The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD - Nintendo Switch

This was a breath of fresh air after having played the recent Breath of The Wild and Tears of The Kingdom games in the Zelda franchise. This plays more similar to the classic games like Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Link to The Past, etc. the dungeons are great. The opening to the game is SLOW. Text sometimes cannot be skipped easily as you can't skip the text if the characters are performing an animation. Granted, you can skip the entire story scene if you desire. It also has no voice acting despite being cinematic in it's story which is odd because they still have the characters' mouths move.The controls take some time to get used to. I would suggest turning off motion controls...the Joycons are not a suitable replacement for the original Wii motion controls. Stick with the game to get past the slow opening and to get used to the controls and there is a masterful game to be had here. There are great dungeons to explore with puzzles to solve and some great boss fights. Music score is fantastic and is refreshing to play a Zelda game with a full soundtrack again after mostly ambient tracks in the recent two games on Switch.

I don’t normally do reviews, but after reading all the crappy ones I figured I’d give my 2 cents. The first time I played Zelda was on my 64 years ago. Since than I’ve played just about every single game since than.The biggest complaint I see here is… people are comparing it to breath of the wild, you do realize, this game is nearly 10 years old, with mild updates, right? This is a remaster, it was designed for the wii, which was a motioned controlled game. It was never designed to have button controls. That being said, they did manage to design a button controlled scheme for this release. It’s a little clunky, you have to hold L to move the camera, since the analog stick controls the sword direction and the camera. It took me probably a few hours to do this seamlessly, as of now I’ve finished the game and got used to it pretty quickly. If that doesn’t interest you, there’s always the motion controls which work better than they did on the Wii.Many complaints about the UI (user interface). Being clunky and difficult… uhhh it’s super simplistic and easy to navigate and understand. I’m not sure what the issue is, people complain about everything I suppose.The story is great, this is technically the very first Zelda game in the timeline, creation of the world, birth of the master sword. This is the first incarnation of Link and Zelda that spawns all the other games. This story is easy to follow, the characters are great, the game is a little on the linear side compared to other games in the series but it makes sense story wise.All in all it’s a great game, especially considering how old it is. I’d give it a solid 8/10. If your a Zelda fan, you’ll probably love it, if your just a breath of the wild fan, you probably wont, as you’ll be going into this expecting more.

For those who didn't get into Skyward Sword back in 2011 because of the motion controls. . . .that is no longer an issue. This HD remaster is more than a pixel and color clean up for HD, alot of QOL changes are here and definitely improve the experience of the game. As mentioned the game does not force you to use motion controls, although the game is HEAVILY designed to take advantage of said motion controls so it's still best experienced that way.For those who still can't stand them the game now offers the option of traditional button controls by use of the Pro Controller. I've heard while it's ok for most other tasks in game such as operating the Loftwing, swimming and anything else it's great but the combat tends to be a bit janky as mentioned prior the game was meant for motion controls.The other heavily criticized aspect of the game. . . mega Navi aka Fi. Your android like companion Fi was meant to be your assistant/helper in this adventure but unfortunately her first outing back in 2011 was handled. . .pretty badly. She interrupted the player at many inconvenient times to relay information that was either redundant or totally useless. Worse even this could not be skipped and sometimes she would speak for far too long. Now there is an option to have Fi appear ONLY in certain moments and no longer interrupts you. The other thing was she would ping annoyingly when your Wiimote batteries were low and she made this painfully aware. The Joycons tremendous battery life makes this issue non existent but I am told she will not inform you of this situation. In short her presence has been massively reduced.One of the other big and hated small things was the fact anytime you turned off the game and then came back to it and loaded up your saved data anytime you collected monster materials or other drops you would be given the same text box to inform you of the object you obtained as when you did the first time like it never happened. This while not a game breaking issue was just absolutely exasperating after several hours of gameplay. Lastly the load times have been drastically reduced, most likely given to the much more powerful hardware of the Switch. To be honest I don't notice much of a difference I believe the original version didn't have very long load times except for a few moments but when looking up a video about this there is a noticeable change.Unfortunately not everything is a pot of gold with this remaster. I don't recall having to recenter the cursor on the Wii version. I probably in one playthrough reset the Wiimote cursor on screen a grand total of either 10 to maybe 20 times. In about 30 mins of playing this HD port I've had to re center the cursor probably twice that amount. I've heard this was because the Wii motion control plus with its Sensor Bar made it easier to keep track of where the Wiimote was being pointed. The Switch lacks that but when it comes to the actual motion controls they feel better. Quicker response and alot less incorrect input when swinging the sword. However having to re center the cursor every 5 seconds does tend to get irritating.The last thing to speak about is the unique Amiibo that was designed for this HD remaster is the Zelda & Loftwing Amiibo. It's bad enough Amiibo's themselves cost $15 but Nintendo saw fit to make this one cost $25, but if you find it for that price consider yourself lucky. In this pandemic era we live in with shortages of just about almost anything getting your hands on this Amiibo is nigh impossible. Unless you are willing to wait for it to come into stock and even then the prices for this thing have skyrocketed due to it's limited availability. Here on Amazon you'll see no price lower than $63 already twice the price of it's intended amount originally. With some scalpers online on other sites selling it as much as $200 I've seen.The entire purpose of this Amiibo is to give Link a quick travel option to the sky above. Normally Link must visit a Bird Statue in what ever region he is in to return to the Sky but with this Amiibo simply tap it on your controller and you are instantly sent back to the Sky no matter where you are even in a dungeon or cave or where ever. It also sets a waypoint to the location to where you used the Amiibo, so using the Amiibo again takes you RIGHT back to where you left the surface. A nifty and handy ability unfortunately locked behind a paywall. This could have been another QOL change for the game to enhance the experience but instead Nintendo had to get greedy and didn't even bother to make any attempt to off set the fact scalpers were going to take advantage of this.In closing there are far more positives to the negatives about this HD remaster making it worth looking into. I still don't think a 10 year old game should have come with a $60 price tag but Nintendo always treats their famous IPs like they are always worth gold no matter how old they are. If you don't mind the few negatives and the fact you won't be able to get your hands on that Amiibo then the game is definitely worth looking into if you didn't get the chance or passed the chance back in 2011 because of motion controls. . . .or you know you were into Skyrim. . . . .because that was also when that game came out.