Skyward Sword Blade Journal, Day 3

Day 3 is over and I didn't come far actually... oh, wait, at first I have to raise the spoiler flag:

SPOILER WARNING! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T BEATEN DUNGEON 3 YET!





Well, I've crossed the Lanayru Desert and beaten the Lanayru Mining Facility dungeon. Overall it felt all very similar to the first two dungeons. First you need to find a number of things that can be found using the dowsing feature before you can enter the dungeon. The dungeon itself felt very similar to the dungeon design of Twilight Princess, very linear progressing and there's some kind of main feature, something only this dungeon has. I swear that the first three dungeons all have the same layout! It's just one floor and there are two crossroad rooms in the center and you travel on a linear path through these rooms. It's the exact same dungeon layout in all three dungeons and it feels bland. It's like the dungeon creator never heard of z-axis or non-linear design. The boss fight one the other hand again was a lot of fun and quite creative. The only remarkable difference this time was that the dungeon item wasn't protected by a miniboss. The dungeon just didn't have one. That's the only variety that we got in the formula. However, this was the last dungeon before the midway story point, so I expect that the game's formula now heavily changes for the next dungeon. I guess at first you will have to deal with the Silent Realm in an overworld, then you will enter new territories in the same overworld, get to a new dungeon, etc. But the two dungeons after that will probably just copy the new formula again.

However, my next destination is the Sealed Grounds. I bet that this is where you fight the giant black thing for your first time... can't wait. No, actually I thought that this was the perfect point to take a pause and end this day, because I'm not really looking forward to the seal fight or the Silent Realm. Ugh.

But the Lanayru Desert was a lot of fun, I love the time warp idea and the music rocked. First I struggled with those electric sword Bokoblins (which look really cool), but this is what you get for only using your sword all the time. Drop a bomb on them with your Beetle or stun them with your Slingshot and these fights get easy. But before you could enter the dungeon, Fi totally spoiled a puzzle for me. I think it would have been much smarter, if you had to figure out the door mechanism by yourself. Looking at the map to see the pattern is genious! That would have been such an awesome "damn, I'm so smart!!"-moment. But instead Fi just pops up and tells you the solution right away. WHAT THE FUCK?! You can always ask her for advice, if you're stuck, so there's no reason that she tells you puzzle solutions like that! Come on! What's next, does she kill the bosses for me?!

The Lanayru Mining Facility itself wasn't too much fun. But I like the new Gust Bellow item, though I wonder what upgrades it might hold. I struggled with the Beamos, because I had problems performing a stab attack. Sometimes I accidently move the Nunchuk at the same time, which results in a vertical spin. Or sometimes it just doesn't recognize the move. It's aweful if you get your ass kicked by a Beamos, just because the controls failed on you. But the boss fight was great, again. It was the scorpion from the Forest Area demo, but unlike in the demo he would also hide himself below sand, so that you had to look for him with the Gust Bellow. But the overall fight was a nice battle of claws vs. sword.

Well, I've only beaten one dungeon today, because I again spent a lot of time with side questing. I farmed different items like Bird Feathers in the woods for two hours! But it was worth it. Additionally to the Quick Beetle I now got the Tough Beetle, which seems to be the final Beetle upgrade. It seems like you can get two upgrades per item in the Scrap Shop. I also fully upgraded a Bomb Bag and a Seed Satchel. And I bought the 7th pocket from Beedle. However, he also sells the last pocket for 1200 Rupees. I think it's somehow boring that he sells three of the four Adventure Pouch upgrades, but on the other hand this lets you get all pockets early in the game, if you're willing to farm Rupees.

And I thought about a nice strategy to get some easy money, but it failed. At the entrance of the Deep Woods, there's this hornet nest. You can easily collect all of them with your Bug Net, go back to Faron Woods, reenter Deep Woods and do the same again. The Deku Hornets are probably the easiest to catch insects and you can get 99 of them in no time. So, I thought about selling them. But you can't just sell treasures and insects like in the Nintendo DS Zeldas. The guy who buys them only looks for three different types per night. So you have to go to bed and sleep through many nights until he's finally looking for the item you want to sell. I don't know, I slept through 8 nights or so until he finally asked for hornets. And then he bought them for only one Rupee per hornet, which is not sufficient. So, my genious money making plan turned out to be a total failure. I really don't like the way how you sell your stuff. It should be more convenient, like in the Nintendo DS Zeldas. Why does Nintendo make a step back like this? They done it right before, why change it into something ineffecient?

You don't take any damage from falls... it makes sense in Skyloft, where you get catched by knights, but in dungeons you should at least lose one heart... there should be some punishment for potentially killing Link.

I still can't buy the blue potion, I guess it's for air when you dive. And I can't get the Slingshot upgrade because I'm missing Dusk Relics. I have no idea where to get them.

Skyward Sword Blade Journal, Day 2

Is it unhealthy to play video games all day long? Probably, but I'm doing it anyway. This game is addictive.

Beware of spoilers! I won't talk about the story though, only about game stuff.

I played a lot today and I'm currently in the middle of the Lanayru Desert. That might be not as far, but keep in mind that I'm sidequesting a lot. I'm usually neglecting the main quests and look around for hidden items and secrets. But this is a good sign, because this means that the sidequests in this game are fun and interesting. Normally I would rush through the main quests and do most of the siqequests at the end. Here it's more like the opposite, I really want to get all those cool item upgrades and I usually just progress in the main quest, if I need a lot of Rupees. Rupee-wise this game is the complete opposite of Twilight Princess. There's tons of expensive stuff waiting to be bought, for example I still couldn't effort the second Adventure Pouch upgrade in Beedle's shop or any of his medals. Rupees are hard-earned here and can be spent and very useful items. Nice.

I also got two medals by now. Like I thought the medals work similar to the rings in the Oracle games, however, you can use multiple medals at once. You don't have to equip them like your shield, as long as they stay in your Adventure Pouch, you will feel their effects. So, basically you could use eight different medals at the same time, if you got all pockets. The Adventure Pouch is a really interesting concept, which adds a nice RPG element to the game in a Zeldaish way. You can store bottles, shields, medals and capacity upgrades (like addditional Bomb Bags). But there's never the perfect combination, you really have to consider your next target destination and bring suitable items. For example an Iron Shield doesn't help in the Desert, where enemies fight with electricity. You need a Wooden Shield here, so you stow your Iron Shield at the Bazar and bring something else instead. The idea with the electricity is already genious, because in Twilight Princess the Wooden Shield would be totally useless after you got the Hylia Shield. The only difference was that the Wooden Shield burns and the Hylia Shield doesn't. It's nice that they put more thought into having different shields.

One of my medals lets me find more treasure. Which is helpful, because you use the treasures to upgrade your items, the more spoils you collect the better. For example I just got the totally awesome Quick Beetle upgrade, which lets your Beetle fly much faster. And I love it soooo much. Upgrading items is really cool, I'm obsessed with it. Collecting bugs to upgrade potions on the other hands doesn't really feel like it's worth it. I only had use for the normal Heart Potion so far, there was no reason to upgrade any of my potions. But collecting insects itself is fun. I love what they did with the Bug-Catching Net. There's this space in the Deep Woods, where you get attacked by hornets. I got freaked out first, but later I found out that you can simply collect the hornets by swinging your Bug-Catching Net around. This is one of the many details, that make this game great.

Surprisingly I still haven't fully familiarized myself with the forest area and Skyloft. I lose orientation quickly in these places. But this just shows how smartly those enviroments were designed. I love exploring Skyloft, it might be my favorite town in the Zelda series already. All the characters are really unique and bizarre and they all have their fully developed homes and stories. And Skyloft offers surprises in every corner. There was this sidequest, where you look for a girl. You'll actually discover a hidden area below the graveyard where some real crazy bat demon guy lives. I loved this part, the humor and the atmosphere were great and it extended into a much deeper sidequest, which involves collecting something similar to the Force Gems in Spirit Tracks. And there are hidden details everywhere. For example there's a Tingle statue in Zelda's room. You can't actually enter Zelda's room, but the room next to it, where you can peak through a slit in the wooden wall. Every character has a living room, which reflects his personality. And the personalities in this game can be quite crazy.

But while the Faron Woods and Skyloft are very well designed places, I wish I could say the same about the other environments. Eldin Volcano was just some giant obstacle course, which even felt repetitive at times. And the first two dungeons were rather short and disappointingly linear. I expect something small and basic from the first dungeon, but the second dungeon was entirely the same thing. The dungeons feel even dumper than in Twilight Princess, you only get the map and an item protected by a miniboss. The rest was a very linear course. The Skyview Temple was much more interesting in the demo, where you had more items to experiment. You even could skip over the miniboss battle. But the bosses were awesome. Ghirahim in the Skyview Temple was a nice and classic duel, I always dig 1on1 sword battles, and Scaldera was a very unique boss that took the Dodongo concept to an entire new level. I'm looking forward to the Boss Challenge mode.

But right now I fear that the game will remain to be entirely linear. Normally I would have the hope that the first half of the game is linear, but the second half let's you do stuff out of order. But this hope was already crushed early in the game. There's this fortune teller at the bazar, who can tell you, what items you will need in the next area. This already indicates that the order of the dungeons and overworld areas will be completely linear. He couldn't predict your next move, if the game wasn't entirely linear. And this is disappointing, linear game design is bad game design, because it's boring. Every idiot can make a linear game. A good video game is the sum of its interesting choices. I'm really happy that Skyward Sword offers some good sidequest where I can make my own gear, because this will probably be the only choices you have in this game. But I at least have the hope, that the dungeon design will improve at some point. Link's Awakening is also an entire linear game when it comes to the order of the dungeons, but I don't mind, because the dungeons theirselves offer a very smart layout with lots of possible solutions and optional parts. You can replay the dungeons in Link's Awakening many, many times and still have fun. But if the dungeons in Skyward Sword remain the way there are right now, the game will heavily suffer from it.

Like I said I'm currently in the Lanayru Desert. And the time fields are totally awesome, I love this idea. This is something that you would have expected from the Temple of Time dungeon in Twilight Princess. Instead they used the dungeon for this giant statue puzzle. It was a missed opportunity. But now we get an entire overworld area, where you can shift between two very different ages. The robot folk is really funny and the contrast between Lanayru in the past and present looks great. Lanayru might be my favorite part of the game so far, though it's still heavily linear. The Lanayru Mine was just one linear pathway, I wonder if I will ever return to this area...

So much about the general stuff, but I also want to talk about some details.

In Twilight Princess you had this really annoying issue, that after leaving and restarting the game it would tell you again how much worth the different colored Rupees are if you walk over a blue Rupee or higher. This was so stupid. Luckily this doesn't happen here, however, it now does the same for all items in your collection. Treasures, bugs and spoils... this is ridiculous. I'm actually thinking about leaving the game on when I'm making a pause, because it's brutally annoying. It just slows the game down that you have to listen to the description of 32 different items again after turning the game off. I already know what an Amber Relic, why are you telling me this again?! But it's not only the found-an-item-text, each time it will open the collection menu and show you how the item's counter gets increased by 1! Each single time! This is soooo annoying and I have no idea what Nintendo was thinking. This is even worse than the Rupees in Twilight Princess. Unless you only play the game in larger sessions, this will heavily annoy you.

Well, and it happened twice to me now that I activated a Goddess Cube, but I can't tell where the treasure chest appeared. It's nowhere on the map or on Skyloft... but there's no real way to efficiently check this, because you can only look at the map of the current area. It would be nice if you could check all of the maps all the time. So, right now I don't know where two of the chests appeared and I spent at least an hour looking in all houses of Skyloft. Maybe the chests appeared inside this giant whirlwind cloud, I dunno...

And what I like about the game, that hearts are actually a rare thing. Well, at least rarer than normally. But rare enough that the game actually gives you a heart dowsing feature. And sometimes you have to use the Beetle to collect some hearts. It happened to me several times now that I was low on health, but struggled to get a refill. Maybe the potions won't be so useless after all. But I also got a heart medal by now, which makes finding hearts easier. But I'm not using it, because I like the challenge and I want to use the space in my pouch for other items.

But sometimes I really get my ass kicked. It can be very different, for example I've beaten the two Lizalfos, who happened to be the Earh Temple's miniboss fight, without a scratch. However, the next Lizalfos, who was just guarding a door, nearly killed me, by kicking me into the lava two times. Sometimes you're lucky by simply swinging your sword like crazy (like you would do in Twilight Princess), but other times this can get you killed. In Lanayru the Bokoblins now fight with electric swords. There's no room for error here and the game can be quite hard. At least harder than other 3D Zeldas. I don't know, how anyone could say that this game is easier than Twilight Princess.

Remember the Faron Woods demo from E3 2010? There was this one room behind some bombable rocks, where you fight a Stalfos. Sadly they removed this room, now there's just a Piece of Heart in an alcove. It would have been more awesome if you still had to fight the Stalfos to get the Piece of Heart.

So much for today.

Skyward Sword Blade Journal, Day 1

Similar to the Spirit Tracks Rail Diary two years ago I will blog about my progress through Skyward Sword. Thoughts, early impressions, stuff... I call this the "Blade Journal" this time. But most importantly, BEWARE OF SPOILERS. Only read this if you're already deeper into the game and/or if you don't care about being spoiled. I will talk freely about the game and I won't refrain myself in any way. Though I probably won't talk much about the story.

I'm currently five hours into the game and I just entered the first dungeon. So, I thought this was a good pause to write this post and get a good night's sleep afterwards. My first impressions? I'm impressed! This game has been really fun so far. It's full of nice and fun details, there's a lot to explore, it feels like the complete opposite of the empty game that Twilight Princess used to be.

Well, it takes some time to get started. It took me about two hours to get back to the point, where I started at the press event. There's a lot of story in the beginning and some tasks that have to be done. However, I was also exploring a lot, for example I would enter every room, talk to every person, etc. And the story is quite nice, like I expected earlier I'm totally into the cute Zelda, she's very lovely. And the story feels right, it's an interesting and fresh set up. The Knight Academy reminds me a little bit of Harry Potter. Actually I've never seen a Harry Potter movie or read any of the books, it just reminds me of it in general. But it's not a bad thing, the school setting is much cooler than expected and offers many colorful characters.

Also, most of the tutorial stuff seems to be completely optional, for example I think you can skip the sword tutorial. I did it anyway, but it's nice to know that you can skip it in a replay. So, overall it doesn't feel as bad as the beginning of Twilight Princess, where you have to herd goats, teach children sword moves, feed cats and other annoying things. Everything done in the beginning is somehow meaningful. However, it seems you can't skip cutscenes. I hope you can do this in a replay, because skipping cutscenes was probably one of the best features of Twilight Princess.

At one point they mention that the Knight Academy is celebrating its 25th Anniversary, which is a nice reference to the anniversary of the Zelda franchise. The 25th Anniversary logo even got included into the game.

When we played the game on the press event, we spent quite some time looking for Rupees to buy a Wooden Shield. It turns out that you actually don't have to buy it, one of the teachers of the academy gives you one... *facepalm* However, I thought it was more interesting to buy it on your own and to have the option going to the forest without a shield.

Since I already played the forest at the press event, I focused on exploring Skyloft first before going to the forest again. And it actually lets you fully explore the entire sky area, you can visit all the small islands, even though you can't do much on most of them. But there was one island with this pumpkin bar, where you can let a chandelier with a Piece of Heart on it fall down, which is a hilarous scene. Overall the game offers tons of funny stuff that you can do in the individual houses. The Knight Academy has a toilet, which you can use. Or there's this old lady which collects old vases and you can actually roll bump into her shelf destroying her entire collection. I bursted out laughing so hard, you can really screw around a lot in this game. Or you can look into people's shelves, which never appeared since Link's Awakening.

And you can actually go to sleep in ANY bed. Going to sleep is the only way to enter night time, which is very atmospheric. You can't leave Skyloft yet during night, but I'm guessing you will get one of those headlights for your birds. Maybe entering the overworld areas during night will lead to very different experiences.

One of the first things I did after getting the Slingshot was visiting Beedle. He sells a lot of useful stuff for a lot of money. I bought a Bug Catching Net worth 50 Rupees and two 300 Rupee expansions for the purse worth 100 Rupees each. But he also offers a medal for 800 Rupees and a one slot Adventure Bag upgrade for 300 Rupees. I also upgraded my Wooden Shield to the Bandaged Shield, got two bottles by now and collected quite some bugs and spoils. And there's tons of other stuff to buy. This game really puts use into your hard earned Rupees, which is great.

When you sleep at Beedle's he takes you out to a tiny island at night. He sits there at a camp fire and stares at his favorite bug. These are the moments, where the game really shines. It's a living world with many things and secrets to discover. There was clearly putten a lot of detail into the game.

Got Skyward Sword

Finally... :D Got the game just now in our local media store. Amazon failed to sent the game today, so I cancelled the order. Others already got the game on Tuesday from Amazon... that's a four day difference! Well, that was probably the last time, that I ordered something from Amazon. It was my own mistake though, I should have sticked with my trustworthy Media Markt from the start. They got like 50 Limited Editions piled up all over the place. Preordering the game, my ass...

And Switzerland already started selling the game last week. So much for my head start, but I still got it one day in advance, which is better than nothing.

But all of it doesn't matter right now, because I finally have the game, HELL YEAH!!!! As soon as I'm finished typing this, I'll start playing. This is going to be a long night. :D Expect first impression tomorrow.

UPDATE:
Here's a shot of the unpacked Limited Edition Pack.

It's very similar to the Wii Play Motion bundle, which came with a red Wiimote Plus.

25th Anniversary Zelda 3DS Bundle Announced...

FFFUUUUUUUUUUUU

What the hell, Nintendo? Are you fucking kidding me?!! I waited MONTHS for something like this! I think at some point it was even denied that a special Zelda 3DS bundle is planned. So, I went to the store with a clear conscience that there won't be a Zelda 3DS and bought the red one. And now, one month later, this happens! You're punishing your faithful costumers! Every Zelda fan who already bought a 3DS now got betrayed by your marketing. Why not announce this earlier? Like at E3? Or at the 3DS conference? I would have waited. But there's no excuse, this should have been released since June or at least been announced at some point earlier!

This is unacceptable, Nintendo. And this isn't funny! I'm seriously angered right now and I'm never going to buy a Nintendo handheld early again. Because you're always punishing the early adopters. Something like this is the reason why people are hesitating to buy a 3DS. Nintendo just screwed every Zelda fan, who already bought one! And there are many. I mean, you can't release Ocarina of Time 3D with two preorder boni (the 3DS bag and the soundtrack CD), so that many Zelda fans go for the game, and then release an unannounced bundle for it half a year later... they screwed us. Imagine some Zelda fan bought a 3DS at the release of Ocarina of Time 3D. He would have lost 80 bucks due to the price cut and be unhappy that he didn't get the Zelda model. That's not fair!

So, what am I supposed to do right now? Buy this thing, sell my red 3DS, sell the second copy of OoT? I'm still losing money... Thanks, Nintendo! You just made one of your longtime costumers very angry and losing his trust in you.

Source: Nintendo Life

Four Swords Anniversary Edition, Extra Round 2

Yesterday I again had the chance to play the new Four Swords Anniversary Edition in multiplayer together with the Evelyn Jade from ZeldaEurope.de. By now she had already beaten the Hero's Trial, so it was an equal match this time and a lot of fun. This game can really bring out your worst sides. There's no other game in the world where you compete this much while you actually have to cooperate. It's an amazing multiplayer concept. And it's downright evil, I did some really bad things yesterday to win. I'm not proud of it, I won't give you any details, but I won. But to be fair it was very close... and she sicced Bow-Wow on me. :D

Well, we had to get the final Hero Key from Death Mountain and clear the third and final door of Vaati's Palace, the one with the 12 floors and all bosses in their strongest form. Getting the Hero Key went smoothly, we got into a new area, which I've never encountered before, where you had to move a large block through a maze. At the end there was an entire room filled with bombable and normal blocks, pretty much like a multiplayer area from the Bomberman games. Normal Wizzrobes would spawn there (yes, you were basically playing Bomberman with Wizzrobes) and we used this opportunity to farm some Rupees. The normal blocks would give cover and there were also some cleverly hidden treasure chests revealed by pushing some of these blocks. Of course we got the Hero Key on our first try, we are pros after all. While playing Vaati's Palace I got to see at least one new area for Vaati's Palace and one new key room for the Talus Cave. I've played all the stages so many times by now, that it's a miracle that I'm still getting to see new stuff. Capcom really put a lot of work into the original game, so that it could be enjoyed many, many times! But I'm repeating myself about that.

I have more than 360,000 Rupees by now... that alone should speak for the replay value.

Last time I stated that you couldn't exploit Rupee Wraiths and Rupoors during Rupee Fever. But actually the game still lets you do that, nothing has changed here and we even used this tactic a couple of times. I don't know why I was under the impression that they changed this, maybe last time Jade and me both run over a Rupoor at the same time, but I already fixed the review and updated the last post. Sorry for the misinformation.

That's it, after this match both Jade and I now got a 100% save file of the Four Swords Anniversary Edition. It's definitely a fun little game, a great way to kill some time until Skyward Swords gets released (ony 11 days left, yay).

Zelda 3DS > Majora's Mask 3D

This is one of the bigger news lately save for all the Skyward Sword spoilers that I'm trying to ignore (the game comes out in less than two weeks, guys...). Aonuma made two interesting statements to a Portugese site about Zelda on 3DS and Majora's Mask 3D:

We are already preparing a new game of the series for the Nintendo 3DS, which will not be a direct sequel for the DS Zelda games, but will make use of much of what was done in the previous handheld.

I can assure you that I've talked with Miyamoto about [Majora's Mask 3D]. But we recently released Ocarina of Time 3D, a remake. We're seriously considering a new version of Majora's, but it didn't seem right to release two remakes in sequence. For that reason, the next 3DS Zelda will be an original game.



It's not a surprise that the Zelda team already started working on the next Zelda game for the Nintendo 3DS. Skyward Sword is finished and it's not like the Zelda team stopped working for the moment. It's also likely that they already started working on concepts for a potential WiiU-Zelda. However, the 3DS has the priority, because the 3DS badly needs software. It's a nice system, which totally got effortable after the pricecut, but the lack of any big software doesn't make it really worth it. The 3DS needs good games as soon as possible. But you still have to take into the equation, that a new Zelda game for the 3DS takes at least two years to make. So, we probably won't get this game until late 2013. Spirit Tracks was also two years in the making and this game recycled everything from Phantom Hourglass. But two years is way too long, what am I going to do with my 3DS until then? So, the statement, that the next 3DS Zelda game will be an original game, actually surprises me. Because this means, we're not going to get any new Zelda title on the 3DS for a long time.

Of course it would look bad to release Majora's Mask 3D right now, right after they already released two N64 remakes. However, in eight months this is already a different story. I was hoping to get Majora's Mask 3D next year as a little something to pass time until the original 3DS Zelda game gets released. And what's GREZZO actually doing right now? The Four Swords Anniversary Edition is done and I thought that they started working on Majora's Mask 3D right afterwards. So, I'm curious what they are working on if not Majora's Mask 3D. Okay, maybe they work together with the Zelda team on Zelda 3DS, maybe they are even the driving force of this game, but I'll doubt it. Or they are working on a Zelda project for a different platform like the Wii or maybe the WiiU. There are many possibilities, if there's someone who could bring back the BS-Zelda games for WiiWare, then it's GREZZO. Or they were removed from the Zelda franchise, which would be a bad choice.

Previously Aonuma said about Zelda 3DS that it will be a game were 3D really matters. But his above statement that Zelda 3DS will make use of much of what was done in the NDS Zeldas is somehow contrary. The NDS Zelda games were made with the touchscreen in mind. You can't have both, you can't have 3D and touchscreen controls. Maybe they keep the graphical style (Toon Link ftw) and maybe they keep the feature, where you draw stuff on maps. But you can't have a game, that features 3D and touchscreen controls at the same time...

Source: Zelda Informer