Ever since Nintendo released the Nintendo GameCube, their sixth generation video game console, Nintendo has developed an obsession with making games easier and targeting younger players. Nintendo has become pretty much the Sesame Street in the video game industry. The Legend of Zelda: Wink Waker (2002) is probably the best example of that. The Legend of Zelda franchise went from challenging and mature to easy and cartoonish. Apparently, Nintendo realized they went too far, since the next Legend of Zelda (home console) video game, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006), is in many ways the opposite of the Wink Waker. With Skyward Sword Nintendo is clearly trying to figure out just how close to Wink Waker from Twilight Princess they can go. The graphics illustrate that perfectly. They aren't as cartoonish as the graphics of Wink Waker, but they aren't as realistic as the graphics of Twilight Princess. They are somewhere in between. That's pretty much how everything else is with Skyward Sword.
The graphics actually look very good, but not for a Legend of Zelda video game. Imagine a video game like Resident Evil with cartoonish graphics. It just doesn't work, no matter how good the graphics look. The Legend of Zelda may not be directly a horror video game franchise, but it's not far from it. In every Legend of Zelda video game you are fighting monsters, for example. So it's most inappropriate for a Legend of Zelda video game to look cartoonish.
Wink Waker was ridiculously easy. Twilight Princess was harder, but still quite easy. Skyward Sword is (unsurprisingly) somewhere in the middle. To make things even worse, Link, the protagonist of the franchise who is usually accompanied by a female being (such as a fairy) in his adventures, is accompanied this time by Fi, who is most ways serves as Link's laptop. Without a doubt, Fi is the worst companion Link has ever had. She has little to no purpose at all in the video game, except to annoy you. For example, when you are about to run out of hearts, the video game starts to annoy you with a pinging sound. Link starts to blind red as well but that's not enough. The Fi starts asking for your attention. Why? To tell you that you are running out of hearts! Imagine how annoying that is. For example, when you are fighting a boss and getting your ass kicked, when the Fi button starts to blink at first you will think that Fi has something useful to tell you about the boss, nope! It's like when you enter a room and you look around and see something that is probably the key to solve a puzzle, Fi shows up to tell you "look over there!" It's very annoying, especially since Fi never shows up when you actually need some help.
Both the music and the story are mediocre. At some points it gets interesting, but it's nowhere near as good as the story of Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess. Before you start a new adventure, you get to see a video of what the story is all about. There was a war. A goddess gathered the surviving humans and placed them on a rock (Skyloft) above the clouds. Sounds promising and interesting but that's pretty much where it stops. Skyloft is too small and as if that wasn't bad enough, the traditional exploration that the franchise is known for is now limited to Skyloft. You basically get a few big dungeons that are divided into mini-dungeons. Surprisingly, the dungeons are quite innovative and not mere remakes of previous dungeons in the franchise.
The video game is quite repetitive. You go through one thing, then you have to go through the same thing - it's a recurring theme in this video game. To top it all off, the ending was horrible. The more you have to do the same things over and over, the more you start to long for something new but then the end comes and that's it.
The controls in this video game are done quite well, except anything that has to do with aiming. You have to frequently manually adjust the aim control, unlike in Twilight Princess, which is an enormous annoyance. Sword handling, in contrast, is the best so far in the series. You can use your Wii remote as your sword and it works well. In addition, the AI of enemies is also the best in the series. So fighting in this video game is more realistic than ever before. There is more innovation when it comes to other weapons in this video game than in Twilight Princess. In this video game you can now collect bugs and all sorts of near useless items. Once you save the game and return to play it, every single time you find a new item for your bug and other item collection you get animation of Link holding the item, the video game telling you what the item is about, then you get to see your collection, the item being placed in your collection and then finally, you can proceed (I'm not kidding)! Why is that needed? The video game treats its players like complete imbeciles who need everything to be spelled out. At times it feels like the video game will at one point tell you how to walk. The video game goes in fact so far that you literally get a place (the Sheikah Stone in Skyloft) where you can go to to see how you should solve something! You literally get an animation of how to do it! All the efforts to reinvent the Legend of Zelda have only made sure that Skyward Sword isn't yet another remake of Ocarina of Time (like Wind Waker and Twilight Princess) but it didn't prevented this video game from being one of the weaker installments in the franchise.
