Since its humble 8-bit beginnings, Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series acted as the frontrunner for both game design and technology, offering well-crafted worlds much larger and content-heavy than its competitors. Just as Link’s debut proved the true potential of the NES, Ocarina of Time convinced the world that polygonal third-person gaming could be more than an ambitious-but-clumsy mess. Soon after Zelda’s monumental N64 installment, the series expanded its scope by playing with time travel (Majora’s Mask), and opening up an entire ocean of possibilities for young Link to explore (The Wind Waker); but from 2006′s Twilight Princess onwards, The Legend of Zelda swapped its once-daring nature for a more eager-to-please, conservative philosophy which proves irritating for those who’ve stuck with the series for more than two decades. Skyward Sword is the latest victim of Nintendo’s one-size-fits-all style of game design, and as a result, falls short of the potential possible from a studio overflowing with talent.

Skyward Sword is not a bad game, but a deeply frustrating one. Baby steps like user-dictated UI options, impeccable motion controls, and an evolution in dungeon design show that Nintendo may be on the right track in some respects, but the following flaws of Skyward Sword do their best to pin down this formerly free-roaming series.

Note for the spoiler sensitive: this article covers certain topics you may want to remain ignorant of until you finish the game.

Content Spread too Thin

Skyward Sword suffers from the same issues that plagued 2006′s Okami; the latter overcompensated for its Twilight Princess competition by delivering an oversized adventure that often dragged like a real Neverending Story. Nintendo’s latest Zelda exhibits the same insecurity, no doubt brought on by massive 2011 releases like Dark Souls and Skyrim; their advertising campaign even boasted this would be the biggest and boldest Zelda to date. But instead of providing a variety of content, Skyward Sword chooses to shamelessly recycle. Much of the game involves Link revisiting old areas under the thinnest of pretenses, where he undergoes tedious and unimaginative tasks like tracking down collections of hidden items and participating in a series of mandatory and increasingly dull time trials. And considering the fact that Skyward’s version of Hyrule contains only three distinct settings, the constant backtracking wears out its welcome far before you realize the entire game plays like a broken record. Skyward Sword has its share of amazing moments, but they’re hard to remember when separated by so much padding.

An Unchanging World

Compared to the most recent games in the Zelda series, Skyward Sword presents a remarkably static world. While Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and The Wind Waker each provide instruments capable of changing the weather, time, and other features of Link’s environment, Skyward’s harp offers nothing but a stupid-easy mini-game used to unlock a series of prescribed places. Past Zelda games empowered players by giving them the ability to shape the world, which is exactly why Skyward’s puzzles seem so uncreative in comparison — they’re mostly tied to the game’s motion-control input, rather than the inspired tools of Zeldas past. Even the series’ day/night cycle has been excised in Skyward Sword, replaced with a binary option (the equivalent of a virtual light switch) used to solve a handful of side-quests in a shockingly small number of locations. The former ability to tinker with so many elements of Hyrule gave this fictional world a certain sense of veracity; in comparison, Skyward Sword comes off as a look-but-don’t-touch Zelda museum.

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