A very solid 3D Zelda experience. I love the art direction and music, they come together to make for a very comfy experience and are pretty much peak Zelda aesthetic to me. I cared about the plot here more than an average Zelda game as well. All the neat little lore bits sprinkled throughout were placed with extreme reverence for the franchise's history, and care to not fuck anything up in the already convoluted timeline.
The actual gameplay front is where I'm a little mixed here. I absolutely love the dungeon/puzzle design here, there was quite a few times where I just sat there and soaked in how brilliant particular sections were. The game is at its absolute best in moments like this!
One thing I'm not too hot on is the combat. I understand that everything about the combat was designed with motion controls in mind, and there were some concessions made in the design to account for that. However, that means that most of the enemies end up being sword users that are pretty samey, and with the new control scheme I just end up spamming 1 attack repeatedly until they're dead. This doesn't apply to bosses, as most of those are great (especially Koloktos).
The padding in the back half of the game is also something I'm kind of mixed on. It is cool to return to old areas and discover new things in them, that's part of the charm of any Zelda game. That charm is lost on me when I'm forced to go back to a previous area (for the 2nd time) to do a bad stealth segment! It really just ends up making the world feel smaller, which is weird since the game felt so vast when exploring the sky at the start.
My main takeaway from Skyward Sword is that if Breath of the Wild 2 has dungeon design as good as this, mixed with open world design as good as BotW, it'll probably be GOATed.
The actual gameplay front is where I'm a little mixed here. I absolutely love the dungeon/puzzle design here, there was quite a few times where I just sat there and soaked in how brilliant particular sections were. The game is at its absolute best in moments like this!
One thing I'm not too hot on is the combat. I understand that everything about the combat was designed with motion controls in mind, and there were some concessions made in the design to account for that. However, that means that most of the enemies end up being sword users that are pretty samey, and with the new control scheme I just end up spamming 1 attack repeatedly until they're dead. This doesn't apply to bosses, as most of those are great (especially Koloktos).
The padding in the back half of the game is also something I'm kind of mixed on. It is cool to return to old areas and discover new things in them, that's part of the charm of any Zelda game. That charm is lost on me when I'm forced to go back to a previous area (for the 2nd time) to do a bad stealth segment! It really just ends up making the world feel smaller, which is weird since the game felt so vast when exploring the sky at the start.
My main takeaway from Skyward Sword is that if Breath of the Wild 2 has dungeon design as good as this, mixed with open world design as good as BotW, it'll probably be GOATed.