The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD Review in Progress

I’m 30+ hours into The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD and it’s reminded me how much I loved this game when it originally came out on the Wii a decade ago, warts and all. (Not as much as IGN’s reviewer at the time, but quite a bit). The story and characters are some of the best in the series and the side quests and weirdness of the world are fantastic. On the other hand, the dungeons (and especially the boss fights) aren’t particularly challenging or memorable for the most part, and the gimmicky Wii-era motion control mechanics are still constantly right up in your face, reminding me why those never worked well. But with so much to do and a lot to love, Skyward Sword’s journey down memory lane has kept me smiling so far.

Because this is a big Zelda game with dozens of hours of stuff to do and we only received review code late last week, I’m going to hold off on a final review until I’ve completed the main story later this week. Until then, I wanted to focus on some of the biggest lingering questions around this version: its controls (new and old) and its graphical facelift.

When it debuted in 2011, there was a lot of discussion around Skyward Sword’s heavy use of motion controls – and now, with the remaster offering both motion-based and thumbstick control options, that debate seems primed to reignite. Even with motion controls disabled, nearly every battle and puzzle incorporates the direction in which you swing Link’s trusty blade and you’re often asked to draw a symbol on a wall or some other task that was clearly built with the Wii Remote in mind. Using motion controls on the Switch, Skyward Sword feels very much on par with the original version, both good and bad. Swinging your detached Joy-con around at an enemy can be a lot of fun, but flapping your arms like a bird to get your Loftwing to fly higher is pretty annoying. And, naturally, when it occasionally doesn’t detect your movement correctly it’s just frustrating and not fun.

The motion-control debate seems primed to reignite.

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.

Every IGN Zelda Review Score

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.

The new stick controls make sense on paper but can be counterintuitive in practice.

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.

I’ve always considered the visual style of Skyward Sword to be one of the best in the series, and it’s now all the more beautiful.

On the bright side, Skyward Sword HD adds the ability to fully control the camera, which was absent in the Wii version, but the caveat here is that it uses the same joystick as your sword in motion-free mode. Since you use the right thumbstick to control the camera normally, when that stick is occupied serving as your sword arm, you instead need to hold down L to move the camera then release it to regain control of your sword, which can be a bit clunky. Still, it’s a welcome addition, and if you’re playing with motion controls (as I ended up doing most of the time) then it’s a huge improvement over the Wii version.

The other major change in Skyward Sword HD is its improved appearance which, in contrast to the controls, Nintendo has completely nailed. I’ve always considered the visual style of Skyward Sword to be one of the best in the series, and the 1080p/60 FPS upgrade when playing docked makes the already lovable world of giant birds and creepy mole people all the more beautiful. It’s still not as detailed or smooth as Breath of the Wild, but it’s a massive improvement over the 480p/30 FPS (!) Wii version.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD screenshots

Aside from these major changes, there’s also a bunch of little quality-of-life stuff that wasn’t in the original, like skippable dialogue and cutscenes, autosaves, tutorials at the beginning that are now optional, and no more repeated item explanations every single time you pick something up. These are great changes that genuinely add up to make a noticeably smoother experience – although, there is one bizarre one in their midst: the not-insignificant new ability to instantly return to the sky at any time is inexplicably locked behind owning a specific Amiibo. Why? Because Nintendo, that’s why!

I still have a ways to go before I’m done, but so far Skyward Sword remains as charming as ever, even if it’s also still dominated by clunky controls and odd gimmicks that are exactly as weird as you remember them. Unsolved control issues aside, this airborne adventure is everything you might expect it to be, for better or worse.

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