The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword [HD]
An excellent adventure overall, just crammed with imaginative, fun, and diverse activities. There's a bit of repetition here and there but for the most part the game keeps things fresh and moving along. It often surprises and even delights.
It's not an open world and the individual sections are not very big—remember, this all had to fit within the Wii's limited memory—but clever level design stitches the parts together into a wide tapestry and mostly conceals the seams. The spatial structure is more like that of a metroidvania, with a lot of backtracking to previously visited locations, which expand or transform as you hit story marks and gain new abilities. It works very well: At the same time as your familiarity with each area keeps growing you also come to expect new and exciting things each time you revisit.
The one weak point—and it's very weak—is the hub world. When it first opens up and the music soars, you might think you're in for hours of exploration, discovery, and adventure. But within minutes you'll find out that there's nothing there. It's just empty space for you to travel through to reach the real game areas. You can kinda see what they were going for, but the Wii just couldn't manage it. We would have to wait 6 years for Breath of the Wild on the Switch to realize this vision. The bottom line is that it's sad that this is how the game starts, but it's possible to get over this initial disappointment and just treat it like a corridor leading to the good stuff.
The quests are simple but always have some kind of wacky and funny premise. Unfortunately, many are extremely easy to miss without a walkthrough unless you're constantly visiting every place and talking to everybody again and again and again. I guess it was expected that you would miss stuff, but it's a game design decision that I always find annoying. Anyway, just use a walkthrough.
Difficulty is just right, I would say. There are many cool and satisfying puzzles. Boss fights are quite fun, and online strategy guides can make them much easier should you get frustrated. But, as usual with Zelda, there are various timed challenges. Not my favorite but they were generally manageable.
The elephant in the room is the controls. Skyward Sword was originally designed for the Wii MotionPlus, which has you wave your hands around to control Link's sword and shield arms as if he were a puppet. It works with the Switch Joy-Cons, too. But the game also supports "normal" analog sticks, which is how I played it. I didn't feel too deprived because the mechanics are basically the same and still give a sense of having to literally go through the motions. In a few boss fights I did get frustrated with the lack of precision and poor reaction time, but I can't say if motion controls would have made it any better. Note that the Switch HD remaster also allows you to move the camera around (in both motion and stick schemes), which apparently was impossible to do in the Wii version. It must have been quite frustrating for those poor cave men of 2011. :(
All in all I feel strongly that the control innovation shouldn't steal the show. This is a solid Zelda game, and it would have been just as solid without MotionPlus. Not to say that it wouldn't be fun to wave a sword around your living room, but it's not by any means all this game has going for it.
The Switch HD remaster has done several additional things to make the game palatable. The original visual design was beautiful in its own way, but now the graphics are hi-res, crisp ... and at 60 FPS. It's buttery smooth and pretty. The music is absolutely gorgeous, and now it supports surround sound. Sound effects are superb, too, except—and this is my pet peeve—Link's grunts and gasps and groans. It's a trope of the whole series, and indeed of Japanese animated media more generally, and I hate it everywhere but especially here.
Fans were hoping that Ocarina of Time would be the one to get a Switch makeover, but I think Nintendo did right by choosing Skyward Sword. It's been somewhat overlooked in the franchise, perhaps dismissed as nothing more than a motion-control gimmick, but now it's really stepping up to its second chance. Recommended!