While Twilight Princess was more disappointing than offensive, Skyward Sword is straight up a trainwreck. Not in the visuals aspect; the game actually has one of my favorite Zelda looks, and I wish they'd done Twilight Princess in this style instead of the drab boring thing they used. No, Skyward Sword is a wreck because of so many reasons it's hard to even list them here. But why not, here's a rundown:
- The Wii Motion Plus controls are finnicky at best, meaning you've taken a game that has always excelled with it's tight controls and broken it.
- On that same note, combat becomes a by-the-numbers affair in horizontal and vertical slices, assuming you can get the remote to work.
- The "get stuff to upgrade stuff" system is some really poor attempt at adding RPG elements, only it's put in so poorly it feels tacked on an tedious.
- The story elements are obtrusive to the gameplay and exceptionally dull. The text crawls and can't be skipped. The story is also just poor overall, so suffering through it hurts even more.
- Backtracking. Lots of it. It sucks.
- There is no open world here. You fly to the dungeons. You do the dungeons. You fly back to the hub. Seriously, did they even play a Zelda game before this one?
- Has all the "woo tons of crap" problem that Twilight Princess had, only the dungeons are worse and the puzzles less interesting.
- Zelda and Link's weird flirty relationship is actually a really good idea...for the first fifteen minutes. It never goes anywhere and nosedives with the plot.
- There's so much more but I'm not a huge fan of bagging on games, even if they deserve it. So let's just say IGN's 10/10 for Skyward Sword was perhaps ever so slightly fueled by fanboy goggles. That or Doritos and Mountain Dew.