Zelda: Skyward sucks, Twilight is good, CDi games are canon

[Sload Soap]

I don't think Skyward Sword sucks but it is certainly my least favourite 3D Zelda. I think I would even rate it behind Phantom Hourglass. It had some smart ideas and fun moments but the main selling point, the sword fighting, never really clicked with me. I remember in the fights against Girahim, when I kept thrusting instead of slicing thinking "if this was Ocarina or Majora, this fight would have been over two minutes ago". That it came out around the same time as Dark Souls and Skyrim and got equally as good if not generally more positive reviews is a bit baffling to me.

[BogusMeatFactory]

I don't think Skyward Sword sucks but it is certainly my least favourite 3D Zelda. I think I would even rate it behind Phantom Hourglass. It had some smart ideas and fun moments but the main selling point, the sword fighting, never really clicked with me. I remember in the fights against Girahim, when I kept thrusting instead of slicing thinking "if this was Ocarina or Majora, this fight would have been over two minutes ago". That it came out around the same time as Dark Souls and Skyrim and got equally as good if not generally more positive reviews is a bit baffling to me.

Yeah I can see why Skyward Sword is so polarizing for a lot of people. The motion controls either clicked with you or they didn't. Some people had an absolutely impossible time with them to the point where they couldn't play the game. Again, I had a 100% perfect experience with them and never came across a single problem, but I am not discounting the fact that other people had a very different experience.

If it worked for you, you tended to really enjoy the game. If they didn't work for you, clearly you didn't enjoy it.

I feel like this idea can be applied to any game really. For me, motion controls work well for me. It must be something that I do, but if the game offers it, nine times out of ten I use them and perform better than with a game controller. Games like Mario Kart 8 is a great example of this. I can play 200cc, with a wii-mote and using motion controls and gold cup it with relative ease, minus a few courses (fuck you yoshi circuit). I find the motion controls to be infinitely better than an thumbstick and offer so much more control over your car and drifting. I try to preach it, but people just don't see it my way.

[casterofdreams]

That it came out around the same time as Dark Souls and Skyrim and got equally as good if not generally more positive reviews is a bit baffling to me.

Well I feel that is because of name alone. The low points in those reviews were more forgiving for this game. If it were another game, they'd be more critical of the same faults.

My post from the page before I was actually speaking of Skyrim. That is my new age Zelda. Yeah sure it isn't whimsical like Zelda but the general progression of the genre and themes are present in Skyrim.

Hey it does sword and shield better than most games.

[Opa Opa]

Twilight Princess was fine, but I actually felt like it was the most pointlessly padded game in the series myself.

Okay, now that I have a minute I'll address this. Here's Skyward's quest progression (spoilers):

-beginning
-Stuff happens, get sword and first tablet
-search for other two tablets
-stuff happens, get harp and learn a song
-quest for three flames
-quest for three parts of a song
(-the four silent realm quests take place during sometime after receiving the harp and during the song quest, iirc)
-open last dungeon, get triforce
-final battle

Twilight Princess:

-beginning
-stuff happens, turned into wolf, get sword/shield
-quest for the fused shadows
-master sword
-quest for three twilight mirror shards
-quest for 6 sky book-things
(-from beginning to master sword(?) there are three or four twilight realm quests to restore the local deity/area to the light)
-fight with Zant
-fight with Ganon

Now out of all this I would label both the silent realm trial and the song quest as mindless filler. The silent realm is pointless due to it being a timed fetch-quest in an area you've already traversed more than once. Also, iirc, the reason you're given the silent realm trial is to "prove your worth as a hero" or something. The game already established at the beginning that you are indeed the hero, preordained by the heavens, and given the ultimate weapon that signifies the bane of pure evil and malice... yet you still need to collect useless spirit orbs? Who wrote this??

Now to be fair, Twilight does the same thing with the twilight realm where you have to find the bugs. However the game has a much more plausible justification: the local spirit god has been broken and you must restore it to both return the land to the light world and restore your human form. Yes, it is still a fetch quest but I have a better time swallowing that than "you need to do it because we said so".

Song quest: should not have been in the game. Although the dungeon in the desert song quest is, no joke, the best in the entire game, the other two quests are more pointless gathering. The water dragon makes you waste your time collecting tadtones because he's a jerk and the volcano segment makes you traverse the same area yet again to regather your lost equipment. I could probably draw an accurate map of the volcano area due to how many times the game sends you there.
The song should have just been given to you after fighting the flying whale and that great desert dungeon thrown in an earlier part of the desert world.

The only part in TP I would consider pointless filler would be finding the six specific owl statues to complete the sky book. It was highly unnecessary and should have been taken out. However, I did look at a guide for that segment of the game to find out the quickest route and at most it only took around ten minutes, but without a guide you'd probably spend half an hour checking every statue.

So alienjesus, do you agree? Disagree? Think I'm crazy?
What did you find to be the pointless material in Twilight Princess?

[alienjesus]

So alienjesus, do you agree? Disagree? Think I'm crazy?
What did you find to be the pointless material in Twilight Princess?

I don't deny that there is some filler in Skyward too (even as a big fan, there is no justifying fighting the bloody Imprisoned 3 damn times. But I took more offense with stuff like the twilight bug hunts and the stupid statue hunt to get to the City in the Sky in Twilight.

Particularly the Owl statue thing. I know it sounds really pedantic as it's actually not a particularly long segment at all, but it's just so egregious in what it asks you to do. The statues are clearly labelled on you map, so there's no hunt for them like the Triforce shards in Wind Waker - they're all out in the open. At best, there's an incredibly simple puzzle to do in an obvious way, so there's no interesting sense of revisiting the area and seeing it a different way like many of the times you go back to places in Skyward. It is literally the game telling you 'spend 15 minutes or so running around and not even doing anything that feels like you're contributing'. I'll take the Tadtones over that any day!

I also felt like most of the stuff between dungeons in Twilight Princess just felt redundant. It felt like it was just something to make you look around at the environment they'd lovingly modelled whilst drawing out the game time. Go around as a wolf! Now go around again as a person! Revisiting the areas in Skyward isn't ideal, but the gameplay always felt very different when you did revisit in my opinion. That just didn't really seem the case to me with Twilight. Having the overworld areas feel just like dungeons was fine by me in Skyward. I'll happily take the dungeony overworld of skyward or the open exploration of Wind Waker over the odd middle ground Twilight occupies.

Twilight also seems to be the biggest offender for empty overworlds in my opinion. The sky in Skyward Sword was unfortunately empty too, but it didn't feel like the focus. The fields in Twilight were time consuming to travel around, even on horseback, but there just wasn't much to find there except poes and gold bugs. meh.

Don't get me wrong, I like Twilight Princess. But I love Skyward Sword. Skyward Sword was the first game for a long time that I sat down and marathoned day after day when it came out. Twilight is the only 3D Zelda I had to restart years down the line because I couldnbt remember where I'd got to after I stopped playing.

[Xeogred]

Twilight Princess was fine, but I actually felt like it was the most pointlessly padded game in the series myself.

Okay, now that I have a minute I'll address this. Here's Skyward's quest progression (spoilers):

-beginning
-Stuff happens, get sword and first tablet
-search for other two tablets
-stuff happens, get harp and learn a song
-quest for three flames
-quest for three parts of a song
(-the four silent realm quests take place during sometime after receiving the harp and during the song quest, iirc)
-open last dungeon, get triforce
-final battle

Twilight Princess:

-beginning
-stuff happens, turned into wolf, get sword/shield
-quest for the fused shadows
-master sword
-quest for three twilight mirror shards
-quest for 6 sky book-things
(-from beginning to master sword(?) there are three or four twilight realm quests to restore the local deity/area to the light)
-fight with Zant
-fight with Ganon

This is silly and pointless because nearly every single Zelda follows an incredibly similar blueprint, and I don't care. It's like a different Bible every time. Same story, told differently.

[Opa Opa]

It isn't the formula I take umbrage with; it's the poor story justifications for retreading the same ground over and over. In all the other Zelda's you get to play new dungeons. In SS, you'll more than likely go through the exact same area again or travel in an extension of a previous area. Twilight Princess is guilty of retreading but nowhere near as bad as Skyward, I think at least.

Side note, SS:

Isn't it technically impossible for Link to meet Impa at the beginning of the game when she hadn't gone through time yet with Zelda?

@aj

I won't take tadtones over anything!

Yeah, TP had an empty world. Although once you open most of the warp gates it becomes less of an issue traveling through it. In Skyward you're stuck with the bird. Quite frankly, the sky has so little to interact with it might as well not even exist. I wish they implemented some sort of warp system between bird statues at least. That would nullify having to go through three loading screens should you have dropped to the wrong location...

In any case, I don't want to seem like I'm completely dogging Skyward; it has some qualities that I can appreciate. I liked the artstyle (though I don't know that it transfers well to an HD television; probably better on a CRT), I liked the item usage (loved the bug in particular), and I liked the concept of exploring the sky. There are redeeming qualities to the game that I know people can appreciate; I'm just not a fan I suppose.

[Ogreatgames]

You can play either one first, they are both great, if your looking just for some Zelda until Zelda U arrives.