Terrible. Absolutely terrible. And god help you if you mistakenly decided to get the special edition like this particular poster. True, I did need another wiimote, but giving 70+ to this atrocity still stings a little inside. I have a list of about 50+ reasons as to why I despise the game, but I'll narrow it down to ten major ones.
1) Wii motion gimmicks are constantly shoved in your face.
Yeah, it's been said before, but it still warrants a mention considering that every single damn action in the game is attached to a wii mote gimmick of some kind which ruins the immersion of the game constantly. No matter how good the controls may be, Wii motion does not always work, and something that works only 95% of the time when a normal button or key press works 100% of the time is frustrating.
2) Exactly one person in the game has a decent character arc...and it's not Link or Zelda.
It's sort of an ongoing theme with Zelda that NPCs will rarely help you, but the level of incompetence and wooden-ness within this game's main cast is truly astounding. Zelda likes to run ahead of you with absolutely no protection, Zelda's father believes that sending you alone is sufficient, even though you're a barely trained knight, and doesn't even think to send any other knights along, despite them never doing anything except catching people who fall off the cliff. Dear god man, just install some more railings.
But the point is, no one in the game really does anything except for Link, Zelda, Groose, and Impa. And among those four, Zelda is the classic Dumb*** in Distress, Link is emotionless as always, and Impa is obsessed with making sure you prove your worth...and little else.
3) There is nothing at stake for me to care about.
The game would like you to believe that there is something that you're trying to save, but the village you're in is about 20+ people, and there is one single island in the game that's inhabited (no, I don't count the inn on the other side of the map). Point is, you're basically saving a village that never really feels the effects of what you're doing, unlike Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Twilight Princess.
4) Fi
Movie Bob called her the 'Exposition Fairy', an appropriate title. I personally call her 'The Sidekick That Can't Die Off Soon Enough'. She is annoying, intrusive, breaks the fourth wall to tell you that your wii mote batteries are running low, constantly repeats dialogue that you've already heard or inferred from the game itself, and she is really really really annoying.
Impa will forever be the benchmark for Zelda companions because she, unlike most other companions:
A) Had relevance to the story outside of just being a guide.
B) Had a good character arc and a personality.
C) Actually proved to be useful outside of giving advice.
As for Fi, she's about as helpful as Navi...and even more annoying. Oh yes, I went there.
5) Reoccurring Boss Battles
There are two bosses within the game, Girahim and Demise, which you must fight THREE TIMES EACH! Say what you will about the previous Zelda games, but one could never fully accuse them of making repetitive samey boss battles...until this one. Twice, Girahim will replace the final boss of a dungeon with himself and his familiar style of battle, and three times you must interrupt your quest to smack down Demise with a rolled up newspaper before continuing on.
One could argue that this was an attempt to make the final bosses of the game appear more intimidating and remind you who you're fighting and why you should care, but I'm pretty sure Ganondorf was able to do this just fine without jutting in every other dungeon and reminding you of the fact.
6) Proving your worth makes up about 90% of the game.
Yhatzee pretty much hit this nail on the head, so I'll be brief. This game is all about fetch quests. It felt like they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, trying to figure out some way to give Link an excuse to go dungeon diving, and all they could come up with was that he needed to prove his worth. When Impa actually said that I was 'late' and wasting my time in rescuing Zelda, I damn near blew a fuse and threw my wiimote through the TV. Thank god for wrist straps.
7) There are a lot of things that seem to only waste your time and artificially lengthen gameplay.
All the time spent flying is probably the main offender here. The world is empty and uninteresting, filled with a whole lot of nothing which makes flying from location to location boring and uninteresting. And considering you have to revisit a select few locations several times, you really start to feel the wear and tear of how pointless it all is. That also happens to bring me to my next point.
8) There are about three or four locations that you must revisit constantly rather than any sort of open world.
You constantly have to keep going back to the town to pick up items at the shop that you might need, you have three designated questing areas that seem to house all the temples you'll ever need to go to, and you have one floaty island in the middle of nowhere that you have to keep returning to to learn all the songs...rather than just learn all three of them the first time you come around.
9) The items are horrible.
There have been some truly stupid items in the Legend of Zelda series, some really great ones, and then you have the ones from Skyward Sword. You get a Beetle which is primarily a puzzle tool and adds yet another flying wiimote gimmick to the list, you get a Gust Bellows which is just a fancy term for 'Leaf Blower used to Blow Sand Away', you get a 'Whip' and I use the term loosely because even a lion tamer clown would be ashamed to use something so gaudy (it also has little to no effect on enemies), and then there are the Boss Keys. Oh dear god...the boss keys.
10) The boss keys are the final nail in the coffin.
Now, this may not apply to everyone, but to me, getting the boss key through whatever silly or ridiculous challenge they had in a dungeon was kind of like a milestone. A goal you had just achieved. Now that you had gotten this sacred key, you were about to fight the big bad. The ultimate bad guy of the level. The dungeon was over now and this big guy was going to be a test for everything you'd learned up to this point, most likely utilizing the item you'd just gotten from the dungeon. Placing that big key in that lock and running through the ominous door into the unknown always left me with a feeling of anticipation and excitement. You were nervous, sure, but you were also eager to see what the new challenge was.
But then, because fifty other gimmicks weren't enough, they had to include one more right before you could walk through the @#$%&$# door. This is one where you have to fit the key into the lock. And while this minigame might not necessarily be hard, chances are that it'll be a bit time consuming as you rotate the damn thing every which way with (what else) the wiimote until it fits. It's like hitting a toll booth on a roller coaster right before you hit the loop. And of course, you have to go through this with pretty much every boss door. And then, no matter how much fun or challenging the boss fight might be, I'm always left with that sour note and those few minutes of fumbling around with the key in the back of my mind, polluting the whole experience.
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And there you have it. A terrible game, a terrible experience, and the last time I'll ever impulsively buy a Zelda game, or a Nintendo game impulsively ever again.
