I have it! So far so good. I'm loving the water color styles, and the controls are very nice even if I need to "recalibrate" the center every now and then (it appears it isn't using the infrared for that, oddly enough). One thing I'll note is there are save points, which is odd considering Zelda as a whole has simply let you save anywhere (even if only recent ones let you continue from anywhere). I consider them a step back, but fortunately they seem plentiful.
I just really haven't been feeling Skyward Sword. Maybe if word from people around the forums is positive enough I'll get excited for it, but right now I'm too deep into Skyrim and Saints Row 3 to really care about anything else [except Arkham City].
There are a LOT of good games coming out right now, so I understand that. However when you get some free time get this game if you can. The special edition controller has the benefit of being an actual USEFUL bonus item.
Incidentally, Arkham City is amazing too. The Riddler's riddles are much better this time around. There's death trap rooms he thinks are impossible to solve, as well as riddles you solve with your words instead of photos (though there are still photo riddles). The showcase though are the giant warehouses rigged with deadly puzzles you need to solve to work your way to save some poor victim. I loved those things. The boss battles are much more varied this time around, as opposed to the "here's yet another giant guy" boss battles in the first game. Too many use a different gimic this time (here's wave after wave of men for you to beat up), but all in all each fight actually has some clever mechanics and puzzles to solve this time around. They're tightening up their boss design to the point that I really have high expectations for the next game, and oh yes, there will be a next game (the in game clues dropped are that Scarecrow will return, joining Hush, Azreal, and Calendar Man (this guy's changed into a Hannibal type figure by the way, he's the only person in Arkham City who's actually in a jail cell)). I recommend playing the game on hard. The challenge of the brawls on that level aren't just for the sake of being a challenge. They make you feel much more Batty.
So yes, I've been pretty into that game myself, but now that I've beaten it I'm diving right into Skyward Sword.
Yeah, the usual Zelda cycle is out in full force with SS... that is, the usual "we hate the current one, the last one(s) that we hated when they came out are the best!" stuff. It's already entirely in evidence, sadly enough...
I don't have the game, but it does seem like the story is quite stupid again. That's unfortunately. Given that it's Zelda I'm sure the gameplay will make up for that, but still, it's too bad that they keep making stories like these.
The gameplay and world design, though, sound great of course. But not the story.
I was excited for Twilight Princess and I loved it, no Zelda cycle for me.
I'm actually just getting into Twilight Princess and I'm loving it so far. I don't see what anyone's gripe is yet. Of course, I'm only in the woods temple. I was afraid that too much of the game would be played as that fucking wolf but luckily that's been minimal so far.
Twilight Princess was great. I didn't get the gripes either. I loved the story as well. The motion controls, in retrospect, are kinda tacked on. I liked them at the time for the novelty but after it wears off you see how it gets in the way more often than it should.
That problem doesn't exist in Skyward Sword. The motion controls, thanks to the "Plus" factor, are quite simply what all of us originally thought Twilight Princess' controls would be.
Play the superior Gamecube version of TP then. :)
But anyway, as I said then, gameplay-wise TP is fantastic, certainly among the best of the srires (it's not quite OoT's equal, but it's very very good), but yeah, I really dislike some things about the story... WW has a better story. TP is the better game overall, though, for sure, because it's got more dungeons and a much higher difficulty level, and I like the art design more too.
I think the main difference between us in terms of storyline taste are that while you look at the primary plot points, I am more interested in how those plot points unfold, so even if the story structure is the same "Link beats Ganon and saves Hyrule", to me that's not as important as how I GET to each of those points.
What do you mean, how they unfold? I don't quite get it... and as for TP, Link, Zelda, and Ganon are all bad characters. Midna's good, and Zant mostly okay, but they can't carry the whole game all on their own...
It's a narrative thing. There's really only 6 or so stories anyway. The trick is how they are told. The first game's story had you saving Zelda from the very start after she put herself in danger to save everyone else by splitting up the triforce to defy Ganon. The second game was more of a sleeping beauty thing, no more need be said than that.
What I liked about LTTP was that while the story did eventually involve saving Zelda, that wasn't the main drive for large sections of it. For example, in the very beginning Zelda tells you Hyrule is in danger and you do have to go rescue her, and you DO, but from then until you get the Master Sword she's "safe" and your goal is to gain the weapon to defeat the mysterious evil priest. Along the way you find out about the imprisoning war and discover 3 ancient temples. The aesthetic went a long way towards drawing me in, with everything "feeling" exactly as it should. Going into the desert felt like wandering a wasteland. The town really felt like a peaceful place, excepting the fact that Link was a wanted man framed for kidnapping the princess. When you finally got the Master Sword you find yet another of your allies was killed and the princess you thought you saved has been found and abducted again. You try to save her, and fail! I thought yet another character had died until I found out the truth, that she and the rest of the maidens were really sent to the dark world where Ganon, the true power behind the priest, lay trying to escape. From there, I'm freeing each of the trapped maidens so they can give me the power to reach Aghanim again and defeat him as well as Ganon. In the end, Ganon lays beaten and I claim the triforce. The ending shows all the wishes Link now makes with it, restoring all those who died back to life and helping out so many of the various characters I met along the way.
Link's Awakening we both know full well.
Ocarina of Time had a pretty interesting story. This WAS the imprisoning war mentioned in LTTP. Link isn't "saving" the princess in this story so much as completing an urgent mission on her behalf. Unfortunately you were both being manipulated and Ganon simply used the two of you to get to the triforce. At this point Zelda is forced into hiding and Link sleeps for 7 years, awakening to a hyrule completely ruined by Ganondorf's rule (huh, actually the story kinda reminds me of the Lion King in a few ways). Zelda turns out to be rebelling in her own way, having become a ninja secretly working to overthrow Ganon. Link and "Sheik" now work side by side to get the power of 7 sages to defeat Ganon. Again, Ganondorf manipulates you two, this time simply waiting for Zelda to reveal herself so he can get that piece of the triforce. Link fortunately has the Master Sword, the only thing preventing Ganon from simply abducting Link the same way. Yes, you must save Zelda, but compared to the NES games or even LTTP it's for such a short time it's hardly a main focus of the story. Once you do free her, which happens almost immediately after she's kidnapped, you fight together to defeat him (well, she gives you magical power which you use).
Zelda plays a much more active roll this time. She already played a more active roll than a completely pointless "damsel" in the original games considering she's flat out needed to save the world, but this time she does more than just hide the ultimate McGuffin. In fact, this is why I was disappointed in the 3DS remake. How awesome would it be to have a whole added game mode where you play as Zelda, starting from the moment Link is trapped in time, getting trained by Impa, going on adventures, having to aid Link through his adventures when he wakes up, saving Kakariko before Link can get there, right up until the end where this time Zelda's "escorting" Link with gameplay mechanics during the final fight. That would be awesome and round out the story.
Anyway, Majora's Mask was another very different story from the ground up.
Wind Waker we both know. Yes he saves the princess, but once again she takes a much more active roll, and we get some insight into Ganon's motivation. I need not explain all the stories of the side cast and how the world is revealed. You say you liked that story already.
Twilight Princess is an alternate time line. I found Zant to be a very well done character. He seemed genuinely malicious, not just power hungry but really desiring to humiliate his former leader. When his plans start to fall apart, his real personality is revealed, he's just a petty little man who can't handle the slightest upset. The complete change in personality was odd to me at first, but I appreciate it a lot more now. Midna's character was also pretty interesting. She seems to be going down the same path as Zant at first, desiring nothing more than revenge. Eventually she changes though. Zelda actually plays a much smaller roll this time, with the focus more on Midna who's constantly with you. However, she does appear to be a strong character doing the only thing she can think to do to save her people. Yes, it would have been nice to see her fight, but in her mind it would have been a worthless effort that would cost everyone in Hyrule. In the end, just like in Wind Waker, we do see her fighting alongside Link.
So there it is. That's my interpretation of the stories. When explained that way, perhaps you can see how I don't consider them all "the same story". Each differs very greatly in the details.
As for the CD-i games, there's practically no "details" to those stories at all. Aside from two having a gender reversal, they are the exact same stories as the very first game, focusing entirely on saving Link and nothing else. In fact, Link isn't even given the courtesy of having done something, anything, to make him WORTH saving in those games. He never broke up the triforce or anything. This is why I don't consider the roll reversal worthy of making those stories "original". As much as I'd like to play as Zelda in one of these games, the story has to actually be unique, as in my idea for an added quest in OOT.
There is an 85% chance you will love this game.
There is an 85% chance that constantly stating every single thing has the exact same probability will start to annoy you.
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This game is surprisingly addictive. I played it for hours earlier today, and found myself wondering where the time went. Twilight Princess felt a bit more like a chore, but I'm enjoying this much more.
The flying parts are pretty fun, glad it's kept to a minimum. But boy, cutscene after cutscene. This game overexplains things. Still, the challenge level feels higher than the last time I played through a Zelda game (Wind Waker). I actually got my ass beat by a giant spider, and was left stunned to find that I actually died in a Zelda game. In the first dungeon.
Perhaps I'm rusty. I'm still getting used to the sword movements, but I'm thrilled to see that the game follows your hand to slash in 8 directions, plus thrust. Very impressive. Its accuracy isn't so bad, but it isn't perfect either. Still, I had a blast trying to slash the giant spider in just the right way to expose his soft underbelly.
Hopefully this won't gather as much dust as Twilight Princess did.
I get what you mean about the cut scenes. However, I really didn't mind them so much. They're still fairly short and Zelda has never crossed the lines that Metal Gear and Xenosaga have just blown through without looking back.
I got so into this game I never even noticed minor flaws. The only one that got me was with the "save point" system they implemented. It feels like a step backwards. Recent Zelda games let you save progress at every doorway, which is the best possible system if you ask me. Literal "state saving" as in some western RPGs would be too much. People would just "cheat" every single boss fight or action sequence. That said, it still lets you save anywhere in the old ones, and this one requires save points. To their credit, they are so plentiful that I'm almost never too far from one.
Their reasoning behind this system was likely to prevent the glitch Twilight Princess had, where if you saved in a certain area in a very brief situation, quit, and reloaded, it broke game progression. They offered a disc replacement there. However, save points didn't solve the problem like they may have hoped. There is still a major progression breaking save glitch if you do a certain sequence of events in a certain order, save, quit, and reload. Instead of offering a disc replacement, or "patching" the game (the original Wii never got proper game patching added in), they went with a very awkward solution involving downloading a "save file fixer" which you run to "fix" any save file broken in that very specific way. It works, but it is very awkward, and it isn't permanent as it would need to be run every time such a save situation was created.
What this says is that if save points were their solution to the problem, then no, that's not how to do it. Next time, go back to "save anywhere", but be sure to do very thorough testing of all game progression events with saving after every single one at the moment the player can be controlled again, quitting, loading the game, and making sure progression still works. This should be done on a semi-regular basis during development (not really needed at every single version push), and then once more, complete and thoroughly, once the game is considered in "release candidate" mode (and again should they find there is a save glitch they need to fix for another release candidate).
That said, it isn't as big a concern now. Both the 3DS and Wii U OSes are capable of proper game patching. The Wii U does this as a game is launched, but the 3DS requires downloading patch data from the store (the latter shall hopefully be fixed). There should be less of a fear of a complete game breaking scenario caused by saving anywhere this time around, as they won't need to do anything really awkward or expensive to push out a fix to everyone.