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Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD

Posts 901 to 920 of 942

Pizzamorg

The more enemies are introduced, the more I am appreciating the combat to be honest. Having proper sword fights with the Bokoblins is pretty neat, although their design is very jarring in this game after BOTW.

Mixed emotions though on the enemies that require you to hit them in a specific way to kill them, like those plants. It doesn’t seem very forgiving as I was sure I was spot on with one of them, but I hit them over and over and they did not die. I just gave up in the end and ran around them, cba with it lol.

Oh and given they told me the importance of the shield, I have yet to use it. Hold down the movement stick to use the shield? No thank you. I guess rather than BOTW where it is an active part of combat, here the shield is just meant to be used to get you in close enough to use your sword? So I just run in and use my sword without it, lol. Just too awkward trying to use the shield under this control scheme.

Life to the living, death to the dead.

Eel

@Pizzamorg the shield is actually pretty similar to how it was in BotW. And if you learn when to use it, it becomes a very active part of combat.

You press the stick to “bash” with it, which is used to parry attacks just like in BotW. Just holding it out to take hits will end up damaging it, and they break.

Bloop.

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Pizzamorg

Oh, so it isn’t really used for blocking at all? Just really for parrying with it? And so I just need to push down the left stick when they are about to attack to parry and then go ham with my sword?

Life to the living, death to the dead.

Matt_Barber

You can block with your shield, but it takes damage when you do so, so you don't want to overuse that. You'll take enough damage from missed parries as it is.

Unlike BotW you can repair and upgrade shields though, and some late-game shields regenerate their health.

Matt_Barber

Pizzamorg

Yeah, it isn’t really the functionality, it is just because it is so hard to control. Blocking and moving in BOTW is fine, but since blocking and moving are on the same stick here, it just feels really awkward to do. Especially as you need to stop blocking to then get control of the right stick to use your sword. Like maybe all of this was true in BOTW as well, I can’t really remember, but all I know is the way in which all the buttons were laid out, I was able to block and attack and do all the rest seamlessly. Here, it just all feels very clunky.

Especially now I have the slingshot, I can just stun and charge in that way, so no blocking is needed. (although even that is a bit clunky to use, when compared to the ease of transitioning to your bow in BOTW). Plus, on top of that, it just generally feels like a more forgiving game than BOTW, there seems to always be sources of health replenishment everywhere. I dunno whether that changes later on, but right now I feel like I can play poorly as I wrangle these controls, because the game doesn’t really punish you for sucking. Not that BOTW necessarily did either, but I much prefer just getting health pick ups from downed enemies than having to keep going into my inventory to eat meals.

Life to the living, death to the dead.

FroZtedFlake

@Pizzamorg Yeah the blocking almost becomes necessary in late-game, I say almost because it's very helpful, but you could probably still make it through without it, maybe.

Games I'm playing right now:
Tears of the Kingdom - Switch

Kingdom Hearts 2 - PS4
Ace Attorney Trilogy - Switch

Pizzamorg

FroZtedFlakerZz wrote:

@Pizzamorg Yeah the blocking almost becomes necessary in late-game, I say almost because it's very helpful, but you could probably still make it through without it, maybe.

Uh-oh. I guess I should get my practice in now then, but it just feels so awkward to use. Did no one test this? Like I can’t get over how bad the controls are. Like I’ve grown to like controlling my sword on the right stick, but it should be lock on and right stick to use the sword and the rest of the time it’s the camera control, because the camera control is the primary thing you’re going to be using the right stick for. If I want to play longer sessions, I am worried I’ll start to cramp having to hold in the left bumper the whole time, it is just so unnecessary.

Likewise, blocking should be assigned to a shoulder button, where you hold it to raise your shield. Why on Earth they thought it a good idea for you to have to hold down the same stick you’re moving with to block is just absolutely bizarre to me. It just makes the shield feel awful to use. I am dreading when I am required to try and parry while using about eight inputs at the same time, just to raise my shield, block and move.

Edited on by Pizzamorg

Life to the living, death to the dead.

Eel

I suppose it’s to keep consistency with motion control mode. Since there shield bash is done by shaking the left joycon, and the general motion controls got translated to the joysticks in button mode.

Edited on by Eel

Bloop.

<My slightly less dead youtube channel>

SMM2 Maker ID: 69R-F81-NLG

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Matt_Barber

Yeah, if you go back to the Wii version, the nunchuck was your shield and the Wiimote your sword, with the various other controls apportioned between them. Since the analogue stick was on the nunchuk, that's how you moved around by necessity. Both the Switch motion and button controls are derived from this scheme.

The plus side of this is that they are interoperable, so you can change between them without any significant differences to the underlying gameplay. The downside is obviously that the button controls are nothing like those for Twilight Princess, Breath of the Wild or indeed anything else.

Matt_Barber

Pizzamorg

So it turns out - to the surprise of no one here - I am a *****. You don’t need to keep the button held down, you just click in the left stick and it leaves the shield out. I still retain that parrying is incredibly clunky to do under these mostly awful controls, however.

I also cleared my first dungeon, the Skyview Temple. It took me close to maybe two hours as I died a few times due to either controls not properly registering or the game just not making it clear wtf it expected me to do. So yeah, again, my feelings here are very mixed.

I actually enjoyed the shrines in BOTW. They were short and intuitive, each one had a pretty easy to figure out and solve gimmick. Just nice little bit sized puzzles to break things up when the world started to feel tedious. They always felt very satisfying to me, never sticking around long enough to feel exhausting or frustrating.

Here, the dungeon is much larger and much less intuitive, kind of the opposite of the BOTW shrines and so therefore lacking the things I liked about them. I didn’t have to google a single shrine, I was googling here pretty much straight away as it kept throwing new mechanics at me, the obvious solution was never the answer and I got tired of having to keep leaving the temple for new seeds. The more google explained, the more I started to satisfyingly engage with the dungeon, but it would be nice if the game shared this with me instead.

It also still doesn’t help that the game is just so clunky, you are often doing things right but there’s a weird delay or just a poor translation of input so things are just off enough to not work. Other times though it’s just so unintuitive I have no idea how people ever figure things out without guides.

On the flip, however, it being a proper space with it’s own unique visual identity is appreciated and the general progression loop of clearing spaces, beating bosses, unlocking new tools (who knew Link would be an Insect Glaive main, rather than a Sword and Shield main?) which then feeds into the puzzles in the dungeon is the kind of structured progression I really missed in BOTW. Even if the controls for the Kinsect are so ***** clunky it kinda spoils the fun.

It is also nice the villain has a proper presence in this story too, even if that first boss battle was truly awful. It just went on so long and it gave no clear indication you were actually progressing the battle, you just had to keep spamming him until the game just decides you can progress forwards now. I am sensing a theme here, as this is exactly how that sky race thing worked too.

Life to the living, death to the dead.

Eel

The game relies heavily on observation and reaction, I do not recommend trying to brute force things.

For example, the battle with Ghirahim, you might have noticed he follows your sword, ready to take it off your hands. If you bait him into thinking you’ll slash from a certain direction, but quickly slash from another, then he has no time to react.

When he rushes towards you to strike you, then a shield bash will stun him.

And when he throws his flying daggers, slashing at them in the direction of their formation will send them right back at him.

Edited on by Eel

Bloop.

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SMM2 Maker ID: 69R-F81-NLG

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Pizzamorg

It is for sure a mindset I am having to retrain to myself. It really makes you appreciate just how much flexibility BOTW gave you when clearing out engagements. Here, everything all basically has one fixed solution and it’s about remembering what swipe will kill the monster or trigger the thing.

Life to the living, death to the dead.

Pizzamorg

Wow the frustration ramped up FAST here, but I have now cleared the second dungeon.

This is gonna make lots of people cry because boohoo negativity about a Zelda game boohoo, but my experience:

Firstly, just getting to the Earth temple was pure torture thanks to constantly blowing myself up because the controls are so ***** ass backwards when it comes to using the bombs.

Admittedly, I liked this dungeon more than the first one. I dunno whether it was just a byproduct of experiencing such huge volumes of frustration just getting to it but it just seemed way more intuitive than the first one. I got killed by the lizard person the first time, as I keep forgetting in this game that everything has a single, fixed, solution that cannot be deviated from. If you break the specific rhythm/sequence they will just auto block every single attack you do. That caused so much of the frustration getting to the dungeon too, with me being like a millimetre off and not counting, so I think I’ve got the solution wrong but no, I need to be exactly 1mm to the left or right and then it triggers.

That aside and save some more frustration as a direct result of the truly rancid controls, I found myself going through this dungeon pretty quickly and smoothly. I did have to google a couple of times, but a lot of it was intuitive enough that I could figure it out for myself.

…Then the boss happened.

Again, because the game gives the player absolutely no agency, I think it makes Skyward Sword HD seem way harder than it actually is. I made at least four attempts and just could not work out how to progress the fight. Eventually I YouTubed someone doing the fight and saw it had a very exact sequence again that had to be followed to progress and clear the fight. Once I knew that, I think I beat it on my second try, as it isn’t really a fight or test of skill, just a memory test to make sure you do all the right inputs at the right time and right place and hope the rancid controls don’t mess you up.

Life to the living, death to the dead.

Eel

Hahaha don’t take it like I’m trying to be mean, but the weird part was your initial infatuation with the game.

I think this is more along the lines of what I expected your first impressions of the game to be.

Yes fighting Scaldera while managing and aiming the bombs is a pain.

Edited on by Eel

Bloop.

<My slightly less dead youtube channel>

SMM2 Maker ID: 69R-F81-NLG

My Nintendo: Abgarok | Nintendo Network ID: Abgarok

Pizzamorg

Lol! Don’t worry I’m not offended, I am already well aware of my reputation on here and my ever growing list of people who put me on an ignore list.

I also want to make it clear, I still don’t necessarily dislike the game, but that just sorta makes it worse. Like it does loads of things which “correct” issues I personally had with BOTW and in a lot of ways, I’d probably say so far that Skyward is the better game. It is just the dang controls. They are just so utterly rancid (imo) I feel like the game is always being held at arms length away from me. Like the stuff like having no player agency really at all is certainly a problem too, but almost every problem here feels magnified as I feel like I am literally fighting with my controller just to play the game.

Edited on by Pizzamorg

Life to the living, death to the dead.

rallydefault

@Eel
Everyone talks about that boss, but I had no problems with it at all. The bomb aiming/rolling/throwing never bothered me with the stick controls.

rallydefault

Matt_Barber

Yeah, I beat Scaldera at the first attempt too, despite blowing myself up multiple times.

It's 90% about knowing what to do, which I could still recall from my time playing the game on the Wii, and only 10% about aiming bombs where the mechanics are fairly forgiving.

Matt_Barber

Pizzamorg

Yeah, that was 100% my issue too, I’d probably still be stuck on Scaldera now, if I didn’t watch someone doing the fight who knew what they were doing, once I knew exactly the things I was meant to do, it made it quite easy.

And I know you could argue that every game is like that and it is to an extent, but here, there is literally zero agency or deviation here allowed to the player at all. If you don’t hit the exact point, or do exactly the right kind of swing, or follow a very exact sequence, things just will not progress. Between that and the controls, it takes an otherwise enjoyable game and makes it absolutely infuriating at times.

What it does do though is really make me appreciate BOTW and better understand where I had problems in that game. Enemies like Thunder are like a Skyward Sword boss, where you can’t really go off the script, unless you did some serious grinding beforehand. You have to prep in a very singular way, follow the exact sequence of what you are required to do to clear each stage or you will fail. It is like being on rails and it is difficult to transition from almost boundless freedom, to suddenly being shackled to a script that has to be followed.

Other bosses or like enemies out in the overworld, you may still need to hit x point to do damage, but how you go about doing that can be done in dozens of ways. It isn’t waiting for you to swing your sword in exactly the right sequence or the enemy will just auto block every attack. And hell, even the Shrines in BOTW, I love watching people on YouTube find ways within the mechanics to do really crazy things to solve the puzzles. That level of experimentation doesn’t exist in SSHD, which has a singular, focused, solution. And like I say, it isn’t inherently a bad thing, but you can’t demand this level of precision and then provide such sloppy, awkward, controls.

Life to the living, death to the dead.

Pizzamorg

So I cleared zone three, no clue how long I was at this zone, but it feels like half of my play through was in this one location. And you know what? I kinda loved it. I dunno whether it was just because the last location was so frustrating, exacerbating almost all of SSs worst aspects or what, but I just thought this zone went so hard, in the good way.

Like for sure it introduced some pretty annoying mechanics, like the sand stuff sucked and I got pretty fed up with how many endlessly respawning nuisance enemies existed in each location that needed to be attacked in this extremely specific way to be killed and all you want to do is just focus on the puzzle. Plus, like it is just crazy how long it takes to even get to the dungeon and then how long it takes to get through the dungeon, but I just thought the execution was so good here, overall.

Somehow, they took all of the learned skill you already had, tossed in heaps of new mechanics and enemies and somehow made probably the most intuitive of the three dungeons so far. I actually don’t know whether I googled a single step for this one? And this one was literally throwing like a new mechanic or enemy, or reintroducing/twisting an old one practically every minute for like five hours straight. AND somehow it managed to introduce/reintroduce/twist all of that stuff without the controls just completely spoiling it. And that boss, so easy! What was going on there? First try and it died so fast I was like… ???

Then it is capped off with a nice little cutscene, with Link being a total badass. I choose the lateness line that called back to the jibe Impa made earlier and just felt so cool in doing so.

Like, I dunno. I was exhausted when this was all over, but content and satisfied too. Marvelling at the class of game design on display here. The Nintendo magic I’d missed out on all of these years. Whereas the last dungeon, I was just happy for the torture to be over. Like I’ve never see a game do such a 180 in terms of quality before, I really hope this momentum is sustained.

Edited on by Pizzamorg

Life to the living, death to the dead.

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