Skyward Sword HD Thoughts

Since some people might care about my thoughts on Skyward Sword HD, I figured I'd write something up for y'all.

tl;dr: Button controls are great, I hope people try out motion controls anyways, and being left-handed sucks.

When I consider any kind of HD/remaster release, I think they are to accomplish one (or both) of two main goals; to give some additional polish and modernization to older games and to create more availability/accessibility on platforms that are more readily accessible. For the first point, I'm kinda whatever about SS HH. I think that visually the improvements to a lot of PS2/GCN and onward era games don't really have as much to gain. The gains are nice to have, but not typically something that the customer is willing to spend money on. And the developers are typically not willing to invest massive amounts of time to make an somewhat old game look modern when they could instead just make a new game with a similar amount of development. Doing a full overhaul would typically require new assets, a new graphics/physics engine, and potentially design changes. So on that vein, sure I think SS running at a higher resolution and frame rate, and maybe some other potential quality of life changes is a nice to have, it's definitely not something that I (and I expect others) are going to repurchase the game to experience.

Which brings me to the second point: accessibility and availability. It's a bit weird to talk about this for a Wii title which was generally very available (unlike the WiiU), but I suppose since the 10 years the game has come out, anyone new to the gaming market or just had too much else going on to play SS at the time, would very much want to have SS on a more modern system. They certainly won't buy a Wii for SS. That being said, I do feel that the 10 year threshold is a bit short of a changeover in audience, but that's really just my personal opinion and Nintendo clearly feels otherwise and they've been setting that as a pattern it seems.

I think there's a much more critical part of accessibility that will affect players here, and that's options to not use motion controls. And I think that's great. Having an option for players who either are unable to use motion controls or just have difficulty with them is a fantastic move. I really hope that if that's what was holding people back from enjoying the game that they'll give SS HD a try. That being said, I'm going to drop the likely unpopular opinion and prospect that the "button" controls are probably not going to play as well as the motion controls. I'm obviously going to try out both control schemes when the game comes out and I highly recommend others do the same to draw their own opinions on this matter. I think that motion controls will likely be the more fluid, and it's quite possible that latency and accuracy in general would be improved on the Switch. But for those that are unable or uncomfortable using motion control and prefer button control, I hope that the system they implement is extremely usable still and allows enjoying the game without the interface getting in the way.

I do have a somewhat more major accessibility concern with the with SS HD that many people probably don't really consider. If you are using button control this doesn't really apply and you almost certainly can use whatever controller you want like the Pro controller etc. However if you are using motion controls as a left-handed person, there's a somewhat major concern. The Wii's controllers have been thankfully relatively ambidextrous, so I had no problems switching hands for left-handed use playing SS or any other Wii title. I know people like to draw attention to the fact that link in game is right-handed vs left-handed or whatever, but that honestly has zero bearing on the usability, and I couldn't care less that link was using the same hand as me. It's a purely visual thing that doesn't affect accessibility. The problem is that the joycons are NOT ambidextrous. You cannot just switch hands. Even if they have an option in game to switch joycons (which they didn't mention in the direct), I'm not entirely sure how great that will be. I'll almost certainly need the movement stick on the right joycon since so that it'll be easier to control the sword with my left. But the right joycon stick is in a very inconvenient location, especially for such a tiny controller for my large hands. I'm honestly not really sure how this is going to play out for me personally and I may end up preferring button controls for this reason alone. I'll have to see what kind of controller options exist when the game launches, but this my main concern as someone who is left-handed. I sorta wish that Nintendo would release a left-handed version of the joycons, but I guess there just isn't much a market for that.

-TestRunner