I've probably voiced my opinions about the game in other threads, but I'll do it again here. Skyward Sword was overall a disappoint game for a number of different reasons. Some of those reasons include the monotonous and encumbering gameplay, the shoe-horned, irritating motion controls, and the overall disappointment after all of the hype that proceeded the game.
As for the gameplay, I was very disappointed on a number of different fronts. It seemed to me like Nintendo was trying to craft a "dungeon in the overworld" type experience that is found in the 2D Zelda games. Essentially every different area of the overworld is another puzzle that needs solving. I think that at base value this was a great idea, and Nintendo didn't do an overly terrible job at this, however there were some glaring issues. The fact of the matter is that any moment not spent inside of a dungeon was rather boring and didn't hold interest for very long. It felt like a chore having to trudge through the zones and meet the requirements to go to the next dungeon. Many areas, especially the desert/boat area had a lot of potential, but even those managed to disappoint me in some way. The sky areas were especially bad in these regards, but I don't really want to get into that here. I think that if Nintendo had put a bit more effort into making the zones fun, diverse, and actually interesting to work through then they would have been a lot more successful on that front.
Additionally there are many issues in terms of gameplay that I had with some of the core concepts behind the game. The most prominent of these issues was with the sword play itself. Sure, it was kind of cool to have such control over Link's sword, but even that didn't work as intended all of the time, which I will discuss shortly. The main issue I had with this was that the sword itself wasn't really used in interesting ways during the combat. 90% of the games combat with enemies involved you slashing your sword at certain areas, most of which were plainly obvious weak points. Not only did this ensure that the game was very easy, it also made for rather boring combat. The systems in place in games such as Wind Waker for combat were much better, and even though they didn't feature "engaging" motion controls, the combat still managed to be fun and flashy. I think that this is one of the primary issues with the combat and sword-play in Skyward Sword; it simply wasn't very much fun.
As for the controls, those are another issue entirely. I understand that Nintendo was trying to craft a unique experience that used the motion capabilities of the Wii with Wii Motion Plus to engross the user in the world and make them feel like they were actually cutting monsters down with the Master Sword. I also understand that the control scheme went through countless revisions to make it work better and be more fun. However, in the end I feel like these efforts were futile, as the end result included controls that were not only cumbersome, but did little to engross me into the world that the game was trying to craft. Countless times I would try and do something, only to find that the game reacted in a way that I didn't expect it to, and Link did something different than what I wanted. If this happens as a few, isolated incidents over the course of the game then that's fine. No one was expecting it to work perfectly. Unfortunately, incidents like this happened all to often, and the "intuitive" controls ended up being frustrating, especially for items like bombs, and actually removed me from the game world rather than engross me in it.
Further more, the game could be somewhat annoying to play even if the controls were working fine. This is due to the fact that you had to sit in a rather upright position and focus a lot of attention on actually performing the swings and manoeuvres properly to get the results that you were aiming for. Now, I think there is an inherent issue with a game that is annoying to play. If you're annoyed while playing it, then it's probably difficult to be having fun while playing it. Often times I would want to sit back and relax while playing the game, but that wasn't really possible because I had to be upright and attentive. I don't want to be one of those people that simply shrugs off the game just because they hate motion controls. There are many games that make excellent use of motion controls, even for sword-play (see Red Steel 2). However, I would have loved Nintendo if they had just allowed me to use my god damn Classic Controller.
My final main issue with the game was how it didn't live up to the hype. After the terribly long and lonely dev period between the release of Twilight Princess, I had gotten my hopes up a bit more than I would have liked. I told myself that I wouldn't get to excited for the game, as I had a feeling that issues like the ones I spoke of above my arise. Unfortunately, I did get really excited for the game as it neared release. Needless to say, I was fairly disappointed with the final result, especially after all of that time that Nintendo had. I thought that maybe after five years Nintendo would have actually made something worthy of the legendary Zelda title and worthy of being one of their flagship games, and while the game wasn't terrible it's clear that it didn't live up to my expectations as well as many others. Maybe it didn't live up to Nintendo EAD's expectations either.
In conclusion, I would like to say that no, Skyward Sword is not a bad game. It had many things that I really liked, such as many of the dungeon puzzles and the RPG elements present in the game. However, in the end I was rather disappointed due to the poorly designed and boring areas, the lack-luster controls, and the disappointment after many long, painful years of waiting. I would say that any Zelda fan needs to play this game, and really anyone with a Wii should. However, I wouldn't get your hopes up too much for it. In the end, I have faith in Nintendo and I'm thrilled to see what they do next with Zelda Wii U and 3DS.
