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Nintendo Releases The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
mayberry42 writes "Finally, the wait is over — for European fans, anyway. After months (well, over a year) of delays, the latest adventure of Link is finally out. Reviews for the game are consistently favorable. Famitsu magazine has given it a perfect score. IGN says it's 'the greatest Zelda game ever created,' and even the best game for the Wii. Of course, some of you may have already known this, given that it has already been hacked to run on an emulator (and yes, it looks even better in HD). I would love to hear the opinions of you Europeans who've played it. Is it as good as they say?"
(Skyward Sword doesn't come out in the U.S. until Sunday, and not until next week for Japan and Australia.) While still complimentary, Giant Bomb's review goes into a bit more depth on the game's shortcomings.
>I would love to hear the opinions of you Europeans who've played it. Is it as good as they say?
Nah. It is a silly game. Running around in a silly hat with a sword, packed with all sorts of unrealistic creatures and someone has apparently built all sorts of puzzles into the world. Who would do such a thing? Totally unrealistic and stupid. You'd probably want to give this one a miss.
It's nice to get the first last for once, but I have to say that I don't understand why developers still release their games at different dates in different regions. Especially with the internet, reviews are going to be coming out as soon as the game is out anyway, which if the game is bad will reduce sales in the regions where the game comes out later (not that this is a concern in this case).
It's a very good game, the best Zelda made. I would say between 9/10 and 10/10. The controls are very accurate and it feels amazing to control the sword in 1:1 movement with the Wiimote. This game shows the power of Motion Plus and It's too bad games of these caliber have not released before. Imagine a Star Wars game like this where you swing a light sabel...
I'm really interested in this game since it seems to be one of the first to use the motion plus support very effectively. Any comments on how it feels or plays in this regards would be good to hear. Everything I've looked at online seems to indicate a good quality title. Will be good to play the wii again.
Insert scathing comment against old-schooler here, cleverly including "off your lawn".
How does this game compare to Die by the Sword?
it would have to be REALLY good to beat Link to the Past. or even Ocarina of Time for that matter. I have my doubts. But will need to see this for myself
I believe it's the E3 demo that has been out for weeks, not the full game.
I played the demo at Target today and to misquote Dr. Zira "It's just so damned ugly". I love cell shading, and the cartoony graphics ,and the great color scheme, but it is in my eyes a pixelated mess. I know the Wii can't due HD, but I really thought Nintendo could pull some magic out of a hat on this one and have it look good. I have a hard time looking at most Wii games except the Nintendo ones, both the Galaxy game and SSBB look great. Monster Hunter Tri even looks better than this. I'm really looking forward to playing this come Sunday, but I'm not sure how happy I'll be looking at it (52" 1080p LCD tv).
According to Nielsen, the main demographics are boys 6-11 and women 25-34.
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The genius of the Wii was that instead of having to fight with Sony and Microsoft for market share, Nintendo basically went and found a whole other market (casual gamers). Where they didn't think this through is that casual gamers are not the kinds of people who upgrade their consoles every generation, especially one with expensive hardware like the Wii U's new controller. Time will tell but the next console generation is probably going to seal Nintendo's fate.
Don't like it? Don't play it.
I get sick of military themed shooters, so I don't play them. See how that works?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
It has nothing to do with "save the princess." Its about game play.
Table Tennis has NO plot at all and is just a ball bouncing a short distance! Yet somehow it is in the Olympics?
Golf involves different hills of the same grass that you play fetch with yourself in...
Football involves the same thing over and over...
Checkers has almost no purpose. yet people still play it.
Pinball has only 2 buttons and you just watch a rolling ball the whole time!
Video games are not a "sport" (neither is golf) but that does not mean they can't involve developing skills and have enough depth to entertain somebody who has developed the skills.
New movies largely suck; video game movies largely suck even when some of them now out perform Hollywood. Many people do not want an interactive movie that is drawn out for 10x the length of time; I know I do not.
Zelda is as far as I'm willing to stretch it; the puzzles are fun and the premises are simple. Batman is a good game but its a slow motion ok movie I just am not willing to put my time into finish. If I want to fight against depressing situations I'll break out a mindless shooter. Better yet, do something in the real world rather than appease your humanity by proxy... your subconscious does not know the difference which is why escapes work so well as a substitute.
I'll stop Zelda when they think we are too stupid to read, like most games.
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Give it up. A new Zelda game will never recreate that experience of firing up The Legend of Zelda on your NES for the first time when you were 10 years-old.
Maybe they just wanted to get the money from the Europeans while it's still worth something. ;-)
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/320/3/0/if_you_like_zelda_2_by_dungeonboss-d4gdo3k.png
Operation Rainfall
You know there is a difference between artwork and technical graphics right?
You can push more polygons at a higher resolution, you can have the best technical engine in the world, but if it's boring and uninspired, then well, it doesn't matter how much AA you've got.
I picked up a copy yesterday and started it last night. Verdict so far? It's ok - pretty good. Heading for a 7/10 or 8/10 kind of score.
It's difficult stepping back to Wii level graphics these days. I didn't notice the difference so much early in the console cycle, but Wii games really do look very grim indeed next to anything else around. The artwork goes some way to compensating - it's very good in places. That said, it doesn't have the really strong visual style we've seen from other games over the last few years; Ratchet & Clank, Gears of War, Dark Souls, Mirror's Edge etc have all carved out really distinctive art styles - and have done so on better hardware. Even on the Wii, Xenoblade Chronicles has had more visual impact. There's just a bit too much "generic fantasy" around Skyward Sword (which is a criticism that can be levelled at a lot of the recent Final Fantasy spin-offs from Square-Enix).
The controls are undoubtedly better than Twilight Princess. There are occasional issues with the motion sensing refusing to register an attack at all, but they're the exception rather than the norm now. That said, I know this is a point about the Wii in general, rather than this game in particular, but I remain unconvinced that motion controls really add as much immersion as they were supposed to. There's that same "lack of connection" feeling that has always undermined motion gaming, be it on the Wii, PS Move or Kinect.
To be honest, if Zelda has one really, overwhelmingly huge problem, it's called "Dark Souls". I know that stylistically, the games are worlds apart (Zelda being a bright, colourful fantasy, while Dark Souls shares its palette with the original Quake) - but they are very similar in gameplay style - the same mix of exploration, combat, back-tracking and problem solving. And in every respect, Dark Souls is infinitely superior; not just to Skyward Sword, but to pretty much everything else in the genre. It's a pity that the reviews focussed so much on the difficulty (insanely hard though it is), because there is a supremely awesome game in there as well - and one that took me 79 hours to beat. The game's melee combat sets the new standard for this genre, with a real and distinctive sense of weight and mass to every weapon. After that, a bit of Wii-mote waggling, even with the Plus enhancements, just feels a bit limp.
Sorry, the text above is more negative than intended. This is a fun game. It's not kept up with the competition, but if you haven't played the competition yet, that might not matter to you.
Basically, Nintendo of Europe is the cool branch nowadays. NoA is primarily concerned with pushing party games. For more evidence, see Xenoblade, The Last Story, and Pandora's Tower, which aren't receiving an American release at all.
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You didn't think Twilight Princess was better than Link to the Past?
Back in the Wii Menu 3.x days, Twilight Princess let you install the Homebrew Channel and start Snes9x GX to run the copy of A Link to the Past that you dumped with your Retrode adapter. (In 4.x, the go-to games are the Lego series and Super Smash Bros. Brawl if for some reason you can't use Bannerbomb 4.0, Bannerbomb 4.2, or LetterBomb 4.3.)
It's a bad input method when the game is designed for pressing buttons and those buttons get arbitrarily replaced by gestures. Of course it doesn't improve games that aren't using it properly, just like an analog stick doesn't improve 2D fighting games or pinball games.
Motion controls are an analog input. Using them like that makes them work. Wii Sports uses analog input, it doesn't just check if you swing the controller but how you do it and that influences the outcome (e.g. how you hit the ball). Sports games in general did benefit the most from the motion controls because they're based on a game design where skill with the tool you're using is a crucial element of the gameplay and previous control methods had to build convoluted replacement systems to challenge the player.
However most current game designs simply presuppose that you are perfect with your tools and only hit a button to use them. Your character will never swing his sword wrong, hold his gun wrong or fail to grab that bar he jumped towards. Of course mapping that to motion controls will go wrong and lead to a "loss of precision". Change the game design to make that loss of precision a part of the challenge: If the player holds the sword wrong while swinging it doesn't cut as well, if the player holds the gun wrong then he will miss his target and if the player doesn't grab that bar then he falls.
Of course all this is separate from the IR pointer controls which are the second best way of controlling an FPS game (the mouse is of course more accurate). Some freaks claim that dual analogs are better but that's simply their inexperience with pointer controls talking, they've played with dual analogs for decades, try five minutes of pointer controls and then just switch to analog controls while whining about the IR pointer. Yes, the shitty default controls in most Wii FPSes and the included statement that you're supposed to tweak that shit yourself are horrible. However once you've found a setup that works (near-zero bounding boxes work for me) it's much quicker and more precise than analog stick aiming. The Wiimote is the only console controller that actually uses that IR pointer scheme (the Move uses some trickery, it's better for spotting where you're holding the controller but worse for spotting where you're pointing it) so the other motion control systems simply cannot replicate that accuracy despite being attached to systems with WAY more first person shooters.
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