Sometimes, standing in line at a demo station, you watch the players ahead of you, and you think you’ve seen all you need to see.  Skyward Sword pleasantly surprised me by showing me I could be wrong.

The controls took a little getting used to, coming off the essentially digital waggling of Twilight Princess and into the modern world of Wii Motion Plus.  I felt that, although the sword tracking was accurate and impressive, it wasn’t exactly functional (don’t go thinking that your high school fencing lessons are going to carry over).  I’ll admit that it’s been awhile since I spun Twilight Princess in the ol’ Wii, but I’m pretty sure the controls were a lot more intuitive than Skyward Sword’s.  Switching between items and drawing your shield took a lot more conscious thought than on-the-fly action gaming should call for, but take that with a grain of salt.  The Zelda series has a bountiful history of easing players into its mechanics, so being dropped into the action with half an inventory of new toys is bound to be misleading.

Speaking of toys, we got a chance to play with a couple of the old stand-bys: potions, slingshot, bow, and a new, Predator-drone-like scarab, that you control remotely to grab items and explore otherwise impossible-to-reach locations.  Several different shields were also available to try out (wood, iron, and such), but no word on if these function as the traditional shield upgrade, or if they had different attributes that look for switching between play.

The only thing I don’t totally get about Skyward Sword is the art direction.  I suppose that the goal was to make is a lighter, friendlier affair than the dark gritty art direction behind Twilight Princess, but the lack of detail in textures just makes the graphic quality feel like a higher-ploygon count version of Ocarina of Time.  Even worse, it feels like Nintendo is admitting they did something wrong with Twilight Princess’s grittiness, like they followed that path just to prove they could.

If it sounds like I have a ton of problems with Skyward Sword, I really don’t.  It’s a Zelda game, and like other Zelda games, it was engrossing and exciting.  Also like other Zelda games, you have a pretty good idea of the jist of what you’ll be doing, so it’s hard to discuss much that you haven’t already seen.  But like the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

 HAWTwired Hype Level: 8/10

Zelda game is Zelda.  Which means it's still one of the better games ever put together.