LoZ Skyward Sword

Taking a slight mental health break after massive amounts of play time racked up on Skyward Sword to write a review thus far. And by review I mean gush about how much I fucking love this game. Ocarina has a metric fuckton of nostalgia points in its favor, but it is in serious jeopardy of being bumped to down a peg as the best Zelda game. There is not a single vista, hill, cloud, stream or structure that isn’t spectacular to behold. As far as environments go, I don’t see any Zelda dev team doing any better. From what I can tell I’m a bit short of halfway plot-wise, and I’ve logged 60 hours. I yearn to explore every bit of environment presented; which is revealed or accessed in a bit-by-bit fashion that never seems to be enough. It’s going to be hard to say much else with any sort of specificity without actually revealing something, so just assume all the follow are spoilers.

The combat controls are as intuitive as ever, but the increased sensitivity of the Wiimotion plus controller (looks much better in gold) adds as true realism to the fights. One of my loves has always been executing a one-man raid on a camp of moblins, taking out scouts with arrows, creating destroying their hovels with some bombs and taking out the last few all at once with the sword of evil’s bane. SS does not fail to quench my blood-lust in this sense, some new and tougher incarnations are litter about in certain areas, and the opportunities for creative kills are still there. But what really gets my inner Leonidas going is the plus control’s call for precise motions in order to execute specific sequences necessary to get the tough baddies down. When faced with upper-tier enemy, a specific sequence of steps and precisely angled slashes are the difference between savagely smearing the blood of your fallen enemy across your face, and removing a sharp implement from your own spleen. This can cause bad timing to lead to untimely death, in fact I found the first two temple bosses to be hard as shit initially. The first is your resident throw-away bad guy Lord Ghirahim, whom you fight right off the bat to: a) introduce him as a character b) introduce you to frustration and c) ultimately provide useful input as the experience makes you a more patient and precise swordsman (which is really the point of the first large section of the game, turning an unsuspecting youth into a chosen hero). I also have to mention this douche because Japan has outdone itself with this villain. I’ve seen plenty of anime, I’ve worn women’s clothing, I’ve seen a man with a big sparkly navel piercing that says “bitch”, this is the fruitiest character I’ve ever fucking seen. Imagine a gay dude, make him as pale a drowning corpse, make him more gay, dress him in skin-tight clothes with a fruity Dracula cape, make him more gay, complete the look with super-emo purple eye shadow and a giant diamond earring, then MAKE HIM MORE GAY. You have just imagined Lord Ghirahim. He teleports, summons a sword and creates other magical happenings with fruity gestures and a flourish of diamond-shaped visual distortions. This is important to note, the diamond magic. This mage is so gay HE’S POWERED BY ARGYLE! Not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just spectacular to think that there is not a non-Japanese person not named Tim Burton who could come up with this character. Did I mention the lizard tongue?

^Proof of concept^

In other combat related observations, the difficulty of the early bosses, while enraging at first really does develop your instincts as a hero. I developed quickly from seeing a giant scorpion emerge and yelling "Oh Shit!" to encountering a huge, four-armed skele-warrior and yelling "Let's do this! LEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOOOOOOOOOY!" The game then becomes that much more enjoyable when a hideous freak that's supposed to be intimidating starts some shit, I pwn it whilst barely taking damage and I can't help but pump my glorious gold Wiimot "What now, bitch!?!"

Despite looking a bit like rip-off of a certain blue-peopled movie that was a rip-off of Fern Gully, the flight is great. You get all the freedom and excitement you free from previous incarnations of galloping across Hyrule Field or sailing through a windblow sea, only far more hardcore; because your crazy ass jumps off a fucking cliff to get scooped up by a bird-monster that comes at your beck and call to whisk you away. Then once you reach your destination, you jump off your sky-beast and nonchalantly and parachute directly onto the spot you need to be.

And now I rave about the equipment, I'm at the point where I have obtained all possible necessary weapons and utility items, so I can speak to them as a whole: EPIC. Slingshot, which is upgradable with a scatter shot, barely worth mentioning. The bow takes annoyingly long to obtain, but has a charge-up/zoom in aspect that maxes out the amount of fun you can have bulls-eyeing switches and sniping moblins. The lame rope and claw given to us by the Windwaker has been replaced by a personal favorite of mine with nearly the same functionality but makes you fell like Indiana Jones, yep, and fucking WHIP! Grab hooks and swing, grab switches and pull them, steal items from enemies, tame lions, whatever you want, all done with a satisfying whipping motion and cracking sound(complete with a temple and enemy and furthers the fantasy in you head that you are Dr. Jones, I could practically hear Short Round). And now the best: Ever wish you could somehow scout over a ridge or across a canyon to see if you could make it there? Ever wish you could easily grab some rupees or hit a switch that landed on a cliff? Ever wish you could just snip the stem of a Deku Flower or web of a spider and get them out of the way? Ever wish you could call in an airstrike on ranged enemies out of reach? PROBLEM FUCKING SOLVED! Introducing a robotic beetle that's steampunk as hell that launches from your wrist. Scout and hit switches from distance, snip spider webs and send their smug asses dropping to their doom, upgrade the pincers and pick up fucking bombflowers! That's right, friends you are now able to stand in one spot and clear and entire area without taking a step. Instead call on you freaking medieval Predator drone and drop it like it's Libya up in here! Ideal for shutting the hell up some annoying frog-things that like to live in lava and sinky-sand and spit crap at you. It's rude and it deserves hell-fire from above. More later, it's time to play more.