Can't disagree with most of that, but sometimes clichès are good if handled well. There is a reason they became cliche in the first place. Also, it is hard to avoid them, especially when you are talking about a great evil that wants to destroy the world (or conquer it).
Well that's true but they could have gone for a little nuance. Demise was quite literally
The Bad Guy. There is no reason, there is no motivation, and in all honesty there wasn't really much personality behind "I am intimidating, you should be scared of me!" Like Ganondorf was a person. His speech in Wind Waker had me rethinking if Link should have been opposing him in that game.
As for the boss fights, my opinion is the reverse, I found Ghirahim pretty easy (and load of fun!) His attack patters and attacks were predictable, and exploitable. His weakness as obvious as ever. However, to me, Demise was much harder once he broke out the lightning. ANY normal or misplaced attack and ZZAP! -2 hearts (-4 for hero mode) in my hero mode run, I got so frustrated, I broke out guardian potion and potion medal for 8 min of invincibility and wailed on him.
Yeah by the end I was so fed up that I didn't even bother booting up the hero mode file. The game was alright at best, it had some very interesting parts but they were all completely disconnected from the game. Most of the areas felt so foreign to each other that they could have been from separate games and the amount of reskinning they did over those three areas, forcing you to go back to them over and over and over again with slight twists on the environment was simply infuriating.
It basically felt like a defacto Zelda game. It hit all of the correct points to qualify as a Zelda game, Zelda, Link, the Master's Sword, most of the conventions but once all those points were checked off it was like the game designers forgot there was anything they could do after that. Most of the Zelda games, the great ones are a result of something being done differently or new despite hitting certain series cliches. This one I got the impression the designers barely understood what a video game was. I mean if you liked it okay, I hope you enjoy yourself but the only ones in the series worse than it were the DS Zelda games. And there is actually an argument that Phantom Hourglass goes above this one despite its many many flaws. To be honest, if it didn't carry the Zelda name I'm guessing no one would remember this game existed. Which is really sad.
About the boss battle: If you raise your sword to do a Skyward Strike in the second part you'll get the same lightning powers as Demise. They knock him over and you can pummel him. I literally beat that phase in about forty five seconds. It was really anti climatic when there wasn't a third stage. I think my reaction was "What he's dead? Already?" Like I literally said that.
That is all to say, it was epic, not because of the combat, but the story and setting. It was cliché, but I found that it delivered the cliché well.
It was epic in the same way the Hobbit movies were epic, not that it was great, just that it was really big and impressive looking. More accurately it delivered the cliche as a cliche. Not that it was delivered bad but they served it to you straight up. There wasn't anything more to it. There were just so many better and more interesting stories in that game that they absolutely failed to capitalize on. Not to mention how caustic Fi was to the entire experience.
Pshh, technically he got a lot more then that, as you fight him at least 3 times before that, and he is alluded to almost the whole game.
Yeah but that was almost detrimental to the entire plot of the game. Firstly if you have to have every NPC telling your main character how evil someone is you obviously don't have faith that point can be made by the guy actually being on screen. Secondly if the world would end were The Imprisoned to escape the pit in the Sealed Ground then everything Ghirahim was doing and by extension you were doing to stop him became pretty much meaningless. Zelda gets into the past to the point of creating the seal without any intervention from you. Ghirahim fails to stop her. The Imprisoned seal is growing weak so basically the whole game would have ended in the same manner if Zelda had thought to leave you the message "The Power of the Gods is in a dungeon underneath Skyloft. when you assemble it make this wish:
"I wish the being Imprisoned on the surface was destroyed."Everything else you did in the game was meaningless and in regard to the later half detrimental as opening the time portal allowed Ghirahim to revive Demise. It just left a bitter taste in my mouth afterwards.
That's sort of all over the place but the basic point is that Skyward Sword had a lot of interesting ideas that entirely failed to come together to become a cohesive and enjoyable game.
