I’m not sure there is a more magical moment in all of Zelda than the moment you first hit a timeshift stone. For five minutes or so you’ve been exploring a dead world of greys and browns, moving through empty tunnels, dodging odd lumpen statues, and shoving heavy mine carts ahead of you to make progress. Then you hit the magical stone that stands in the middle of a plaza, and a bright bubble emerges. And within that bubble everything is different. The brown stones around you are now brightly painted. Nearby statues of slumped robots return to fizzing, bickering life – in truth they were never statues at all. Dead plants sprout hearts for you to take, and those mine carts now hum with energy and ghost along on electrical tracks.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD reviewPublisher: NintendoDeveloper: NintendoPlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out on Switch 16th July
I never really get over this moment. But in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD, a rerelease of the Wii original from 2011, it was doubly special for me. Because this is the point I switched from handheld mode to playing on the big TV.
This is a remaster based around generous tweaks and “quality-of-life” updates, so it feels right to talk about the controls from the off. The original Skyward Sword was a Wii game to the hilt – literally, as you had to negotiate with your surroundings every time you wanted to swing your Wii Remote sword, while enemies lined up to block attacks if you opted for the wrong angle. These controls never really clicked for me – and quite a lot of other people, reading around the internet. So one of the things I was most excited about with the HD remaster was the option to play the game using button controls.
Partly, this was down to the perverse joy of having a whole Zelda world squeezed down onto a handheld. Game devices you hold in your hand still retain a touch of magic, of dazzle, and there is something pretty special about sitting on a bus while simultaneously exploring a volcanic mountaintop with a glossy talking sword. But the button controls aren’t quite what I had hoped for. What they feel like – and this feels odd to say of a Nintendo game – is the very best that the team could do given the circumstances.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD soars onto Nintendo Switch July 16th! Watch on YouTube
The sword is the main stickler for me. Because directional swipes are so fundamental to the game, you can’t put sword attacks on a button. Instead, and this is clever for sure, they sit on the right stick – flick up, down, left, right, diagonal to strike, and push up to hold the sword aloft and charge it. Problems: firstly, for me at least, and granted my fingers probably shake a bit more than most people’s do, there was just enough input confusion to make more hectic fights feel like a bodge. Secondly, with hovering threat of intermittent drift and an aging console, I didn’t really feel too hyped about flicking the thumbstick around with the inevitable force that I would fall into using so regularly for twenty-odd hours. More than that, being dumb, I would often forget the camera wasn’t on the thumbstick, so Link would constantly be drawing his sword. I appreciate my mind is more muddled than most, but this never really felt engaging or precise.