Listen to the Rain

Other than Ocarina of Time, this was the Zelda game I was most worried about playing. But whereas in Ocarina's case it's because it was so universally loved, in Skyward Sword it's because of the opposite.

Skyward Sword is a console Legend of Zelda game, so when it came out it got plenty of perfect or near-perfect reviews (AV Club, IGN, Eurogamer, Game Informer). I even listened to an old Nintendo Voice Chat podcast episode a couple months ago where they gushed about how great the game would be. But since then, opinions turned on it a bit. People talk about the motion controls, of course, but they also complain about the fetch quests, the backtracking, and the hand-holding, which have gradually been escalating through the Zelda series and find their ultimate expression here. So when I loaded it up, I wasn't sure whether to expect a complete mess or a maligned masterpiece.

What I got was a game that tries very hard but sadly falls short of its lofty ambitions.

The Japanese title is just a transliteration of the English "Skyward Sword."


Motion controls first came in with the Wii release of Twilight Princess and are one of the major reasons--along with World of Warcraft, admittedly--why I never finished the game. But where Twilight Princess's motion controls were tacked on to the point where the GameCube version is probably the superior version of the game, in Skyward Sword they were integrated from the very beginning. Swinging the sword requires swinging the WiiMote, and the direction of the swing is taken into account. Bombs requires flicking the WiiMote, overhanded to throw and underhanded to roll. Guiding the beetle item through the air, as well as swimming and flying on the giant birds of Skyloft, all require motion controls.

The major problem is that the motion controls are mostly reliable and in desperate situations they usually work. But when fighting a boss battle where motion controls make or break the fight, such as the battles against recurring antagonist Ghiranim, it's infuriating to try to swing diagonally right to left, have the WiiMote interpret it as swinging horizontally right to left, and then be stabbed in the face. Sometimes the WiiMote loses its center calibration, and when using a tool that requires aiming pressing down on the D-pad easily fixed this. But when swinging the sword or bug net there's no such easy solution, and sometimes you just have to take a few strange swings to shake it out.


That's not to say that it's entirely a gimmick, though. Puzzles in Legend of Zelda games that aren't Majora's Mask have always tended to be simplistic, at worst devolving into entering a room and looking for where the eye that needs an arrow is. Use of motion controls opens up a number of new possibilities, from guiding the beetle down narrow corridors to flip switches to the way that the boss keys are now 3D objects that require proper placement in the keyhole to work. And aiming the bow was a lot more fun when I could just point to where I wanted Link to shoot.

And honestly, my initial impression of the combat was very positive. One major problem I had with Oracle of Seasons was that it was supposedly focused on combat rather than puzzles, but there simple wasn't enough conceptual space in "press A to stab" to allow the designers to create any interesting battles. Skyward Sword didn't have that restriction and was much better for it. Even in simple battles against bokoblins, I typically couldn't flail away blindly because they would block Link's attacks. I'd have to consider the direction of my attacks and sometimes wait for an opening. It was almost (I know, I know) like Dark Souls in the way it required intentionality to avoid taking too much damage. Especially the boss fights, which required specific attack patterns to specific areas and no longer followed the normal Zelda "hit weak spot then flail away three times" pattern that's so overused by now.

If only the motion controls had been just a little more accurate. And later on, most fights again normal enemies can be won just by flailing because Link is so powerful. But early on, it was a great change from press A to stab.


Skyward Sword also has an assistant character that rivals Navi for annoyance.

The major problem with Fai (Eng: Fi) is the same problem with Navi--she is constantly popping up to tell Link things that the player already knows. In her robot-like cadence, she'll say that she has confirmed signs of Zelda's presence and that there is an 85% chance that there is a sacred flame in the room ahead where the sacred flame is marked on the map. She'll tell Link that the volcano is extremely hot and to be careful. It's every part of Navi that's annoying, except unlike Navi, she's not just a voice that requires a button press to listen to. She'll leap out of the Goddess Sword, say her lines, and only then can Link go back to what he was doing anyway. The designers of Skyward Sword made absolutely sure that the player would never get lost.

Maybe as the design of the game went on, the designers realized that they were overusing Fai. I feel like she became less and less ubiquitous as time went on, and when she did appear it was only to deliver short statements rather than restating the plot. But as much as the game wanted me to feel sad at Fai's fate at the end, I couldn't. I had too many memories of マスターに報告 ("Information for the master") ruining the thrill of discovery, of the designers thinking that the player couldn't be trusted to just play the game. Sleep, Fai. Link will do just fine without you.

Even without Fai, though, the game still explains what every single item is after picking it up anew after starting a new session. G-d forbid I forget what a grasshopper is.


There are some new systems that deserve comment, however. Gone is the traditional long trading quest that leads to an optional but powerful reward and in its place is an actual crafting system with multiple dimensions. In Skyloft's bazaar is a Junk Shop that takes the various materials Link finds throughout the world, monster skulls and horns, magatama, bird feathers, drops of the Goddess, and so on, and enhances his shields and tool items. It's possible to make the bug net larger, or enhance the speed of the beetle, or make the bow more powerful, or allow the slingshot to shoot multiple pellets like a shotgun. Sure, there are only eight tool items, but a lot of previous Zelda games had one of the tool items simply be an upgrade to something found previously, like the boomerang and magic boomerang. Offloading that onto a crafting system puts upgrading into the hands of the player, allowing them to decide whether they want to put in the time. None of these upgrades are necessary to beat the game other than a single beetle upgrade to allow it to carry bombs, and while there are several tiers of shields, I went through the whole game and I'm not sure I ever used a shield to actually block an attack. I never ground for materials, either--I just upgraded when I was back in Skyloft and still got a few items up to max.

The game also combines bug collecting, crafting, and the potion merchant together into another crafting system. Rather than there being a dedicated bug-collector like in previous games, bugs are used as ingredients to improve potions. After buying a potion, Link can walk next door to the potion-seller's husband and he can brew up an improved version of that potion, restoring more hearts, allowing Link to breathe underwater for a longer period of time, or further reducing the amount of damage Link takes. This last potion shows that Skyward Sword also carries on the great tradition of crafting systems breaking the game, since an upgraded defense potion makes Link invincible for three minutes. Carry the potion medallion too and the invincibility is extended to six minutes. There is no boss fight in the game that lasts that long, so while a defense potion costs 200 rupees, plus the time cost of finding the bugs, it renders any fight in the game trivial.

After a single hit from Demise took off two hearts, I drank a defense potion. After that, the battle was already over, I just had to play it out.

There's also a stamina bar that allows Link to dash the way that the Pegasus Boots did in other games, except without requiring a single unbroken dash. It also allows Link to run briefly up walls and mantle onto new surfaces, drains when climbing along vines, and is used as the limiting factor for the spin attack. It's much more ubiquitous than the crafting system, but counterintuitively it didn't impress itself on me as much. Since the spin attack required shaking the WiiMote and nunchuk simultaneously, I rarely did it, and I only ever ran out of stamina when I was sprinting around to get to where I was going faster.


The backstory of Skyward Sword is that the Goddess Hylia, when humans were under siege by an army of monsters led by the demon king Demise, protected humanity by lifting part of the land into the sky. This became Skyloft, where the game begins, and by the time Link and Zelda are born they've forgotten entirely about the surface, since anyone who descends below the thick obscuring clouds never returns. Link and Zelda are childhood friends, and while Zelda is the daughter of the mayor--no Hyrule yet, so no royal blood--Link is a lackadaisical knight-in-training who oversleeps every day and requires Zelda to wake him up. They're childhood friends, with an established relationship, and the game does a good job of showing this in its opening moments.

Of course, just like in Minish Cap, the villain curses Zelda early on and she spends most of the game away from Link in one way or another. The early connection does increase the investment in trying to find Zelda, unlike some of the other games where she never appears until the ending, but there’s no opportunity to develop it any further. I really feel that in a game as story-focused as Skyward Sword, where Zelda is spirited away but still free to act for most of the game, there should have been more opportunities to talk with her. To fight beside her, or at least with her support. Instead Link spends most of the first half of game chasing her--and how did she get through all these monsters and puzzle-locked doors anyway--and most of the second half unable to talk to her. For all of its linearity being used to tell a story, Skyward Sword fails to capitalize on the most basic story element of the Legend of Zelda, instead focusing on fetch quests with the possibility of finding Zelda at the end of them. Go to the three temples. Now collect the three flames. Now fight the same boss three times. Now get the three parts of the Song of the Hero. It’s the classic formula of Ocarina of Time, folded into itself until it’s a hall of mirrors.

My favorite story was Bado's (Eng: Groose) journey. He goes from a puffed-up bully, convinced that Link is too much of a loser for someone like Zelda, to a person who genuinely desires to help Zelda and Link in their quest to fight Demise. The scenes in the Sealed Temple with him, Link, and the old woman were some of the most touching in the game--definitely more touching than anything with Fai. Or even with Zelda, honestly. She was just not around enough for me to develop a connection to her stronger than the one I had from previous Legend of Zelda games.


Skyward Sword is the first Legend of Zelda game to not have an contiguous overworld other than Four Swords Adventures, and I don't really like it. There isn't as much backtracking as I had heard--the fetch quests at least take place in different areas--but it's still too fragmented. There are three (of course) major areas, Firone (Eng: Faron) Woods, Orudin (Eng: Eldin) Volcano, and Laneyru Desert. There is no way to get between them other than by returning to the sky and dropping onto a new area. This loses one of my favorite parts of some of the Zelda games since A Link to the Past, which is the way the world folds on itself and new areas are revealed to be right next to old areas. There are a few of these, like the waterfall in Faron Woods, but generally new places are entirely new.

Some of the locations are great, though. My favorite was the way the Spacetime Stones (Eng: Timeshift Stones) in the Laneyru Desert transformed the area around them into a lush grassland. There's one area with an endless expanse of sand that used to be a shallow sea, and Link rides through it on a boat with a spacetime stone so that a small bubble around the boat is water. It's visually stunning to watch, certainly more than the endless red and black of the volcano.

The surface has several non-human races both new and old. Gorons of course, primarily in the person of Marugo (Eng: Gorko), an archaeologist studying the ruins scattered around the surface and very interested in stories of the ancient goddess and her chosen people. There are also the kyui (Eng: kikwi), a group of plant-birds living in Faron Woods; the moguma, mole-people who live in Orudin Volcano; and a bunch of ancient robots who live in the Layneru Desert. But unlike other Zelda games, Link never goes to any of their cities. There's no Goron Village to visit, or Mogma Tunnels, or anything. And while Skyloft is interesting at first, the sky is even emptier than Wind Waker's Great Sea, which at least has more than one island with a town on it. The other peoples of Skyward Sword are like the regions--disconnected, unmoored from any relation to each other. Link can rescue a few mogma and kyui, and he can talk to the gorons, but he can't really affect their destinies the way that unfreezing the goron village in Majora's Mask or pacifying the guardian dragon on Dragon Island in Wind Waker does.


What Skyward Sword wanted to be was a narrative-driven Zelda game with realistic combat, requiring thought before diving into battle and where the player could really feel like they were participating in the fight in a way that pressing A simply can't deliver, a game where the tightly-controlled areas and linear path allowed for greater control of the story. It gets about two-thirds of the way there. Unfortunately, the fiddliness of the WiiMote controls, the endless monologuing from Fai any time anything changes, and the on-rails story put me off. The fun of the sword combat and the puzzles wasn't enough to overcome these downsides, and while I don't think that Skyward Sword is the worst Legend of Zelda game ever made--for me, that's still Phantom Hourglass--I won't want to return to it. Even a Switch version with more accurate motion controls wouldn't fix the story and worldbuilding issues. And while I like the crafting and stamina systems, they seem only three-quarters implemented, to the point where for much of the game they aren't really worth considering.

After this, I can see why Nintendo took the completely opposite approach with A Link Between Worlds. Skyward Sword is a little too janky, a little too unpolished, a little too overstuffed with subsystems, and a little too annoying. I appreciate that there a lot of people who love Link and Zelda's relationship in this game, but I like exploring and the small stories, so even osananajimi Zelda and Link, or Zelda asking Link to awaken her for once, didn't move me. I want a game to tell me what to do but be free to let me fail. Skyward Sword wasn't interested in that, and I return its lack of interest.

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