We’ve been waiting for this game for several years now; is it going to be worth waiting a bit longer?
The very first thing I learned from my Zelda experience at E3 was to never, ever get in line for a game at the very beginning of the day. Before the doors were even opened, the line stretched all along the side of the Nintendo booth, and even though I was one of the first in the doors, I ended up waiting around 40 minutes to get my turn at a demo station. There were periods in the middle of the day where the wait was shorter, so if you ever head to E3, try to be smart about when you go to play things. Nevertheless, I did eventually get a free T-shirt and the chance to play The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
The graphical style feels like it’s halfway between The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess; it’s colorful, and it looks good in motion, both of which are important in my mind. The game sounds excellent as well, from what I was able to hear apart from the din of the show floor (which was less than what I was hoping for). The HUD is a little large, though; they’ve got a full outline of a Wii Remote with a jacket on the screen, along with a Nunchuk, and it takes up a fair bit of real estate, so I hope it’s reduced for the final product. Now that presentation comments are out of the way, let’s move on to the meat of any game, the gameplay.
As has been mentioned before E3 began, this game requires the use of the Wii MotionPlus in order to play. Your Wii Remote directly controls Link’s sword; if you tried out the swordplay in Wii Sports Resort, it’s fairly similar to that. Whenever you slash, though, Link goes into a slash animation, and the direct control is lost for a tiny second, but he does slash in any direction you can so it’s not something that’s going to hamper your gameplay experience in any way. Besides slashing, though, whatever you’re doing with your Remote, Link is doing with his sword; this actually comes into play on occasion, such as with one door with an eye where you need to rotate the sword around and around the eye to make it dizzy. It’s quite satisfying to watch the sword follow your actions the way it does.
The game makes sure that specific slashes are required, as well. Against general goblin enemies, you need to slice at then in such a way that their sword doesn’t block yours; fighting the Deku Baba plant enemies, you’ll need to slice in the same direction that their mouth opens up in. Near the end of the demo, there was a scorpion boss that required me to slice at his claws in different, but rather specific angles; here, I felt that my sword didn’t slice at quite the same angle that I was swinging my Remote at, but this was only happening occasionally. Still, it’s not something that I’d like to see persist in the final product, unless it turns out to be my fault the entire time.
This time studying the sword, though, is because I ended up not checking out many items; the demo wasn’t long enough to check out the entire area, and I ended up following a very sword-centric path, plus I was a bit absorbed in studying its mechanics. In retrospect, I wish that I had flown a beetle, or bowled with bombs, or flung my whip at enemies with the Remote. Hindsight is 20/20, I suppose.
I did check out the shield, though, which is controlled with the Nunchuk. Shaking the Nunchuk quickly brings it up, and shaking it again does a shield bash, which you can use to reflect projectiles back at enemies or something like that. The system is thankfully quick and responsive, and having one hand for sword and one hand for shield is very entertaining, even for a hardcore Zelda fan.
The item selection is streamlined nicely, though. You hold a button to bring up the item menu, then point the Remote at an item and you’ve got it selected right away. The same thing happens when you select the potion button (yes, there’s a potion button, thankfully); you point at and select a potion, while still running around, and drink it while still running, instead of having to stop, which is useful.
Overall, everything I tried is working excellently, with only a couple minor hiccups; certainly, nothing to the degree of the errors that happened during the press conference. The Wii Remote pointer depends on simple infrared lights to know where it’s pointing, and every blogger in the universe was shooting infrared from their laptops at that time, so disaster was probably inevitable. On the show floor, there were no such problems.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is looking excellent from a basic control and gameplay perspective. There’s plenty of other things to consider, like level design, story, environment, and more, but Nintendo’s clearly put a lot of time into the basics. Stay tuned to NintendoGal.com for more details on Skyward Sword, which is due for release early next year.
Keep watching NintendoGal.com as our impressions wrap up this weekend, including impressions on the upcoming Nintendo 3DS.
