Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD

I'm already getting quite annoyed with trying to get a pre-order for the Zelda Joy-cons.. I don't have time to keep refreshing pages the whole day and these things are sold out in minutes in my country.. Quite frustrating to say the least.

Even ignoring that Nintendo games include 3 of my favorite video game stories, there is so much worse out there just in terms of well reviewed, popular games with any focus on story that I can't possibly imagine thinking this.

If you want to be pedantic then yes, it didn't have to use the sensor bar for gyro motion. And without it it's technically similar to the JoyCon. But with it WiiMotion+ had a fixed calibration point that could be used to more accurately zero the controller.

Now I don't know how Skyward Sword was coded but these WiiMotion+ games on the Wii did always ask you to point at the TV before you started to use it to zero the controller. If it was me programming it I would've made use of the information on the sensor bar position captured here to re-calibrate the gyro while the player was at rest with the sensor bar in view. Whether they did that or not I don't know but it is something WiiMotion+ had the JoyCon don't. Which makes the JoyCon inferior.

I'm not so convinced. Of all the Zelda games it's probably the closest to BotW with it's fairly open "dungeon" structure, crafting mechanics, stamina, gear upgrades and so on. I mean it's clearly well short of what BotW ended up doing on a lot of these things but Zelda before Skyward Sword had none of these things.

Probably my strongest memory of playing Skyward Sword is wandering around Lanayru Desert collecting tumbleweed for gear upgrades. Not something I've done in any other Zelda other than BotW.

Also, criticized and poorly selling? It did get reviewed with 9s and 10s when it came out so it's not like it was objectively a horrible game. Of course the forum opinion of it is more negative than some other Zeldas but I think that's more a combination of it's poor sales, so it has less nostalgia defenders, and the way it leant into motion, which is (unfairly IMO) seen as a negative for any game that had it.

It's poor sales were more to do with the fact that it launched right at the end of the Wii's life when the Wii was in decline. It sold less for the same reason that Spirit Tracks sold 2mill less than Phantom Hourglass or Splatoon 3 is going to inevitably sell less than Splatoon 2 did

I guess it depends on what you're looking for in a (Zelda) game. For me some of the biggest issues I had with Skyward Sword were how disconnected the world is and how the areas just didn't feel diverse enough. There's a forest, Death Mountain lava area, and desert area. I will give the desert area credit for the neat things they did with it, but that was really the most stick out part of the game in the end.

With me really being bothered by those things, BOTW is a very stark contrast, and going back to SS would be a bit jarring.

That's not to say that the game doesn't have value, it does. I'm sure it'll sell just fine, too. But as for me, BOTW is a world of difference.

@skywake I hope people see BOTW as more than just a stamina meter and upgrading gear lol. The very linear and hand holding structure of SS is very opposite to BOTW's and lot of those players are gonna have a hard time adapting to it.

Skyward Sword actually has the lowest metacritic score of all of the 3D Zelda even if it did get 9s and 10s, all of them are above 95 apart from SS which is low 90s if I remember correctly. It's a series which generally gets reviewed well but it just happened to be at the bottom of it hence the worst and it's not just this forum, it has a general feeling of being considered the worst 3D Zelda by alot of people.

In a lot of ways, I think of BOTW as far away from Skyward Sword as anything in Zelda. Skyward Sword is a linear, story-driven(?), game that constantly sends you back to the same areas that are as divided from each other as possible. BOTW is an open world game that sends you out there to git gud or die that's even less linear than most non-linear games so you can go everywhere in one seamless world (shrines and divine beasts aside). And also the story is mostly optional.

I took your comment as more "Skyward Sword is the worst Zelda to pick for people who liked BotW" than "BotW and SS are different". Of course they're different, BotW breaks a LOT of Zelda conventions so it's not going to be the same. But the linear and "hand holding" structure of SS isn't exactly unique to SS. You could easily say the same of Twilight Princess or Wind Waker.

What I was saying was that if you were to rank the Zelda games based on how much they have in common with BotW I'd put Skyward Sword at the top of that list. And in terms of gameplay mechanics that means upgrading gear, stamina and the more open dungeons. I'd also say the storyline of SS is closer to BotW than any other Zelda, specifically the way they both approach Zelda in the story.

With that said.... if we're ranking purely on how "linear and handholdy" they are I can definitely see where you're coming from. I just think BotW is so far away from all of the other (3D) Zelda games on that metric that any of them would be jarring to someone who's only played BotW. Skyward Sword at least has some elements in common with BotW. As much as I love Wind Waker and would personally list that 2nd on a "Zelda games to play" list after BotW I can't say it's more like BotW than SS is.

Well I for one don't agree with that ranking. I also don't agree with putting OoT above both WW and BotW which Metacritic has and is also probably "the general feeling". More to the point, we're talking about 93 for SS and 97 for BotW. Outside of OoT all of the 3D Zeldas sit between those two rankings on metacritic. On the Switch only BotW and Odyssey are above 93 so, much of a muchness IMO

Do you guys think SS HD should have the option to play as a lefty?

I thought, maybe Nintendo could give the option to invert the image horizontally like it was with TP on Wii.

@dionysos283
Isn't Link supposed to be a lefty anyway? Pretty sure skyward sword was the first game where he wasn't because they thought most players would be more likely to use their right hands to swing the Wii remote or something.

@Zeldafan79
Twilight Princess on Wii was the first game, where Link was not left-handed. They inverted the whole game to allow for motion control.

@dionysos283
Yeah I might have mixed up which game it was but I remember people freaking out. They were mad because suddenly Link was holding his sword in his right hand. Perhaps they already got lefty's covered for skyward sword HD and it's in the settings.

@dionysos283 Only on the Wii version, he was still left handed on the Gamecube one.

@jump
Yeah that's what it was! They inverted it on wii and people who didn't play it on gamecube were like WTF? Why is Link right handed all the sudden? Oh the rage on forums back then LOL!

Im glad Nintendo is re-releasing Zelda Skyward Sword for the Switch/Switch Lite since I never had the Wii/Wii U years ago.

Didnt game critics or gamers make a big fuss about some crossbow or bow and arrow thing for Zelda Skyward at the time?

I wonder if Nintendo will ever revisit the "Master Quest" concept for the Zelda ports. It's such a cool idea and I think it worked really well in OOT and also in Zelda I (NES).
Remixed dungeons like that would actually motivate me to buy Skyward Sword again!

It's hard to know how easy it is for them to do.
Just flipping the character model itself so that it appears left-handed instead of right-handed, is incredibly easy to do (pretty much every graphics engine does that automatically if you scale a model negatively in object-space). So the fact that they needed to flip the entire game world with Twilight Princess on Wii, suggests that it created other complications for them.
Maybe something to do with animations no longer lining up? Or maybe some of the physics and tools that Link uses were hard-coded into lining up with his right-hand. Impossible to know without knowing how they designed it all.

I assume they would also need to flip every enemy.

I'd love if they could flip the world, or at least Link, so that he's a leftie. I didn't have too many issues with it in Skyward Sword other than some odd sword positions since I did use the Wiimote+ with my left and the nunchuck with my right.

In my experience, while you can technically play Skyward Sword without the sensor bar, it does use it.

For a while I played Skyward Sword without the sensor bar plugged in. I forget if I had to bypass the calibration test or not, but I lived in a small dorm at the end time and the wii remote was either picking up the TV light or the sunlight on the windows either side of the TV, so i could get through the calibration test with a little bit of fiddling, the wii remote pointing toward the TV and everything. It took me a while to realize this, but when I played like this, Link's Sword would frequently come far out of alignment to how I was holding it, and would swing in the wrong direction occasionally. I even tested this by plugging in the sensor bar for the calibration test, then immediately unplugging it for gameplay. It seems that the Wii (or at least the Wii U) uses the sensor bar to keep it oriented so that it doesn't drift.

I have a theory that a number of players left the sensor bar unplugged and this contributed to their issue with the controls. Though even if I'm right, it was definitely only a small contribution to the problem.

After Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword on the Wii I unfortunately don't see Nintendo going to the effort to making a leftie mode. I guess they can always fall back on the idea that if you struggle with motion controls you can always use the button controls?

A "mirror mode" would definitely be pretty cool though. Not just as a feature for left-handed people, but as an extra feature for those interested. Honestly surprised this was never implemented in Twilight Princess HD (or that they never reintroduced the Wii motion controls).

Didn't you need the sensor bar plugged in to even launch the game? (Pointer on the Wii menu)