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. 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. The world around them isn't as timeless without the aid of natural CRT effects, though. 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. One particular issue comes from the game's incredibly low-resolution textures, since they're juxtaposed against vibrant 3D character designs.
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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.īut booting the 2011 game on a modern higher-resolution LCD panel exposes the Wii's inability to process such an aesthetic in timeless fashion. Skyward Swor d 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. Sadly, this ten-years-later project fumbles the most obvious path to re-release improvement: the visuals. Something is missing from the shading or lighting pipeline to give them any sort of depth or discernible volume. Your eyes do not deceive you: those boulders are in a Nintendo adventure game from 2011.
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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.
Wind Waker's open seas ultimately felt more alive and creatively packed than Skyward Sword's sparsely dotted skies. 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. 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. 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. And control foibles nearly drown out the series' best writing and characters in years.
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. You may not find a more uneven tour de force in gaming this year.
I didn't catch a puff, as I wrote the following for the now-defunct, iPad-only outlet The Daily in November 2011: I honestly am not sure what sweet Hyrulian grass most critics were smoking during Skyward Sword's original pre-release period. "Coolly received" Skyward Sword? But Ars Technica printed a rave review! So did others! (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. 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. 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.īut 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. Further Reading The diminishing value of gaming’s “HD remakes”In the intervening years, expectations for "HD" versions of older games have exploded, primarily because gamemakers have gotten better at this.
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