New footage from the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD confirms that players will be getting a more streamlined experience compared to the initial game. Thanks to the removal of lengthy tutorial sections and mandatory explanatory dialogue, Link’s sky-high adventure should be much more straightforward and less cumbersome to play.
As a remaster of the original 2011 Nintendo Wii title, Skyward Sword HD aims to improve upon the original in minor ways while maintaining its signature spirit and charm. This remake will be carrying over features like the advanced motion controls while tweaking or toning down less-popular additions like Link’s loquacious sidekick Fi. The re-release will also feature higher resolutions and performance enhancements, ensuring that it will meet the standards that players expect from a modern Nintendo game. Aside from these changes, Skyward Sword HD looks to be a very faithful recreation of the decade-old adventure game.
Among the changes in the remaster are more streamlined and elegant tutorial sections, according to a recent video from Nintendo of America. The high-resolution gameplay footage is from an early level of the game where the player is first learning the basic traversal mechanics of climbing and jumping. In the video, Link gets a brief dialogue prompt from his friend and teacher Horwell telling him that he can use his sprint ability to climb onto a few boxes and then to hop over a small gap. The encounter is short and mirrors other bog-standard intro levels in games of this kind.
This is significantly truncated compared to the 2011 game; In the original release, Horwell’s dialogue went on for much longer, regularly interrupting the gameplay to remind the player that the sprint mechanic can be used for traversal. The function of the stamina gauge is also explained at length in the original game after Link climbs atop the boxes. Horwell’s instructions relating to Z-locking also look to have been removed. These changes were made with the intention of creating a “smoother play experience” as the Tweet puts it.
Many older games are guilty of including needless or superfluous features, and Zelda titles are no exception. Mechanics like stamina gauges and Z-locking have been staples in video games for decades at this point, so it’s reasonable to assume that most players will have enough gaming literacy to understand them from the start. By trimming the fat from the original 2011 game, Skyward Sword HD looks to be allowing players the chance to learn the game without so much hand-holding, hopefully leading to a much more organic and less frustrating gaming experience.
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD will be soaring onto Nintendo Switch consoles on July 16, 2021.
