I pre-ordered the special edition of this game back when it came out some seven or so years, and I really couldn't get into it. I thought the pacing was really slow, the tons of tutorializing and controls were frustrating, and the dungeons and story weren't really grabbing me. I really liked playing as Ghirahim in Hyrule Warriors last week, so I decided to finally give this game another shot. I still had a lot of the same problems with it, truth be told, but I clearly managed to actually finish it this time. As far as my overall feelings about the game go, I think Flake put it best in the Slack chat best when he said, "Skyward Sword would have benefited from being a 20 hour game." I did damn near everything (although apparently missed 5 heart pieces), and it took me about 36 hours, but there honestly isn't really that much side content to do compared to the proper game content. At the most, six hours of that was side-quests, and that's a liberal estimate.
The issue that most people immediately notice in Skyward Sword is the glacial pacing, and it is a problem the whole game. Outside of the perhaps the Triforce piece hunt in Wind Waker (which I didn't mind too much), this is probably the only Zelda game I can think of where the game feels actively padded with a ton of uninteresting, frustrating, and/or repetitive content.
The second and third imprisoned fights, getting the water dragon's healing water, and escorting Scrapper up the volcano were just all miserable and I did not enjoy them at all. Then you have stuff like the entire Hero's Song section, which the Thunder Dragon part was fairly fun of, that still feels really unnecessary and only added to pad out the game's clock.
That's just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head, and that stuff takes up at least a third of the game's run-time. All that on top of the flying, which is the boring sailing parts of Wind Waker but now the game forces you to pay full attention to it all the time to actually get where you're going, just makes the game feel like such a slog so frequently. Twilight Princess was a game I thought outstayed its welcome with its length, but Skyward Sword commits that sin on top of not actually doing it with new areas more often than not :?
For all the relentless tutorializing this game does, where it feels the need to remind you that your Wiimote's batteries are running low, what a boss door looks like, telling you what you're doing yet again when you walk to a new location, reminding you what all 36 materials and bugs are every time you pick them up between play sessions, this game just does not give you a good enough explanation of how to actually play it. From rolling bombs being unclear, to constantly having to realign your cursor to aim any ranged weapon, even the main selling point of the game, the sword combat, I found to be strangely temperamental and not explained very well.
Ghirahim, the first boss fight, is so incredibly unintuitive with the way he uses his hand to block your attacks where every enemy up until that point has used a sword or had some obvious dividing line down where you're supposed to slash them. It makes for an incredibly difficult and frustrating boss fight when it's just the first boss of the game, and yet this is trying to teach you not to telegraph your attacks. Ghirahim is the only enemy who uses such a small defensive point to block attacks with, so presenting him in this way is only unintuitive but needlessly confusing. You don't even need to not telegraph your attacks. If you lazily drag your hand from one side to the other, he just doesn't block from that angle you've now moved to, meaning not telegraphing your attacks isn't what you need to do to beat him at all, you just need to know how to beat him. Stacked on top of how I could only get Link to do the slashes I wanted him to do around 60% of the time, and the sword combat was just pushing me away from the game the entire time I was playing it.
On a more positive note, the game looks and sounds beautiful. It's a bit pixely, sure, but the art style makes the world, the enemies, the bosses, the NPC's all look charming and beautiful in their own ways. The music as well is some of the best the series had had until Breath of the Wild (or so I've heard, having not played it yet). As annoying as the Bokoblins are to fight, they and the other enemies have such charming, well-animated designs that I can't help but like them. The dungeon designs are also quite good, if still fairly typical and fairly linear Zelda dungeons. The one inspired by Buddhism (the 4th one, I think) was definitely my favorite on a design level, even though I think it was my least favorite to play through x3
The story is also one of the best in the series up to that point. Groose, Zelda, Impa, and (all the problems I have with how his "fop" character archetype is portrayed aside) Ghirahim are some of the best characters the series has ever had, and the twists the story takes with them are nearly all ones I genuinely didn't see coming. Groose has at least 4 or 5 different versions of his theme for different points in the story and his character arc, and that attention to detail is something I couldn't help but love.
I have fairly mixed feelings about the crafting and items in the game. I thought the pouch-system was fairly clever, and the way you had to choose between more shields, medals, and bottles made for some really good opportunity cost when it came to preparing for missions, even if shield destruction was never a problem I encountered. I really didn't like how you could never get perminant upgrades for your bomb-bag and arrow quiver and such, mostly because it made Batreaux's side-quest (even if I liked the concept of how it was presented, with more side-quests tangentially contributing towards one instead of one long trading sequence) feel totally pointless because the bigger wallets he gives you (instead of say, a bigger bomb bag or quiver) are totally useless because you absolutely never need that much money for anything. I overall liked the equipment upgrading for better arrows and bug net and such.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is probably the closest a game I've played has come as close to being Not Recommended in quite a while. I mean, if I did damn near everything like I did, it must've been doing something right, but this game has some big caveats to enjoying it. Unless you really like motion controls or are willing to look past them, you really won't enjoy this game. This game deserves the controversial place it holds in the fandom because it genuinely has a lot of serious problems in its design as well as a heap of brilliant innovations. If you can find it for cheap, it's worth checking out at the very least.
The issue that most people immediately notice in Skyward Sword is the glacial pacing, and it is a problem the whole game. Outside of the perhaps the Triforce piece hunt in Wind Waker (which I didn't mind too much), this is probably the only Zelda game I can think of where the game feels actively padded with a ton of uninteresting, frustrating, and/or repetitive content.
The second and third imprisoned fights, getting the water dragon's healing water, and escorting Scrapper up the volcano were just all miserable and I did not enjoy them at all. Then you have stuff like the entire Hero's Song section, which the Thunder Dragon part was fairly fun of, that still feels really unnecessary and only added to pad out the game's clock.
That's just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head, and that stuff takes up at least a third of the game's run-time. All that on top of the flying, which is the boring sailing parts of Wind Waker but now the game forces you to pay full attention to it all the time to actually get where you're going, just makes the game feel like such a slog so frequently. Twilight Princess was a game I thought outstayed its welcome with its length, but Skyward Sword commits that sin on top of not actually doing it with new areas more often than not :?
For all the relentless tutorializing this game does, where it feels the need to remind you that your Wiimote's batteries are running low, what a boss door looks like, telling you what you're doing yet again when you walk to a new location, reminding you what all 36 materials and bugs are every time you pick them up between play sessions, this game just does not give you a good enough explanation of how to actually play it. From rolling bombs being unclear, to constantly having to realign your cursor to aim any ranged weapon, even the main selling point of the game, the sword combat, I found to be strangely temperamental and not explained very well.
Ghirahim, the first boss fight, is so incredibly unintuitive with the way he uses his hand to block your attacks where every enemy up until that point has used a sword or had some obvious dividing line down where you're supposed to slash them. It makes for an incredibly difficult and frustrating boss fight when it's just the first boss of the game, and yet this is trying to teach you not to telegraph your attacks. Ghirahim is the only enemy who uses such a small defensive point to block attacks with, so presenting him in this way is only unintuitive but needlessly confusing. You don't even need to not telegraph your attacks. If you lazily drag your hand from one side to the other, he just doesn't block from that angle you've now moved to, meaning not telegraphing your attacks isn't what you need to do to beat him at all, you just need to know how to beat him. Stacked on top of how I could only get Link to do the slashes I wanted him to do around 60% of the time, and the sword combat was just pushing me away from the game the entire time I was playing it.
On a more positive note, the game looks and sounds beautiful. It's a bit pixely, sure, but the art style makes the world, the enemies, the bosses, the NPC's all look charming and beautiful in their own ways. The music as well is some of the best the series had had until Breath of the Wild (or so I've heard, having not played it yet). As annoying as the Bokoblins are to fight, they and the other enemies have such charming, well-animated designs that I can't help but like them. The dungeon designs are also quite good, if still fairly typical and fairly linear Zelda dungeons. The one inspired by Buddhism (the 4th one, I think) was definitely my favorite on a design level, even though I think it was my least favorite to play through x3
The story is also one of the best in the series up to that point. Groose, Zelda, Impa, and (all the problems I have with how his "fop" character archetype is portrayed aside) Ghirahim are some of the best characters the series has ever had, and the twists the story takes with them are nearly all ones I genuinely didn't see coming. Groose has at least 4 or 5 different versions of his theme for different points in the story and his character arc, and that attention to detail is something I couldn't help but love.
I have fairly mixed feelings about the crafting and items in the game. I thought the pouch-system was fairly clever, and the way you had to choose between more shields, medals, and bottles made for some really good opportunity cost when it came to preparing for missions, even if shield destruction was never a problem I encountered. I really didn't like how you could never get perminant upgrades for your bomb-bag and arrow quiver and such, mostly because it made Batreaux's side-quest (even if I liked the concept of how it was presented, with more side-quests tangentially contributing towards one instead of one long trading sequence) feel totally pointless because the bigger wallets he gives you (instead of say, a bigger bomb bag or quiver) are totally useless because you absolutely never need that much money for anything. I overall liked the equipment upgrading for better arrows and bug net and such.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is probably the closest a game I've played has come as close to being Not Recommended in quite a while. I mean, if I did damn near everything like I did, it must've been doing something right, but this game has some big caveats to enjoying it. Unless you really like motion controls or are willing to look past them, you really won't enjoy this game. This game deserves the controversial place it holds in the fandom because it genuinely has a lot of serious problems in its design as well as a heap of brilliant innovations. If you can find it for cheap, it's worth checking out at the very least.