If you ever wanted to know exactly how much The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword holds your hand, you’ve come to the right place. You will find no exaggerated opinions based on hazy recollections here. This is an objective analysis of handholding in Skyward Sword, and I now have full faith in the data collected from this game after auditing the game once more with a second playthrough.
UPDATE: The data gathered and analyzed for my playthrough of Skyward Sword will not be included in my final evaluation of Handholding in 3D Zelda Games on Home Consoles because it was not held to the same standard as my audits of Twilight Princess, Ocarina of Time, and The Wind Waker. As a result, my verdict in the Hey, Look, Listen series has been delayed and a new article that reanalyzes handholding in Skyward Sword will be released once I can complete another playthrough of the game and write an analysis.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is a magnificent adventure that actively encourages player-driven exploration and discovery unlike any other Zelda game I’ve played for this Hey, Look, Listen series. By the end of my 30 hours and 37 minutes with this gem from the GameCube era, all I could think about was my desire to run back into the embrace of its tremendous open world.
Ocarina of Time holds a unique place in the world of video games. Aside from being honored as one of the greatest video games ever made, its sidekick character Navi is often regarded around the Internet as among the most annoying characters in gaming. Quantifying how annoying Navi can be or how often she held the player’s hand throughout an average playthrough of Ocarina of Time was always one of my main reasons for conducting this audit of Zelda games, and I hope readers will be as satisfied with the results as I am.
I love Twilight Princess.
This 2006 Zelda title, released for both GameCube and Wii, has its share of flaws. Several key moments in the story are poorly explained, the motion controls on the Wii version (which I played for this audit) feel like they hinder the gameplay more than they enhance it, and the graphics are consistently murky. That said, I cannot get over how deliciously satisfying its temples and swordplay are, how packed the overworld is with things to do, and how frequently the game made me, and Link, feel like a badass. Twilight Princess is more than the game Zelda fans were hoping for before they caught their first glimpse of Wind Waker in 2001; it is one of the best Zelda games ever made.
I did not enjoy Majora’s Mask.
I know this is a game close to the hearts of many, but my first entire playthrough of Majora’s Mask was rarely as pleasant or rewarding as the other Zelda games I’ve played. My 27 hours and 29 minutes of play time were marred by an incompetent camera, clunky controls, dreary environments, side quests and main quests that felt tedious, an overly complicated saving process, and a lackluster central focus on masks, too many of which felt like one-trick-ponies.
Paul Grzelak 