Skyward Sword

By the title people can probably guess what I've been up to during the last week. Yes, I've been playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. And I completed it 100 % in one week. Compared that to the me in 2003 that had taken five years with a guide to finish Ocarina of Time. So now I can say once again that I finished every Zelda game published by Nintendo. And what do I think about it? It was OK, the story was interesting in its way to try having a new archenemy than Ganon and the series as a whole seems to go that way (this is gonna contain spoilers for those who haven't finished the game just so that anyone stumbling upon this knows). What I mean is that this games end boss is a demon lord, Spirit Tracks had the end bosses as a Demon Train and a Demon King, you have lovecraftian horrors like Bellum and Vaati so the series seems to go with ancient demon horrors as the main enemies of the series where Ganon is, as explained in the end of Skyward Sword, the eternal curse put upon the, by the Goddesses appointed, Hero and Princess. So instead of the manifestation of his inner-self, Ganondorf must have somewhere before Ocarina of Time made a pact with the series actual devil to gain his power and his Ganon form being the price for it (giving up his humanity and so on) which looks a lot like the actual devil himself.

Other aspects of the game is the music, not bad, I really liked the song when you followed the path to the Goddess Sword, but I miss familiar tracks from the older games. I only recognized one and that is the Zelda-theme. The graphics are nice and atmospheric and I have nothing against the cel-shaded look, it actually make it look lively (the more realistic look from Twilight Princes mostly went in colors of brown, red and grey which is not the prettiest colors to look at). Then again it's hard to tell due to the condition of my TV which I still haven't fixed so the colorful graphics make it at least easy to see what's going on. Then we have the controls, motion based making you theoretically swing with the sword yourself pulling you into the combat... in theory. I don't know, but sometimes I've had a hard time making a forward thrust with the sword (often crops up during a certain boss-battle against a Scorpion) and sometimes it feels like the most reoccurring boss is cheating since he blocked my every move (which he is supposed to do, but it doesn't feel like I could create a pattern on how to strike so it usually ends with me swinging all I got until he decides to use a sword instead). Mind you, they aren't horrible or hard to understand, there is just some flaws.

An enjoyable experience overall during the 50 hours it took me to finish the game and then they top it of with a hard mode as well (or "Hero's Mode" as they call it), don't know if I'm gonna finish that, but I now regret that I didn't make a double save post before the final battle so that I could have some proof of my 100 % cause I feel that the hard mode probably will kill me a lot more than the normal one (I think I died twice and one time was during the boss-rush game to get the best shield which was really good to have in the final battle). The biggest complaint though is that it feels short, the world itself feels small in comparison to the open plains of Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess or the vast ocean of Wind Waker. Now it's just an open sky with small rocks thrown around and three larger ground areas to explore, I miss the feeling of the epic scale the 3D Zelda games just have when you leave the forest area for the first time and can see the mountains in the north with the Castle just below standing as a monument over civilization in a world plagued by evil and the wild. You felt small in the world, in awe of nature, in this game it just feels... empty in the sky while the ground areas feel cramped together. All in all there is 6-7 temples that for a console Zelda is pretty standard so it shouldn't feel smaller. Maybe it has to do with me getting older and actually multitasking the game to find all secrets, heart pieces and so on compared to me as a child spending time just walking around avoiding the temples and dungeons cause I was scared. Talk about personal character development. Now it's just waiting another five years for the next home console release of the series to see where they are going with this with some handheld games in-between.