I’ve talked about this at length here before, several times, but Skyward Sword, when looked at from a game design / development lens, is just not really a good game. It’s pretty, the musics great, but that’s the most it has going for it. The remake on switch made it better (by that I mean I was able to beat it instead of putting it down after 10 hours because the controls were so bad), but it was still just….not great. I’ll link a video I threw together a year ago from my stream where I talk in depth but, the jist is, the game feels like a lot of half-baked ideas. Good concepts with poor execution. Crafting, stamina, traveling, the not-so-open world, all of these things are ideas that can work great, but just kinda miss the mark in SS. The biggest issue, to this day, is still the controls. Nintendo made a zelda game trying to showcase the capability of the Wii, and get people interested by having a crazy cool and interactive control set up, and the controls were just flat out bad. They literally did not work as intended a vast majority of the time. Someone in a recent thread said ‘the controls were very hard to master and I loved that’. That’s wrong; they weren’t hard to master, they just didn’t work right. A game made for the audience of 8(ish)+ shouldn’t be hard to play because of the CONTROLS. That’s just bad design 101. Hell even Elden Ring controls are more intuitive than SS.
If you care to listen here’s about 13 minutes of me describing in-depth flaws with the game, as I attempted to beat it in 24 hours (ended up taking about 30)
https://www.twitch.tv/realpatchthomas/v/1163923031?sr=a
by PatchTheLurker
21 Comments
You’re beating a dead loftwing.
Now, as I mentioned earlier in a thread with an opposing viewpoint, I loved Skyward Sword. But imo, at its worst, Skyward Sword is a necessary stepping stone to Breath of the Wild. From what I can tell (I don’t follow the internet’s opinion too heavily outside very specific areas), the Sonic fandom is hoping that Frontiers will at least be the SS of the Sonic series.
I’ve seen people complain about a franchise that doesn’t innovate (like Pokémon). I’ve seen people complain when a series does the opposite and can’t seem to stick with something for more than a couple games in a row (like Sonic). And people who just wish those stagnant franchises would take the plunge and risk doing something new.
I and many others enjoyed SS on its own merits, but you’ve gotta admit even if you hated it, it was a building block for the future. Too many elements are present in BotW for this not to be the case. In that regard I think SS did an amazing job at introducing new elements while maintaining the core formula. Some think they went too hard on the new stuff and say BotW doesn’t even feel like Zelda do them.
You’ll never please everyone, but imo it’s important to keep things fresh even with winning formulas. Every franchise needs a good SS every now and then. (And I hope Sega keeps this frontiers formula and makes it look like a ss and gives us a botw next time. Could be quite an epic game. Same with Pokémon’s Legends Arceus.)
>They literally did not work as intended a vast majority of the time. Someone in a recent thread said ‘the controls were very hard to master and I loved that’. That’s wrong; they weren’t hard to master, they just didn’t work right.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. You were just doing something wrong.
The game doesn’t always use the controls in a sensible way but they always accurately output the same thing you input.
My 60+ year old step father didn’t even struggle with the controls.
I feel like that’s an incredibly overplayed narrative just to shit on the game. I’m by no means the most dextrous person and the controls were very intuitive to me.
I had very few issues with the controls. I’ve always thought that complaints about the controls were a bit overblown.
The only thing I wish they’d changed are the flying and swimming controls. Those didn’t need to be motion controls imo.
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Controls could be better, sure.
It is still an awesome game!
Besides the flaws it could have, it has great art, fun and enjoyable levels, a very good story, and some iconic moments and characters.
I CAN understand the motion controls ruining all that for some people.
But the Switch version with joystick controls gets rid of that (and also makes Fi immensely less annoying), so I don’t really see much reason to put the game down like that.
One of my fave Zeldas, to be honest. I rate it considerably higher than TP or MM, which always get touted as peak Zelda… But hey, subjectivity and all that.
Controls **do** work as intended. It’s just that people bad at the game tend to blame the controls rather than realize their own mistakes.
I had no issues with the controls on the Wii. None.
I even remember there being videos on YouTube with people demonstrating the controls without issue to counter those saying they were unresponsive.
The game was designed with outside areas that felt like “dungeons.” I think it succeeds at that. New gameplay mechanics aren’t isolated anymore inside dungeon areas. Everything is considered a dungeon.
Most of my issues were fixed with the Switch port. EXCEPT for some of the pacing/padding.
I never had an issue with Skyward Swords controls, However I do prefer the button controls of the surprisingly worth buying Skyward Sword HD. In fact, SS in my opinion, has the best plot/story of any other Zelda to date (that says a lot coming from me who’s favorite Zelda game is MM, and as you know, yes, we really like to suck MM’s dick) and the soundtrack is beautiful
I like that you’re willing to debate your opinion here with folks. I don’t like that after a certain amount of effort, you stop debating and plug your twitch channel.
I like Skyward Sword, and for all its faults, I find it to be a fine game. I respect that you don’t like it, but I’m not gonna willingly click on your echo chamber link about it.
I had TONS of issues with controls on the Switch port. I played 85% of the game with the Pro-controller and it was too easy and I suddenly had the feeling I wasn’t playing the game as intended. So, I started using the motion controls and they were pretty brutal. The thrusting never worked right for me. Shooting arrows and flying the beetle were troublesome for me and just all-around combat was clunky.
I see people praise this game all the time like they can’t believe this game is good. They’re blown away. No one could have seen a good game with SS. Of course it’s a good game, it’s Zelda. It’s actually great. Skyloft is one of the most fun areas to explore. It’s the only town in any Zelda game where the characters actually change as the story progresses but the game still has a ton of issues, so I’m glad to see someone come on here and actually speak the truth. The controls are bad. They’re pretty awful.
Tom Mcshea, is that you?
Honestly, I respect that you don’t like the ideas presented in the game, but the controls [have been shown time and time again to work as intended.](https://youtu.be/QEge_2Vuft0)
Either you were doing something wrong or the game was bugging out like crazy, in which case I’d recommend you call customer support.
>when looked at from a game design / development lens
And the problem with that is that the people picking up these “lenses” have little or no experience with either game design or development.
I’ve been a software developer for nearly two fucking decades, and I’ve even thrown together a few games. I still wouldn’t even try to look at a game like this from a “game design / development lens” because I don’t have the necessary experience.
But it seems there is no shortage of people who have decided that because they have driven over a lot of bridges they can now look at things from the “bridge designer lens”.
If all you’ve done is drive over bridges, all you can speak on is the driving experience of bridges. If all you do is play video games, you might get an idea what is fun and what is not but you don’t become a game designer through osmosis.
It’s the first Zelda game I have 0 want to ever play again.
Cool story bro.
Damn sounds like somebody can’t beat Calamity Ganon…
For someone who claims they aren’t self promoting, you sure are doing a lot of crying about people not watching your video. People are ignoring your video because this ISN’T a video sharing sub. It says plain as day right in the rules that posting fan-made stuff isn’t allowed, yet you did it anyhow. If you can’t be bothered to type out what you want to discuss, then don’t post. Simple as that.
I agree that certain concepts weren’t done properly. Stamina was a bore. But it wasn’t bad per se. Just… not that fun. It didn’t feel like that bad of a thing though. Just another recourse to keep track of.
Controls… did work for me just fine. I rarely had to recalibrate, (i’m sure I did at times, but its not enough for me to remember doing it alot) and I played the game once a year for like, 4 years straight? (5 years?, every Jan i did a playthrough).
The ideas/extra mechanics were for sure rough. The start was indeed slow.
But the story was good. The core gameplay was fun. The dungeons were awesome, and the puzzles solid. The items were simple but fun to use. The “Zelda” parts of the game felt like good typical Zelda.
The concepts for it’s areas were solid. They weren’t out there, but they were fun.
I’m not going to say the game was well made and polished. Many mechanics obviously had flaws.
But i don’t think it was poorly designed. This may be because I define poorly designed differently to you, but to me, the UI never felt bad, the Controls worked fine for me (all Wii games that used that lil add on worked super well for me) the layout was straightforward (sure it wasn’t “open” but thats not a bad thing inherently, I liked the layout), the characters were solid, the various gamplay components were fun (flying loftwings, running around, combat, puzzles, the Guardian Zones that the name escapes me currently) were all fun to play, straightforward and unambiguious. The game never felt obscure or made in such a way that makes no sense. It was, in that, well designed.
I would consider the poor implementation of some mechanics like crafting to be a lack of polish in a sense. It wasn’t really core to the game, you could enjoy the game rather fully without it.
I’m just going to add myself to the “actually the controls work fine” club. Similarly the pan flute in Spirit Tracks often gets panned and I don’t know why, it works perfectly.
You had me up until “They literally did not work as intended a vast majority of the time”. I think there’s a lot to praise about the controls, there’s also a lot to criticize. But positing that the controls didn’t work a vast majority of the time is, in my opinion, hyperbole. I found that the controls would act up approximately 1-5% of the time, depending on calibration. That’s not a good number, and I’m not defending it. But for a novel control scheme, it worked well enough for me to enjoy the game, and well enough to demonstrate the possibilities of the technology. I think Matthewmatosis on YouTube made a good point in his review of the Wii original. He stated something along the lines of if a game’s control system fails 1% of the time, that may not be enough to prevent someone from enjoying the game, but it is still unacceptable for a control input to fail that frequently, as when compared to button inputs, that doesn’t happen.