It’s been three weeks, but I have returned to post my penultimate blog…of the year. This post and the one next week will be the last ones I post for this year, leaving me to play games all Christmas break with hardly any responsibilities. Until then, here is part one of what I call [insert title] SKY edition. You can figure out what that means because of this week’s game. Next week, well, I won’t spoil it, but you can probably guess what the second game I’ve been playing that has “sky” in the title (especially if anyone pays attention to my status updates that I only post with the intention of me being the only one who reads them).
Real Life
I’ve been doing quite a bit these last few weeks. I moved my computer up into my room temporarily to play some games, which was fun until my parents started to miss seeing me and demanded I move the PC back downstairs where it used to be. I also had enough money to send my Wii to Nintendo to get it repaired, which I never thought I was gonna do until I realized I got so much cash on my birthday. Went to see the Muppets on Thanksgiving with my family (probably wouldn’t have gone to see it any other way), turned in a rough draft of a term paper that was apparently a diamond in a sea of utter trash from my peers, and I got a stomach bug Monday night and lost precious hours of sleep dry heaving and feeling miserable.
And that’s probably not all I’ve had happen since my last blog, but seriously, do you really need to hear anymore? Let’s move onto the game at hand.
GAMES!!!!
I’ll admit, I did not see myself playing this game before the end of the year. My Wii’s disc drive got busted earlier this year in June and I didn’t have the money to pay for repairs and shipping. The thing could still play Gamecube games and I still had my virtual console stuff so it wasn’t a total lost, but still, the idea of not being able to play Skyward Sword was tough. That didn’t stop me from getting the game preordered for my birthday, because dang it if I can’t play I at least wanted that gold wiimote and carry that over to the Wii U. At the beginning of November I suddenly realized I had a bunch of money from my birthday that I could use to get the system repaired. I set up the order, sent it in, came back faster than I expected it would, and I was now ready for Skyward Sword. Except for the part that involved waiting almost a week for the game to arrive from Amazon. But again, totally worth it.
So with that anecdote all done, I have the game, and been playing it on and off with my file going at about 17 hours or so. How am I finding it? Pretty darn great. There are a lot of things about it I really like, and just couple of gripes, but I like it a whole lot. I haven’t finished it of course, so I can’t speak for the rest of the product, but for now, I will say that this game comes very close to being my Game of the Year.
I'm sure I don't need to remind you guys that the art style is great looking, but I'll go ahead and say it again: the art style is great looking. It looks great, but there are moments where you are able to view a huge vista and then it looks fantastic. It really does look like a painting when you see it. Nintendo makes the best of its asset to make a good looking game even in 480p.
This is also the first motion plus game that I own, because I got the gold wiimote bundle, and the sword controls are a lot of fun. It kinda sucks that you don't get to use it a lot at the beginning because it takes a good couple of hours to get going. The combat in the game is a lot of fun and engaging, and I've already died quite a few times from enemies I encountered for the first time and could not figure out. Dying once is one thing, but more than once in a Zelda game is surprising for me. But again, all those times that I died were in combat scenarios, so every other part of the game poses no real threat (falling off of ledges into bottomless pits don't make you lose a heart).
The art looks great, and the combat is a lot of fun, but what I really like are the puzzles and dungeons, or rather the entire surface world. Skyloft and the whole world above the clouds acts as your Wind Waker style overworld, but the world below the clouds is basically its own huge dungeon, with the actual dungeons just being mini dungeons inside those dungeons (I said dungeons a lot, huh?). Yes, there are the traditional Zelda style dungeons in the game, but the areas surrounding them have plenty of puzzles to solve and hidden things to find. The puzzles in the open areas aren't that tough to solve, but the ones in the dungeons are well done and feel fresh, something that Twilight Princess disappointed me in. As of this writing, I just finished the fifth dungeon, which was a lot of fun, as well as the areas leading up to that dungeon.
I did mention I have some gripes with the game. One of them is very minor that I'm sort of used to it now, but I still need to mention that the cursor movement on menus and aiming is really slow. It is nice that you can aim past the sensor bar and the cursor will still respond on the screen, but it is way to slow for my tastes. Again, very minor complaint. The other one I have is a bit more important however, and that is the pacing. It took me an hour and a half to get to Faron Woods, and throughout the game there are moments where you are sent on fetch quests that serve to pad out the game which left me impatient to go to the next main dungeon and continue the story there. One example in particular would be the time between completing the 3rd dungeon and starting the 4th. The going back and forth fetching items for people was a bit too much for me, but right now I haven't had much problems with that now. So long as the game keeps me going to new locations, I'm happy.
There's been a lot of great moments in Skyward Sword. There are some things that are disappointing, mainly the pacing, and I haven't finished the game so I haven't seen everything this game has. I'm going through my first run just doing the main path, but on a second playthrough I plan to throw in all the side quest stuff. Again, so far this game comes very close to being my Game of the Year. Could that change by the time I finish the game? It might. If not, it will still be pretty high up there on my list.
In Conclusion
And that's it. Check back next week for Part 2, and then that will be it for [insert title] in 2011. Christmas Break will be my time to play games and buy games from the Steam Christmas Sale, much like last year. I might also do some changes to the blog when 2012 comes along. Maybe. I'm not making any promises, because I could easily just not doing anything at all. But it's not out of the question.
Peace.
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