There is an overall sense of unfulfillment when playing Skyward Sword. I game I never played and heard incredibly mixed feels about when it launched. I was in a phase of avoiding franchises I grew up on to expand my horizon of other games and with mixed opinion, I decided to avoid it up until now and well I do see a great Zelda game in here.

Dungeons are a lot of fun to figure out and to explore, and the boss fights are easily some of the best boss fights in the whole series, no exaggeration. And speaking of some of the best in the whole series, the entire concept of Lanayru Desert is incredible. A land where you strike time stones to make a small area of land go back in time where you interact with the now lost robot tribe. It's so imaginative and it puts a big smile on my face.

But that leads into everything else which is a major major mixed bag of halfhearted ideas.

Skyward Sword unlike other Zelda games is centered around one area, Skyloft. In this game, Link and Zelda's hometown in the sky. So all the shops, and interesting characters and side quests are all condensed in this one little area, and it gets rather boring. But not as boring as Skyloft's big open area, where Link flies atop his trusty bird steed to fly around a big empty area with not a lot of interesting set pieces.

Sometimes within the small pieces of land in the sky are chest that you can't open until you strike a cube on the surface world, which usually just has money or (oh great) crafting material inside which I'm not gonna lie, crafting is one of my least favorite tropes in video games, but thankfully crafting isn't necessary but it makes treasure chests a lot less impactful.

And finally we have Skyward Sword's biggest flaw. There's only three major lands to visit in the game:
Faron Woods, standard little grassy area
Eldin Volcano, standard volcano setting
and Lanayru Desert, which once again, is a lot more interesting than the rest of the game with it's time travel aspect. None of the other places in the game give that level of creativity, and what sucks is that's it. Compared to the last 3D Zelda game, Twilight Princess, there were so many unique setpieces and places to visit, it just makes this game feel like a real step down.

Combined that with the horrid pacing of the game. The opening is such a long sequence that takes forever to get into the major meat of the game, and even when you do your first mission basically is to play hide and seek with these kiwi-tanooki so that holds you back.

Then it's just constantly returning to these lands for only minor expansions of the land. Maybe a lake here, going within the volcano here. Once again, Lanayru Desert wins again by giving you a pirate character as you sail on the sand that was once the major ocean.

So at the end of the day I had my fun with Skyward Sword but it just got old after a while. There is a lot of fun to be had so I still sort of recommend it, but just know there is a lot of fluff you're gonna have to swim through just to get to the good parts.