Skyward Sword HD Announced

 

Arguably the "biggest" news of yesterday's Nintendo Direct in terms of Zelda was the reveal of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD for Nintendo Switch. The title itself shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, who is remotely interested in the franchise, since this has been up in the air ever since the Nintendo Switch became a thing. And after Eiji Anouma himself teased the possibility at a Zelda concert in 2018, it was only a matter of time...

The timing right now is quite similar to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD, where the game comes out right before its 10th anniversary and acts as a filler, before the next big Zelda title will be released. It's also possible that Tantalus Media, the Australian studio that did the HD port of Twilight Princess, is working on this again, but we don't have any information on this yet.

Judging by the visuals this is probably not the case, however. In the past I've kept pointing out the fact that Skyward Sword already looks really good when upscaled to HD via emulator. But I didn't truly think that whoever was going to work on this HD "remaster" would take this to their heart so closely, where this really just looks like the Wii game got upscaled and that's all.

When they showed the game during the Nintendo Direct I wasn't even sure that they are going to actually call this "Skyward Sword HD", where this might as well could have been an emulated re-release of the Wii game, similar to Super Mario Galaxy. There don't seem to be any improved textures and the environments looks somewhat muddy as a result.

So, this could simply be just another side project of the main Zelda team, similar to The Wind Waker HD. But unlike that game they also didn't bother with adding any new visual effects. It doesn't necessarily need any of this, since the original art style of the game works pretty well in HD. But still you can't help but feel like this is the most lackluster of the 3D Zelda remasters so far...

They can make up for this with new features, however. Three years ago this blog already filed a huge list of possible additions and improvements to Skyward Sword HD, where this still holds up for the most part and you should definitely go read that excellent article.

One point on that list has already been checked off, at least partially: the game will fully support button-only controls, so you can play the game in handheld mode (probably also with a Pro Controller, but they haven't shown this yet). In this case the sword will be controlled with the right analogue stick.

It has been questionable in the past whether this would work well or not, but it seems fine and might be even a very good way of playing the game. I'll definitely try both control schemes to see what's the most comfortable and the most fun.

Well, the game will be released in July 16th, where together with the DLC for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity this already looks like it's going to be a busy year for Zelda fans. But I wouldn't be surprised if we're also getting the other HD remasters ported over from the Wii U as well, this time as an actual 35th Anniversary celebration.