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The Legend of Zelda™: Skyward Sword HD [Jul 16, 2021 ]

Keyser_Soze

By Keyser_Soze
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gamer.tv

gamer.tv

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21 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

I'm glad they give you the option to play without motion controls, but even though I never finished Skyward Sword, I'm not really tempted to spend $60 on this version.

 

I'm not, though I do wonder how much more engaging the game would be without any unnecessary waggle - and the fact it can be played as a handheld is always tempting with games like this...

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crispy4000

crispy4000

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IGN switched back to motion controls after trying it the other way:

 

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For those who typically aren’t into motion controls – a category in which I include myself – there’s an option to disable them altogether. Unfortunately, the replacement is every bit as much of a pain in the neck and doesn’t really solve the problem I have with the motion controls. It’s not that I hate exercise or swinging my arm around – it’s that I hate how unreliable they are. But the motion-free answer to this, which is the only way to play in handheld mode or on a Switch Lite (unless you buy another controller) is that the right joystick serves as a directional pointer that you flick around in place of swinging your arm, and there are just as many issues with that.

For one, you actually have to flick the stick around for a swing to register, not move it slowly. If you do, Link merely draws back his sword in preparation for an attack – he’ll only swing it once you rapidly flick the stick in a direction. Because you can’t take your time to line up those inputs, this means you end up with the exact same issues of inaccuracy as you’d get from motion controls.

On top of that, the way the stick has to be moved makes sense on paper but can be a little counterintuitive in practice. For example, if an enemy is guarding to your right, my instincts tell me to input toward the left to hit his unguarded side. But flicking the stick to the left swings my sword from right to left and immediately gets blocked. Like playing with an inverted camera, in order to hit the enemy I have to do the opposite of what my instinct naturally wants to and move the joystick to the right so that Link will swing his sword from left to right and hit the enemy’s unguarded side. I might've chalked this up to a problem unique to my broken brain, but another IGN staffer had the exact same issue trying to swing the sword in the intended direction. At the very least it takes a few hours for the unintuitively strange controls to start feeling natural.

In fact, I ultimately ended up switching back to motion controls because at least then I knew which way to swing the controller to get the desired result more naturally. That’s a huge miss for people like me who were hoping for a more reliable option, or for people who pick up Skyward Sword for the first time only to be presented with two less-than-ideal options. To be fair, motion controls are so baked into Skyward Sword’s DNA that there might well be no good way to get around the problem no matter what, but either way the route Nintendo landed on is disappointing.


https://www.ign.com/articles/the-legend-of-zelda-skyward-sword-hd-review

 

 

That’s about what I expected.  Mapping this game’s sword controls to the joystick isn’t a simple fix.  There will be a learning curve regardless.

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Jason

Jason

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8 hours ago, gamer.tv said:

 

I'm not, though I do wonder how much more engaging the game would be without any unnecessary waggle - and the fact it can be played as a handheld is always tempting with games like this...

 

I already forgot where saw something about the lack of ability to orient the joycon toward the TV is a downgrade from the Wii experience with regard to the motion controls.

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TwinIon

TwinIon

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ArsTechnica preferred the new control scheme:
 

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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.

 

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.

 

 

The problem from that reviewer with the new controls is that with the sword mapped to the right stick, you have to hold L to free-rotate the camera.

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1 hour ago, stepee said:

That doesn’t sound so bad to me actually. I’ll probably pick this up tomorrow since it won’t go down in price just to check out the controls and see how it looks, then play it after ys9.

 

Impressions asap please.

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Nokt

Nokt

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22 hours ago, best3444 said:

Impressions asap please.

Non-motion controls are not great. Not horrible to adapt to, but the little I remember from the short amount of time I played it on the Wii motion controls were easier. I have not tried motion controls out yet as I wanted to give non-motion a good chance.

Having to push L to move the camera around is extremely tedious. I find myself just targeting to get the camera to shift to where I am running more often than not.

1 hour ago, Captain Pickle said:

Played for 10 minutes last night. First impression, link looks stupid 

Indeed, his facial expressions just make me laugh at its stupidity.

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57 minutes ago, Nokt said:

Non-motion controls are not great. Not horrible to adapt to, but the little I remember from the short amount of time I played it on the Wii motion controls were easier. I have not tried motion controls out yet as I wanted to give non-motion a good chance.

Having to push L to move the camera around is extremely tedious. I find myself just targeting to get the camera to shift to where I am running more often than not.

Indeed, his facial expressions just make me laugh at its stupidity.

 

Awful news. Thanks for the impressions.

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Nokt

Nokt

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5 hours ago, best3444 said:

 

Awful news. Thanks for the impressions.

Okay, its not as bad as I thought.

 

I'm probably just an idiot, but I had the impression that in order to swipe your sword a specific direction you had to put the sword in the opposite side and swipe. So lets say left to right swipe, your put the sword to the left and then swipe all the way right. Nah, you just literally just flick from the neutral stick position. Made combat much more tolerable. Camera still sucks though.

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crispy4000

crispy4000

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3 hours ago, Nokt said:

Okay, its not as bad as I thought.

 

I'm probably just an idiot, but I had the impression that in order to swipe your sword a specific direction you had to put the sword in the opposite side and swipe. So lets say left to right swipe, your put the sword to the left and then swipe all the way right. Nah, you just literally just flick from the neutral stick position. Made combat much more tolerable. Camera still sucks though.


After reading impressions it really sounds like learning to use a second analog stick all over again, without knowing if you prefer inverted or not.  With some people it will gel immediately.  With others, it’ll be a struggle.

 

To be fair, motion controls also had a learning curve, and that’s something I actually enjoyed about the experience.
 

 Every so often you’ll find someone who prefers waggle in TP because it’s not deliberate.  It’s messier and more tacked on, but more forgiving.  TP is also the most button-mashy Zelda has ever been if you use traditional controls.

 

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Keyser_Soze

Keyser_Soze

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3 minutes ago, Biggie said:

Butthurt?

 

No not really.

 

13 minutes ago, GameDadGrant said:

Haven’t started it yet. Yep. I buy a game, then don’t play it for a week or two. Or ever. It should be a personal meme for me by this point.

 

I think everyone has that meme.

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MarSolo

MarSolo

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BOTW just immediately throwing you into the world and telling you to have fun has spoiled me. All this fucking “oh no, Link your Loftwing is missing and you have to find it, ask around to find it” is so damn tedious and fucking boring.

 

The controls aren’t too bad so far.

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imthesoldier

imthesoldier

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22 minutes ago, MarSolo said:

BOTW just immediately throwing you into the world and telling you to have fun has spoiled me. All this fucking “oh no, Link your Loftwing is missing and you have to find it, ask around to find it” is so damn tedious and fucking boring.

 

The controls aren’t too bad so far.

 

I feel Skyward Sword was really bad at that not so much because of Nintendo being Nintendo, but rather this was the Wii era where the "casual" gamer started getting into games, and thus, Nintendo thought newer gamers needed more handholding.

 

Unfortunately for the rest of us, it meant that we had to be on the short end of said handholding, and it made the game rather tedious, and boring at first. So in this regard, I'm glad they "fixed" a lot of that, and made it all optional, controls included.

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Keyser_Soze

Keyser_Soze

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25 minutes ago, MarSolo said:

BOTW just immediately throwing you into the world and telling you to have fun has spoiled me. All this fucking “oh no, Link your Loftwing is missing and you have to find it, ask around to find it” is so damn tedious and fucking boring.

 

The controls aren’t too bad so far.

 

There are no loftwings in BOTW so you would have to find one.

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MarSolo

MarSolo

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1 hour ago, imthesoldier said:

 

I feel Skyward Sword was really bad at that not so much because of Nintendo being Nintendo, but rather this was the Wii era where the "casual" gamer started getting into games, and thus, Nintendo thought newer gamers needed more handholding.

 

Unfortunately for the rest of us, it meant that we had to be on the short end of said handholding, and it made the game rather tedious, and boring at first. So in this regard, I'm glad they "fixed" a lot of that, and made it all optional, controls included.


Yeah, it feels weird going back to this type of Zelda game after messing around with BOTW and A Link to the Past for so long.

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