Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Skyward Sword Upgrade System Trailer

Watch on Youtube. So, there's more than just collecting bugs. You collect all kinds of things to upgrade all of your items. This was already mentioned at E3, but now we finally get to see this in detail. There are slots for 12 different bugs, all of them probably caught with the Bug Catching Net. There are also 16 slots for various spoils, that get dropped by enemies or are found in the environment. Similar to the spoils in the Wind Waker or some treasures in Spirit Tracks. For example there are Amber Relics, Ornamental Skulls, Monster Claws and Jelly Blobs to be collected. And there are four more slots for what I call "rare treasures" right now until we know better. This is how the Collection menu looks like:



Those items can then be used to make upgrades for your gear. In the trailer the Wooden Shield gets upgraded to a Banded Shield. (That's the fifth shield already!!) This looks really similar to how you purchase Train Cars in Spirit Tracks, three individual items are needed for an upgrade, each of them with a different count, in this example you needed two Amber Relics, one Monster Claw and one Jelly Blob (and also 30 Rupees) to make the Banded Shield.

Overall this seems to be an improvement over the spoil and treasure systems from the Wind Waker and the Nintendo DS Zeldas. I really hope they don't mess it up again this time, I don't want to spent hours and hours repeating the same tasks until I finally get the required item. It was a real pain to collect all 64 Ship Parts in Phantom Hourglass and all necessary Treasures in Spirit Tracks. But since there probably won't be a trading mode, I'm optimistic right now. The main reason why they made some of your treasures in Spirit Tracks extra rare was to encourage trading between players. If you can't trade there's no reason to fuck with the probabilities.

It would also be important that each collectible item gets at least one solid spot, there doesn't have to be any randomisation at all. In the Wind Waker each one of the spoils got dropped by a certain enemies. If you wanted a certain kind of spoil you just hunted down the specific enemy. Easy as that. It looks like in Skyward Sword Bokoblins might drop these skulls for example. So, if I want skulls I hunt Bokoblins. The bugs should have habitations. Let's say the lady beetle lives in the forest, so if you need lady beetles you go to the forest.

But what I certainly like are the upgrades. It's already amazing that we will get so many different shields and I'm eager to see what kind of upgrades for the B-items will be available. Could be really cool stuff. Hype, hype, hype.

Source: Zelda Informer

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