Leave Luck to Heaven #8: Skyward Sword Trailer Breakdown
This week, ending today, is the US GDC for 2011. As every year there were many announcements including a Guild Wars 2, more specs on Sony’s NGP, a couple Xbox 360s red ringing on the demo floor, and a new video featuring The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. This video seems to have quelled a lot of naysayers, and while I look forward to the game the video seems to have raised some issues to me.
The Video
Okay, first, let’s take note that this game is supposed to take background art inspiration from the impressionist Paul Cézanne and yet very little is shown outside and more on dark drab areas. Doesn’t seem to emphasize the style in my opinion but maybe some would argue.
Motion Plus
The MotionPlus is definitely emphasized. In fact the outline of the Wii Remote, that is super prevalent in the video, is clearly one with a glove and motion plus attached to it. Now the use of MotionPlus is not new, as Nintendo mentioned its use since at least last year’s E3. However, many of the seasons suggest that a good portion of the game is focused on how and from which direction you strike from. This goes so far as to put blue lines on the seemingly less important enemies. I guess at least the rope balancing scene didn’t require the Balance Board.
Now this isn’t to say that it is all bad. The video also shows that swinging at certain objects makes dynamic cuts entirely based on the direction. With this tight handling however, hopefully within the options the game can be set for those that are not right handed. (Like Link use to be.)
New Item
The new item featured in the video looks to be either a way to see ahead or from a new angle or more likely a flying bomb. I say this because of the bombchus of Ocarina of Time giving a land based bomb. Now unfortunately, we didn’t see it making contact with anything or even an enemy on the screen. Hopefully, this isn’t the only new item unless it turns out to be a much cooler thing than what my guesses are.
New Villain
Based on the video this guy is clearly a new villain. With Twilight Princess they showed Zant and he turned out to be more of a secondary villain to Ganondorf. Based on the story of this game potentially taking place before all the others timeline wise, I’m not sure we should hold out for Ganondorf to be the main villain. Now at the same time, I would gamble that there is a larger villain behind this or that the villain shown in some way gets additional power.
Overall
At the end of the day, this video isn’t really long enough to show anything. Now, if this is all that is to be expected, then we might have problems.