The 3D Era Zelda Games

[Vergil]

Despite the recommendations of pretty much everyone on this website I've asked I decided to try out Skyward Sword first because I find the artstyle charming and I need some that's pleasant to look at and runs at a framerate meant for human beings.

So far I like it well enough, the switch version I'm playing allows you to ignore motion controls and has some QoL features that make the gameplay have less interrupts. There are some more classic bizarre Nintendo design decisions though. They decided to add a stamina meter to Zelda and it's an extremely vestigial feature in this game. I really don't understand what the point of limited sprinting in games is in the first place as it has zero gameplay or mechanical system besides "go slow or alternate between going fast and then slow". It's even worse here because basically any decent sized path will be littered with stamina fruit to make your sprint essentially infinite anyway.
Even the short climbing sections are too afraid to make you do any sort of meter management and will often give you stamina fruit anyway.

For combat a stamina meter makes total sense you want to punish flailing strikes or overwhelming enemies with spam but for basic movement like running it's literally only there to slow down the game arbitrarily. You can't offset it either with upgrades and consumables like other games which is still an annoyance but at least there's some sort of management and decision making involved for the sake of convenience.

[wndrbr]

Skyward Sword is not good, but it has some neat new features that I liked. Adventure pouch, item upgrading. I liked the concept of overworld (surface) being more like a big dungeon, and some of the puzzles (especially in the sand region) were pretty cool albeit not developed to their full potential.

I thought the stamina bar was a good addition, it was just undercooked (like most of the good things in SS tbh). Most of SS's problems stem from dev not being confident in their motion control gimmick enough, so they had to make the game easy and dumb enough so it could be played even if the player doesn't really understand how to play it.

[KnightoftheWind]

I absolutely despise Skyward Sword, it's just a terrible game all around. And given that it's director is responsible for BOTW and TOTK also, I'd say Nintendo made a big mistake hiring him on.

[Tweed]

All 3D Zeldas are bad.

[A Chinese opium den]

Soyjack Sword.

[Oyster Sauce]

Don't break Peatrice's heart, you rascal

[Irenaeus]

I recommend Ocarina and Majora's, skip the rest.

[maidenhaver]

If you've played Wind Breaker, you've played the best 3d one.

[Oyster Sauce]

If you've played Wind Breaker, you've played the best 3d one.

It does so many things excellently, but it's the only 3D Zelda I haven't beaten because the end stuff is so ******* boring. Maybe the HD sail+changes makes it bearable.

[maidenhaver]

The ending was also cut for time. There was supposed to be a bigger castle dungeon, instead of ganon's tower.

[Vergil]

Really haven't encountered anything that makes me see why so many people hate Skyward Sword to this degree. Even the intro while a bit on the long side was easy enough to speed through as a first time player.

[Oyster Sauce]

Really haven't encountered anything that makes me see why so many people hate Skyward Sword to this degree. Even the intro while a bit on the long side was easy enough to speed through as a first time player.

Well if you've only played Skyrim you wouldn't get why people dislike the parts that were dumbed down.

[KnightoftheWind]

You probably had to play the Wii version to really understand why most people hate Skyward Sword. The entire game feels like a patronising chore. It's designers had very little respect for player intelligence, so they had "Fi", your annoying companion, chime in every 10 minutes to remind you how to wipe your own ***. Many characters in the game are also annoying, both from a design standpoint as well as dialogue, which lends the game a very juvenile aesthetic all around. Wind Waker, a game that looks more cartoonish, was more mature and meaningful than anything seen in Shitward Soyrd.

The plot feels inconsequential and meaningless. The events in the game would have transpired just the same whether or not Link was involved at all. A twist occurs later on that reveals that everything that was supposed to happen, already happened before you even set foot on the surface. The game also treats your entire adventure as a "trial", not as a result of Link's own drive to rescue Zelda, but as a mere test as if he were in grade school. You revisit the same areas again later in the game, and the Faron Woods segment has you doing the most ridiculous nonsense imaginable to continue the story. Basically the guardian of the area throws a tantrum and floods the entire forest, and asks you to collect musical tadpoles (really) to unflood the forest and to collect the next magical item.

Modern AAA games may be humiliation rituals, but Nintendo was doing it long before everyone else.

[Falksi]

Yeah, it's trash.

[J1M]

Really haven't encountered anything that makes me see why so many people hate Skyward Sword to this degree. Even the intro while a bit on the long side was easy enough to speed through as a first time player.

You underestimate how intrusive the motion controls were.

[Vergil]

You probably had to play the Wii version to really understand why most people hate Skyward Sword. The entire game feels like a patronising chore. It's designers had very little respect for player intelligence, so they had "Fi", your annoying companion, chime in every 10 minutes to remind you how to wipe your own ***.

You underestimate how intrusive the motion controls were.

It does seem like almost all of the biggest sticking points have to do with features that the devs have even themselves admitted were not up to par and have scaled back if not outright removed in the HD switch remaster. Motion controls are really terrible and ****** up an entire generation of games due to Nintendo's insistence on sunk cost fallacying that ******** gimmick. Not that other companies are free from this either playstation move and the kinect were also responsible for a lot of digital fecal spray.

[J1M]

Also, fighting the same bosses 3 times was lame.

[Tweed]

Is this the Zelda where Link gets the Master Sword and kills Ganon? I love that one!

[Vergil]

Is this the Zelda where Link gets the Master Sword and kills Ganon? I love that one!

this one got big bird

[Tweed]

Is this the Zelda where Link gets the Master Sword and kills Ganon? I love that one!

this one got big bird

[Vergil]

Is this the Zelda where Link gets the Master Sword and kills Ganon? I love that one!

this one got big bird

Nah loftwings are shoebills. TotK would have been the perfect game to reintroduce them.

[wndrbr]

Vergil only likes this game because he has the hots for Ghirahim.

[Greyborne]

I felt like Demise was a lazy villain. The battle was annoying, too. The Wii nun chuck will not be missed.

[wndrbr]

[Segata]

New Vergil avatar just dropped

[Vergil]

That guy is a gross weirdo and the first boss fight against him was weird and annoying. If you just spam right attack there's a 90% chance you'll get a hit trying to actually think about where his hand/sword is usually results in the finicky controls failing on you.

[Vergil]

The animation when Link goes to bed is cute UwU

[J1M]

I absolutely despise Skyward Sword, it's just a terrible game all around. And given that it's director is responsible for BOTW and TOTK also, I'd say Nintendo made a big mistake hiring him on.

Goodness is measured via sales sir.

[J1M]

If anyone can recommend more games like Zelda 64, especially ones native to PC, I would be interested. Preferably something that is family-friendly. Darksiders is great, but not an ideal choice due to the setting.

[SoLong]

I absolutely despise Skyward Sword, it's just a terrible game all around. And given that it's director is responsible for BOTW and TOTK also, I'd say Nintendo made a big mistake hiring him on.

Nah, it was fine for what it was. Fi was a bit overexposed through the games and I wanted to punch the water dragon, but I found the game had just the right mixture of gimmicks to keep it engaging without being overbearing. (The desert section with the time-shifting mechanic in particular was very good.)

Demise as a final villain was disappointing, particularly since he's the ultimate cause for Ganon existing. Ghirahim was... well, he was an incredibly powerful gay clown, which are terrifying even without the rampant psychosis. On the upside I've never seen a gay guy chase a girl this aggressively and prefer to think that the game was trying to subtly cure those so affected.

Many mechanics were not done cooking (the stamina wheel and item crafting) and the game aggressively re-visited areas by arbitrarily gating content and stretch the run time. Still, I actually liked the motion control aspect, and I say this as someone who played it on PC in a perfectly legal manner.

BOTW is actually one of my more beloved Zelda entries (as long as I mod out the ******* weapon durability, **** that trash with a rusty barbed-wire dildo) alongside Majora's Mask, Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time. I particularly liked the four champions and was impressed that they managed to cram so much personality into a couple of scenes for characters who are already dead by the time the game starts (I resent that some of it was DLC though). A game successfully making me sad on behalf of dead people is a surefire sign of quality, mostly because I otherwise contemplate killing characters I think are too annoying (hello there BG3).

I haven't actually played ToTK yes, I've been looking forward to it once I have more time. Apparently the game is a bit too gimmicky for its own good and someone told me that all that ancient machinery in the first game just disappeared (how the **** did that happen? How do you lose four gigantic WMDs the size of a mountain?), but it's not like it costs me mo- I mean more than a little effort to find a copy and check it out.