Hold the controller over your head. The Master Sword glows. Point it at the screen, hit Y to recenter, and swing. On the screen, Link swings… kind of the right way. Then, your chatty companion, Fi, chimes in with a very long and earnest explanation of something you figured out several minutes ago. Rinse and repeat for about 40 hours, and that’s Skyward Sword, one of the most cinematic, heartrending, memorable stories Zelda has ever told — and the one saddled with the most finicky gameplay.
All the hallmarks of memorable storytelling are here. You meet and befriend a pompadoured bully who turns into a lovable ally. You can sneak a peek at a princess preserved in amber and wonder about the logistics of time-loop mechanics. You watch Link sigh and steel himself as he descends into dungeons, you feel Zelda’s heart break as she turns away from Link to follow her mentor Impa, you gasp when you figure out the true identity of the villainous Ghirahim. And, unfortunately, you also have to wrestle with the motion controls. If you’re playing it on the Switch, that is. At least you’re not wrangling the Wiimote. And if you are, my apologies.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi and produced by Eiji Aonuma, shipped for the Wii in November 2011. The Switch remaster, Skyward Sword HD, dropped 10 years later. The remaster helped fix some of the less-than-popular gameplay elements with autosave, a player-controlled camera, skippable cutscenes, and the ability to trade the motion controls for a button-only playing experience.
When the Zelda team decided to create an origin story for the Master Sword, the gimmick of the motion controls was built into the game’s premise. As part of Nintendo’s Iwata Asks series, Aonuma said the game’s real theme was “the sword which makes use of the Wii MotionPlus accessory,” asking the team to build the swordplay around the new peripheral. This resulted in control issues that caused many players to simply write the game off.
Which is a shame, because the story itself is brilliant. As the earliest game in the Zelda timeline, it follows a young Link as he prepares to graduate from the Knight Academy on Skyloft, a seemingly idyllic floating island. Graduation celebrations are a bit dampened when his best friend, Zelda, falls through the Sky Barrier hovering between Skyloft and the hidden, ominous surface land far below. Trying to find Zelda, Link stumbles through dungeons and faces absolutely terrifying Silent Realm trials. Along the way, you face off against villains that are sometimes less-than-scary (see: The Sandship’s “leviathan” that looks like a plush toy). Other foes rank among the best in the series (see: Koloktos, the many-armed construct Ghirahim wakes up in the Ancient Cistern). As you reach the end of the game, you’re forced to ask: Can Link reach Zelda in time? Or will your enemies get there first?
There are some story elements that introduce series-wide plot discrepancies, for sure. (It’s rumored that Fujibayashi wrote the game’s basic synopsis in a single day, and one possible justification for the entire sky island environment was simply that Fujibayashi wanted Link to jump down from a high place.) But I can forgive the odd plot hole when it’s found in a story that’s strong in so many other ways.
Skyward Sword stands out by including villains with stage presence and staging encounters and story beats against a sweeping orchestral score. This game’s final villain is Demise, the force of hatred personified, and the vengeful spirit that later becomes Ganon. Demise is aided and abetted by Ghirahim, a flamboyant swordsman who treats every fight like a campy performance. Each encounter you have with these foes feels directly out of a movie: Ghirahim duels you like a showman who’s already bored of winning, Koloktos looms over a flooded temple, and Demise, in a realm that looks like a storm above the sky, throws lightning you have to answer with perfectly timed Skyward Strikes (incredible).
The music backs the experience perfectly. It also holds secrets. The game’s main theme, “Ballad of the Goddess,” is Zelda’s Lullaby played backwards, an idea composer Hajime Wakai slipped in on his own and Aonuma called an intentional link between the Goddess and Zelda. That reversed lullaby is the game’s legacy in miniature: a melody the series keeps handing down and reimagining, and a hero and a princess reborn into the same story.
Shortly after the game launched, Aonuma told Official Nintendo Magazine, “I honestly think we cannot go back to button controls now.” A decade later, Nintendo went back to buttons. The Nintendo Switch version nearly matched the Wii original’s lifetime sales in just 77 days. The gimmick that justified the story turned out to be optional; the story itself is what stuck. And the dream behind Skyward Sword lived on, through other games. Fujibayashi, the game’s director, wanted Skyward Sword’s Link to drop out of the sky and just keep going, a dream he later realized in Tears of the Kingdom, where you can dive off a sky island straight down to the Depths, without ever stopping on the surface.
But the dream started in Skyloft, and so did the bargain: You get Zelda’s most memorable story, and you pay for it with frustrating controls, a companion who explains everything twice, and a massive whale-like demon boss you need to fight three separate times. Rinse, recenter, repeat. Don’t worry: Fi will let you know when you’ve landed the strike and are ready to move on.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD is available to play on Nintendo Switch.