Facebook

Hey folks,

I play through a lot of games that don't end up becoming a topic in my game design hobbying - I play games first and foremost because I love them, and only a fraction of what I play ends up in a video or a blog post.

Every time I finish a game, though, I write up informal notes of my impressions and overall thoughts. I figured I'd start sharing these on Facebook since I think some of you folks would find them interesting.

Over the holiday I played through Skyward Sword. I've been playing the Zelda games since the launch of Ocarina of Time and have played through all the 3D games in the series - Ocarina, Majora, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword. I'm super excited for Breath of the Wild and wanted a bit of a refresher on the series before it comes out (hopefully as a launch title for the Switch!).

On the whole I think it's a great title. Numerous design flaws and minor annoyances drag it down from brilliance to mere goodness.

The good news is that the core Zelda experience of wonder, discovery, and exploration is still there, although the latter can feel missing in the second half of the game due to the backtracking and padding. The art style and music are excellent and there are a huge number of "genius" moments - the Sky Keep, the minecart racing, the timeshifting orbs, the ocean in Lanayru Desert, etc. These are times when you see the title for what it should be.

This gets dragged down by a number of small issues that, when put together, really negatively affect the overall experience. The motion controls are arguably the biggest issue and one I plan to put together a video on in a few months. Something I learned from being an Xbox One early adopter is that when a control doesn't work all the time - in that case, the Kinect's voice commands - it comes across as not working at all, because you don't trust it to do anything important or timely. The motion controls in Skyward Sword probably work most of the time, but because they don't work all the time they come across as dysfunctional. This is particularly evident when enemies start using electrically charged weapons, where the player gets shocked and taken out of the moment. When this happens because of a control issue it can be frustrating, and over time that wears on the player's experience.

I don't feel like much thought was put into Fi. I think the designers were trying to accomplish something here, given that she's the first companion that's designed to act like a machine. The implementation, however, doesn't work on any level - the lack of personality makes her unappealing to listen to, the repetition of advice is grating, the beeping at low health is grating, the tendency to go on and on is grating, etc. Maybe Fi could have worked if the designers had managed to achieve their vision, as-is she ought to be removed from the game completely.

The dowsing system comes across like a bandaid for the decision to have the player backtrack through every area three different times. I assume the designers figured the player would be bored from exploring areas more than once, so dowsing would allow them to skip straight to their objective.

The issue is that organic exploration and organic puzzle solving is one of the best features of the Zelda series - exploring is rewarding and fun. Puzzles are solved because puzzle solving is fun - a lot of the time, a puzzle is solved before the player even realizes they need to in order to move forward. The game thus has an organic and fresh pacing to it that doesn't feel forced. Because Skyward Sword includes so much re-use of areas, this design feature ends up being missing in the second half of the game. Dowsing is a bandaid for it but doesn't really solve the core design issue.

Fi's tendency to repeat advice ad nauseum and the dowsing system both made me feel like the target audience for this game wasn't clear to the designers. Nintendo games have historically been designed to be playable by small children, which is fine. When I play through Mario games and see reminders of what the A button is, I can appreciate that a young child might need that. The thing that bothered me in Skyward Sword is that some of the puzzles can be quite challenging. In contrast with Mario games (where you can usually skip around), the game is highly linear. This means that the target audience of the game must be someone older than a small child, otherwise they wouldn't make it very far. Yet the game is often designed as if a small child is playing it. The Mario games have always managed to strike a balance between playable by children and appealing to adults, I'm not sure what happened in this case that caused the designers to fail both audiences so spectacularly.

The game was padded quite a bit, a big surprise for me as I had never gotten that impression from any of the previous Zelda games (even Wind Waker). Fetching the propellor and fetching the water basin amount to just going from one place to another because the game tells you that you have to - these are just two examples, this happens constantly. It seems to me like the developers wanted a long game to justify the five-year development cycle and decided to pad it out in order to get there, which is a real shame. The introductory segment in particular is way too long, and I get the feeling I'd have finished the Deku Tree by the time I first hit the surface in Skyward Sword.

I felt the narrative wasn't too strong but I rarely pay attention to it in this series so that didn't bother me.

Despite all of these complaints, the overall package is still really strong. I think the backtracking is the only design issue that doesn't come across as a polish or play testing problem. Even there, I think the implementation is the issue, not necessarily the design. Ocarina of Time re-used areas and made it interesting using its time travel mechanic. Plenty of other games do it by featuring interconnected worlds with shortcuts and the like. My point is that re-use can be done well, but it wasn't here - it's too obvious that it was done primarily to save development resources.

One of the first things I did when I finished the game was check to see if they were making an HD remake, since I would love to re-experience the game without the motion controls. I found this quote from the producer of the Zelda series:

“Yeah it's definitely possible” Aonuma told IGN. “As I mentioned earlier in the presentation, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a result of what we wanted to expand and make a better Skyward Sword. It's like an evolved or expanded version.”

It seems like Nintendo internally acknowledges the issues in Skyward Sword and is trying to fix them. Personally that gets me pretty excited for Breath of the Wild - Skyward Sword is a brilliant game that's marred by lack of polish and minor design issues. If they can replicate its genius and fix its problems they could conceivably make the best Zelda game to-date.