“Hey Ryan,” you say to me “you didn’t do one of these Zelda write-ups for August. Did you give up on it?”
No, I did not. There just wasn’t anything to report. I had completed Phantom Hourglass in June, and did not receive my copy of Skyward Sword HD until late July. It didn’t seem like there were any updates worth writing. But there is one now!
Skyward Sword HD is done, and… I don’t really remember how I felt about it in the end last time, but I had a pretty good time with this replay! While I believe that the motion controls are perfectly acceptable in the original version, I took advantage of the new “standard” controls that were implemented for the HD version, and they also work very well! I never thought it could be possible, given how deeply integrated the motion controls are into Skyward Sword, but Nintendo pulled it off!
Also, the game itself is still fairly good. Not quite as good as the other 3D Zeldas, but it’s a game that I had fun playing. Too much repetition and too much text bogged it down a bit, but otherwise a good Zelda adventure that clearly had a lot of influence on Breath of the Wild. You can start to see Nintendo breaking away from the Zelda formula in this one, and I for one am very glad that they did.
I also managed to both start and finish A Link Between Worlds during August. 2D Zelda games tend to have a lot less cruft to them, so it was a fairly quick playthrough. It also helped a lot that it’s just such a fun game that I had trouble putting it down and always looked forward to my next recording session (can’t really say that about Skyward Sword). It’s an excellent game and definitely should be one that I revisit more often than I currently do.
It’ll probably come as a shock to many, but ALBW slots in right underneath my top 3. I think it’s that as far as overall quality goes, ALBW and LTTP we neck-and-neck, but I find the former just a little bit more fun to play. Skyward Sword sits right in the middle of the list, easily the least-good of the fully 3D games, but still my favourite of the B-Tier games.
- Link’s Awakening
- Majora’s Mask
- The Wind Waker
- A Link Between Worlds
- A Link to the Past
- Twilight Princess
- Ocarina of Time
- The Minish Cap
- Skyward Sword
- Four Swords Adventures
- The Legend of Zelda
- Oracle of Seasons
- Oracle of Ages
- Phantom Hourglass
- Spirit Tracks
- The Adventure of Link