Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (UK Import, includes bonus CD!)

Zelda just gets better – loved Ocarina, but this is just as beautiful … Fun and spellbinding.

Fantastic game well in excess of 50 hours of game play so far :) very worthwhile all round an excellent addition to the Zelda series

Nintendo really delivered on this title. With an exceptional orchestral soundtrack and an engaging story line, this is perhaps the best Zelda ever released. Any body who owns a Wii owes it to themselves to play this game.

From a design point of view, the game is a messy mix of groundbreaking, and mind-numbing. While the game has been enjoyable so far, it sorely suffers from a bad case of thinking the player is a vegetable, and must have their hand held throughout the entire experience.

Fi, your helper, is ten times more annoying than Navi ever supposedly was. I never found Navi annoying, but Fi makes me wish I had ol’ Tinkerbell back. You are told explicitly how to do absolutely everything, all the way through the game. If you're ever supposed to find something hidden as part of the story, there will be a blatantly obvious “hint” in the exposition text, and then, if that wasn't blatant enough, Fi will outright say “This is where you have to go.” and then point on your map.

She is also painfully slow, with hints on monsters now spanning page after page after page of blabbing. Navi, and even Midna were short and to the point, whereas Fi dances around the point, with annoying, robotic catchphrases like “I calculate 85% probability that…”

If you couldn't even stomach Navi, then Fi will make you want to throw your Wii out the window.

Another fault I have with the game is bizarre pointer controls. In every other Wii game I've played where the pointer controls ANYTHING, the pointer has been mapped 1:1 for location on the screen where the reticle is. For some reason, your reticle's “centre” is wherever the pointer was on the screen when you pressed the button to aim, which can naturally be troublesome if your Wii was pointed off to the side. They have included a button to re-centre the reticle, but it baffles me why they would have changed the pointer controls so drastically from the established standard in the first place.

So all in all:
Swordplay- FAR more complex, and very welcome. Each enemy requires a different tactic to beat.
Tools- More options to solve puzzles and increase mobility, feels less like the typical “bag of spilling” effect of getting all the same items over again.
Graphics- Beautiful style, done like a watercolour painting
Music- As always, very fitting, and in places very memorable. Playing the harp is incredibly disappointing though. You simply hold A and wave the wiimote on a single axis, and the game plays it for you. It’s no ocarina.
Story- Good so far. Though there’s very little subtlety anymore, with Fi braining you with every little detail. The characters are expressive, and, bar a few (Groose…) they are all well done.
Freedom- Terrible. This is the most linear Zelda I've played, with almost no reason to go back and explore somewhere you've already been compared to earlier games. Hardly any heart pieces to be collected, as link starts with far more hearts than normal.
Dungeons- Far too short. Spanning 1, sometimes 2 medium sized “hub” rooms, with very few smaller rooms in between. For those who played Ocarina of Time, each dungeon is on average smaller than or just as big as the mini ice dungeon. Often only 1 floor, very rarely 2.
Puzzles- Good. The game is noticeably more puzzle-y than other Zelda games, which is quite nice.
Bosses- Mixed. I'm up to the 5th dungeon now, and I've had mostly good experiences. The forest dungeon and water dungeon's bosses were particularly fun. The desert dungeon's boss however, left me going “… That was it-” after only a minute of fighting.

So all in all… It was a good game, but marred by the completely unnecessary, and downright insulting hand-holding. It’s one thing to be a little too helpful, it’s another completely for Fi to put the game on hold in order to spend almost minute telling you, in her annoying, robotic terminology that there’s a chest in the room, and that it’s probably important… After the camera had already deliberately panned over to show that same chest (In very ominous surroundings that clearly show its importance) the moment you entered the room!

Show, don’t Tell. The game already does a great job of Showing what you need to know, but then it proceeds to Tell, through Fi, with all the subtlety of a brick to the face.