Hello, Malstrom. One more time, eh? From the start, I must acknowledge this email is fairly long. But this is what I’ve been waiting for–my Final Farewell to All Things Nintendo. One more rant, one more holiday season, and then life begins again–this time, without the company that has entertained me since 1987….
Well, it has happened. At long last, Zelda Wii has been released. I will say up front that I did, in fact, buy this game. And since I never do anything halfheartedly, I went all the way and got the $70 collector’s edition, as well as the $25 strategy guide. Thanks to a longtime association with the man who is now fairly high up in the food chain of my area Gamestops, I was able to play the game several days before its official release, and, to accommodate this, I’d already set aside a full week off (I run my own business out of my house, so this is pretty easy for me to do!), a neat stretch of days which led right into my normal Thanksgiving vacation. During this time I played through the whole game twice, the second time on the high difficulty level (which, by the way, is much better than the regular game–not by any means good, but better. Curse Nintendo for not allowing this mode from the start!). To some, all this may seem excessive, but I do not regret any of it one iota. I’ve been planning for more than a year to do this. You see, I consider it the visitation and funeral of anything and everything I’ve ever had to do with Nintendo. And with good reason.
Skyward sword sucks.
It is not good.
And worse, it does violence–Violence!!–to the Legend of Zelda name.
The Zelda series is over. If the two straight terrible DS games didn’t convince everyone–and they did convince quite a few–this wretched abomination of source code will.
How is this a Zelda game? Please, someone, tell me. There’s no overworld. No Hyrule. No Princess Zelda, just some ugly anime chick who I don’t even know or like. No Ganon, although I guess you could say the last guy will someday become Ganon. There’s no one to save, nothing to fight, nothing to see, and nothing to do! There is nothing to this game! Nothing! It’s just a series of random, inane gameplay objectives thrown together in a line. Nothing in Skyward Sword has any purpose or makes any sense. I have no idea what the hell any of this stuff is for. Zelda is in no danger whatsoever. Skyloft is never at any point even remotely threatened by anything. The only bad guy we ever see spends the entire game whining about his own impotence. Just about the only type of enemies we encounter are endless variations of Bokoblins. All I have to say about them is they were leopard underwear. The surface doesn’t have anyone living in it, except a bunch of stupid, ugly animal species that shouldn’t even be in the game. What are these stupid robots doing here? Why am I supposed to find these ugly tree people who look like testicles? I don’t like them. I don’t want to save them! I’d rather kill them. Why am I swimming around to pick up these stupid tadpoles? Now, some simplistic people may not have a problem with any of this, but I always need to know the “why” behind the “what.” In this game, there is no “why.” Why is Link doing any of this stupid, pointless stuff? I kept asking myself this question as I played the game. Why are we doing all this? For the sake of doing it?
Not to mention there is no overworld! No overworld! What the hell? This isn’t a Zelda game. You cannot remove the overworld from Zelda, people! Do these Nintendo fools have any idea what made this series great to begin with? When they said they were going to integrate the overworld and dungeons better, I had no idea this was what they were talking about. (I can see now why the Nintendo people were so reluctant to discuss this issue before the game came out.) I had assumed–as I think most fans assumed–they were going to make the dungeons fit more naturally within their environments. This was, after all, one of the things TP did better than any other Zelda game before it, and it would be the logical development of the promise of the original Zelda games. I guarantee you this is what people are thinking of when they dream of Zelda in HD. But here, your only goal in any of these segmented corridors is to move from the entrance to the exit via some sort of weird gameplay “puzzle” (I use that term loosely, by the way–these aren’t really puzzles), at which point you’ll make a shortcut back to the entrance, over and over and over and over again. That’s it! That’s all! That is literally the only thing you ever do in the game!
This isn’t a Zelda game. How in the bloody hell could anyone claim otherwise? Why are you making things so difficult, Nintendo? This is not complicated! Give us a Zelda game with an overworld, with enemies that actually pose a threat, with dangerous dungeons containing even more dangerous enemies, with a Princess that needs to be rescued from these enemies, and people who have lost their homes and are too terrified to step outside their caves. Get rid of the NPCs. Get rid of the stupid animal species. Get rid of all this talking. My god, the talking! Talking, talking, talking! Babble, babble, babble! This is so unlike Nintendo. It’s worse than it’s ever been in any other game! Why? Why are we going backwards with this? Why does Nintendo keep adding this unnecessary junk?
The game we call Skyward Sword is a single-player version of Wii Sports Resort starring Link. It isn’t a Zelda game. I challenge all the Zelda fans out there to say otherwise.
The challenge is out! Will any Aonuma Zelda fan step forward to meet it?
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