I beat two similar games recently, so I’m going to make one post about both games and compare them.

These games are action-adventures, but if you’ve played as many games as I have, you’ll know that this genre label doesn’t really mean anything as it has been applied to everything from stealth games to crowd-combat beat ‘em ups. So, how do these games actually play? Well, I used to think it was a combination of puzzle-solving and combat, but as I played these games (Skyward Sword especially), I came to a realization: the Zelda games don’t have puzzles; they have gimmicks. The formula is usually “enter dungeon, see new objects, wait until you get the dungeon’s item, then use said item to interact with the new objects.” Unlike actual puzzles, there’s no need to stop and think about what you can do and how everything reacts to what you can do, as once you figure that out, you’ll instantly know what you have to do to progress. If you ever get stumped, it isn’t because the puzzle is hard, but because you haven’t found all of the pieces to the puzzle yet. You see, whenever the solution isn’t immediately obvious, you usually have to look around the room until you find the object you need to interact with (this is where the “challenge” for the “puzzles” comes into play), at which point the solution will become immediately obvious yet again. From the beginning of the games to the end, the “puzzles” never get harder, or even more obtuse; they just kinda flatline into either boredom or aimless wandering since the mechanics of the “puzzles” don’t really provide anything to build off of, with later dungeons merely going “hey, remember this gimmick? Do that again.” In other words, the games’ “puzzles” play out more like a hidden object game, just like Portal 1’s “puzzles.”

With that said, Twilight Princess does have a couple actual puzzles in it, giving it the edge in this category. For example, in order to get the Master Sword, you have to hop across platforms, but when you do, two statues will move based on where you jumped, and the goal is to get both statues on specific tiles at the same time. Later, in the ice dungeon, there’s a block-sliding puzzle where you have to push three blocks across ice (meaning they’ll keep sliding until they hit something solid) until you can get one of the blocks to stop on a switch that unlocks the way forward. The closest Skyward Sword has to a real puzzle is in the Triforce dungeon where you have a sliding puzzle with tiles that correspond to the dungeon’s rooms, and you have to slide them around to connect the doors and make a path forward, but you can’t move the tile representing the room you’re in, so you have to settle on a partial solution, then look for another sliding puzzle in another room.

But still, if you’re looking for puzzles, I wouldn’t recommend any Zelda game (except maybe that Twilight Princess Picross game).

Now, we’re on to the second main aspect of the games: the combat. Following the trend set by Ocarina of Time, combat is removed from the rest of the game, so if you’re in battle, you don’t have to worry about environmental hazards or anything; just the enemy. Heck, even when there are multiple enemies, it isn’t uncommon to be able to focus on and kill one before worrying about the others. In Twilight Princess, there are two main strategies for defeating enemies: run up to them and mash the B button, or run up to them and mash the B button as a wolf. Ah, but there are also a few enemies that will force you to rethink your strategy, such as twilight birds that will be evasive at first then charge at you, or white wolves that will be evasive at first then charge at you. Despite the incredible depth present here, Skyward Sword manages to be even more complex by using the WiiMote’s patented waggle technology to do its level best to try to figure out which direction you’re swinging it, then swing Link’s sword accordingly. You’ll need to utilize this mechanic, too, since enemies will often block your attacks if you swing the WiiMote in the wrong direciton (or the Wii thinks you swung it in the wrong direction). However, honestly, neither game gets very challenging outside of boss fights. As for boss fights themselves, they’re usually well done; since almost each boss uses the dungeon gimmick in some way, it adds (at times much needed) variety to the battles instead of the usual “run up to them and mash the B button” affair. Despite Skyward Sword getting the edge in this category due to its extra layer of combat, you’ll find yourself mostly fighting the same goblin enemy throughout the game (and I’m pretty sure this goblin enemy doesn’t require the skill mentioned previously, instead simply being defeated if you waggle at it enough). When you reach the third area and see the goblins with electric swords (which will hurt you if the goblin blocks your attack), you might think the game is starting to get more challenging, but then the game realizes what it has done and goes back to using regular goblins (except sometimes they’re a different color, and that’s the only difference). Sure, there are also non-goblin enemies like the spiders and hermit crabs, but those are few and far between, and the hermit crabs are mostly used for a gimmick involving quicksand, then they’re forgotten.

A third major point of comparison is how the games treat fast-travel points. In Twilight Princess, you’ll regularly be attacked by a specific type of enemy that, at first, isn’t that different from the other enemies, but when there’s only one left alive, it will screech and bring its comrades back to life. In order to beat them, you need to kill them all at once using the wolf’s spin attack: Midna will make a circle around you, and releasing the button will make you charge at each enemy in said circle, one by one, and instantly kill them (unless, of course, you bump into the wall mid-charge, which sometimes can’t be predicted, at which point the attack is cancelled and you’ll have to sit through another screech). Defeating all of these enemies will create a way-point that you can teleport to at any time (unless someone can see you, at which point you have to go a bit further away to hide, or if it’s the way-point that’s over the bridge that collapsed, at which point you’ll have to teleport somewhere else and walk). Skyward Sword makes some notable improvements on this formula. First, you don’t have to fight groups of the same enemy over and over to unlock the next way-point; you merely have to reach it. Second, way-points are more common, so you don’t have to walk as far to reach where you need to go. However, there’s one major problem introduced here: you can’t instantly travel to a way-point whenever like in Twilight Princess, or even from one way-point to another. Instead, you have to travel to the Hyrule Field of this game, Skyloft, then turn around and fly back to the entrance of the area, but that’s only if you want to go to another way-point in that area; if you need to go somewhere else, you need to fly across the vast, empty sky until you get there, and there’s no stamina speed-up here; you have to wait the entire painstaking amount of time it takes your bird to fly from one area to the next. Keep in mind this is opposed to Twilight Princess’s way-points, which are primarily there so the player doesn’t have to trek through Hyrule Field each time. Sometimes, there will be small rock tunnels that will give your bird a speed boost, but there aren’t even enough of those for the four main areas you’ll need to fly back and forth from. The game would have been improved if it simply let you teleport directly from one way-point to another, including the ones on Skyloft which, without the way-point feature, only serve as save-points. It’s worse if you want to get a treasure from a sky-stone. First, you need to find them on the surface, then hit them with a Skyward Strike (hold the WiiMote straight up for a second, then swing), then go back to the sky and fly to whichever distant rock the treasure chest spawned on. This whole “flying to the islands” part is nothing but padding; it would have been better if the game just gave you the item when you hit the sky-stone. Because of this, Twilight Princess gets the edge again despite its way-points having problems that were improved on in Skyward Sword.

Despite these games being so similar, each game has a few specific things about them I’d like to mention. First, let’s address some of Twilight Princess’s more gimmicky mechanics.

Near the beginning of the game, you’re introduced to a grapple mechanic: the game will flash “(A) Push” on screen, and based on that information, you’d think you’d have to push the A button at the right time, but that will get you hurt; instead, you have to hold the button well beforehand and you’ll be able to grapple the NPC no problem (at which point you hold left or right to toss it aside). Aside from its introduction, this mechanic only comes into play twice: once for the midboss of the second dungeon, and again near the end of the game, at which point you’ve probably forgotten about it.

Another gimmicky mechanic in the game is a wrestling mini-game where you have three moves, each acting as a sort of rock-paper-scissors move to the opponent, but there’s really no way to predict or react to the opponent’s moves, making it one of the most annoying parts in the game. Plus, it only shows up twice: once right before you get the iron boots and again right before you can enter the second dungeon. It doesn’t even show up as a “remember this gimmick?” segment at the end, though I’d prefer if it wasn’t there at all and the time spent making it was instead used to improve other aspects of the game (in fact, this is a remake; why didn’t they do that?).

However, as much as I dislike the wrestling mini-game, the worst part of the game would have to be horse combat. Once again, this only shows up near the beginning and near the end, but the main issue is that the horse controls are meant for going forward fast; they aren’t built to be easily maneuverable. You need to be going fast to reach your target, but if you miss, you practically have to come to a complete stop to reorient yourself. This is much worse when it’s done near the end of the game, since on top of the awkward horse controls, you need to rely on an NPC to stun the boss (otherwise, getting close will result in the boss attacking you and not the other way around).

Lastly, I should mention the hardest part of the game: it’s when you’re going through the woods right before you get to the Sacred Grove. You’re stuck as a wolf for this part, so you only have melee attacks and can’t use any of your items. You also climb ledges slower. In order to progress, you have to find and attack a skull kid, and when you do, it runs off to another part of the woods, and while you’re looking for him, he’ll constantly summon puppet enemies to attack you. Because of the aforementioned slower climbing of ledges, you can’t outrun them since, when you go to climb a ledge, they’ll catch up with and attack you. However, your regular attack is also slow, and since they come in groups of four, one of them will usually hit you during your fight. Of course, you have your “kill everyone in a circle” attack while in wolf form as I mentioned earlier, but if you remember, the attack is cancelled if you happen to run into a wall, at which point the enemies once again have an opening to attack you. Plus, you start with three hearts after Game Over (and you only have six hearts max at this point) and you can’t go back to get fairies in your bottles since you’re a wolf and can’t use items, and since you get trapped in wolf form right after a boss fight, you don’t exactly have the ability to prepare for this part, either. It’s quite frustrating, especially on Hero Mode where you’re stuck with those three hearts since you can’t get any from enemy drops or from cutting grass.

Now, let’s go back to Skyward Sword.

First, its motion controls. I’m guessing this was one of the first games to use the Wii Motion Plus since the game begins with an unskippable five minute cut-scene detailing how to use it (which I didn’t need since my WiiMote had Wii Motion Plus built in). Just when you think it’s over, BAM: this is how you use it with the nunchuck! this is how to recalibrate it! this is how you cook eggs with it! Like, I know that already; just let me play the game! Oh, but before that can happen, you have to calibrate the Wii Motion Plus by leaving the WiiMote on a flat surface for a few seconds, then point it at the center of the screen to calibrate…something. What I don’t understand is why it has to do that second part when the IR sensor is capable of knowing where the WiiMote is pointing onscreen by itself. Plus, whenever you pull out an item that requires pointing at the screen to use, it defaults the center to whichever direction you happen to be pointing the WiiMote at the time anyway. I’ve read that the game uses the IR sensor to re-calibrate itself, but I never noticed that happen in my experience. As far as registering swings, the WiiMote is fairly accurate, but as I mentioned previously, it does tend to mess up from time to time (what’s especially annoying is when it registers a diagonal slash, as I’m pretty sure that’s never required in the whole game and gets blocked whenever a specific slash is needed to attack an enemy).

Next, Skyward Sword’s stamina mechanic. I don’t mind the added ability to run, but it seems like this was only added as an excuse to add large, empty areas. Yeah, Twilight Princess also has some large, empty areas (notably the entrance to the Temple of Time), but IIRC they weren’t this frequent. Plus, it also seems like the only reason the stamina has a limit to it is so they could make quicksand rivers that you can only just barely run across before your stamina runs out, at which point you have to sit there and wait for it to refill before running across the next stretch of quicksand.

Also, I already mentioned how the game likes to reuse the generic goblin enemies over and over, but this isn’t its only reuse of enemies. Lizalfos are reused as a miniboss well after they’ve been established as ordinary enemies, and you have to fight The Imprisoned (a proper boss) three times throughout the game. What makes that last detail especially annoying is the fact that the first time you fight the boss is the hardest: Each time you fight it, you have to defeat it before it reaches a specific point on the map, but not only does it have a charge attack (that it only uses during its first battle) that both can’t be stopped and sends it further along the path, but the second and third time you fight it, you have a weapon that can stun it for a brief period of time. Oh, and on top of this, the game reuses entire areas at times. For example, before you can get to the fourth dungeon, you have to re-traverse the first dungeon. The only difference is that one of the doors is locked again, but since you already got the keys from the treasure chests already, you have to use the gimmick from the second dungeon to find another key.

Speaking of the first dungeon, I’d like to mention an especially annoying gimmick the game introduces here (then subsequently forgets about, just like the wrestling in Twilight Princess): shortly into the dungeon, you reach a locked door with an eye symbol above it. Even if you didn’t know that Zelda puzzles typically involve shooting eyes, you’d know that your most recent item was the slingshot, but when you equip it to shoot the eye, it shuts itself. If you try to use a Skyward Strike to hit it from a distance, it will just blink the attack away. So, how do you get past this part? Well, it turns out you have to move the sword in a circular pattern to make the eye dizzy. Nothing in the game before this point established that this was even a possibility, and nothing like it is done since.

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Before I conclude, I should compare the games’ final bosses. In Twilight Princess, the first phase of the boss reuses the tennis match from Ocarina of Time (which, arguably, was itself reused from A Link To The Past); the only difference is that when the boss is stunned, that counts as the attack rather than you having to run up to the boss and mash the B button (this threw me for a bit until the cut-scene played that transitions from the first phase to the second phase). The second phase has the boss charge at you, and you have to shoot the glowy part to stun it so you can attack it. However, after doing this twice, it will avoid your arrows and Minda will tell you to transform into wolf form, but even here, the boss will just ram into you. After a bit, you’ll see the “(A) Push” prompt again, meaning the game is bringing back that old gimmick without doing anything different. You have to push the boss to its side and attack it enough times that it starts to get rather repetitive, then the boss transitions to its third phase: the horse combat I mentioned earlier. The only annoying part about this fight I didn’t mention is that the final boss can summon ghost horses, and each time you’re attacked (whether by a ghost horse or the final boss), you’re knocked off your horse and have to get back on and start moving again (and while you’re trying to reorient yourself, the final boss can turn around and hit you again). After this is the boss’s final form, and you might think that after everything you’ve had to put up with to get past its third form that this would be even more difficult, but no: you can beat the boss simply by spamming the “roll around and attack from behind” move; no strategy or thought needed.

In contrast, Skyward Sword’s final boss does require a bit of thought due to the fact that you have to swing the WiiMote in certain ways to avoid being countered. However, similar to The Imprisoned, this is just a slightly upgraded version of a boss you’ve fought twice already. The first phase has you attacking the defenseless boss until you knock it off the ledge, then you jump down and start again, except when it gets near the edge of the latter ledges, it will hold out its hands and you have to swing your sword without hitting its hands. After this, the boss gets a bit more serious about attacking you, and you need to counter its attacks (or block them if you have a shield) to create an opening and attack back. After a bit, it will summon a giant sword that it will use to block your attacks, and you probably won’t notice that you have to attack the sword perpendicular to how the boss is guarding in order to break the sword (mainly because the boss will restore the sword if you don’t attack it successfully). It was around this point in the game where I realized the game rewarded slow but accurate attacks as opposed to quick attacks because the boss will sometimes rotate the sword after you attack it successfully, but then the boss will casually wait there for you to attack it again (and only an unsuccessful attack provokes the boss to knock you away and restore the sword). After defeating this phase, you can save and restore your health, then tackle the third phase, whose only real difference from the first part of the second phase is that you can only hit it once after a successful block/counter, making the battle a bit tedious. The fourth and final phase gives the boss an electric sword; if you’re too close to the boss for too long, it will summon a lightning bolt and knock you away, and if you’re away from the boss for too long, it will charge at you and attack. The way you defeat the boss is by stunning it with a Skyward Strike, then wailing on it, but what makes the fight annoying is that the game changes how the Skyward Strike’s mechanic works: rather than hold the WiiMote straight up and wait for the sword to glow, you have to hold the WiiMote straight up for a variable amount of time (it’s almost never the same) and wait for lightning to strike it; if lightning strike’s the boss’s blade first, you won’t be able to charge a Skyward Strike, but if you do it first, you can pretty much keep stunning and attacking the boss until you win. Also, this is the only battle where the Skyward Strike comes into play; at all other times, it’s just a slight extension of your regular sword attack (not even that far ranged), and it’s much more convenient to go right up to the enemy and swing your sword than to try to get the WiiMote to register you pointing it up, then wait for the charge.

You may be expecting me to make a verdict on which game is better, but honestly, I don’t think I’d recommend either of these games. The combat is okay, but the hidden-object-style “puzzles” and its slash-and-burn approach to its gimmicks are something I’m not a fan of. Plus, each game has a bunch of little issues that may even dissuade people who genuinely enjoy hidden-object games.

P.S. I think I’ll stop doing my “next time on” segments as I’ve already had to make so many exceptions, even not counting my portable backlog.