Blog: Thoughts on Tales of Graces f

I recently finished playing Tales of Graces f. Which is a PS3 expanded port of a Wii game (Tales of Graces). It's a jrpg that is part of the long running Tales series. Quite a while ago I played through the GameCube Tales of Symphonia, but other than that I haven't played other games in the series.

Tales of Graces f (via GameFaqs)

This game is an action rpg, in which you run around on the world map and then when you run into enemies (which are visible in the world) you enter a combat environment where you can move around the enemies and use different combat commands which are bound to the different controller buttons. The rest of the time you run around the world and talk with people and try to avoid TOTAL ANNIHILATION OF THE PLANET (as I said, it's a jrpg). Interestingly the game is also set over 3 (well 2 and a half) different time periods where you play first as a child and then later as a young adult. The last section of game takes place about six months after than the main story line and gives you an extra adventure and a bit of a "where are they now" section.

I'm very charmed by this game. Objectively, it would be hard to rate it as especially good since it has some design and technical problems that hold it back from being excellent, equally it would be hard to consider it bad since none of its problems are game-breaking. Overall it's average, however I enjoyed playing it and as I said I was really charmed by our encounter (which lasted 50 or so hours).

Some of the visuals are pretty cool. (via GameFaqs)

I'll talk below about the things I liked, didn't like, thought about and would include in a game of my own. As always please be warned since there will be spoilers.

Things I Liked

Many of the things I liked I only came to like after a lot of time spent playing the game. By the end of the game, I came to really like the characters, but in the earlier parts of the story they felt flat and a little unpleasant. As you spend more time with them and as the story lets them develop they become a lot more lovable and entertaining.

While the characters got better overtime I think I may have enjoyed the story a little less at its end than I did at its beginning. In the earliest phases we play a local lord caught in a greater conflict between three greater kingdoms who are all suffering a shortage of the magical go-powder that makes all the magic and technology work. Later the game shifts to more of standard, chase down the giant evil and kill them (although it is actually more nuanced than that). Overall the story was still a good part of the game.

Another thing I liked, although I don't know that it's the kind of thing I want included in every game, is the aging up structure of the narrative. Playing the first few chapters as kids lets you be bad at the game while your character is still young (which makes more sense than why a 20 something year old soldier is not quite sure which end of the gun/sword/gunsword should be pointed at the rats). It also offers more narrative options than keeping the time in the game continuous, so you're able to be a kid, have a tramatic event happen and then runaway to clown school (by which I mean the knight academy). I don't know that they implemented it quite as well as they might have, there are things that might have been done better and worked into the story (you lived two blocks away from your friend for 7 years and never talked to him?), but overall I think it made the story work in this game.

Hey we're just kids right now! (via GameFaqs)

I also liked getting an extra mini-adventure at the end of the game. This was added on for the PS3 version and lets you return to your main characters six months after the end of the main quest. It's nice to get a calm way to transition out of the game at the end. The story was less intense, but still interesting and lets you see the characters returning to their real world jobs and sorting out their real world relationships. As with the rest of the story it could be slightly better and less melodramatic but it was a really nice way to finish the game.

Things I Didn't Like

For some reason the developers created an artificial intelligent for the camera and made it terrified of the main characters. It was difficult to see things in many areas of the game because the camera was so far away from the action. Some of this might be in the nature of PS3 games (and my having a not-quite-actually-hd television, it was also somethings difficult to read the type) and it did make it easier to see the enemies around you, however at first at least I found it really disconnecting. I understand that the models and textures might not be at the top of the line for the PS3 but it would have been nice to actually see some of what was going on.

I also found that the difficulty on the bosses was way harder than any of the mooks in the area. I guess the intention was that I should grind more, but I (for some crazy reason) didn't want to grind. It's especially frustrating since the difficulty shows up at strange times in the game (you might get five boss fights in a row that are easy and then one that's nearly impossible). Other than an attempt to boost the hours that the game takes, I suspect that some of the difficulty imbalance is due to the fact that single enemies are at a great disadvantage of groups of enemies (since they are easy to stun-lock and simply can't move as fast as your party of four fighters), however for story reasons some bosses need to fight alone and so they ramp up the difficulty to keep things "balanced".

The combat system was also quite complicated (or I was fairly dumb). After 40 hours of play time I was still learning how the game worked. While I certainly take some of the blame, having not played a "modern" jrpg (the last I think I played was Final Fantasy 12, which isn't modern or at all the same) and having not played a tales game in a very long time. On the other hand the game was still giving introductory tutorial messages during a boss fight more than 30 hours into the game. At the end (especially in the future section) I felt good with the combat system and got better at winning fights, but it certainly took me a long time.

The combat system ... of course we know what's going on here. (via GameFaqs)

The crafting systems was frustratingly complex for very little pay off. Craftable things seem to come in three types, food (and items), gear and valuables. The valuables system was fairly straight forward, but required you to go through the list of every item you have available and see what it can be crafted with, then you can sell the outcome (or save them to see what you can combine them with). The actual utility of this never became clear to me other than to have a bank of spare cash and it took more time than I'd really have liked.

The food system basically works the same way. When you have food as an item you can use it to heal the whole party for some percentage of their HP. More interestingly if you use the crazy inexplicable object creator thingy to make food, it can produce effects in the battle environment (like reviving dead characters, yay cheeseburgers). While this is cool, the fact that no food items are not actually usable to produce effects makes the whole system less helpful.

The gear system is where the problems really stood out to me. As far as I can tell there were at least four different mechanics that affected the creation of gear. Some of them augmented gear and others gave you new types of gear and then somehow you could get things back from gear without losing the augments and then ... you could do something with them. Unfortunately this is not at all intuitive or explained well in the tutorial text and I was never able to understand it. (And I'm willing to admit that it might be me as much as it's the game).

Things I Noticed

Back in the days of the Super Nintendo, on the the things I enjoyed about many RPGs was the sudden access to flight, freeing you up to travel around the world anywhere you want to go and to do anything you want to do. In particular the mode-7 airship from Final Fantasy VI (3) and Flammie the Mana Dragon from Secret of Mana hold a special place in my heart.

Now however, most games don't allow you to fly around the world. In Tales of Graces f you can't even pick your destination from the map, you have to pick it from a list beside the map. Given that it's tough to remember where you want to go by name some times this isn't an ideal solution to the going places problem. It's also much less immersive and fun than getting to fly yourself

Things I'd Include in a Game

One of the interesting things about this game is that I don't feel like there are any components I'd really chose to integrate into a game. Basically, while I enjoyed the game, I didn't feel that any of the novel parts of the game were actually things I'd choose to play.

Final Thoughts

Overall it's a little difficult to talk about  this game. I definitely enjoyed it and will probably play bits of it again at some point in the future, but overall it didn't stay with me the way some games do. I also think that while it's a fun game it's not a great starting point either for the series or the genre. Tales of Graces f is a solid game but nothing to really shake up your world.

He has crazy eyes, but it's only because someone crazy got in one of his eyes ... (via GameFaqs)

Blog: Thoughts on Mass Effect 3

This is another post of my thoughts on video games. As with the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, I finished Mass Effect 3 quite a while ago. Interestingly unlike Skyward Sword, Mass Effect 3 left less of an impact on me and I find that it has largely faded from my mind (and it isn't, on it's own, a game I'm likely to return to).

Just a warning this post will contain major spoilers for all three Mass Effect games.

This is Calrin Shepard. Your only defense against the Reaper threat.

To go back a bit, I really enjoyed Mass Effect, more, I think, than a lot of other people. I enjoyed the RPG aspect of the character management and the combat (although not the inventory). I even enjoyed the Mako sections (that bouncy tank) that no one else liked. The thing I liked most about Mass Effect though was that it let me play a guy who was geuinely enthusiastic about going to space, meeting aliens and doing cool things.

Mass Effect 2 therefore was a mixed bag for me. It was easier to play, better organized and still a lot of fun. It felt a bit more closed in and I found it harder to play Shepard as the space enthusiast and as a realistic human being. Because of the way the game was structured it was necessary to get as many paragon or renegade points as possible to get powers and story points unlocked successfully. This meant that you weren't free to chose the dialogue option you wanted, but had to pick the choice that gave you the points you needed.

Enter Mass Effect 3, which felt on the one hand like an apology for how much Mass Effect 2 wandered off from the original idea of Mass Effect and on the other hand like a plea from EA for everyone on earth to start playing their games. This made the game quite mixed having some of the aspects that I really enjoyed from Mass Effect (such as the interplanetary diplomacy and your original crew), but still some of the streamlining from Mass Effect 2 that felt a bit as though the control of the game was not up to you.

Someone who sorta looked like me used to sorta work for you.

Things I Liked

As I mentioned the thing I liked best about Mass Effect was the feeling being able to run around and be excited about being in space and meeting new and crazy races (if you wanted to play that way). Mass Effect always seemed to be light hearted enough that meeting people and doing things always felt fun. Now I realize that the plot in Mass Effect 3 doesn't allow for so much light heartedness but it was nice to at least have a chance to go do some things that were more "spacey".

It's good to have the old gang back together.

I also liked the way the combat was designed. Mass Effect was clunky at best (even though I enjoyed it) and while Mass Effect 2 was much slicker it also limited the options available to you (playing as an engineer I felt like my hands were tied for much of the game). Mass Effect 3 seems to have found a balance point between the two, where you get to play the way you want to play but the game is still streamlined and organized. That being said though the very best part of the combat (at least as an engineer) is the joy of setting the bad guys on fire.

Surprisingly I also really enjoyed the multi-player. I hadn't expected to enjoy it, in fact I hadn't even really expected to play it. I don't usually go for multi-player games, I tend to play games for a break for interacting with people.  The fact that multi-player was somewhat necessary to get the best ending for the game (and we'll get to the ending in a bit) drew me in especially since I didn't want to spend too much time grinding on the single player elements to get my "readiness" up to the top level.

It turned out however that the multi-player was maybe the most fun part of the game (even if I was the weakest link on several occasions). Especially once I got used to the maps and the style of play (and it was kinda tough as an engineer) I had a lot of fun and I think if I were to fire up Mass Effect 3 again in the near future it would be to play multi-player (especially if I could do it with people I know.)

Things I Didn't Like

Unfortunately Mass Effect 3 has a number of aspects that I just didn't enjoy. The first of which the story. Actually it's not the story itself that was my problem so much as all the side-stories you needed to do to get on with the main story. This is one of the parts where my memory is fading a bit, but the number of times you had to do the traditional RPG thing of helping one person to get the thing to help another person to get the thing to help the first person to get the thing you needed to do the first part of your quest seems very high.

In particular I feel like Tuchanka was both the best and worst part of the game. On the one hand you had incredible character moments and scenes that changed the shape of the galaxy, but at the same time you're dicking around on a planet doing things that had do nothing to stop the invading fleet of giant sentient space robot lobsters.

I think the solution to this would have been to make the game much more open (I recognize there are some options, but they're less even than in the previous two games). You have 7 days and all of space open to you. Go see who you can convince to save earth and the rest of the galaxy. You can keep most of the set pieces and scenes of the game the same, but you give the player a lot more flexibility to cut and run when the time invested is out weighing the benefit collected.

Another thing that bothered me about the game is the amount of time taken for Shepard to get anything done. Even if we exclude the length of time it takes for interstellar travel (which they don't really talk about in game, is it seconds or is it days) there's still the fact that the game takes a lot of time. Enough time that the onboard reporter to have several reports that it seems would take place days or even weeks apart and for that mater there's enough time for people to build a giant super weapon. It speaks to the weird construction of the threat in this game. Giant sentient space robot lobsters that are explicitly designed to absorb and destroy all life in the galaxy have to conduct month's long ground wars?

And I'm fighting you by hand ... why?

This is one of the more common problems in video games (and a lot of creative works), the relative power of the bad guys is set way to high for the good guys to ever combat. We want a strong enemy so we can feel great having over come them and been victorious, but if the creators have to invent reasons why the bad guys don't auto-win over the good guys the story telling is going to be slightly hollow.  It's difficult to take a defeatable video game enemy as a real threat to the entirety of life in the galaxy.

This feeds into my last major issue and it shouldn't be any surprise to hear that it's the ending. I'm less bothered than a lot of people because I'm in the camp of believers that most of the game was "the ending" and as such the results of the decisions you made and the actions you took are played out long before you start shambling around the citadel with a small child (the spoilers will really take effect now, also context is everything).

The thing I was most upset about with regards to this was the resolution between the Quarians and the Geth. Now I may in fact be wrong, but as far as I can tell, regardless of the actions you take in Mass Effect 3, if you took particular actions in Mass Effect 2 there is no way for you to get the "best result" and save both races. I suppose you can call this the natural outcome of the choices I made thoughout the first two games (although I'll counter by telling you that it would have forced me to make only the paragon choices through out the game regardless of how I wanted to play it and that in Mass Effect 2 this means siding against the optimism I was playing for with my Shepard), but it is extremely frustrating that there was no option in the game that let you do anything about this.

This may prove to be wrong, as I mentioned, but I did extensive research online at the time, knowing the outcome I wanted. I think this is another thing that game designers should strive to avoid. If someone wants something to happen in the game they shouldn't need to play with the walkthrough open on the side.

The second point where this becomes a problem is in the final ending. You're given a large ending-o-tron which can make one of three endings happen. You "win" by giving up, you "win" by annihilating the reapers and all other forms of artificial life (including the Geth you might have just saved and your teammate/ your own ship's AI) or you "win" by smushing everything together into a big circuty mess and all you have to do is kill yourself first.

The problem comes here though, if your "readiness" score is high enough and you choose to destroy all artificial life then you get a scene which suggests that either Shepard survived or, at least, Shepard's corpse was recovered. No mater how high your score is if you make the other two choices then this hint isn't given at all.

So for me, the choice came down this, kill my ship/shipmate EDI or kill myself. I had my score up high enough (thanks to all the multi-player I played) and arrived at the final choice with enough war resources to "win" the game. In and of itself this isn't a bad choice. You or your friend. Selfishness or Selflessness. Simple dramatic choice. My Shepard chose selflessness, of course, because that's the way he is.

My problem is that I could have made that choice without doing all the extra work. I could have skipped all the optional missions and all the multi-player. None of it mattered. I gave up all the work because of a plot related choice. So in effect the game didn't reward me for my work and actually punished me for trying to live up to an ideal.

I haven't played the "extended ending" so I don't know exactly how it affects what we know about the world at the end of the game. From what I've read it doesn't bring Shepard back to life, nor make clear if EDI survives if you chose to destroy the Reapers. It adds a do nothing option, but I don't know what the result of that is either.

I would have really liked to see a result that allowed you to explore the consequences of your decisions without relying solely on which button you chose at the end and what your "score" was thought the game. To stick within the framework they've chosen it the ending should reflect at a minimum how well you've played and what you've decided. So if you want endings for people over a line in the score and under it then make six endings, good merging, good surrendering and good destroying and then bad / mediocre merging, surrendering and destroying. Don't tie the quality of the outcome to the choices made by the player.

However the other way to do it would be to remove the score and make the result of the game much more dependent on the choices the player has made throughout the game (and in fact all three games, as long as there's a chance for the player to try to get the result they want for the major decisions). This allows for players to see the ending that's tailored to the way they played the game (and saves you from needing to incorporate a weird ghost-space-child to give you a sudden victory at the end of the game).

The final thing I'd like to gripe about, is the Citadel. In the first game it was a wide open space (if not as large as you might like) where you could chose several different ways to get around. In the second game it was a 3 story office building with nothing interesting in it at all. Mass Effect 3 does a better job of making it an interesting place to visit, but it still feels small and chopped up. I wish there had been more space, more options and more things to do even if it meant spending more time in elevators.

Things I Noticed

When I wrote up my thoughts on Skyward Sword, I found there were a bunch things which I didn't feel that strongly about, one way or the other. For Mass Effect 3 I don't have anything I feel that neutral about. If this continues in future thoughts on games, I may remove this section all together, but for now I'll leave it at my unneutral feelings.

Things I'd Include in a Game

By far the best part of Mass Effect 3, and the whole Mass Effect series is the relationships between you and your team mates. Characterization is important to making you feel connected and making you care about what's going on in the game. If you had never spoken to Mordan would you care when he sacrifices himself? You might, because some of the characterization is done through the main plot, but there's so much more when you've had those long weird chats with him every time you've run past.

Sometimes you just want to hang out with your buddy. 

When developing my own game, I want to make sure that the way you interact with your team mates and the choices you make and the actions you take are well reflected. I want to make sure that you feel like you're working with real people who care and are interested in what's going on around them. This can be complex, but it's also as simple as Shepard's relationship with Wrex: "Wrex." "Shepard."

I'd also keep the number of team mates down. By the end of Mass Effect 3 you have two and a half crews whom you've adventured with and whom you care for. When wrapping up the story a lot of these angles are going to have to be cut short or else the game will last forever. To combat this keeping a small handful of people to really care about is important and helps make the game feel more meaningful.

Final Thoughts

Despite what EA would like you to believe, there's no real reason to play Mass Effect 3 if you aren't a long term player of the series. I really enjoyed a lot of my time playing the game and if I'd stopped halfway through I'd have had a much more positive outlook on the game. I know that endings aren't easy, but unfortunately Mass Effect 3's really hurts it. Not so much for its content alone but for highlighting all the weakness of the series all at one time.

At some point, I may play these all again. I've partially played through Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 to see what the renegade side is like but never to completion. I'd like to revisit them, but I'm still disappointed that to get some of the outcomes I want I have to auto play the paragon route.

I really liked Mass Effect and I liked Mass Effect 2 even though I disagree with a lot of the decisions BioWare made about that game. For Mass Effect 3, I enjoyed the gameplay, but feel left short by it. I enjoyed the story, but felt it didn't fill in all the gaps I wanted to know about. At the end of the day, I was left liking Mass Effect 3, but not loving it.

Yeah, I had a few graphical problems. It may be time for a new PC.

Blog: Thoughts on The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Since some of my long term project goals involve making video games, I thought I'd spend a few posts talking about games I've played lately. In these posts I want to focus on the things I liked, the things I didn't like, the things I thought were interesting and any lessons/ideas/concepts I'd take away for my own games in the future.

The first in this series is going to be one of the best games I played last year, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

For the purposes of this discussion I want to mention things from all through the game, so I'm not going to protect anything as spoilers. Please be warned that this will spoil the game right through to the end.

It's now been a while since I finished playing Skyward Sword. I have a habit of being very slow when approaching games and often don't play them anywhere near the window where they come out. As such I'm fairly proud of myself for jumping on the Skyward Sword bandwagon and playing through the game as fast as time allowed.

I really liked Skyward Sword. I know some people have dismissed it as having been too much of another Zelda game, but I think it struck a good balance between introducing new concepts into the game, restructuring the experience and keeping the core Zelda feeling. I had a lot of fun playing it and thought that it felt great while playing it.

Things I Liked

One of the aspects I liked the best about the game is how active it is. The inclusion of sprinting and the stamina meter makes the game feel a lot more alive and makes it more fun and exciting to go free running across the landscape. "Oh, I just need to hop up on to that ledge. I don't need to go through the climbing animation, with a little sprint, it's just a step right up." It is an easy way to make you feel like you have more control over Link and more abilities in the game. It is also nice that without using the sprint button Link still moves at a good pace so you don't feel like the sprint is the mandatory way of moving.

When in doubt a nice sprint through pub is enjoyable. (via GameFaqs)

With Link's improved ability to move around it's nice that the landscapes are as interesting and varied as they are. While the environment has always been a strength of the Zelda series I think that Skyward Sword shows particular attention to detail and interactivity.

The other strength of the landscapes is the way you become familiar with them. While people have complained that the small number of environments is a sign of laziness on the part of Nintendo (or a sign of them running out of time), I think returning repeatedly to the same places breeds a familiarity that really enhances the world. Particularly the Trials of the Goddess forced you to learn the details of the areas and to become intimately familiar with them. That being said I remember fairly well the landscapes of most of the Zelda series so this may not be something that is a special feature of Skyward Sword.

The style of the game is also very good. While with Twilight Princess I found myself frequently irritated by the lower quality graphics and the textures, in Skyward Sword I never noticed these flaws, much in the same way Wind Waker looks far better and more timeless than the other 3D Zelda games. In particular making the world bright, colourful and slightly cartoony kept me from looking at the edges and thinking about why things looked the way they did. I also suspect that Nintendo did do a better job of graphics programming for Skyward Sword, but I didn't care either way.

The encounters outside of the temples were another high point in the game. While again these are not exactly novel to the Zelda series, they are given more time and effort than these types of areas have been in previous games and they broke up the learning the tool puzzles from the main dungeon/temple parts of the game. In particular the forrest area encounters were interesting and fun, while the ones for both the fire and sand areas tended to be a bit more tedious, but still not bad at all.

I liked the personality of Zelda in this game, and I liked that in this game Zelda did not spend the majority of the time kidnapped, even if she did have to spend a significant amount of time asleep. Having an active pre-existing relationship between Link and Zelda was also a nice touch rather than hunting for a mysterious princess.That being said however I also feel that there may have been a just as interesting (if not more so) version of this game where you follow Zelda instead of following Link. I think ideally in this case it would have been great to be able to play as both.

Having more fun than Link? (via GameFaqs)

Upgrading your potions and equipment was a nice addition to the Zelda series and I like that the selection different equipment (especially shields) was important to surviving the different challenges of the game.

Things I Didn't Like

One of the things I felt quite strongly about is that the world, especially Skyloft is too small, especially if this is supposed to be the entire "human" population of the world. The town of Skyloft is great, but it's the only town in the over world and there are only a handful of people scattered over the rest of the space and most of them run mini-games. There's no explanation about where the knights live and there's no places where any of the characters come from. It's even mentioned how jealous some of the other knight cadets are of Zelda and Link growing up together in the "big city" near the academy, but there are no other towns where these people could possibly have come from. Did Groose live on an isolated rock until he was invited to the come to the academy? No wonder he's so unpleasant to link. "I didn't even have DIRT man!"

On a smaller scale I did not like the underground digging minigames where you had to crawl through a grid avoiding giant centipedes and pushing switches. These areas made you move too slowly, weren't interesting and really didn't measure up to the creativity expressed in the remainder of the game.

The flying aspect of the game was also a bit of a disappointment. In Wind Waker the sailing portions felt active and like you were always working towards a goal. In Skyward sword the flying is largely uninteresting and there aren't many points were you get to practice your skills or get any benefit other than getting where you were going. The different control systems for falling (tilt) and flying (control stick) was also difficult to navigate and annoying. It would have been really nice to have some jump-off-the-bird-do-something-awesome-then-hop-back-on-the-bird moments (see the Saints Row III airplane bit, but with Zelda).

Groose says "Hi!" (via GameFaqs)

For a Zelda game I also thought that the music was weaker than it might have been. That's not to say that it doesn't fit or isn't good, but I don't remember it. Unlike Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time the melodies aren't that memorable. The strength of symphonic recording shouldn't overpower the music memory of the game.

Finally I was disappointed with the Hero Mode, although possibly not fairly. I only played it for about 45 minutes. I found that there was very little from the game to admit that you had already played, knew how things worked and knew where the plot was going. Getting the option to skip cut scenes doesn't really make you feel like you're being rewarded for having made it through the game once already. In addition you got very little extra from the game, extra challenge alone is fine, but having some extra experiences would be nice as well. I guess I was hoping for something more like a New Game+ mode rather than a Challenge Mode, but I really would have like something more from Hero Mode.

Things I Noticed

One aspect of the game which could have been made better was the collection of materials needed to upgrade the gear and the potions. There were points later in the game where I spent quite a bit of time wandering around certain areas of the game waiting for bugs or other materials to respawn so I could collect them. Having a scarce resourse is great and can make the game much more exciting, but for most video gamers there's no way they'll go into the final fight without all the advantages they might need (like powered up potions) if they can get them.

Another aspect that might have made the game more interesting is focus more on the gear load out aspect. It has a minor effect in carrying potions medals, and consumables for your ranged weapons, and in choosing the right shield for the right environment but you still cary all the tools at the same time regardless of the kind of thing you're doing. It might be interesting to have different kinds of load outs for underwater missions or dangerous climate missions (more than just extra earrings).

Better bring my vacuum. (via GameFaqs)

Things I'd Include in A Game

As I mentioned earlier, one of the things I like most about this game was how familiar it made you with the land. This is definitely one the things I'd try to focus on especially in a story driven game. Making the landscape as much as a character as the people you meet in your journey is important  seems to be one of the ways to really make the game memorable and visceral.

I also really enjoyed the different types of equipment and think that it would be another good concept to include in a game. While one of the things I want to avoid in an ARPG style of game is the 'bring the right tool to solve the puzzle' sections, allowing players to set their own equipment and style is an important way to allow them to invest in the game and feel attached to their character and their decisions.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed Skyward Sword and played nearly 60 hours of it. While it may lag a bit in spots I found that the game was pretty compelling and I was sad when it ended.

Looking at the future of the series, with either an HD Zelda or a new Link to the Past style game, I think there are a couple of things that would be good to see (or not see). The first is a really live world, where you find towns throughout the world with interesting active residents who don't even necessarily need you to solve their problems. The second is an active Zelda, the series has been moving this way, but it would be nice to see them stretch and put Zelda in a position of power and authority. The third is that it doesn't need voice acting especially for Link. There may be a way to do it without it being weird, but in it isn't necessary for a Zelda game.

When in doubt fall on things. (via GameFaqs)