Thank you to Nintendo UK for the review code.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was a divisive title when it was released. While it has its fans, the consensus outside of the Zelda fandom was that it was a bad game. It received many perfect scores on its arrival, but among the wider gaming landscape it’s endured a reputation as a motion control heavy, overly handholdy, and very wordy game. Is it those things? Yeah, to an extent.
Personally, I enjoy Skyward Sword, and I think the hate towards it is overblown. It’s a perfectly charming game with good characters, beautiful music, great level design, and a strong emotional core. I could end this review here, but I’ll go a little more in depth on my thoughts.
Skyward Sword was the first significant departure from the traditional Zelda formula that the Zelda team had attempted. How do we more seamlessly integrate dungeons? The end result is that the world was split between the sky and the surface, leading to the area up above being a more traditional Zelda town, and nearly the entire surface below being structured as if it itself was comprised solely of dungeons.
 He leaves no openings |
The level design is very linear and segmented, due to the ground areas being broken up by the sky barrier, and this was done so that each region could be tackled by its own dedicated team. You revisit each region three times over the course of the game, each visit containing its own challenges and obstacles. The results vary, with the Faron region having the weakest sections, the Eldin region having the most contrived revisits, and the Lanayru region outshining them all by offering three wholly unique sections with each revisit, with its own gameplay gimmicks being built upon over the course of the entire game. There’s a certain sense of artificiality from this structure, making the world of Skyward Sword the least believable of all the 3D Zelda games, but the levels are so original, creative, well designed, and paced that they overcome this drawback.
Due to circumstances during development, they couldn’t really commit full swing to breaking the Zelda formula, so you end up with a game that still follows the basics of what Ocarina of Time established in 1998. That’s why they still say Skyward Sword is the last “conventional” Zelda game, even though they’d initially planned to move away from those conventions. So while it’s not groundbreakingly original, what you do end up getting is a selection of some of the strongest Zelda levels in the entire series, with the fifth dungeon being a particular favorite of mine.
I’d be remiss if I did not say I appreciate the more focused levels in a gaming landscape dominated by open world games. Booting up Skyward Sword in 2021, and being able to blaze through three unique and fully featured levels in under an hour each, is a breath of fresh air after playing so many games in which the main appeal is getting lost for hours at a time with no clear objective or endpoint. It is ironic that when it came out in 2011, it was lambasted for not being as open or free as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. But in 2021, when you put the two games up against each other, Skyward Sword comes out ahead.
Outside of the strong and structured level design, the biggest draw of Skyward Sword in today’s environment is that it has an incredibly strong storyline, something not found in most open world titles. It focuses on telling an epic origin story for the entire franchise, and while it blunders in a few sequences, it succeeds in developing very compelling characters and their plights. I cared greatly for this game’s versions of Impa and Zelda. I cared a lot about the ever splendid Groose, who goes through one of the strongest character arcs I’ve seen in a video game. I even cared about Link who, despite being one of the industry’s most famous silent protagonists, gets his own personal growth shown expertly through his body language as the game progresses.
 The smile |
All of this coalesces into one of the strongest finales in the entire series, with all of the major characters converging onto one point in an exciting conclusion that the game painstakingly builds up to with as much of its runtime as it possibly can. This sense of importance and gravitas could only have been achieved through the increased emphasis that Skyward Sword put on its story.
Of course, the main focus is still on the classic adventuring gameplay of the series. While this game shakes things up with its level design, it also took a gamble at replacing the entire combat system with one that uses the motion controller as a 1 to 1 input for your sword. This ends up turning a lot of combat encounters into a sort of puzzle. Fighting enemies can seem stilted and unnatural at times due to the way they just hold up their weapons to telegraph how to attack them, but the level of immersion while using the sword in combat is unreal at times. Due to how strenuous making big movements with the controller can be, there were plenty of times where I felt like I was exerting myself just as much as Link does. It lends a heightened sense of excitement to the ‘mano a mano’ boss fights in particular. The two battles at the end are not just a highlight of the game, but a highlight of the entire series.
Skyward falls short in a few areas. Combat encounters are a little unbalanced, the fifth dungeon boss is perhaps one of the worst in the entire franchise, and there is excessive padding for what is already a pretty lengthy game. Ultimately though, it has real heart in what it is trying to accomplish, and that earnestness shines through to the very end.
Now, finally, getting to the quality of this HD remaster– I’m not gonna beat around the bush, Skyward Sword HD isn’t the best they could have done. Everything seemed to be lined up for this to be the definitive version of the game: they added the ability to quickly progress text boxes and skip cutscenes; the frame rate was increased to 60 for smoother gameplay and motion controls; and the graphics are crisp at 1080p. Even with all this, I can’t help but feel that the results were less than ideal.
I have a personal bone to pick about a specific category of the “improvements” to this version. Much hoopla was made about lessening the helper character Fi’s interruptions, but this goal was ultimately misguided. Instead of removing particularly egregious instances of Fi explaining game concepts you’ve almost definitely gotten to grips with, they removed bits of flavor text that built up Fi into a much funnier and more whimsical character. I actually like Fi, and while I can recognize that they had the best of intentions at doing this, they removed the wrong interruptions, which just ends up making her a weaker character.
 This line among many is cut from Skyward Sword HD |
Perhaps the biggest downgrade comes in the motion controls, which is a big problem since this game was and is still filled to the brim with them. Without a sensor bar for reference to automatically recenter the motion controls, the calibration of the gyroscope goes out of wack with just a few swings of the sword, leading to constant usage of a button to manually recenter the controls yourself. This is extremely immersion breaking, and honestly frustrating given how precise and immersive the original controls were.
Worse still, the game no longer recenters its motion controls when aiming, so upon entering an aiming mode, Link will often be wildly drifting to one direction, necessitating the use of the Y button. I understand there was no way around the lack of sensor bar, but this one particular adjustment leads to the motion controls feeling a lot worse than they did before, which is a shame because, technically speaking, when properly calibrated the sword is more responsive and accurate for the few swings before it becomes off-kilter.
The new button controls, that allow you to use the sword with the right stick and control flying and swimming with the left, leave a lot to be desired. Firstly, they decided to make the game’s new free camera be a secondary action, requiring the player to hold the L button to use it, despite it likely getting far more use than the sword. Secondly, there’s a significant delay to your sword inputs that makes this control scheme feel just awful. I presume this is because the game needs to wait to see if you are doing a regular slash or a spin attack, because they came up with the most inelegant solution of doing the spin attacks, requiring you to flick the stick rapidly three times to determine which directional spin attack you are doing.
I hate to play backseat game designer, but perhaps maybe the most elegant solution would have been to have the sword be drawn with the Y button. By default the right stick would control the free camera, but by pressing the Y button, you would deactivate it and bind the right stick to the sword. Then, you could hold the L button to use the Spin Attacks, which would remove the need for the game to wait to see if you are using one of them. Just a thought.
The obvious missing option is one to mix and match the motion and button controls, which would solve this conundrum, and honestly I am surprised that they didn’t do this. Certain things like aiming, using the sword, and flying feel much better with motion, but I’d prefer button controls for just about everything else. I ended up just immediately switching to motion controls and staying with them upon getting the sword, because the button controls felt legitimately awful to use. I was genuinely hopeful that this control scheme would cause more people to play this game, and I am saddened that they’re just bad. Perhaps they will work for you, but they did not for me.
The release of Skyward Sword HD marks a peculiar point in the franchise. The cloudy reception to the original Skyward Sword left a shadow over the Zelda franchise, one that the developers barely recovered from with 2017’s Breath of the Wild. It’s clear that they took complaints made towards this game to heart and overcorrected, ultimately making a Zelda game that felt much like 2011’s Skyrim, the game many players wished Skyward Sword was. Now we’re back where we started, with Eiji Aonuma enthusiastically hyping it up and telling players to give this game a chance, and it seems like many people listened.
 The game’s story remains one of its standout qualities, especially in today’s landscape |
There is a thing known as the “Zelda cycle”, which is somewhat of a meme. It’s the idea that after the latest 3D Zelda title disappoints, players come to appreciate the title directly prior to it. It started with The Wind Waker, but it hadn’t made its way to Skyward Sword, at least not when Breath of the Wild came out. I’ve been seeing faint echoes of it happening now, with Skyward Sword HD, which is surprising to me because I think this version of Skyward is not really much better. I guess it just took an entire decade for people to come to appreciate the game underneath all of their gripes with the motion controls and handholding.
I’ve had a mixed relationship with Skyward Sword. Originally I decried it just as many people did, and only in 2015 on a replay did I come to appreciate it. With this latest venture into the world of Skyward Sword, my appreciation for it has only grown more. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is an enchanting game that I unabashedly love. While it’s one of the most flawed games in the series, it has many qualities not found in the Zelda games released after it, with some of my favorite levels and music in the franchise, and a story and characters I adore. Skyward Sword is absolutely worth playing, and it’s an experience that shines bright once you wipe away the dust on the surface.
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Thank you so much for such a great article.