THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: SKYWARD SWORD REVIEW

A great evil that once terrorized the land shall threaten to rise again. The gods that vanquished the evil in ancient times sealed the power needed to thwart it in a great sword and a mysterious symbol. A hero chosen by those gods shall undergo many trials to claim that power for himself and save the future of the land, and the future of a girl with whom his fate is intertwined. This is the story that has been handed down for generations.

Nintendo supposedly keeps a timeline that ties these tales together into some sort of coherent whole. I don't buy it. Sure, there is the rare exception of Majora's Mask: an actual sequel to Ocarina of Time, and not coincidentally the least formulaic and most experimental game in the series. But for the most part, Zelda games are all echoes of each other, handed down from one (console) generation to the next, changing the context but not the form.

If the Super Mario games are all about breaking the rules, Nintendo's other great series is about observing them. Zelda games are never without mystery or surprise, but they are always the same, and for those who've lived with them for even half their quarter century, they're getting pretty familiar.  That said, can Skyward Sword  do anything to make this formula feel fresh? The short answer: yes it can.

It doesn't do so by rewriting the order of service (It hardly constitutes a spoiler to say that your first stop is a forest temple, your first tool a slingshot). Instead, Skyward Sword joins motion control innovation and subtle restructuring together to make this the most effortless, breathless, free-flowing Zelda game since 1991's A Link to the Past on Super Nintendo. As per the usual in the Zelda franchise, this title can easily take between 40 and 50 hours to complete.

The ghostly figure of the Ocarina and Twilight Princess somberness is at last abandoned for a cartoony, colorful, and even romantic game. This one's quite rightly for the kids - in all of us.
In this telling of the old tale, a Goddess saved her people from war with demons by making a home for them on an island in the sky. That's where we join Link, riding his great Loftwing bird and training to become a knight of Skyloft. Zelda isn't a princess, but his childhood friend and his headmaster's daughter (OOOHHH scandalous).

The game stays in the sky for a while for a story-led introduction that is long but delightfully unforced. It piles on the romance between the young sweethearts before Zelda is inevitably snatched away and Link discovers that the mythical land beneath the clouds is real; he dons his green uniform and goes down there to find her, of course!

For the first part of the game you're not trying to rescue her from some distant threat, you're just desperately trying to be reunited with Zelda, tracking her across the weird world below (you follow her signal with the new 'dowsing' ability which allows you to track certain things in a first-person view with the point of your sword). Skyward Sword is more explicitly a love story than any Zelda before it - more than most video games dare to be, in fact. The leads share great chemistry, if much less screen time than the innocent pals of the last entry Spirit Tracks.

In fairly strict adherence to Zelda form, your search takes you from enchanted woodland to fiery volcano to ancient desert, and ultimately to a dungeon and boss fight in each. It's business as usual, predictable in its brilliance. Although, the same can't be said of a memorable duel at the end of the first dungeon with Link's newfound nemesis, Demon Lord Ghirahim: a wonderfully distasteful villain, a creep with an interesting taste in fashion and a lascivious lizard tongue. One new gadget also stands out at this early stage: the Beetle, a remote-controlled drone that can be used to scout inaccessible areas and even pick up items in out of reach places!

Then, around halfway through, Skyward Sword changes gears completely. Instead of repeating the well-worn flow of field exploration to dungeon to boss in new areas, it remixes and expands the three zones you already know - and becomes more fluid and unpredictable, which in itself is something new for Zelda games.

Although you're going back to places you've already been, few Zelda games have moved forward with such purpose, such up-tempo pace.  Even when you think it's built to a crescendo, it turns out there's more to come.
As well as sticking your nose into the townsfolk's sweet and characterful side-stories, in Skyloft you can sell the bugs and treasure you collect, or use them to upgrade your potions and - a series first - your gear. Having a better bow, faster beetle or more handsome and durable shield is a far more compelling draw than the modular ship and train customisation of the DS games. You can also mix and match different shield types, potions, perk-bestowing medals and extra ammo capacity in the limited slots of your adventure pouch, creating a custom character build for different types of adventuring. That's right, an upgrade system!

These are hardly deep role-playing systems, but they're great fun to tinker with. They also make the trajectory of your inventory - always the core of a Zelda game - feel both more focused and more flexible than the straightforward expansion of your abilities in previous entries. A stamina gauge, used for sprinting, climbing and certain attacks, is another exciting addition the design, giving Link's normally very 'flat' control scheme a touch of Mario's inertia and rhythm.

Steering your crimson Loftwing through the air with tilts of the remote is another thrill. So is guiding Link's plummeting sky-dives, and so is lashing his whip, and so is delivering a pin-point shot with what must be the most satisfying bow in video games history. Nothing requires you to point at the screen, making for longer, more relaxed play sessions. Sensitivity and response are perfect; reliability is almost there, but you will occasionally need to center a cursor with a quick tap of the D-pad.

Most importantly, every second is fun. No developer in the world does controls as well as Nintendo when it sets its mind to it, with such pleasurable feedback that simply manipulating the game is rewarding - and no developer designs games around controls so well. Skyward Sword is a world away from Twilight Princess or Super Mario Galaxy, and by far the most successful synthesis of motion controls with traditional gaming to date.


Alongside this revelation is all the stuff you take for granted in a top-drawer Nintendo release. Stuff like an absolutely perfect dynamic 3D camera which you don't need to control yourself, or rock-solid game performance even on hardware that's approaching archaic, or the fact that you can trust the design of the battles, puzzles and game systems to never, ever let you down.
Maybe you've played enough Zelda games by now that even that won't be enough to cleanse your palate. That would be a fair response, but if it's so, this game wasn't made for you. Like a tale told from one generation to the next, the point is to keep the tradition alive for others - and for them, Skyward Sword will surely be the greatest adventure money can buy.


SCORING

GRAPHICS: 10  Considering the Wii's overall lack for graphical capacity compared to its Microsoft and Sony counterparts, Skyward Sword puts even the best competition to shame with its outstanding appearance. Smooth edges over a cartoon-like outer shell create not only a setting for gamer-game intimacy, but also a unique and unprecedented presentation of an iconic video game franchise in a way we have never seen before. Few experiments end in perfection. Count this game in.

AUDIO: 9.5  The soundtrack is as deep as every other Zelda game before it, and yet somehow it still feels fresh. When it comes down to it, the sound is everything you could ever want for the adventures of Link.

GAMEPLAY: 10   Fluid controls intertwined with a mix of seamless motion sensory controls make standard gameplay as easy as it has ever been. The bow by itself sets the bar for this game above everything that came before it. The main plot is predictable and yet unpredictable all the same, while the weapons and gadgets combine old faithfuls with new, highly engaging, highly interesting items that at times will make you wish you didn't have a quest at all.

DIFFICULTY: 9.5   If you're looking to breeze through a game, you are looking into the wrong title. Bringing back the difficulty levels and the playthrough length of the Ocarina, you are looking at one of the most difficult games you will ever pick up. The main enemies can be laughable at times, but the boss battles are difficult, the puzzles are near indecipherable at times, and the objectives for certain sidequests can be beyond frustratingly difficult.

MULTIPLAYER/ONLINE PLAY: N/A

MISCELLANEOUS: 10  Next to no glitches, problems, or errors. Simply non-stop action, non-stop adventure, and non-stop fun.


OVERALL 9.8

It is hard to turn Skyward Sword away. It lives up to and even past the Ocarina and Twilight Princess at times, all while remaining a fresh and absolutely delectable entry in the Zelda series. Stop reading. Hyrule needs to be saved.