Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Holding the Sword Skyward

Like last year Nintendo opened this year's E3 press conference with their biggest title. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.



The facts: It uses a new art style. And it focuses heavily on MotionPlus, like it should. You can roll bombs, there's a whip and a new beetle item, which is basically the evolution of the seagulls from The Wind Waker or the hawks from Twilight Princess. And it's entirely playable at E3.

My reaction is kind of mixed. I'm not disappointed, but I'm also not too much excited. I'm not too sure about the comic looks, I thought the Twilight Princess look was very beautiful. But on the other hand the above screens TOTALLY reminds of old Zelda artwork for the NES games.



And the details are there, for example the shooting a heart with an arrow to pin it down was genious. But overall you have the feeling, that it's a step back from Twilight Princess and on the same time not as iconic as the look of The Wind Waker.

The MotionPlus demonstration was totally fucked up, but I guess it works way better in the actual game, since it works like Wii Sports Resort and Wii Sports Resort works fine. Well, most of it is what you expected, which means the Wii Sports Resort sword play and archery mechanics are used in Zelda. Of course the sword play looks much more fun than in Wii Sports, since there isn't this annoying blocking by pressing B mechanic. It's like sword play should be and I'm excited for that. The bow seems to works fine without having to switch the hand, well, I played Wii Sports Archery already in the Zelda style, because I was too lazy to switch the hands. And it's actually not a big problem, it feels just a little unfamiliar at first. One of the coolest mechanics was the sword beam by holding the sword skyward. Nice idea. The biggest surprise for me was that this was the only MotionPlus game Nintendo showed. That's really disappointing, but at least Zelda is going to be awesome when it comes to controls.

We can't say more at the moment, if it focuses MotionPlus combat and offers a much more open world than the last bunch of Zelda games did, I guess then it will be a good game. It also seems, that it doesn't focus on some major gimmick like "wolf", "boat" or "train", which is definitely a good thing. The focus is on the MotionPlus action. However, I guess pretty much no one has the feeling, that this Zelda game is going to surpass Ocarina of Time. I don't know if it's just the art style or if it's because they haven't shown us anything that let's you think, that this game is going to be epic.

Well, it's coming out somewhen 2011, too bad, I was rooting for a holiday 2010 release.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, Miyamoto stated that it's almost finished. They need the rest of the year to polish up graphics and finish a few dungeons. Hopefully it would be ready by the beginning of 2011.

TourianTourist said...

Yeah, I heard about the "early 2011" release. Sounds good.

Nintendo is really good at timing the release of their biggest titles at the moment. Super Mario Galaxy 2 was released recently, Other M is coming at the end of this summer and there's Donkey Kong Country for the holidays and probably Skyward Sword in spring 2011. That way there's no excuse to miss any of them. :D

I got both Super Mario Galaxy games last week, because I enjoyed New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Galaxy 2 was just the big thing at the moment. Hopefully Zelda will get many new players and fans with Skyward Sword. The key to this of course will be the MotionPlus action similar to Wii Sports Resort. Lots of people bought MotionPlus and now there's quite the demand for a game like Skyward Sword.