Tribes of Skyward Sword: The Sky People
Posted on August 19 2011 by Alex Plant
A Zelda game based on a sky theme may be all-new to the series, but sky settings and magical races that populated them aren’t. The Minish Cap introduced a race of sky dwellers known as the Wind Tribe who inhabited Hyrule in ancient times but at some undisclosed period in history left to live in the clouds. Twilight Princess spoke of a Sky People, ancestors of the Hylians, who founded Hyrule’s culture before leaving it behind to take up residence in the heavens. Now we’re heading up to Skyloft, a sky continent high above the clouds that has been separated entirely from the surface world below.
Many have speculated on whether Skyloft has some connection to the Cloud Tops or to the City in the Sky, but now I’m going to explore how these possibilities might play out. Knowing Zelda tradition, we could see explicit connections, or we could get only vague hints and clues. Let’s break down the evidence we have, shall we?
What we know about Skyloft
Pretty much everything we understand about Skyloft so far comes from interviews with the creators, sans a few glimpses of it in trailers, screenshots, and demos. In the interest of accuracy and to provide good evidence, I went ahead and looked over every single interview we ever dug up on the subject rather than trying to recite it all from memory.
Here’s what I found:
Skyloft is a series of floating islands separated from the dangerous surface world
Here’s something that already distinguishes Skyloft from previous sky civilizations: it’s literally a series of floating lands, whereas Cloud Tops was aptly on top of clouds and the City in the Sky was a bunch of mechanically-suspended egg-shaped buildings. Of course, knowing Nintendo, aligning this with other games is just a bit of creative license away, but it’s still something that tosses up a red flag for me.
We also hear that the world below is ruled by evil forces, and Aonuma suggests that the two worlds were once one, but have been separated. Could the evil forces now ruling down below be the reason why Skyloft is divided from the surface? That’s another disparate detail: the Wind Tribe may have left the world for reasons undisclosed, but the Oocca left after having built the Hylian civilization, not because of an evil threat. But then again this could be yet another case where a little bit of “new story” magic might expand on a story we previously only thought we knew.
Link lives on Skyloft, a series of floating islands that are above the clouds. He’s a normal kid living up on these islands above the clouds, but then an incident occurs and Link is forced to travel to the land beneath the clouds. This other world below the clouds has been captured and is being ruled by evil forces. So he has to go down there and start his adventure. The juxtaposition between the two worlds is very important.
– Eiji Aonuma, Official Nintendo Magazine August 2010
Now, Link resides in Skyloft and he is, again, just your average kid. He doesn’t think anything unusual about living on these floating islands, but unbeknownst to Link, below the Skyloft, below this cloud cover is another land. It’s a very dangerous place, it’s ruled by evil forces, and one day, an event occurs that forces Link to actually travel to that land. And the subtitle, the Skyward Sword, is really the event that both reveals the land to Link and leads him on his journey. […] So, when he gets that, that’s the event, again, that reveals where Link needs to go and what he needs to do. So Link is led by this mysterious sword to the land below the clouds and back up to Skyloft and again back below, and while he is journeying back and forth between these two worlds, the mystery of why the worlds have been divided and separated becomes clear to him
– Eiji Aonuma, GameSpot interview, June 2010
The people of Skyloft are oblivious to the existence of the surface world
For whatever reason, the people of Skyloft have no idea there’s a world below the clouds. I imagine this has something to do with either being up there for generations and just forgetting about everything on the surface or intentionally not mentioning it in order to guard some sacred secret… or both. Whatever the case, your average Skyloftians think the world in the sky is all there is, at least until Link’s quest changes all that.
Yes, it’s only the people in Skyloft. Nobody on there thinks anything of it, though, because living in Skyloft and flying around on birds is normal to them. They don’t have any awareness of there being a mainland beneath the clouds and so forth—that gets expanded upon once Zelda goes missing, and you get access to the areas under the clouds.
– Eiji Aonuma, Famitsu June 2011
Everyone in Skyloft rides their own birds, Link’s is special and helps him access the surface
Here’s another detail that diversifies Skyloft from its other sky city counterparts: the denizens travel around on the backs of giant birds called Loftbirds. Now, admittedly, the Wind Tribe also is tied to bird transportation – when Link plays the Ocarina of Winds in Minish Cap, a feathered friend comes down to whisk him away to one of the many Wind Crests – but never have we seen birds like these.
It’s the custom for each person to have one bird. Link has a red one, and it’s actually a special and very rare breed of bird—which is something that makes him get picked on, like ‘Why do you get this fancy bird and we don’t?!’ But it turns out that you need that red bird in order to access the mainland. So the hand of fate gets involved here, like it always does in Zelda games sooner or later.
– Eiji Aonuma, Famitsu June 2011
In the context of the story, Link lives in this world above the clouds, but eventually has to dip below to the surface world in order to move things forward. So [the birds] are a key to accessing those areas. In addition to that, there’s a vast world above the clouds as well – little islands floating in the sky all over the place that you can explore, and there are events and scenarios that play out there as well, which are accessed by riding your bird.
– Eiji Aonuma, Nintendo Power, July 2011
There’s a boarding school for knights-in-training
Ah, this game’s explanation for why Link knows how to wield a sword – he’s learning to become a knight! The Wind Tribe and Oocca don’t seem to have any direct connection to the art of swordfighting and don’t seem to have their own soldiery, but yet again that doesn’t prevent Skyward Sword from introducing these elements! There’s nothing directly saying so, but I think Link’s birdrider skills come from his time in boarding school as well. I guess we’ll find out in November!
Link, Zelda and their other friends all go to the same boarding school, and you’ve got teachers and a principal as well. It’s a bit of a different setting from previous Zeldas.
– Eiji Aonuma, Famitsu June 2011
The people you saw in the opening scene are part of – we don’t have an official name for it yet – a sort of academy, a knight academy, that Link is a part of and [they] oversee the school, and [the people are] also his classmates. So in that sense, this is a game that really puts Link in a different context and a different environment.
– Eiji Aonuma, Nintendo Power, July 2011
The People of Skyloft are Hylian
Okay, so I don’t have an actual interview quote for this one, but it’s pretty blatantly obvious given that the characters we’ve seen so far all sport the traditional long ears we’ve come to know and love. They come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and skin tones – there’s even a black guy! – but they’re all definitely Hylian. They turn out to be some kind of proto-Hylians, or even the “ancestors of the Hylians” mentioned in Twilight Princess (a credit to a possible Oocca connection), but the fact of the matter is that they’re definitely not the short-eared, homogenous group we saw in Minish Cap.
…Looks like there’s not a lot here that points to any kind of connection between Skyloft and the previous sky cities. Again, as I’ve been saying, this doesn’t mean Nintendo won’t include some kind of relationship anyway, and they tend to try to keep even the familiar things fresh and new with each iteration, so this definitely doesn’t close the case just yet.
How the other Sky Tribes might connect
You all came here for speculation, so speculation ye shall have.
As I just mentioned, the people of Skyloft do seem to be Hylian – and given that a number of the trappings of Hylian civilization such as the royal family and Triforce don’t seem to exist up in Skyloft, this probably sets them as the “ancestors of the Hylians.” Now, we know that according to Twilight Princess the ancestors of the Hylians created a number of cultural elements which they left behind in Hyrule when they ascended to the heavens.
How could this work? Well, the Hylian culture left behind by their ancestors could very well have come from a time before there was a royal family anyway. Could the ruins we explore on the surface be remnants from when the Skyloft people once inhabited Hyrule? I think it’s definitely possible.
What about the inhuman Oocca? I sort of hinted at a possibility in a recent article I wrote about the Sheikah:
[The Oocca’s role in Skyward Sword] really depends how far the Oocca’s role as the “ancestors of the Hylians” has progressed by Skyward Sword. Do Skyloft’s Hylian-like people descend in some way from a post-Oocca culture, or is their civilization still waiting to be fashioned in the world below? Whether or not the Temple of Time already exists by Skyward Sword’s time or the Oocca themselves already live somewhere above the clouds should both be good indicators.
[…]
It’s also possible that the Oocca haven’t completed their work in Hyrule yet – and this is especially likely if the Temple of Time doesn’t exist yet, since they are credited with its creation. In that case, might we see the groundwork for the “messenger to the heavens” sideplot take shape? Could the Oocca and Sheikah be working together to protect Skyloft in order to prepare for the inevitable creation of the Master Sword, the final seals on the Triforce and the Sacred Realm, and the triumphant establishment of the Hyrule Kingdom?
What we see in Skyward Sword, whether or not it spells out the answer to these questions, could be key in terms of figuring out the complicated relationship between the Hylians, the Oocca, and now these Skyloftians. If the Temple of Time exists, or the Oocca have already moved to the heavens, then it seems likely that the ancient ruins they left behind in Hyrule will already exist. Skyloft’s people could therefore be “descended” (at least culturally speaking) from them. If neither of these is the case, it could be that the “birth” of Hylian culture has yet to come about.
Speaking of the origins of Hylian culture, I’m a little curious as to whether the Skyloft people will actually be called “Hylians.” We’ve already seen that the Hylian Shield bears the race’s traditional name, but for all we know it could just be a placeholder title, like the Master Sword’s appearance in the E3 2010 demo. If they go by a different name or the “new” name has its origins in Skyward Sword, I think it’s safe to conclude that the culture comes about there as well. If they are indeed known as the Hylians throughout, it’ll be a bit harder to say for sure.
There’s a similar sort of indicator for the Wind Tribe. We know from Minish Cap that the Wind Tribe kept in close contact with the royal family, particularly King Gustaf, before ascending to the heavens. We also know that there isn’t exactly a royal family in Skyward Sword, although that doesn’t rule out the possibility that there could have been one before Skyloft became separated.
If we meet the Wind Tribe up in the sky, we’ll know there must have been a royal family in pre-Skyloft times. (This’ll be a lot easier if we hear about a previous king, like Gustaf.) On the other hand, if we meet the Wind Tribe on the surface (or, say, Zelda has a father or grandfather named Gustaf), it’ll be more or less confirmed that the Skyloftians aren’t really related, and the ancient period during which the royal family establishes contact with them hasn’t played out yet. Of course, we could never see any explicit mention of the Wind Tribe at all.
Unfortunately, I don’t know the answers to these questions, but hopefully I’ve helped narrow down things we might watch for in Skyward Sword to try to unravel the mystery for ourselves. I’ll leave you with this interesting observation: When I last played Minish Cap, I noticed a visual similarity to the cape worn by Ghirahim on one of the tapestries hanging in the Wind Tribe’s dwelling-place. Check out the sprite below alongside the official art:
See any similarities? Connection or coincidence? You decide! And I haven’t forgotten your fan requests for future articles (feel free to keep ‘em coming, by the way!) – you’ll be seeing some responses to these starting real soon.
The Skyward Sword Speculation Series is a column that focuses on speculated possibilities for Skyward Sword‘s gameplay and storyline. The idea came from a general speculation article we published in the wake of E3 2010, and I’m bringing it back in the wake of E3 and Comic Con 2011! While I try to make my guesses based on confirmed or suggested facts, bear in mind that they are still just that – guesses – and may or may not prove to be true, or even at all accurate. I’ll be dealing with all kinds of other possibilities in future articles, so stay tuned for upcoming installments!
