The shield is an excellent item as long as you don't suck at it. It doesn't take damage as long as you shield bash and is sometimes necessary to stun Ghirahim. The only way to be good at this game is to have perfect timing.
No, never. It's much more fun that way. Also, you can deflect octorok's attacks with your sword, so it isn't really necessary to have a shield at all. And personally, I think Link looks much cooler without a shield.
I loved that you could upgrade items in Skyward Sword, which made shields alot more interesting. I liked the idea that it breaks and wooden one burns, iron one gets zapped etc.. Loved the shields in Skyward Sword. I wish you could get the Hylian Shield abit earlier so you could actually use it in the playthrough instead of just getting it at the end for the last boss.
I'm playing that minigame the thunder dragon hosts and I just found how useful the shield bash is, especially against Demise and Ghirahim. I'm trying to get the hylian shield but the minigame is very, very hard (for the record, I'm playing on Hero mode).
i don't get a kick out of artificially increasing the difficulty of the game i'm playing like some other people do, so i use everything that's given to me, including the shield. plus, i didn't realize how effective the shield bash was until the end of my first playthrough, so i basically already played a lot without using it already
I used the shield quite a lot. At first I did not use it much as I did not find much use for it but later in the game I did. Once I got the Hylian shield I never took it off.
I tried beating those totem-poles without a shield, trust me, it is very very difficult. After the enemies started to get harder, that's when I started to use the shield.