In Which I Talk About Video Games For A Little Bit
Hey Tumblr! Look! It’s four problems I have with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword! Lengthy diatribe is lengthy and behind the cut. Most of you reading my blog will probably want to skip this.
Of the myriad interests of mine my blog has clued you into (politics, writing, politics, writing, pirates, writing, Harry Potter, politics, Doctor Who, Calvin and Hobbes, writing, and politics, to name a few), one thing I don’t really talk about all that often is video games. I always think I try and get too much out of video games, seeing as how I play them for the stories and not for the, er, gaming experience — although I do have a long and storied history with all iterations of The Sims.
So today I’m going to talk about a game that I had looked forward to for months and months (years, if we’re being honest), and now find myself on the cusp of beating, but I can’t quite muster up the enthusiasm to actually beat the damn thing. I am talking of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
I’ve been a fan of the Zelda series since 1998, when Ocarina of Time came out. I spent so many hours playing that game over and over again, and dutifully bought its successors on every console from the GameBoy Color to the Wii. I greatly enjoyed the last big time Zelda game (Twilight Princess, which came out in 2006), and so I thought, with five years of work put into it, Skyward Sword would be great.
And then I played it and… I kept on waiting for it to get good.
Not that it’s bad, per se; not that I don’t think it’s fun, and isn’t that what games are supposed to be all about? (No, says the snooty blogger, they’re all about ostentation and design!) But something like Angry Birds is also fun, but I would pay $50 for it (plus $20 for a special remote accessory) and then invest 40-odd hours into that. (No comment on how many hours I’ve actually played Angry Birds.) (I am a fan of parenthetical comments today.)
No, if a game takes five years to develop and I’m going to pay for the equivalent of a tank of gas for it and then play it so often that my academic career is imperiled, it needs to be more than just mindlessly fun. It needs to be engaging, it needs to be difficult, it needs to be entertaining — the investment I’m making needs to pay off. And it doesn’t in Skyward Sword. And here’s why.
The graphics are crap. This is, I think, the perennial criticism leveled against the Wii and all games published on it. It just doesn’t have that powerful of a graphics engine, especially when compared to… well, all the other mainstream consoles or heavily-modified gaming PCs. Fine. That’s Nintendo’s choice. They wanted to capitalize on a market of casual gamers, and so they made a system whose best selling game is Wii Fit.
But Nintendo and the raucous Zelda fanboys and fangirls on the Internet can be as high minded as they want about the graphics (“The focus is on gameplay, not the graphics,” and I will grant that a game like Skyward Sword is more engaging than Call of Duty 239: Special Modern Warfare Ops 82: The Sepia Threat to America), but Skyward Sword looks like it was made in 2004. It really says something about the quality of the graphics engine you’re running when YouTube can run a higher-resolution video of your game footage than your machine can.
Of course, if you’re going to say it’s all about gameplay and not graphics, then maybe your gameplay should match up to your rhetoric, because…
The motion controls are crap. The idea is that, through the Wii Motion+, you have 1:1 motion controls. Of course, 1:1 are way too precise for Nintendo’s casual gaming market, so they dumb it down a bit and give it some lag time. It’s like Nintendo wants to hold your hand the whole way through the game, and they don’t want to leave any drooling moron behind.
But then they insist on every enemy in Skyward Sword having motion-specific weaknesses. Do you know how many times I was killed by a goddamn Beamos because my controller would not register that I was slicing horizontally instead of diagonally? Or how often a Deku Scrub killed me because I couldn’t send a Deku nut back his way?
Don’t even get me started on how awkward flying is. There’s a point, later in the game, when you have to fight a boss on your bird in midair. It took me nearly 40 minutes to do it properly, because you have to align the bird with the targets on the flying… whale… thing, and of course it’s not going to work out very well with the awkward controls.
Let’s be honest here: Motion controls are, and have always been, a gimmick. It was a particularly lucrative gimmick for Nintendo, but they’ve gotten real old, real fast.
The world is crap. This game does not actually take place in Hyrule, unlike other Zelda games. And that’s fine. I won’t fault Zelda for branching out and exploring — I enjoyed Majora’s Mask, as well as Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, all of which took places in worlds that were not Hyrule.
If I had to compare this world to anything, it would be the vast ocean from Wind Waker. But unlike in Wind Waker, where you had a seamless world that you could feasibly explore, Skyward Sword does not offer that kind of experience. You have the sky, which, apart from one town, is nothing but a collection of floating rocks, most of which you will never visit. There is quite literally nothing outside of the sky other than the main island where the game starts.
The real problem, for me, is the world below — what will eventually become Hyrule. Unlike previous games, where you could, say, start off in the forest and ride all the way through the desert and then take a quick jaunt into the northern mountains, you don’t have that option here. There is no overworld. You fly your magic bird to a gigantic beacon and fall down to one of three areas — the forest/lake, the volcano, and the desert.
That’s it. They aren’t connected. You can’t go from one to the other. They’re little microcosms existing in bubbles. Part of the fun, for me, of older Zelda titles was in exploring. It felt like Nintendo was so afraid we would wander off and get lost that they roped everything else off and made it so we could only go into these three specific parts.
Of course, all of that — all of it — could be forgiven if one thing held up, which unfortunately, it does not. And the final nail in the coffin for an altogether disappointing experience is…
The story is crap. I’m a writer by trade, a connoisseur of fine storytelling. I like to be engaged, and deeply, with what’s going on. That’s why I play video games, because it gives me an opportunity to explore an interactive venue for storytelling. It’s why I eschew games like the Modern Warfare franchise or virtually any other major first person shooter. The storytelling just isn’t there. Zelda, for all its faults, is home to terrific storytelling, and that’s why I’ve continued to purchase and play Zelda titles fourteen years after I first discovered the series.
But unlike previous Zelda games, Skyward Sword just doesn’t have the propelling force of a solid story to carry my interest through. The game is essentially about rescuing Zelda (not a princess this time around!) after she is kidnapped by monsters. OK. After fifteen minutes of introduction you set off on this quest, and I never once cared for her character. I could think of no reason to go off rescuing this girl, but the game beat me over the head (with awkward motion technology) saying “This is important you need to rescue her go ahead and do this.”
That might be forgivable if the game had other interesting characters that appeared throughout the game. And in Skyloft, you do find an assortment of interesting characters… that maybe have a total of one hour of screen time. The only character from that group that serves any function in the plot is the intensely unlikable high school bully-style character.
Of course, there is your constant companion, the robot-like Fi, a spirit infesting your sword. Fi pulls off the monumental task of being more irritating than Navi with aplomb. A character tells you to go to the mountains, Fi pops up and says “I calculate an 80% chance we should go to the mountains.” You start running low on hearts (dealing with the aggravating beep-beep of your depleted life meter) and Fi pops up, saying “Master, you are running low on hearts.” You die in one of the unbearably annoying Silent Realm trials, and Fi’s words flit across the screen (I’m convinced that no amount of arguing ever would tell Nintendo to hire some goddamn voice actors for their games, so we’re stuck with text-only dialogue in the year 2012 when a free app on my cell phone knows how to talk more than my $50 video game) saying, “Master, you have failed this trial and must start over.”
Thank you, Fi. I hadn’t grasped that yet. It all goes back to Nintendo’s newly-adopted hand holding philosophy: clearly our players are morons who won’t be able to figure these things out. We’d better carefully lay out everything they’ll need to know to play this game.
Then there’s the writing. Maybe it’s a good thing Nintendo refuses to spring for voice actors, because the dialogue in this game could have been written by a third grade class that won a contest. At one point in the game, a character says the regrettable line, “Do not fear it. This is what we have been waiting for. At long last, the gate has been reactivated. Standing before you is a path that transcends the flow of time. It is a portal to the past…” Stephanie Meyer wrote more convincing dialogue for Edward Cullen.
The story refuses to engage me. I am doing things not because I actually want to do them, not because I care about the characters, but because the game will not progress any further through its turgid porridge of a plot unless I do them. When I fought the same boss for the third time (not that he had killed me three times, but because there is a boss you have to fight at three different parts of the game with only the addition of arms and a tail making any difference), I began to grow tired. At one point you have to advance the plot by going through “Silent Realms” to prove your worth (or something); the first one of these was tolerable. By the time I got to the fourth one, I wanted to gnaw my own arm off, but I couldn’t, because it was too well-attached with all the Wii Remote accessories.
Of course, I’m still playing the game, which should tell you something. If I hated it, I would have stopped a long time ago. And when Skyward Sword does something right, it does it really well. The dungeon design is, as always, superb; the items you find in said dungeons are interesting and work well; the boss fights are better than the encounters with grunts, possibly because they are tougher and don’t rely just on a correctly-timed swipe of your sword; when the game varies its plot requirements (in the beginning and at the end of the game) it’s fun and exciting. And those things help buoy the game and keep it from being bad.
Yes, I’m indulging in hyperbole when I say that the controls, the graphics, the world, and the storyline are crap, because if I really thought they were that bad I wouldn’t be playing. But this is Zelda, for God’s sake. A student who consistently turns in A+ material is going to be disappointed with a B-, but a student who only ever gets C’s will be ecstatic with a B-. Nintendo and Zelda used to be A+ material, and that’s why this B- of a game feels so off.
