All THAT being said, I do agree with a lot of what you are saying, and it could be considered the fatal flaw of the game that it can be completed with ignorance of the most beautiful relationships that game can form with the player.

But looking at it with this view also sours many elements of it as well. I feel like Aunoma wanted players to interact with the environment in different ways, but didn’t really quite always know how, so he ends up just throwing a billion things at the wall to see what sticks. It almost feels like frustration, although usually too tightly executed to feel like desperation. It’s because of this that I agree with you that I think the new one will adjust its storytelling pacing to its gameplay pacing and get rid of the five hour openings, and let the world and puzzles tell the bulk of the story again. I like Zelda stories and I find that for all their simplicity, they are thematically poignant to gameplay in a way that many other developers have no idea how to replicate yet.

On top of that, there’s an even worse fetch quest by the end where you have to collect notes from all the previous worlds.

The game has some bright spots (certainly not the beginning that takes an eon to get going), and I think they’ve learned a lot from this game. It seems like the next one will drop the overbearing story and just focus on dungeon and puzzle solving and combat. Link is Link, do we need another origin tale at the beginning?

Just my quick thoughts on Skyward Sword for right now.

It was exclusively terrible in Twilight Princess. It added an extra layer of frustration to what is already the most bloated and directionless Zelda game. The interesting and unexpected boon that Skyward Sword gave the series was the developer’s need to rethink how to form the relationship between interaction and environment in the Zelda series, albeit on the unfortunate shoulder of motion controls. Twilight Princess had none of this thought, only tacked on controls based on the shittier version of the already shitty input system of the Wiimote.

Skyward Sword has freshness and creativity to it, although it also suffers from not only an unnecessarily slow start (though not as bad as Twilight Princess‘) but also a strange indecisiveness that feels like Aunoma trying out a lot of things, but not really sticking to any one of them- a restlessness that isn’t satisfied yet, a need to keep experimenting. But either way, despite Skyward Sword revitalizing the interaction/environment relationship that Twilight Princess keeps alive in sacred flames inside its temples and almost nowhere else, it still hits the wall of the Wiimote technology that was much too primitive to ever have been the primary control scheme for video games. Not to mention the bad name Twilight Princess rightfully gave to the combination of motion controls and Zelda.

Either way, motion controls will always be a blemish on those two games, but both of them – in addition to flaws unrelated to motion controls – certainly have plenty of excellent gameplay.

Sailing is the best part of Wind Waker. It insulates me from the terrible gameplay that would follow in the franchise.

@Triggered: Just don’t blow your load all over ME.

…do it on Ethos.

I am sensitive to the issue of pandering and your article has triggered me. Thank you!