Day 16: The Final Trial and The Sky Keep
I didn't do much today, mainly because I'll be busy all night tonight and I got to a really good stopping point (any time the game asks you if you want to save out of the blue, that means that's a good stopping point).
So first I did the final spirit trial, and I don't know if this was by design, but it was by far the hardest for me. I had to restart two or three times, which is more than any of the others. But when you succeed, you get the Stone of Trials, a red gem with a triforce in the middle. Fi tells me it's a part of a pair, so I know exactly where it goes (I knew as soon as I saw it, but nevertheless): the bird statue with the missing eye that's been haunting me the whole game. So when you put it in, the statue turns around, becomes a cannon, and fires a ball at the part of Skyloft with the Goddess statue causing the bottom half to just fall off. Then a spiral shaped building descends from it; this is the Sky Keep and it houses the Triforce.
The Sky Keep is really cool, because it's made of eight rooms arranged in a square. One room is the entrance, three house the pieces of the Triforce and are designed accordingly (sorta; I'll get to that), and three are designed to mimic the dungeons of each region. There's not a ninth one to make the square complete because the [really cool] gimmick of this dungeon is that the rooms are movable by using a puzzle board in four of the rooms. The trick is that whatever room you're in at the time is unmovable, which makes moving the other rooms trickier. Now, about the Triforce rooms. The Wisdom one has you using a timeshift orb, and that makes sense because timeshift stones are by their very nature puzzle-oriented. The Power room has you traversing a course of lava, which involves jumping from one lava floe to another and dealing with a few dark monsters (which can curse you). The Courage room is divided into three subrooms, in which you fight a series of monsters (two iron shield moblins, then a room full of bokoblins and stalfos, and then a giant four-armed stalfos and several ReDeads cursed bokoblins. Now, in my opinion, Power and Courage should be switched. Especially since the Power room has a couple blind leaps and relies heavily on tools, while being cursed can prevent you from using those tools, usually to the detriment of your health (for instance, there was one time when I was on a floe that was sinking, but I was cursed to I couldn't clawshot off of it, though luckily the curse lifted at literally the last second). So my point is that the Power room is scary and the Courage room requires brute force. But maybe I'm wrong.
After you get all three pieces of the Triforce, you get to make a wish, and Link wished for Demise to be imprisoned forever so that Zelda can wake up. The wish is granted and the Goddess statue island starts to fall back to the surface! But more than that, it lands in the Sealed Grounds, because IT USED TO BE PART OF THE TEMPLE OF HYLIA, WHICH MAKES SENSE BECAUSE IT'S A HUGE STATUE OF HYLIA AND I DON'T KNOW HOW I NEVER CAUGHT THIS. The spiral shape of the Sky Keep matches the spiral path leading to Demise's seal, and the architecture of both places matches up perfectly. It's amazing. But anyway. Demise is sealed forever now, and Zelda wakes up, leading to a beautiful reuniting of Link and Zelda and Groose is happy and it's all so sweet, the end. That was a great game. The ending was a lot more downplayed than others in the serBUT WAIT. That's not the end at all! Ghirahim shows up to interrupt the lovefest, because he's discovered a loophole. Demise is sealed forever now, but that's a new development. So Ghirahim kidnaps Zelda and runs through the Gate of Time so they can go free Demise in the past! So that's where I stopped for today. Phase 3 is complete, and how many phases does this game have anyway? I don't know, but I'm excited to find out.
Days 17 and 18: The Final Battle(s)
It turns out that I quit right before the end of the game, so there really won't be a lot to cover this time. I headed to the past and out of the Temple of Hylia, and then saw Ghirahim doing this weird dance ritual with Zelda floating in the air. I couldn't let him unseal Demise, so I headed to the bottom of the spiral, but then Ghirahim threw up energy walls and sent hordes of bokoblins, moblins, and stalfos at me. I fought my way through all of those and my reward was a fight with Ghirahim. Lucky me.
So he goes One Winged Angel for real this time (he loses his clothes, turns all black, gets an orange diamond on his chest, etc) and makes an energy platform that rises high into the air. He plans to knock me off, so I have to do the same to him (and then perform a Fatal Blow on him). Doing that three times begins the next stage of the fight, and it's really easy to do - if you're not overzealous, you can get through it without losing a single heart. He pulls out two swords, and the game doesn't tell you this but you're pretty much just supposed to ignore him for now. Eventually he'll teleport and then fire a sword beam at you, which you volley back at him and then wail on his exposed chest. Do that a couple times, and stage 3 of the fight begins: he pulls out a giant sword that he'll use to counter your attacks (and attack you, of course). You have to break the sword in half and then hit his chest, which is harder than it sounds because if you're not fast enough, the sword will heal itself. Defeating him reveals that Ghirahim is actually an evil counterpart to Fi and also reveals that the ritual he started has been continuing this whole fight. So it was a waste of time because Demise is now free. And you have to battle him!
Luckily you get a chance to prepare before the final battle, so I took that opportunity to find a Goddess Chest I had previously missed, get a piece of heart from Gorko for helping him out (which filled another heart container), and - after fighting Demise a couple times and losing - going to the item check to get my second life medal and two more bottles for fairies (bringing the total up to five). And even with all of that, 49 hearts in total, it still took me like three hours to beat him. It was awful. The first stage isn't that bad: you block his sword attacks with your shield and then attack him with your sword, then repeat this until he falls down. But when he gets back up, shit gets real. It starts lightning everywhere and Demise can charge his sword with it, because it's basically an evil Master Sword (complete with inverted Triforce at the base of the blade). Link can do the same thing, but good luck with that. If you can manage to do so without being hit or without being hit afterward, you can block Demise's attack and then strike him with your own sword...a lot. I usually had to do this two or three times before he fell down, and I had to make him fall down three or four times before I could actually perform a Fatal Blow on him (he stays down longer each time). I *finally* did, though, and he died, and the day was saved thanks to The Powerpuff Girls Groose me. In his dying breath, however, he cursed Link so that his descendants will never be free from the evil that plagues Hyrule, and then swore that every time he was destroyed, he'd be reborn in a new form, thus explaining Ganon, Malladus, etc.
Then Link and Zelda go back to the temple to talk to Groose and Impa, and Impa says she'll stay there to make sure everything stays ok. Zelda is against this at first, but then gives Impa one of her bracelets to remember her by, and then the three of them return to the present. When they get there, they notice that Grannie (the old Shiekah) is wearing the same bracelet. She was Impa all along, and I totally called it! Also, I read online that she was wearing the bracelet for the whole game; I never noticed it, but it doesn't surprise me because this game is full of foreshadowing. There's tons of it. Callbacks and foreshadowing, that's what this game is made of. Anyway, a couple of the other Knight Academy students come down to the surface to party with the trio, everyone's happy and the credits roll.
During the credits, we get to see the game from Zelda's point of view: landing on the surface, meeting Impa, praying at all the temples, etc. Then after the credits, we get a scene of the other students (Groose included) flying back to the Sky. Zelda and Link seem about to leave too, but then Zelda says she wants to stay on the surface and fulfill Hylia's wish of building a nation there. So Link holds her hand and their Loftwings fly to the sky without them. THE END.
Final Verdict
I really, really enjoyed this game. I don't just want to gush so I'm trying to think of things I didn't like about it or thought could be better, but I'm having lots of trouble. The design is great (the impressionism-derived graphics are inspired, as are the character designs, monster designs, dungeon architecture, etc), the writing is great (the characterization rivals Majora's Mask, the game is never bogged down in exposition despite setting up every other game in the series, I've already mentioned the foreshadowing, etc), and the gameplay is great (for one thing, the motion controls definitely make it more immersive). It's more challenging than other games in the series without being noticeably more difficult and definitely not Nintendo Hard, and this is achieved mainly through just not explaining every detail to you; for instance, Fi often doesn't know how to defeat an enemy, and there are several things you can do in the game - such as minigames - that I never knew anything about until I read about them online (another way it's achieved is through great AI: the Skulltula will never purposefully turn its back to you, bokoblins will step on your fingers if you're on a ledge and run away from bombs, etc). And this is very nearly the quintessential Zelda game; it doesn't have Ganon or Hyrule or the Zora or even some more notable enemies like Gohma or Dodongo or wizzrobes, but it still *feels* like the distilled essence of the series, at least in my opinion.
Part of that is all the callbacks I've mentioned throughout these reviews, which are so numerous that it sometimes seems like they just put all the other games in a blender to see what came out, even though a large number of things in this game are completely new. Part of it is that, perhaps because it's the first chronologically, this seems like it'd be a good first Zelda game for someone, which is definitely not true for many of them. Part of it is that you actually get the Triforce in this game, and as part of the gameplay no less, which has never been done before. And a large part of it is that, unlike perhaps any other game in the series, the name The Legend of Zelda actually makes sense: Link may be the protagonist, but this game's story - start to finish - is all about Zelda and her ongoing attempts to make Hyrule a better place to live in.
If I had to change some things about the game, I would've connected the three areas (though have it so that you had to discover those paths on your own) and perhaps added a fourth area in the middle just for a little more variety. I also would've developed the Parella more and probably added a Zora presence somewhere, even if it were just the monster kind. And I would've gotten rid of the slingshot and had something else instead, because nearly everything you can do with it can also be done with the Beetle, which you get no too long afterward. But none of that really matters. Skyward Sword was a fantastic game and right up there with Majora's Mask as one of my favorite in the series.
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