Video Game Review #147: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Nintendo Wii

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword came out in late 2011. I remember being extremely excited to play this game, especially after I’d read all the glowing reviews it was getting. I was a huge Zelda fan to begin with, but when you threw in motion sword controls that reacted based on how you swung the Wii remote, it was AWN. I asked my girlfriend (who would later go on to become my wife) for this game as a Christmas gift. Like the good girlfriend that she was, she came through in the clutch and got this game for me. Not only was it super cool that I had gotten the game, but it also came with a bonus CD that had full orchestra versions of classic Zelda tracks on it. I remember the two of us driving out to my parents’ house on Christmas Day with the Zelda soundtrack booming in the car. It was like we were going on an adventure. I loved it!

The game, however, was a different story. The motion controls were cool, but that was the only cool thing about it. The whole game just seemed a bit tedious to me. The environments were bland. You revisited the same three stages over and over again throughout the course of the game. To me, there were no memorable or iconic moments to be seen here like there were in almost all of the previous Zelda games. In fact, the whole game itself was kind of a slog for me to play through. It wasn’t particularly fun and it began to feel like a chore after a while. I could not for the life of me figure out why the game had gotten such good reviews.

I ended up beating the game just for the sake of beating it. The disc went back in the case. The case went back on the shelf. I told myself that I would someday return to the game to see if my opinion had changed on it. About six or seven years passed before I finally picked it up again.

When I first started playing the game again, I found that my feelings had not changed. I quickly got bored with the game and after a couple of days of boredom I decided that I needed a break from the game to play something more fun. I put my playthrough on a temporary hold and switched over to the PS4 to play The Last of Us instead.

When I came back to Skyward Sword, I noticed that something had changed. Maybe it was just me forcing myself to power through the game, but I started playing it for hours on end and found myself actually enjoying the experience. No, it still wasn’t the best Zelda game, but I tried to put that out of my head. I tried to ignore what the other Zelda games had done and judge Skyward Sword on its own merits. That is when I started to realize that the game wasn’t really as bad as I had thought.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is canonically the first game in the Zelda series. Link and his people live in a floating city named Skyloft. The world below is shielded by a layer of clouds so thick that no one has seen the surface in ages. In fact, many people believe there is nothing below the clouds at all. That is, until prominent Skyloft citizen Zelda falls and disappears into the clouds below. A shimmering light shines into the sky, and a passage to the surface opens through the clouds. Being the brave adventurer that he is, Link hops aboard his big flying bird and goes down to investigate.

Down below, Link finds out he is the chosen hero, because of course he is. The villain of the game, Girahim, is attempting to free an ancient powerful demon from his long slumber. Once freed, the demon will destroy everything in its path. Zelda, an incarnation of the ancient Goddess of lore, is going around from temple to temple on the surface, doing her part to help keep the evil at bay. Girahim is attempting to stop her, but Link is there to fight Girahim while following Zelda’s trail in the hopes of catching up with her and aiding her on her quest.

You follow Zelda from temple to temple, navigating through each temple, solving puzzles, collecting keys, and fighting bosses. After you have completed the first three temples, things should become very familiar to fans of Zelda games in the past. You are sent out on multiple quests to track down the artifacts you need to win the game. First you have to go find secret mystical stones. Then you have to go learn songs from the game’s three dragons. Then you have to go collect something else. Then something else. Rinse and repeat - something we have seen in a countless number of Zelda games in the past. Don’t get me wrong, the formula works. This isn’t a bad thing. Not necessarily very original, but still fun. The thing I didn’t like is that the game recycles the same three environments (the forest, the volcano, and the desert) over and over and over and over and over again. You revisit them multiple times over the course of the game. Sure, you unlock new areas and new locations within each environment each time you visit, but things still feel super repetitive after a while. A little extra variety would have been nice.

When not exploring the three surface locations of the game, you will find yourself flying around on your red bird above the clouds. Skyloft and its surrounding floating islands act as the central hub village of the game. Here you can talk to people, take on tasks for them, and do things that advance the game’s storyline. You can also fly from island to island, exploring and seeing what kind of surprises each little area has in store for you. In The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, I absolutely loved sailing the sea and exploring all of the game’s islands for their secrets. For whatever reason, I never did here. I checked out maybe two or three islands, but that was it. Exploring just didn’t hold the same magic or appeal that exploring in Wind Waker did for me. Probably because each island I visited seemed to contain some random Skyloftian who wanted me to do something for them. Whereas in Wind Waker, you never knew what you were going to find. As a result the majority of my time above the clouds was spent simply going from point A to point B to advance the plot. I could have explored more, I just didn't find the exploration very interesting here.

A lot of reviews of this game praise its puzzles and its dungeons. They were serviceable, but I didn’t find any of them particularly fun or memorable. I didn’t dislike them, but again: nothing groundbreaking or iconic to be seen here like in previous Zelda games. OK, I told myself I was going to stop comparing this to past Zelda games, but here I continue to do it. I guess it is something that just simply can’t be helped! One thing the reviews were critical of was the motion controls, which I liked. Weird, huh? Everything about the game that they liked, I didn’t. The one thing they didn’t, I did. But I just thought the motion controls added some extra depth to combat situations. Plus it just felt cool swinging the Wii remote like a sword, and watching Link react appropriately onscreen. It made things awkward with my cat, though, because she kept trying to lay on my lap when I was playing this game.

Another thing I will acknowledge that I liked about the game is its story. It is average on the surface, but once you dig deeper, the events of this game explain a lot of Zelda lore. It explains the origin of the Master Sword. It explains the significance of the bird logo to be seen in future games. It also details the origins of Ganondorf as the main villain of the series. In fact, the game does a good job explaining why it is that Link, Zelda, and Ganon always seem to be at the center of attention each time there is a crisis in Hyrule. It explains why and how the destiny of these three characters is tied together. That is pretty cool in my books.

I just realized I have nearly made it to the end of the review without mentioning two of the game’s more memorable side characters. One, Groose, is memorable in a good way. He starts out as a bully, but has a nice redemption arc going on where he becomes one of the game’s heroes when all is said and done. The other one, Fi, is memorable in a bad way. She is like this game’s version of Navi. She pops up from time to time to give you advice and explain plot points to you. The only problem is she pops up TOO MUCH and it gets tiring after a while. She talks for a long time. She talks oh so slowly too. You can’t skip over the things she says either. I just wanted to kick her in the head after a while. Worst video game companion ever! Speaking of annoying things, I hate how when you pick up a dropped enemy collectible in the game, such as a jelly blob or a skull necklace, it always has to freeze the action, explain what the item is, pause the game, open your inventory, and deposit the item into your inventory before unpausing the game and letting you return to action. It makes me groan and not want to pick up items when I see them laying around. The game even does this if you pick something up in the middle of battle, too. It is so tedious and intrusive, it drives me absolutely nuts. Come on, guys! Who thought this was a good idea?

Despite my complaints, I did end up liking the game by the time I finished it. This is one of those games where I would keep telling myself "okay, just a little bit longer" but then continue to play for several more hours. This is a pretty decent game on its own merits, but I just can't help but feel that when compared to past 3D Zelda games everything about Skyward Sword screams average to me. Average puzzles, average dungeons, average music, average graphics (seriously, why is everything so bland here? I thought this was supposed to be a step above the GameCube and N64?), average everything. Well, except for the plot. True, an average Zelda game is still better than 50% of games out there, but I couldn’t help but feel that this game was a disappointment as a Zelda game. If I had to rank my favorite 3D Zeldas, this would definitely rank behind Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess. I have not played Breath of the Wild yet, but I can't imagine liking this game more than that one.

So I have a little bit of a dilemma here. Average Zelda game, but slightly above average NOT Zelda game. C is too low. C+ or B-? Hmmmm….

Gah! I just don’t have it in me to give this game a score in the C range. Despite its numerous flaws which I outlined in great detail above, I still had an overall enjoyable time with the game. It could have (and should have!) been much better. But if you take away the expectations that the name “The Legend of Zelda” immediately bring to mind when you start this up, it really is a solid title. Solid, but at the same time never extraordinary.

Overall:

B-

If you liked my Skyward Sword review, please check out a few other of my game reviews:

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

Final Fantasy X

Sonic Colors

Super Paper Mario

Video Game Review #146: The Last of Us Remastered

The Last of Us Remastered

PlayStation 4

I first played the Last of Us back in September of 2013. The game had already been out for several months, and I was well aware of all of the rave reviews it had been getting. Best PS3 game! Game of the year! Best game of all time! I knew from the hype and the reviews that it would be something I would like, and I fully intended to check it out someday. But I had plenty of other stuff to play, plus my mind was occupied with my upcoming wedding. I was in no hurry to get The Last of Us just yet.

As fate would have it, I started talking to a guy at work named Jeff. We hit it off bonding over our love of video games. He told me he would loan me his physical copy of the Last of Us if I would let him log into my PS3 account so he could download Grand Theft Auto V. We had literally just met, and I wasn't sure if I could trust this guy. Was that kind of exchange even legal? I justified it in my mind: nothing could stop people from trading physical copies of games, so why would an electronic copy be any different? Plus, I liked this guy and wanted to be his friend. My instincts told me that he was alright.

So I went ahead with the exchange. Not only did I get to play an awesome game in the Last of Us, I met a great friend in the process. Jeff and I had a ton of fun hangout sessions where we would play retro video games together and geek out over Youtube videos. We even contemplated creating our own channel together. He would also go on to write several guest reviews for this blog before his untimely death in June of 2018. In a way, the Last of Us was the game that brought the two of us together, even though it was only for a small handful of years. I can't help but think of him whenever the Last of Us comes to mind.

Run, girl. Run.

I knew very little about the game as I came into it. I only knew the basic gist: that you played as an older man and that it was your goal to escort a young girl through an apocalyptic wasteland. That’s it. So the beginning of the game surprised me a bit. For those who have never played the game before, The Last of Us starts out with you in control of a young girl. Her dad is the protagonist of the game, Joel. Naturally, I assumed that this girl was the one he would be escorting across the country. Nope. A cutscene shows the girl giving Joel a watch for his birthday before bedtime. Even though the scene is not very long, it does a terrific job establishing the two as characters as well as giving us a quick glance into their relationship. An unspecifieed amount of time later, your character wakes up in the middle of the night. Something weird is going on. There are news reports all over the TV of something catastrophic going on. A building explodes in the distance as you look out the window. You explore the house, looking for your dad, but he is nowhere to be seen. Just when it starts to seem like he has left, he comes rushing in from the outside and locks the door behind him. People are going crazy and turning into zombies. Technically I guess they aren’t really ZOMBIES as we know them; they are human bodies taken over by spores and fungi. But  whatever. If it looks, moves, and acts like a zombie: it’s a freaking zombie to me. You get in the car with Joel and take off, but quickly things go awry.

Long story short, you and Joel end up on foot, running desperately to safety from the zombies. A military man with a machine gun appears and guns a couple of them down. You get a brief glimpse of hope that he is there to rescue you, but within seconds he gets orders over the comm to leave no survivors. Joel realizes what is going on and grabs his daughter and jumps and rolls down a hill as the man opens fire. At the bottom, Joel realizes that his daughter has been fatally wounded by the gunman. Joel sobs and cradles his dead daughter in his arms as the screen cuts to black. Welcome to the Last of Us!

I must say that this was one of the most effective openings I have ever seen in a video game. It made me cry the first time I played through it, and I am pretty sure it did the second time too. In the span of only about 15 or 20 minutes, you really get to know Joel and his daughter and appreciate the bond between them. To have that bond suddenly ripped apart, thrown to the ground, and spat on is a tremendous punch in the gut. I remember the first time I played this game, it was so intense that I contemplated taking a break and coming back to play later. I didn’t though - I kept going! And I am glad I did.

The game jumps forward 20 years in time. Instead of holding your hand and explaining everything that has happened in that 20 years, the game leaves you to discover that stuff on your own by using context clues. There are only a few major cities left across the country – all of them gated off and under oppressive military control. There is a small group of rebels out there that refer to themselves as Fireflies. Whether or not this has anything to do with the TV show Firefly and its Browncoat rebels, I have no idea. But I like to think it does.

You are in control of a very jaded and grimy looking Joel. I think he is now a smuggler or something. I forget the exact details, but an arms agreement between Joel and a criminal faction goes awry. Joel’s partner in crime, a woman named Tess, is attacked and nearly killed. Joel and Tess set off for revenge. Little do they know, this kicks off the main quest of the game. In order to get their weapons back, Joel and Tess are forced to escort a young girl named Ellie to the Fireflies. Ellie is special because she has been bitten by one of the infected, yet has not died or turned into one of them. This is something that no one has ever seen before. It is possible that Ellie contains a cure to the mass infection in her blood. Joel and Tess take Ellie under their wings and set off through the decaying, overgrown ruins of the city to the Firefly base.

I am not going to recap everything that happens in the game, because then I am going to be typing for a long time. But let’s just say that the journey takes a lot of unexpected twists and turns. People die, detours are taken, new people are met, new destinations set before our characters. Some are the characters you encounter are nice, some are shit heads. Expect a lot of hard hitting and emotional moments. If you have ever seen the Walking Dead, you will see a lot of familiar themes pop up here. I think the game handles them better than the show, though!

Gameplay takes place from a behind-the-back 3D perspective. Uncharted was the obvious thing that came to mind when I started playing this. Makes sense, as both games were made by Naughty Dog. Resident Evil 4 could be another inspiration. You use the left shoulder button to draw your weapon, the right shoulder button to shoot. You run, you crouch, you can climb up on things. You have your typical first aid kits and healing items. You can’t just pause to reload your gun or use these items however; these things must be done in real time. This makes things a bit more intense if you are almost out of health and need to heal in the middle of a fight. Stealth plays a major factor in this game too. Not only is ammo sparsely located and easy to run out of, but if you rush into combat your enemies can kill you VERY quickly. You will spend a lot of time crouched and sneaking around. While crouching, you enter a focus mode that lets you “see” where your enemies are based on the sounds they are making. If you want to get good at this game, you definitely have to take advantage of this feature, because the game’s perspective doesn’t really allow you to see your surrounding territory all that well.

Throughout the course of the game you are going to be fighting both human and infected opponents. You must adapt your strategy depending on who you are fighting. Humans are faster and can fire weapons at you, however they are physically weaker and can be brought down relatively easily. It is normally encouraged to use stealth tactics to sneak up on them and take them out one by one before you have a whole group of them flooding your location. There are several types of infected opponents, however, and some of them are blind. This may seem easy at first- if they can’t see you they should be easy to beat or sneak by, right? Not necessarily. The blind ones are extremely powerful and will one hit kill your character. The only way to kill them is to sneak up behind them and stab them with a shiv. If you don’t have a shiv, you have to unload your gun into it as many times as you can and hope for the best. Trying to fight it with your fists is a lost cause. The good news about these things is that they are relatively slow and easy to escape from. They’ll even forget about you after a while once you’ve lost them. The not-blind creatures are a different type of challenge. They can see you and will take off chasing after you at a moment’s notice. They are fast too! The good news about them is that they are weaker than their blind comrades. They can’t one hit kill you. You don’t need a shiv to stealth kill them. You can even take them down in regular hand to hand combat. These are the main enemy types you will encounter throughout the game, but the game does throw a few “massive” infecteds at you from time to time. These things act as boss characters, in a way. They are big, powerful, and take a LOT of ammo to bring down. I never look forward to fighting these things.

Graphically, the game is gorgeous. The character models are great. The landscapes are sensational. What makes the game stand out, in my opinion anyway, is the level of detail put into its environments. It doesn’t matter if you are just walking through a kid’s playroom that has nothing in it as far as items or anything you need to advance the plot. The room feels like a small child spent several years of his or her life there. Pink walls, toys on the bed and on the floor. Hanging decorations. A dresser with photographs and books on it. There are personal touches everywhere you look. You only pass through the room for about 15 seconds, and it is such a small part of the game. But the amount of detail put into the room is staggering. Now imagine the entire GAME being like that. A countless number of rooms, a countless numbers of streets, sewer tunnels, crumbling buildings, subway stations, stores, etc, all meticulously detailed and covered with small personal touches. The makers of the game created an entire living and breathing apocalyptic world that feels strikingly real. I can’t even imagine how much time was put into this game simply creating its environments. Just looking at this from a purely technical aspect, The Last of Us is a marvel.

Voice acting is sensational too. And the music… don’t even get me started. It is absolute perfection. As impressive as the game is technically, it is really the bond between Joel and Ellie that keeps things going. Watching them grow together over the course of their journey is magical. They start out at odds and quickly get on each others’ nerves. Ellie even steps on Joel’s toes when she brings up his dead daughter. But by the end of their several month journey, the bond they form is unbreakable and they would do anything for one another. Even though you are playing through events that take place 20 years after the death of Joel’s daughter, you can tell that her death has left a lasting impression on him and has shaped him into the man he is today. It is interesting to watch the tough, battle hardened Joel let his defenses down around Ellie. If you take the emotional prologue of the game away and jump right into “present day” times, I think that relationship suffers and is not nearly as interesting as it turned out to be.

So The Last of Us has outstanding graphics, great music and sound effects, interesting characters, terrifically designed environments, a great combat system, an intriguing plot, and it really makes you care for its characters. It is no wonder that so many people consider this one of the best, if not THE best game ever made. It is hard to find flaws here. I can name a few though. First one is in the stealth system. Not necessarily how with you control, but with certain NPCs like Ellie that you travel with. If you run and hide behind a wall just before an enemy turns around and sees you, great. But Ellie often tails right behind you. A lot of times she will clearly be in the sight of an enemy, but they do not see her for some reason. As long as YOU are hidden, your companions are virtually invisible to the enemies. Ellie could breakdance in the middle of an otherwise empty hallway and the guard would go walking right by her, completely oblivious to her existence. If the game is looking to be as realistic as possible, the enemies should see her when she is running around and all hell should break loose. But that never happens. I get why they have it set up like this. It would suck to run and hide and do everything perfectly yourself, but then Ellie keeps getting spotted and busting your cover. That would be irritating as hell, especially if it kept happening over and over again. It is just a small complaint I have.

Another one is in the glitches. There weren’t many, but there were some. My most memorable glitch is when I somehow managed to phase through the side of a building while trying to shiv an infected enemy in the neck. I don’t know what happened, but Joel pulled it too close to the wall to stab it and bam all of a sudden I am free falling 20 stories to my death. Another nitpick has to do with enemy AI. Once you know how to manipulate these creatures, the game is cake. For example: the first time I played this game, I remember taking part in a brutal, grueling fight against three “massive” infected enemies and a horde of small, fast ones. It took me soooo many tries to make it through that area. But it was all good. It was fun. It was a challenge. I felt rewarded when I finally made it through. What happened this time around? I chucked a grenade into the center of the enemy formation. The sound attracted other enemies, who came running. I threw another grenade into the fray. Then another. Then a few Molotov cocktails. When the smoke settled I had cleared out the entire area without even breaking the slightest of sweats. I felt a bit disappointed that it was so easy, to be honest with you. I wanted that giant, epic, difficult showdown I’d experienced the first time I played the game. And I didn't get it.

So no, the game is not perfect. That is not going to stop me from saying it is top notch, however. This is a REALLY good game. The first 15 minutes are enough to suck you in entirely, and the game never really lets up after that. While playing this game, I had other titles I was working on as well. I have been getting into this habit lately of playing through multiple video games at the same time. Not with The Last of Us, however. Once I started playing this game, my focus was entirely on this game and this game alone until I was done with it. Even going back to when I first played it 5 years ago, I turned around and started up a second play through almost immediately after beating the game the first time. I NEVER do that. That just shows you how good this game is.

While I don’t necessarily buy into the “greatest game ever” hype, I can see why people put it in that category. Personally, I would still say Final Fantasy VII takes that spot. It would be interesting to see where the Last of Us stacks up. Maybe I will have to do a list or a ranking of my favorite games ever sometime soon. Hmmm…..

Before I conclude, I would like to add that my copy of the game came with free downloadable content. There is an entire chapter, about two or three hours long, called The Last of Us: Left Behind. The game switches back and forth between two different time periods: during the main game (while Ellie is trying to save an unconscious Joel from David's men) and before the start of the main game. The "present day" timeline is pretty straightforward. Ellie sneaks around the abandoned lake town and gathers supplies and fights enemies while trying to get Joel somewhere safe so she can nurse him back to health. This effectively fills in one of the main game's blank spots, from the point where Joel is knocked unconscious to the point he wakes up.

The past timeline is the one I found infinitely more interesting. It takes place three weeks before the events of the main game. Ellie is living a normal life in one of the military towns. Normal is relative, I guess. She is being trained to be a child soldier, after all. When One of Ellie's friends is about to leave on a secret Firefly mission, she invites Ellie out with her for a night on the town. The two friends sneak out of camp and to an abandoned shopping mall. They explore and marvel over all the relics from the past. Ellie has lived in a military camp her whole life and it is like walking into a different universe for her. You explore and check things out like a video game arcade, a carousel, and a Halloween costume store. Being The Last of Us, of course, things don't stay happy and chipper for long. The infected start to pour into the mall, making your return to camp a lot more complicated.

I don't want to spoil too much, but... if you were paying attention to some of the things Ellie was telling Joel in the first game, you will see those things happen here. You find out how she got bit. You find out what happens with her friend. Suffice it to say, some more manly tears were shed during my playthrough of this DLC.

All in all, I thought the DLC was excellent. I am glad it came with my version of the game, because honestly I probably would have never played it if I had to pay extra for it. But it would have been money well spent. It gives you a lot of much needed backstory about Ellie, in addition to being pretty action packed and fun too. The next time I play the Last of Us, I will have to play the main quest, stop at the part where Joel blacks out, play the DLC, then finish the rest of the main game.

If you have read this far it really should come as no surprise that I thought The Last of Us was an excellent game. I liked it the first time when I played it on the PS3. Playing it in HD on the PS4, plus with the free DLC, made the game even more fun. This is definitely a classic title, and I would recommend it to absolutely anyone and everyone who has not already played it. You are doing yourself a disservice by not checking it out.

Overall:

A+

If you liked my review of The Last of Us, please check out the following reviews:

Resident Evil

Resident Evil 4

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

The Walking Dead