Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Skyward Sword HD Unimprovements

There is a weird phenomenon currently going on with the marketing of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD: they are praising the remaster for improvements that aren't there, because these issues didn't exist in the original Wii version.

Here are two examples of such social media tweets:

In the first tweet they make it sound like the original game told you what a heart is every time you picked one up, which isn't true. And the second one highlights the possibility to skip over the sword tutorial, which was already possible on the Wii as well. Just talk to the guy once and leave. To be fair, the latter doesn't exactly say that this is a change, but it gets received like one.

Now, what happened here? It looks like they've went over the known list of improvements, then played Skyward Sword HD and picked some parts of the game where they thought that these were affected by the changes, but actually weren't. And it's not like nothing has changed or improved here, they just picked the wrong examples.

What used to be a problem were the treasures and insects, where each time after you turned the Wii off an on again, it would reset the information about them, so you would get it all over again. This was especially annoying, because it went into the collection menu every time to show you the supposedly new items. With 16 treasures and 12 insects to find, this was actually a reason to let the game run without ever turning your Wii off between sessions.

Now, this has been fixed, luckily. What hasn't been fixed were the hearts or Stamina Fruits, however, because those never had this issue to begin with. You only ever got an explanation for them once in the beginning of the game and then it would remember that, even after turning the Nintendo Wii off. So, Nintendo is highlighting something that didn't need fixing for some reason, acting like it used to be broken.

As for the tutorials, they've already shown us some other parts where things have been streamlined, like for example in this tweet about Horwell. But skipping the sword tutorial isn't something new and even got praised by this blog back in 2011. Maybe the mentioned tweet only wants to emphasis this possibility, where this isn't really a mistake, but people view this as a change nonetheless.

And this is what makes this such a weird phenomenon, the reactions. "Oh, this was so annoying, what a great change!" Well, it's been over nine years, so memory can be a little bit shaded, but now people actually believe that the hearts were a problem like that and even doubt you when you state otherwise... It's funny how your memories can be tricked.

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