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Sam clearly doesn't have any gratitude crystals about this

Review: Skyward Sword HD isn’t the 35th Zelda birthday gift we’d hoped for

Welcome tweaks for brand-new Switch players, but the same can't be said for Skyward vets.

Sam Machkovech | 139
If you'd like, you can pretend that Ghirahim (right) is the thirsty, corner-cutting Nintendo, and Link is an average fan, aghast at the shape Skyward Sword HD ultimately arrived in. Credit: Nintendo
If you'd like, you can pretend that Ghirahim (right) is the thirsty, corner-cutting Nintendo, and Link is an average fan, aghast at the shape Skyward Sword HD ultimately arrived in. Credit: Nintendo
Welcome to Link's sky-island home in Skyward Sword HD.
A sword stuck in a slab of stone, and a young man eager to swing it: Yep, it's a Legend of Zelda game, alright.

Nintendo has never shied away from opportunities to touch up and re-release its most beloved video games. 1993's Super Mario All-Stars is arguably the industry's first "big" remaster project, while the Zelda series has been downright spoiled with the concept going back as far as a 1995 reimagining of the original Legend of Zelda for the Super Famicom's Japan-only satellite service.

In the intervening years, expectations for "HD" versions of older games have exploded, primarily because gamemakers have gotten better at this. And the Zelda series has excelled within this trend, too, as highlighted by Nintendo's top-to-bottom retouches of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask for the now-discontinued Nintendo 3DS.

But if those games are examples of Zelda remasters at their best and most ambitious, then this week's Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD (a re-release of the 2011 Wii adventure game for the Nintendo Switch) is arguably the opposite.

If you never played Skyward Sword on the original Wii, this is likely the better way to play one of the series' most coolly received entries. (As ever, a "so-so Zelda game" is still typically pretty good in the grand scheme.) Yet this Switch port's scope and technical wimpiness are hard to stomach at a $60 price point this many years after the original game came and went.

Open skies < open waters

Now, hold on, you might say. "Coolly received" Skyward Sword? But Ars Technica printed a rave review! So did others!

I honestly am not sure what sweet Hyrulian grass most critics were smoking during Skyward Sword's original pre-release period. I didn't catch a puff, as I wrote the following for the now-defunct, iPad-only outlet The Daily in November 2011:

You may not find a more uneven tour de force in gaming this year. Skyward Sword's slow start is just about unforgivable for such an old franchise, but sure enough, later challenges—particularly a time-bending mechanic—prove among the best in series history. And control foibles nearly drown out the series' best writing and characters in years. What Nintendo delivered here was probably as experimental or risky as we could expect from a game with the word "Zelda" in it, and the result is certainly a good one. But games like Assassin's Creed, Arkham City, and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, in creating open worlds with childhood-sized visions of grandeur and accessibility, beat Nintendo to this year's 25th anniversary party.

The more commonly accepted takeaway, this many years later, is that Skyward Sword's Wii-specific gimmicks and finely crafted highlights couldn't make up for its general issue— a failed attempt to one-up the wide-open wonder of Wind Waker or to keep up with so much Zelda-inspired competition in that era's 3D-adventuring renaissance. Wind Waker's open seas ultimately felt more alive and creatively packed than Skyward Sword's sparsely dotted skies. And while Nintendo still delivered a satisfying, content-rich adventure in its 2011 Zelda game, it's hard not to see the series' follow-up home console game, Breath of the Wild, as a repudiation of Skyward Sword's reliance on old series tropes.

However you feel about Skyward Sword ten years later—on the eve of the original Legend of Zelda's 35th anniversary, no less—know that this new HD version is almost entirely identical in terms of content. GameFAQs bookmarks from 2011 will apply to any Skyward Sword HD conundrums in 2021.

Bilinear filtering? Really, Nintendo?

A capture from this week's Skyward Sword HD via the Switch's 720p framebuffer.
The same scene from Skyward Sword's original Wii version at 480p resolution. Arguably, the lower resolution did more to hide the original game's technical shortcomings than it did to hide particular technical artistry in vistas like this.

Sadly, this ten-years-later project fumbles the most obvious path to re-release improvement: the visuals.

Skyward Sword revolved around a novel aesthetic for the Wii at the time—a smeary-filter effect that leaned into that console's low resolution and technical weaknesses. The results looked pretty darned good on CRT TVs capped at 480p resolution, and this unique approach countered other consoles' increased focus on HDTV compatibility by instead looking like a watercolor painting come to life.

But booting the 2011 game on a modern higher-resolution LCD panel exposes the Wii's inability to process such an aesthetic in timeless fashion. One particular issue comes from the game's incredibly low-resolution textures, since they're juxtaposed against vibrant 3D character designs. Link, Zelda, and a wide cast of new and wacky characters benefit from Nintendo's ability to defy technical generations in its character designs, all animated with expressive faces and eyes. The world around them isn't as timeless without the aid of natural CRT effects, though.

Yet in spite of the Switch's considerably larger and faster VRAM pool, this year's Skyward Sword HD continues to rely on the same texture and effects budgets. Zooming in on major characters during cut scenes still mostly looks great, but the piddly original clothing textures look that much more out of place today.

Really, all of the game's textures—which cover the game's ground, walls, ceilings, and architecture—are drenched in a cheap "bilinear" filter, which you may best recognize from classic console emulators. Remember the first time you toyed with settings on an emulator like NESticle, only to find they turned pixellated edges into weird-looking blobs? Skyward Sword HD looks like that much of the time. It's not ugly, per se, but the game's action pauses often enough for cameras to linger on the blurry stuff and make players wonder what the heck Nintendo's "HD" team was thinking.

Additionally, Nintendo didn't see fit to give the game a serious pass on modern effects like depth-of-field blurs in the distance or ambient occlusion on up-close elements. The company has left the game's "level of detail" (LoD) slider in the same place as the 2011 original, which means tufts of grass and other small details continue to appear out of nowhere as Link approaches them. On Wii U, Twilight Princess HD and Wind Waker HD each did more to earn the "HD" in their names, and I went back and forth between original Wii captures and my Switch footage of Skyward Sword in search of anything that approached those games' level of visual scrutiny. I never saw it.

How much prettier could Skyward Sword HD have been? As one brief example, here's an early flyover from the new Switch version...
...and here's the same moment as touched up by a homebrew patch dubbed Skyward Sword 4K. This is currently only playable on emulators.

Instead, we're left with a jump from the original 30 fps performance to a steady, locked 60 fps frame rate, along with a boost to near-max resolution in both docked and portable modes. For some Skyward Sword fans, this frame rate jump might truly be enough to merit the upgrade, if only because emulator fanatics know that fans have yet to get the game working at a higher frame rate (beyond using frame interpolation trickery, which isn't the same). But those same emulator fanatics have seen what fan-made texture packs and engine tweaks can do to bring this game into the modern visual era. Nintendo's failure to exceed the community's efforts is a serious shame.

MotionPlus, now waggle-minus

In better news, this remake's development team put more effort into modernizing the game's controls.

Skyward Sword was Nintendo's final Wii game to require the Wii MotionPlus accessory. This dongle added a gyroscope to the Wii-mote, which meant games could recognize your controller's relative rotation angle. Instead of randomly flicking a Wii controller to fake like a tennis pro, MotionPlus players could expect their pantomimed golf swings, bowling tosses, and sword swipes to resemble what happened on screen.

Hence, Skyward Sword doubled down on Wii waggle more than any other first-party action or adventure game, and most of the game's controls required real-world motion in one form or another. That came most blatantly in the form of Link's sword: swing horizontally, vertically, or diagonally in your living room, and Link would do the same. Battles and puzzles revolved around this twist, whether because enemies held directional shields or because weirdly shaped keys had to be rotated to fit into their locks. Items followed suit. You'd aim a bow with your hand to shoot, roll underhand to throw a bomb like a bowling ball, or guide a flying mount by holding the Wii-mote like a paper airplane.

Step two: Perhaps instinctively, swipe vertically, either with motion controls or a joystick. That's one head down.
Step three: Watch that head grow back like a starfish's appendage. Realize you needed to hit all three heads simultaneously.

The first big upgrade in Skyward Sword HD is optional liberation from those original Wii-era mandates. Should you disable motion controls, the game remaps nearly every motion mechanic to the Switch's right-side joystick. This upgrade alone may flip the Skyward Sword switch (pun intended) for anyone who had become fed up with Wii waggle.

Nintendo's non-motion translation is mostly good, with a few caveats. The biggest weirdness comes from the right joystick being assigned to the sword by default, as opposed to it being a freely adjustable camera a la Breath of the Wild (which Switch owners are more likely to be familiar with). Skyward Sword, like other classic 3D Zelda games, originally used a fixed camera that players could only adjust with constant taps of a "Z-focus" button. You'd move, then tap the focus button to bring the camera behind your back, then move, then tap, and repeat to constantly fudge the camera.

Skyward Sword HD recognizes more modern camera options by letting you freely move its camera... but only if you hold down the "L" shoulder button. Without that button held, the right stick is always ready for a quick sword jab or an aimed wave of your blade.

If you're anything like me, this means you'll constantly wave your sword when you mean to move the camera. In a dumb move, Nintendo mandates this order of operations: hold L for camera, let go of L for sword. I would have much preferred this the other way around so that I'm in battling mode solely when I hold down L—which has its own logic, as if the left index finger is pantomiming the act of unholstering. But Nintendo being Nintendo, that option is nowhere to be found.

Your mileage may vary, but I found myself never getting used to holding L for the camera. Instead, I more easily unlearned using the right joystick as a camera entirely and returned to the Z-focus universe of old, since Skyward Sword was designed to work that way in the first place. If you can't see yourself doing the same, you can either get used to selectively holding L... or playing with motion controls enabled. By waggling to swing the sword, you'll free the right joystick to work the camera at all times.

Why I kissed Skyward’s motion goodbye

In the end, I elected not to bother with motion controls for a few reasons. The biggest is that Skyward Sword's original Wii version came with a crucial calibration step that the Switch lacks: a focal point toward your television. Wii MotionPlus required a Wii sensor bar to aim at, thus guaranteeing its general orientation. Its brief pre-gaming calibration process required players to place the sensor on a table facing the screen. Skyward Sword HD skips both of these steps and instead asks motion-enabled players to tap a calibration button at any time during gameplay.

Those MotionPlus steps were more cumbersome, but they did a better job of guaranteeing orientation, especially as players could lose their wrist's bearing in waggle frenzies to repeatedly swipe at major boss battles. Comparatively, I found my hand losing my Joy-Con's calibrated orbit more often in the Switch version than I did on the Wii (which, to be clear, had its own calibration issues). This issue ramped up whenever I piloted my flying mount, the Loftwing, around the Switch game's skies, enough so that I wished the game offered a "disable motion during flight" toggle.

Not only are sword maneuvers quicker to pull off with a joystick, their directionality during frantic combat is easier to guarantee than wrist control.

In a few select moments, I wanted the option to juggle motion and normal buttons simultaneously. For instance, I might prefer to finely aim a sword strike during a puzzle, and confirming exact diagonal swipes inside Skyward Sword is sometimes easier with motion than with a joystick. But there's no getting around it: the ability to quick-tap a direction on the joystick to attack is much better than doing the same with a fuller wrist motion, especially over the span of dozens of hours of adventuring. Tap up, and Link swipes up. Tap down or to the right, and he follows suit. Or, slow-press the joystick to carefully wave the sword in various directions (which some instances call for).

It's so much easier this way. The same goes for clicking down on the joystick to emulate a direct jab, or doing the same with the left joystick to "shield bash," or tapping the joystick left-right-left to pull off a spin move. Not only are these maneuvers quicker to pull off with a joystick, their directionality during moments of frantic combat is easier to guarantee than wrist control, especially since the latter often requires tapping the "Y" button to re-center your orientation. Thus, I heartily recommend kicking Skyward Sword HD's motion controls down beneath the clouds and into the trash heap.

I also faced an issue in my home testing environment. I hadn't played a motion-sensitive Switch game in a while. When I tried doing so with Skyward Sword HD, I found my Joy-Cons frequently struggled with Bluetooth signal disconnections, leading to a different kind of "Joy-Con drift" where button and joystick presses would linger even when I let go of them. Switching to a traditional gamepad fixed this personal issue. I couldn't replicate this Bluetooth signal brouhaha with my PS5 in the same entertainment center, so I'm not sure what is up with my Switch. But I imagine I'm not alone when it comes to Joy-Con woe.

Faster text, but not necessarily faster travel

A Nintendo-produced video that details various quality-of-life tweaks for Skyward Sword HD.

In a major quality-of-life tweak, Skyward Sword HD benefits from less intrusive tutorial text—and much faster options to skip walls of text and entire cut scenes. Where the original release was convinced that you were a dumb Wii Sports player, unable to figure out how a 3D Zelda game might work, Skyward Sword HD inserts fewer interruptions and overlong explanations into both the game's introductory town section and later gameplay. Nintendo now buries a lot of helpful guidance—particularly from in-game helper Fi—in a handy d-pad shortcut. If you're indeed stuck, aid is always one button away.

Additionally, nearly every cut scene is now skippable, even during your first playthrough. And most of the game's walls of text can be paged through with a single tap of the B button. The latter is my jam, since I'm a speedreader, and this tweak absolutely pumps life into the game's previously laborious passages.

However, Nintendo has opted to lock one handy in-game shortcut behind the purchase of a real-world Amiibo toy. This shortcut is brand new to Skyward Sword HD, and it lets Link place a specific beacon anywhere in the game's overworld, fly away to finish errands or resolve side quests, and then warp directly back to where you put the warping beacon. With this perk, resolving the game's Majora's Mask-like series of errands is streamlined a bit. Without this perk, Link is forced to manually fly to various points in the game's open sky, dive through the clouds, and pick from one of a few previously discovered save points.

I didn't receive a Zelda-and-Loftwing toy during my review period in order to test this shortcut, but I can already tell you that it's a shame Nintendo chose to paywall this handy feature, particularly in a game whose "help as many people as possible" side quests will lead players to a considerable amount of back-and-forth travel. If the game had been more robustly touched up and remade in this "HD" version, I might have shrugged off the $25 Amiibo issue and been fine with slower-but-doable fast-travel options.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD

Zelda All-Stars when, though?

Instead, I'm left laughing at the notion that Nintendo packed $60 of spanking-new polish in this ten-year-old game. The top-to-bottom control refresh is absolutely welcome, while touch-ups to the game's pages of text don't hurt. But in a modern world, I'd call those the kinds of niceties a responsive, fan-friendly game publisher would add to its existing game for free as a bog-standard patch. That collection of updates is not a reason to repackage the entire game as a new $60 SKU.

That attitude, to be fair, comes from someone who previously beat Skyward Sword and isn't necessarily eager to do it all over again (or wishes someone in my position could access, say, a remixed "master quest" take on the game from first boot). If you aren't familiar with Skyward Sword's highs and lows, and you're hungry for a long, colorful, memorable adventure worthy of the Zelda name, this game's $60 asking price isn't egregious. It's not Breath of the Wild, sure, but it's also significantly bigger and more ambitious than 2019's re-release of the Game Boy classic Link's Awakening (whose own $60 Switch price raised my eyebrows).

But this many years later, it would've been nice for this new package to include some older Zelda games, much like how the Wii classic Super Mario Galaxy came in a $60 Switch package last year, original visuals similarly intact, with Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine in tow. If pandemic-related development issues are to blame for this week's uneven "HD" package, a few classic-gaming bonuses would've gone a long way for a project whose ambition didn't quite reach the clouds.

Verdict: Buy begrudgingly if you're a Zelda fan who skipped the game's original Wii-waggle version.

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