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Can we stop pretending Skyward Sword was bad?
qial
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Or that BotW was anything like NES Zelda ESPECIALLY compared to this game? Open-endedness never made Zelda 1 or ESPECIALLY 2 what it was. Zelda 1 had multiple branching paths of progression, not "go anywhere whenever." Zelda 2 has contained microcosms established in a railroaded fashion. BotW really was just Japanese Skyrim after all; SS is way, WAY more akin to the NES games, especially its bosses (even if some had hugely telegraphed solutions) and levels like Ancient Cistern where you had to transgress level geography to figure out puzzle solutions. Seriously, this game was Great. Underrated imo, and fun fact, a slave to a budget crisis over the motion technology that fyi was established per press release by Nintendo itself to have interference with routers and cellular devices (Motion+ that is). Highly recommended to anyone who got themselves a Wii U and needs more games to play with backwards compatibility. Worth forming your own opinion about at least. It's got your real love story between Link and Zelda and is a known self-aware inversion of series tropes (it's why the main theme is Zelda Lullaby backwards--
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDDAXsgoc5s .The real stroke of brilliance was the draw distance filter with the impressionism-inspired effect on distant objects in FOV. Silent Hill levels of brilliance for masking a poor draw distance (read: weaker hardware). This game was amazing and another fun fact: the final product was only made in One Year. It was in dev hell for ages over the Motion+ debacle and it took Wii Sports Resort for them to have to scrap development and restart for about a third time, so they could start from scratch and still push out a game that has a ton of its own merits. Play it.
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The way people complain about the stamina thing in the game, I am throwing it in the same bin as people who don't like the weapon durability in BotW. Rather than work with the system as it is meant to flow, they spend the game fighting it, and thus it keeps "getting in their way."
But that's all outside observation.
The thing that really gets me most about BotW is all the false analogs people draw between it and Zelda 1. Zelda 1 is NOT "go anywhere whenever you feel like," it's strategically paced to require key items to get to certain parts of the map and even beat certain levels that you might have been able to access previously. BotW is like this for the Great Plateau, and it's absolutely fantastic during this period, but afterwards? Sandbox. Not much like Zelda 1 at all from that point forward.
The shrines are the one thing similar to Zelda 1 by design, really. The maze structure gets kept intact. But the open world negates it entirely and it's a huge defining mechanic of the kind of game Zelda 1 is.
Maybe by "bad" people really mean just a weaker entry than usual in the Zelda series. Which comparatively to other game series' is still really really good.
RE: Zelda 1 and Breath of the Wild, for me it was similar to the design in Link Between Worlds. There's not a set order that you have to do stuff in. Zelda 1 let you do dungeons out of order, although some you couldn't progress due to lacking a certain item at the time. There's a great sense of exploration that is common in both. The other 3D zelda games have a set order in the way you need to do temples/dungeons and what not.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
That's normal for the series at large, but personally, I think SS is mid-high at worse. It's better than...virtually any of the other post-N64 entries, in my book. There ARE bad Zelda games in my opinion. The DS games were awful. Twilight Princess was a huge letdown by virtue of being so derivative that it hurt it a good deal in spite of a bigger hype train than a boxcar full of gravy. I reiterate, Skyward Sword was made in a year or less, at least the build that we got released to us, after restarting from scratch to implement motion controls; get rid of motion controls for lack of them "working"; then for Wii Sports Resort to come out with the fencing minigame and prove the Zelda team wrong so they scrapped AGAIN-- the game is an achievement. Weapon crafting doesn't get enough love. It's great and better implemented than how derivative BotW is of AAA western open world games by comparison. SS at least has its own identity and isn't bad at what it does; the problem is that it does a lot of things different from certain other Zelda games, by design, and this seems to have Triggered a lot of people with addictions to above mentioned Hype Trains.
I would say most customers don't really care that it was made in less than a year or whatever. They just want to play a great game. The crafting stuff was an interesting addition, I didn't mind it. I haven't played the game in 6 years since it came out, but from what I remember the crafting was rudimentary. At least, I didn't use it much outside of upgrading the shield.
There are genuine problems with motion controls in the game. Motion swimming was a Horrible choice and worth docking it a full point or more. It's always a letdown when a Zelda isn't 10/10 worthy but imho there's only two or three games in the series at large that really are, despite how many get it for free (Skyward Sword included). The control problems can be remedied if you disconnect your Wii from WiFi (especially if you made the mistake of forwarding ports circa say, 2009) and turning off your phone according to press release. I'm not saying that makes the clear and present problems more or less permissible. But man, when they work? It just feels so good. It's a Zelda game that feels a lot like wielding a real sword when it's actually working right; it's whether or not they are that's up in the air.
Honest question, are there updated builds of SS later in print ala OoT that fix any of all that? There might be for all I know. Console games do get patches you know, but it only works in disc copies when you get a later print.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
I liked spirit tracks! I never did try SS though, because waggle controls and hand holding are the things I hate most about wii era games and it seemed to have it in abundance.
You're convincing me to take another crack at it someday. It's one of those I didn't give much time because of the format it established. I should play it longer next time to have more of an opinion... It's the only mainline game I practically haven't played, come to think of it. It was just uh, less than intuitive...in my personal case...
Man, why didn't the Wii U ever add DS to VC? You have two screens at your disposal with that thing. It would've been great, and I'd have an easy opportunity to play that game again proper.
And that final boss? Like a freaking super saiyan diablo or something. One of the more epic sword duels I've done in a video game, and challenging to boot. I admit I was disappointed in the ease and simplicity in the finale of BotW.
Most of the criticisms I have heard leveled at it tend to be the latter half of what Bowen said, primarily the tutorial and linearity of the early game.
Did any of Fi's predictions ever turn out to be a false positive? I'd like to see a statistical analysis of how unlikely Link's journey was, assuming that all of the listed probabilities were accurate.
I quite enjoyed it. It was certainly better for me than Twilight Princess, which felt like they took an excellent game and spread a thin layer of misery across every aspect of it.
It annoyed me too but personifying the sword was an interesting story choice and the Vocaloid stuff they used for her in lieu of regular voice acting (BotW's was absolutely awful btw, like, totally verified the theory that it would be so bad that it would hurt Zelda games that were otherwise fine if not better for being reading-intensive), was pretty cool in hindsight, even if a little uncanny-weird.
I don't think it was awful, but it definitely wasn't the best either. It served it's purpose which was fine for me. The game is spades in every single other department.
Yeah, that's right. I like weapon degradation. Fight me.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
Everything else? Absolutely awesome. I think I beat that game in about four sittings total. I enjoyed it much more than I did Twilight Princess on the whole of things.
The comparison of Zelda 1 to BOTW is much less about the raw mechanics and whether parts of the world were gated off, and more about the overall feeling the game evoked for that generation, given the technology. In Zelda 1 you could "go anywhere" and swapped stories on the playground about the secrets you'd found. In BOTW you can go anywhere and swap stories on the playground about the secrets you've found.
The DS games are good. BOTW's voice acting was good.
But overall the feeling of this thread is pretty weird. I know there's room for plenty of topics here, not everything has to go in a megathread, but the vibe I get in here is "these are my Zelda opinions, fite me." Like everything must be passed through this one lens and judged. It's not "let's all talk about this together" and if it was, it would just be the regular Zelda thread again. I dunno.
The sky world was a bit boring and pumpkin balancing can choke, but aside from that, it was wonderful
I suppose you could game the controls if you wanted to, but they worked fine on their own
I wouldn't say it was a bad game, but it was a bad Zelda game.
What you find in BotW are novelties at best they serve little-to-no purpose to completing the actual game, Unlike Zelda 1. BotW's voice acting was absolutely awful, too. The King breaks character a trillion times, you can hear him waver between his character's voice and his real one a trillion times. It's absolutely atrocious.
Zelda 1's openness is tied directly to progression. BotW's is a novelty item where the real game is climbing a bunch and being bored. It sucks. It's a lesser Skyrim made by Japan and nothing like Zelda 1 outside of the shrines, which like I already said, at least keep the maze format in tact. But they're lacking in any real meat and the cosmetic decision to make them look identical was pure laziness. You know how much work it is to click something on a palette? Like none. It's a crappy game.
When the person at the register asked what was wrong with it I told them "it's a bad game" and they said "...oh"
E: Actually, that's the same amount of time I played Breath of the Wild before getting bored and stopping as well.
COINCIDENCE...?
Yes.
What's wrong with something being made in Japan or by Japanese people, exactly?
Sorry. Disagree on all counts. You can say all this with whatever authoritative tone you like, but it doesn't give it any more credence than my own thoughts on it.
Skyward Sword can be a good game without needing to drag other games through the mud. Plus that way lies other people showing up to ask us to "stop pretending BOTW was bad," or TP, or Spirit Tracks, or whatever.
Nice false flag. I didn't say anything to this effect whatsoever. I said it's worse than Skyrim at doing all the same things. The Japanese part is to delineate it from the known western-developed Skyrim, because it is just an alternative Skyrim made by Japanese and worse than Skyrim...imho.
Skyward Sword was better. But TP was better than WW before we throw the cycle into it.
Nice passive aggression btw Sporky. I'm not taking any tone with a purpose. This is how I talk. As in, brass tacks, down to business, straight to the point. Trigger warning: I don't think some things are good. Oh no.