Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword "HD" (Nintendo Switch)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Release Date (NA): July 16, 2021
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Developer: Nintendo
- Genres: Action, Adventure
Game Features:
"HD"
When Nintendo announced Skyward Sword was getting a remaster for the Switch, I was skeptical. I never really liked the game on the Wii, the motion controls were iffy at best and I wasn’t a huge fan of most of the gameplay design. But Nintendo attempts to fix the motion control issues in Skyward Sword "HD", giving users the ability to use button-only controls if they don’t want to deal with motion. So how did this turn out?
Honestly? Not great. But we’ll start the review by glancing over the story quickly, since Nintendo made no content changes, leaving it much the same as a decade ago. Skyward Sword’s story marks basically as close to the beginnings of the Legend of Zelda timeline as you can get, introducing the goddess Hylia and focusing on the origin of the Link-Zelda-Ganon trinity that most of the games focus on. You start off as Link in Skyloft, a small town that floats in the sky above a layer of clouds. You’re an initiate in the Knight Academy, which serves to protect Skyloft and its citizens from danger posed by monsters that spawn at night, or occasionally catching citizens that fall via their giant bird friends called Loftwings. After various events in the sky, Zelda is eventually caught in a whirlwind and tossed to the “land below,” and Link is chosen by the goddess Hylia to save her after being led to the “Goddess Sword” by an annoying floating spirit named Fi. In typical Legend of Zelda fashion, this means going through dungeons and finding new items etc etc blah blah blah, I’m sure you all know how Zelda games work by now. This is all well and good, the story is decent enough for a Zelda game and finally getting to experience the beginnings of the Legend after so many years was a good choice by Nintendo.
Unfortunately, that’s sort of where the nice things I have to say mostly stop. Gameplay-wise, I think Skyward Sword "HD" is a hot mess for a variety of reasons: the stamina mechanics introduced in the original still sucks, the entire game starts slow and only becomes extremely tedious the more you play, it’s not even remotely HD whatsoever (and anyone who says otherwise should get their eyes checked), and the newly-introduced button-only controls just aren’t that good (although this is less because of the R-Stick design and more because of some of Nintendo’s dumb decisions in implementing them).
I’ll start off with the biggest change that Skyward Sword "HD" introduced: it’s new button-only control scheme. The idea here is that anything that used gyro controls in the original game would be mapped to the R-stick, and for the most part that’s fine. The beetle, the slingshot/bow, and the hookshot all feel pretty great, and controlling your Loftwing is basically perfect now. However, controlling things like the sword, whip, or bug net are all done by “flicking” the R stick in the direction you want to swing the item, which is...rough for the most part, and in the beginning I had a lot of issues having flicks actually register as flicks, or register in the right direction (so really, much the same as motion controls). I was quite annoyed that you couldn’t control the camera by default via the R-stick, like every modern 3D action game...ever, and had to hold down L to control it, but I ended up just using the usual “spam lock-on” tactic past 3D Zelda games mostly used for camera controls, so, ok fine whatever. What annoyed me the most though was the way they implemented item controls: holding ZR brings up the item wheel, and tapping the ZR button lets you use the item. The problem is that mapping these two things to the same button means you’re going to accidentally activate one or the other all the time. If I’m using the bow or slingshot, my muscle memory always makes me hold ZR to aim because that’s just how games work, and it screwed me up way too many times to be acceptable. What Nintendo should have done was use the button ZR, and have you hold down R to bring up both the item and adventure pouch menu that you could just swap between when needed.
So what about the slow gameplay, then? Nintendo did add some QoL fixes in (mostly just being able to skip most text and a lot of cutscenes, and shutting Fi up finally which is great...but nothing new, since you can already do those same things with cheats on the Wii/Dolphin), but unfortunately that just doesn’t help with how slow the actual gameplay is. When Skyward Sword first released this made sense: you were being introduced to a new “complex” control scheme so Nintendo opted to ease people into it all. Unfortunately, the pacing of the game was awful and never improved, and that still remains the same today. The biggest issue, in my opinion, is just how often Nintendo recycled the same areas again and again and again. You’re not just visiting the forest, desert, and mountain area once or twice, you have to keep going back and back and back and back for story reasons, and back and back and back and back to collect items if you decide you want to upgrade your items. You have to visit these areas the first time, then go back to do the silent realm stuff, then do the next dungeon for “sacred flames,” then go back again to unlock the Song of the Hero, with lots and lots of warping between each area and Skyloft, as well as plenty of little side things to do in between. The limited locations in this game is such a huge flaw, and it’s something quality of life fixes just can’t mend.
Then there’s the elephant in the room: the “HD remaster” graphics. This game’s textures look like trash. Unlike Twilight Princess HD, where Nintendo actually went and modified textures and increased resolution on almost everything, for Skyward Sword “HD” Nintendo opted to lazily upscale the textures to 720p and slap a gross bilinear filter on top, that’s it. Character models do manage to look decent up close, yay, but you might as well avoid looking at any environmental textures because they’re just a smudgy gross mess that look like they came from a decade old game. Pair that with all the hilarious pop-in you’ll see basically everywhere, and the only conclusion I can draw is that Nintendo put no care whatsoever into this game and just slapped a control patch on it so they could charge you full price.
And that kind of sums up Skyward Sword "HD" for me: A meh cash grab that had little to no care put into it, with the sole purpose of Nintendo easily lining their pockets and keeping everyone distracted from the fact that Breath of the Wild 2 won’t be out any time soon.
Verdict
- No more bad motion controls.
- Nice Quality of Life improvements, even if they are basically gecko cheats.
- 60fps is nice.
- Not HD whatsoever.
- New control scheme just isn't great
- Game is still extremely slow.
