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Here we go, finally a Skyward Sword fanart! I had a pretty bad addiction to bug catching while I was playing this. The only insect I managed to max out, though, were those pesky wasps.

Skyloft is my favorite environment in the game to look at; all the vibrant colors scattered everywhere give it a great inviting, artsy look. I’m sorry I doubted the art style prior to the release, as I started to really enjoy it as soon as I started playing. The visuals of several environments in particular (flooded Faron Woods, the sand sea, and the Eastern-inspired temple designs) had a sunny, sometimes melancholic, always peaceful atmosphere that I really enjoyed being in and exploring. Where Wind Waker’s art was more bold and attention-grabbing, the style of SS came across as more mellow overall, but once I got into it I found it very well-suited to the game.

I liked Skyward Sword. I liked it a lot, but in a different way than I usually like Zelda games. It reminded me of Mario Galaxy sometimes, in that it seemed to be seeking first and foremost to offer up a big colorful lighthearted world to play in and just have fun with. (This was reinforced by the few environments and designs that seemed SMG-inspired, such as the technological areas.) SS also reminded me strongly of the DS Zeldas, both in the gameplay and the writing, to the point that I almost felt like I was playing an expanded DS Zelda on a console. The motion controls were something that I could take or leave in the long run, although I thought they worked for this game and I did enjoy the added depth to combat and the greater sense of autonomy during battles. My enjoyment of Skyward Sword revolved heavily around the gameplay and environments, and my favorite parts of the game tended to be when I was just running around hunting down Goddess Cubes or exploring familiar areas for hidden things or just waving the sword around (with the exception of a few particularly memorable battles—the Ancient Cistern and Koloktos are now one of my all-time favorite Zelda dungeons and bosses, respectively).

Some of my favorite new things in SS were the Goddess Cube treasure hunts, the ability to exchange collected items for upgrades, the streamlining of simple actions (such as being able to run up walls or put bomb flowers into your bomb bag), the ability to customize your adventure pouch (I love giving myself huge arrow reserves or loading myself down with medals, though I wish the last two heart containers hadn’t required medals) and the multiple dialogue options and multiple endings for sidequests (it wasn’t used to great extent, but it was a fun touch and seems promising for the future). I found myself looking forward more to the segments in between the main quest than I did to actually progressing the story.

At the risk of being controversial, the story and characters were probably my main complaint with the game. (No, actually, my main complaint was that the Collection screen appeared every single time you picked up an item after a console restart, but that’s probably been mentioned to death by now.) It’s not a large complaint, as the story worked well enough—it kept me wanting to play ahead, and I liked what was done with Zelda’s and Impa’s characters—but I noticed a lack of depth in the way a lot of dialogue was written. I found the NPCs to be fairly superficial (and yet I found myself caring more about them than I did about the ones in TP, which was frustrating because I wanted them to tell me about their lives and their history and all the things that would justify my caring, but they were all mostly focused on outlining their straightforward problems as excuses to send me on sidequests), and the motivations for large-scale, world-impacting events tended to be left unexplained (generally it could be boiled down to evil creatures being evil because they’re evil—though this is admittedly not unusual for a Zelda story). Past Zelda games have often managed to imply a wealth of history or character depth with very little actual information given, and I’ve found that I prefer it when the dialogue aims to create the sense of a world and leaves the rest to imagination than when Nintendo actually tries to give straightforward explanations, because Nintendo’s explanations frequently come down to abstract concepts of good versus evil.

In short, I loved Skyward Sword for the bright, colorful new world it gave me to explore, for some very atmospheric battles and environments, and for the greater control it gave me over how I interacted with that world, but I wished that it had all been developed more in terms of lore and character interaction. I’m trying to figure out if it’s just my nostalgia goggles that cause me to put OoT up on a pedestal when it comes to those things (I am fully confident in putting WW and MM up on that pedestal, but I feel like the extent of the worldbuilding in both games was unusual within the series as a whole). There’s been a shift in the tone of Zelda games ever since the DS Zeldas, and as much as I like the DS Zeldas, they seem to have ushered in an era of more superficial NPCs and more generic lore—as well as, ironically enough, a greater focus on linear story.

It works well enough; I still really like these games. But when I turn off SS after a play session, I find myself thinking about all the things I did more than about the world I did them in. OoT, MM, and WW have always left me thinking about the universes and characters within them and trying to imagine my own interpretations for them, while SS makes me focus much more on my own interactions with the game world. But it’s a beautiful world, and that’s plenty for me to be happy with.