I finished The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword about two days ago now. I really enjoyed it, and of course I go back and play some more now and then (there's a few things I never finished, and I'm considering whether to play Hero mode).


[ [ Warning: Minor spoilers ] ]


I just wanted to point out some of the obvious similarities with Skies of Arcadia, mainly the fact that the setting for both are in floating islands, and the characters in each start out knowing nothing/little about the "surface". They're both adventures and have RPG elements, they're both Nintendo games (well, SoA Legends anyway), they both let the player control flight on an overworld map of sorts, they both have a bit of anime-style to them, and they are both awesome games.

I felt that Skyward Sword broke the mystery of the "surface" a bit too early on, with most locations of importance on said surface. Skies of Arcadia was almost entirely in the sky, on many islands with lots of scripted events and plenty of variety. The land mass the player would explore in Skies is essentially all in the sky. Not so much in Skyward Sword, where floating islands of any significant interest were few and far between. Skyward Sword would have likely gained more interest with the inclusion of more towns/villages as well, regardless of their location. While there weren't exactly dozens of exciting centers of civilization in Skies of Arcadia, there were still a few good such locations and that was enough.

While the combat system in Skyward Sword seems to me to be many times more fun than in Skies, I can't help feeling that Skies had more depth to it than that. The story for Skies is well-developed, with lots of dialogue and scripted events. But like with many JRPG's, the actual combat gets tedious and even boring after a while. Being an older game, and possibly because of other reasons, Skies of Arcadia lacked fluid controls and animations. This is mainly made up for with an intriguing setting and story that even now fills me with wonder. Character depth in Skies seemed to grow exponentially, while Skyward Sword - while being very well presented - feels more like it only touches on the surface.

It seems that Skyward Sword focused more on the gameplay mechanics and graphics, and less on the story. Skies seems to be the reverse. Of course, I loved both games, but I kind of wish there was a game in between, or (with some luck) maybe even with the best of both worlds. Perhaps I let my expectations get the best of me, but once I was able to fly in Skyward Sword, I was hoping to find more islands similar to the ones in Skies of Arcadia.

Again while I really do like Skyward Sword, I have to say that the way it keeps forcing you to read text you've already read when you load a save game (like the notices when catching bugs / collection items) gets REALLY old. And then many times you can't skip a text box or make it load the words a lot faster even though you've seen it before. Things like this could be easily improved. Skies wasn't perfect either, with incredibly repetitive, and all-too-frequent random encounters (typical of nearly any JRPG, and/or MMORPGs...). This is just nit-picking, but small things can make a big difference in a player's experience.

All that said, there's some similarities between Skyward Sword and Wind Waker as well... but I feel that is obvious to any Zelda fan and won't waste the time on a journal about that.