[Note from Jake: Welcoming the newest Capital Wasteland writer to the fold, James Cameron!]
Mechanics are the
most important part of any game, video or otherwise. Without them, you have nothing. Mechanics are what bind games together in
series, in genres, in fanbases. The
rage at
Dead Space becoming
Gears of War by way of
Resident Evil is the rage of
one game losing what makes it really special--the mechanics. This is why I can honestly say after two
hours of playing it: I really, really wish
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
was just a rehash.
A bit of a preface: I'm a fan of the mainline Zelda games,
and I've enjoyed most of the older Game Boy spinoffs. With the switch to 3D, Zelda became one of
the franchises to properly manage the transition of major game mechanics into a
widely different format. Ocarina of
Time, for all the hype, still remains as a golden example of a way to
"handle" 3D. With Majora's
Mask and The Wind Waker, the Zelda series further refined Ocarina combat,
exploration, and puzzles into an extremely polished system. Twilight Princess, for better or for worse,
was clearly a GameCube game ported to the Wii, and couldn't really be said to
properly transition the mechanics from simple 3D to motion-controlled 3D. With Skyward Sword, we could finally see how
Nintendo would manage it. In a
word?
Poorly.
And what was so strange wasn't that motion controls were an illegitimate
control scheme (though I guess there are still segments of the gaming community
that don't view the Wii as a worthwhile console). It was the "under the hood" changes that utterly remade the game. Even now, I'm still not convinced Skyward
Sword is a Zelda game. Maybe I'm just
showing my "gamer generation card;" I'm sure there are fans of the
Zelda series who felt the transition to 3D was poorly handled. But for now, I'd like to examine just what
went wrong.
