The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

• 1. Introduction

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  The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword got its story in a single day. Director Hidemaro Fujibayashi feigned illness, shut himself in a hotel room and wrote the synopsis. Nintendo built the game for the Wii over roughly five years, and much of that time was spent untangling problems like this one. What forced a plot to be rescued in a hotel room? Why did the producer nearly drop the motion add-on that the whole game depended on? And why did a game with glowing reviews leave so many longtime fans unsatisfied? The answers run through a floating town, a live orchestra and a sword spirit who became an internet joke.

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• 2. Story And Characters

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  Skyward Sword opens at the Knight Academy on Skyloft, and for its first hours it plays like a school drama. Link is a trainee knight. His class rival Groose considers himself a romantic rival for Zelda too. Zelda is Link's childhood friend rather than a princess, and that was a deliberate choice. Producer Eiji Aonuma explained that rescuing Zelda felt more contrived with each installment, because the two often barely knew each other. Childhood friendship gave players a reason to care and cut extra plot. The team also had Link narrowly miss her as she travels the lands below.

  The story began as an origin tale for the Master Sword. Swordplay was the game's theme, and that blade is the one most tied to the series. Trying to explain the origins of the entire series produced early plans full of contradictions with established lore. Naoki Mori, who joined the project for one and a quarter years, wrote the dialogue from that synopsis. Shigeki Yoshida worked with him on storyboards and led the cinematics. The total was estimated at 79 scenes, running over 120 minutes.

  In the legend, three Goddesses left behind the Triforce, a wish-granting power, and the Demon King Demise laid waste to the land to seize it. The Goddess Hylia sent the survivors into the sky and defeated him, though she was too weakened to finish him. Hylia was a new addition to the series' lore, and she turns out to be Zelda under another name. Because only mortals can use the Triforce, she was reincarnated as a mortal. Zelda later seals herself in a crystal, and her power turns the Goddess Sword into the Master Sword. The old woman who guides Link is eventually revealed to be Impa.

  Fujibayashi was intent on one scene above all. Zelda jumps from the edge of Skyloft and Link catches her, right after his exam. Zelda also received a mischievous streak. She pushes Link over a ledge, a gag first planned as a rule of three and trimmed to two. Groose was added to enliven the school setting, and his growth mirrors that of a Link who is otherwise mute and static.

  Fi, the sword spirit, was created before Wii MotionPlus entered the picture, back when the team imagined different gameplay concepts. Her design echoes the Master Sword. She also serves as a second voice for a silent hero. Her technical lines for each area were written by different people, so her speech drifted, and Fujibayashi rewrote them until she sounded consistent. Nearly all of her dialogue ended up being his. The villain Ghirahim was modeled on Dark Link from Ocarina of Time. He could read Link's movements, so players had to think rather than swing at random.

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• 3. Swordplay In Motion

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  Aonuma's enthusiasm forced the team to start the game over. Fujibayashi proposed building swordplay around the Wii MotionPlus add-on when developers were already working with the standard Wii Remote and Nunchuk. Aonuma loved the idea, so work began again from scratch. Later he seriously considered dropping the device altogether. What rescued it was Wii Sports Resort. After that game appeared, the team saw how motion could drive a sword, talked with its developers and borrowed the technology. Enemies then had to counter free-moving blades, so their artificial intelligence shifted stances depending on where Link's sword sat. Miyamoto later said the first two years went into experimentation and were not wasted.

  In play, the direction in which the player flicks the Wii Remote sets the direction of Link's slash, and the Nunchuk raises the shield. Realism turned out to be a poor fit. The team first wanted lifelike sword movements, then added unrealistic ones because the realistic versions hurt the character's portrayal. Aonuma had imagined Link holding his sword overhead. That idea became the Skyward Strike and gave the game its title.

  Motion swordplay freed up buttons, which made room for a Dash that lets Link sprint. Designers folded other actions into it, such as scaling walls instead of slamming into them. Dowsing, a first-person search for a chosen object, came early from the themes of discovery and exploration. It spared the team from building landmarks for important places, and marker beacons kept players from getting lost.

  Items followed a similar logic. At Miyamoto's insistence, desirable items that were normally held back until the end of a campaign appeared early. Bombs were colored bright blue so players could spot them in any area. The Beetle, a mechanical flier that players steer, replaced the boomerang because the team wanted an item they could control. That Beetle and other pseudo-technical gadgets inspired the ancient mechanical theme of the Lanayru Desert.

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• 4. Skyloft And The Surface

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  Three overworlds were all the team allowed itself on the Surface, after earlier Zelda games had offered many more fields. Developers expanded each one so that repeat visits would reward players. Experience with Twilight Princess pushed them to compact areas, since its overworld and dungeons had felt too large with puzzles scattered thinly. They also moved environmental puzzles into the overworld. The hardest balance was letting players travel quickly while still finding new features.

  Skyloft exists because the three Surface regions had drastically contrasting environments and could not be joined directly. The sky was first imagined like the course selection screen in the Super Mario series. The team instead gave it its own quests and population, so Link had somewhere to prepare for his adventures. One early idea, when jumping down from the sky seemed unlikely to win approval, was a huge central tower, with a higher jump meaning a longer free fall. Once the sky route was chosen, the Loftwing mounts were created so the trip felt rational. Skyloft's citizens follow time-driven routines modeled on Majora's Mask, with side quests tied to the main story. Navigation rules ruled out a Loftwing racing minigame.

  Each Surface region carries a theme. The forest revolves around landforms altering gameplay, the volcano around rules that change, and the desert around duality between past and present. Faron Woods and the Sealed Grounds come first, mostly flat, to ease players in. Eldin Volcano adds height differences, lava and slopes that demand sprinting. In the Lanayru Desert the team built three zones, switched by Time Shift stones, an idea inspired by Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess. Its Ancient Civilization, which used electricity to power both technology and people, was hard to include naturally. Recurring enemies were given slightly altered designs in each region.

  The Silent Realms were a new mechanic. They hold enemies that cannot be defeated, and Link must rely on sprinting rather than weapons or items, against a time limit. Indestructible foes had appeared in Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, but here the change was to restrict what Link could do. The Silent Realms were first planned as special dungeons. The team dropped that plan and set them in areas players already knew, because knowing the ground was the key to finishing them.

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• 5. The Live Orchestra

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  Ten people made up the sound team, split evenly between sound design and music composition. Hajime Wakai served as sound director and lead composer, joined by Shiho Fujii, Mahito Yokota and Takeshi Hama. Koji Kondo, the longtime series composer, supervised and wrote only one piece himself, the music for the prologue video about Demise and Hylia. He also helped arrange his colleagues' pieces using an electric piano and a Mac. Fujii handled environments, dungeons and boss battles, including the music for Skyloft, and studied art and environmental assets so her work would suit each place.

  A live orchestra performed the score, a first for the series and for the Kyoto division of Nintendo's development group. Twilight Princess had included a single orchestral track, handled by the Tokyo division. Yokota was brought in to help orchestrate because of his experience. Aonuma had not considered an orchestra and stayed sure the score would remain synthesized, even after Wakai raised the subject. Miyamoto insisted, and the decision surprised the entire team. The trade-off was less freedom to adjust tracks than synthesized music allowed.

  The orchestra carried the emotion of environments, cinematic scenes and story moments. Link and Zelda received their own themes, and singers appeared for the first time in the series. The main theme, "Ballad of the Goddess", is a retrograde version of the recurring tune "Zelda's Lullaby". The workload doubled the music team from the standard five, making it the largest sound team on a Nintendo game at that point. Staff reaction to the score led directly to The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary Symphony Concert.

  Music also became a mechanic through the harp Link receives. Earlier games let players use their instruments only at set times and places. Here the harp could be played whenever the player wished.

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• 6. Release And Remaster

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  In April 2008, Miyamoto hinted that the Zelda team was regrouping to make new games. At the 2008 Electronic Entertainment Expo, he confirmed that a Wii entry was in development. The game was unveiled there the following year, still without a title. Miyamoto could not show gameplay as he had hoped, so he displayed promotional art of Link and Fi. He announced Wii MotionPlus support and a 2010 release window. Aonuma's later remarks about playability cast doubt on that window, and he said his focus on the new game moved Spirit Tracks to the end of 2009. The title followed, with a revised 2011 release period and a playable demonstration. Miyamoto said the delay came from a refusal to ship an unfinished product for the company's convenience. The extra year went to finishing core elements and polish.

  Promotion included a five-part online comic from the Penny Arcade Presents series, written and illustrated by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. Television commercials featured actor and comedian Robin Williams with his daughter Zelda, playing on his stated love for the series. The game reached all regions in November 2011, as a standard edition and a limited deluxe edition with a gold Wii Remote Plus. Both included an anniversary CD of orchestrated pieces from the series.

  After launch, players discovered a glitch that corrupted save files if three late-game events happened in a certain order. Nintendo issued instructions for avoiding it, opened a feedback channel on its Japanese Wii site and offered to repair corrupted saves manually. On the 1st of September 2016, the game returned on the Wii U Virtual Console as part of the series' 30th anniversary.

  Skyward Sword HD reached the Nintendo Switch on the 16th of July 2021, co-developed with Tantalus Media. A Joy-Con pair themed after the Master Sword and Hylian Shield launched the same day. Aonuma said in June 2016 that a remaster might be possible. Years earlier, while settling the graphical style for Breath of the Wild, Nintendo had tested an HD version of the game on Wii U development kits. That led to The Wind Waker HD, whose success encouraged more remasters. A Nintendo spokesperson told Eurogamer that no Switch version was planned at the time, and an Amazon UK listing in August 2020 was soon removed.

  The remaster runs at 60 frames per second and offers two control schemes. One copies the Wii Remote Plus and Nunchuk using Joy-Con motion. The other maps the sword to the right analog stick, which allows handheld play, a Pro Controller and the Switch Lite. Autosave arrived, any of three files can be used, and Hero Mode gets its own slot. Fi's hints became optional, dialogue and cutscenes can be skipped, and item descriptions appear only on first encounter, except for Gratitude Crystals. One Amiibo, showing Zelda with a Loftwing, enables fast travel between sky and surface.

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• 7. Acclaim And Sales

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  Metacritic gave Skyward Sword a score of 93/100 from 81 reviews, making it the 10th highest scoring game of 2011 and the 6th best-reviewed Wii game. Famitsu awarded a perfect score, the third for a Zelda game and the sixteenth for any video game. IGN, Eurogamer, Game Informer, Edge and VideoGamer.com also gave perfect scores. Nintendo Power said it was "truly worthy of being called 'epic'". Joystiq's Griffin McElroy admitted that much of the content seemed unnecessary and extravagant, but said that beneath it lay "the best Zelda game of all time".

  Reservations ran through the praise. Jose Otero of 1UP.com credited the developers for moving away from Zelda tradition, yet called the result "a weird middle ground filled with genuine surprises, inessential carry-overs, and copy/paste quest structures". Tom McShea of GameSpot was notably less positive, finding the controls unreliable and most of the experience unnecessary and overly familiar. Ray Carsillo of Electronic Gaming Monthly found the motion controls difficult to handle. GameTrailers said the game showed the series' "first gray hairs". Oli Welsh of Eurogamer, by contrast, praised the controls and the visuals despite hardware limits.

  Fi drew the sharpest complaints. Critics and players found her frequent interruptions annoying and compared her unfavorably to Navi from Ocarina of Time, and she became the subject of internet memes. VentureBeat writer Sebastian Haley dissented, calling her the best aspect of the game.

  Awards followed. IGN's Best of 2011 awards gave it Best Game, Best Graphics, Best Sound and Best Story in the Wii category. Electronic Gaming Monthly, GameSpot, Edge and Nintendo Power named it Game of the Year. At the Spike Video Game Awards in 2011 it won Best Wii Game and Best Motion Game. In 2012 it collected nominations at the Interactive Achievement Awards, the Game Developers Choice Awards and the British Academy Games Awards.

  Sales told a more uneven story. In Japan it debuted with nearly 195,000 units and topped the charts, then fell out of the Top 20 within a few weeks and finished December under 320,000. North America sold about 600,000 units in its first month. Worldwide first-week sales reached 919,119, and Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé called it the fastest-selling game in the series at that time. By March 2012 the total stood at 3.52 million, with 360,000 in Japan, and by December 2020 it reached 3.67 million. The HD version scored 81 on Metacritic and had sold 4.15 million by December 2022.

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• 8. After The Sky

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  Fan and retrospective opinion cooled faster than the reviews. Critics and series fans objected to excessive linearity, backtracking, the motion controls and a lack of gameplay innovation, and they were divided on the narrative choices. That feedback shaped A Link Between Worlds and, most visibly, Breath of the Wild. Aonuma returned as producer and Fujibayashi as director, and the team set out to answer complaints about linearity with a non-linear world. Aonuma said his wish for Breath of the Wild was "to expand and make a better Skyward Sword".

  The sequel to Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, also carries echoes of the older game. Floating islands above the kingdom of Hyrule drew comparisons to Skyloft in various publications. The developers acknowledged this, saying the Switch hardware let players travel seamlessly from specific points in the sky down to the surface, which the Wii's graphical limits had prevented.

  The game's reach extends even to paleontology. Tentalus spencensis, a fossil from the Cambrian Spence Shale of Utah, is named after Tentalus, a boss from Skyward Sword.

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