Games in Review: Skyward Sword

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was quite possibly one of my favorite games to play.  Admittedly, I'm a bit of a late comer to the Zelda franchise with my first game played to completion being Windwaker and about 3/4 of Majora's Mask under my belt I jumped into Twilight Princess last summer.  The visuals of Twilight Princess were some of the best that I've played in a while, although I found the colors just a touch flat and brownish, because if VG Cats has taught me anything it's that "brown is real".

But anyway, Skyward Sword is in effect, a prequel to most of the other Zelda games by establishing various points of the franchise such as:

The birth of the eternal princess

The origin of the Master Sword (aka: GLaDOS' cousin)

The reuniting of The Triforce

In that respect, I have to give it a lot of credit.  The motionplus technology works phenomenally with the overall game play aspect, really causing the player to think about how to actually go about attacking rather than swinging wildly.

The visuals are like something out of a watercolor painting: the further things are from the player, the more splotchy and impressionistic they become and gradually come into focus as they get nearer.  The character designs are incredibly tight too, keeping with the "realism" they established in Twilight Princess and borrowing every so slightly from the cartooniness of Windwaker to establish a new style of it's own.

However, there were points where it sort of got frustrating: particularly when the standard enemies in the dungeon became more difficult than the boss.  When I first encountered the Skultula I died possibly 3 times before figuring out how to actually kill it.  But to it's credit, the items you collect actually carry relevance throughout the game instead of for a dungeon and a half.  I also really enjoyed that it brought in a few aspects of slightly more expansive RPG's in that you can actually collect items from dead monsters as well as bugs and  use them to upgrade your equipment and potions.  The sidequests alone can keep people occupied for hours.

Overall I really enjoyed this game.  The one major downside I can find with being done with it is that I accidentally erased my original save data when prompted to start "Hero Mode".  I'd recommend this game to anyone with a Wii, beginner or veteran because it really is just pure fun.