however, was extremely inaccurate and made many battles far more difficult than they should have been for all the wrong reasons. The tech is highly flawed, there is no question about that, and it drained quite a lot of the excitement the battles would have otherwise had.

-The overworld was pretty bad. The sky, as Conn said, was just boring and very little was ever going on. There was one island which was very nice and haunting while the thunderhead was still dark, but afterwards it just became blegh. The surface, meanwhile, had some really great ideas. Acting as dungeons of sorts was a good direction to take it in, but most of it boiled down to fetch quests and such far too often, and the revisits were often criminal in their execution, Lanayru being the only exception.

-Dungeons were really not that good! Two of them stood out as being really great for this game, but are still a far cry from the quality that Ocarina, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening offered over and over. Two other dungeons (the third and fourth) were the absolute worst dungeons I have seen in this series, barring maybe Oracle of Ages' worse ones. The rest of them were ok but very unimpressive. Overall there was very little in the way of interesting puzzles, everything was offered almost solely on a room-by-room basis with few overarching dungeon challenges (unlike the five games I mentioned earlier, wherein dungeons very often had large puzzles spanning multiple rooms, even the entire dungeons) and the action was, as mentioned earlier, very flawed. Some of the bosses still managed to be highly entertaining, although in no way does that go for all of them.

-Handholding. Conn covered that perfectly so I won't waste any time on it.

-I've heard the NPC's were very good in this game, in particular if you take the time to go and fix people's problems. However, the game spent so much effort wasting my time in the main quest, with horrendous amounts of padding and dull fetch-quests left and right, that I never felt enticed to solve further fetch-quests and, in all honesty, do anything more than what I've already done. The game was horribly paced and offered few rewards for the huge amounts of effort spent into doing menial things.

All in all, there is a lot in the game that could have been exploited to make for an honestly enticing and enjoyable game. Too bad the bad decisions and incredibly sub-par dungeon design makes it one of the least impressive games in the series! I really, really am not feeling optimistic about Zelda's future at all.

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