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YOU’RE RIGHT! Ask Joe how often I tell him I’d enjoy zelda games so much more without all the dumb minigames!!! Haha, you can only do so many shooting galleries before you’re like “UGH, I don’t care about heart pieces anymore!” My least favorite part about Skyward sword and Twilight Princess was all the collecting, poes, bugs, plants, I did not enjoy it because it kills the pace of the game for me. I like when I game has a new game plus option where you’ve already gotten the reward for doing the collections and can just progress through the game without distraction.

I say that, but I still dearly love Banjo Kazooie, Jet Force Gemini, and those other Rare collectathons. Maybe it’s because the item collection is so integral to game progression in those game and not an optional side distraction, dunno.

Man, Jet Force Gemini… See, what’s crazy is I gave all the homing missiles to the girl and the dog on my first playthrough, but the game forces you to fight the final boss with the guy, and unless he’s souped up with all the homing missile upgrades, that final boss is near impossible!!! So after failing the boss fight about fifty times, I just played through the whole game twice, collecting all those ewok-esque teddy bears yet again simply so I could equip the guy character the second time around and actually beat that boss. Totally worth it, though, because, geez, that game was rad to the last drop. Tri-rocket launchers should be in every game ever. Also, THAT SOUNDTRACK? FREAKIN’, GREAT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Quo6ALsUmM&index=5&list=PLD2C0B69A4CC799C1

The typical Zelda shooting galleries do get pretty old and sometimes frustrating fast. But on the other hand, I found Links Crossbow training to be lots of fun, and I was quite good at it.

I know that we both are talking about TP Zelda and SS Zelda, but I hope I’m not coming across as directly comparing the two. It really can’t be done effectively with the big difference in their settings. I believe it’s also unfair to say as you said about SS Zelda’s personality, or the lack thereof.

SS Zelda is in a setting where she, Link, and an isolated, small populated town have lived together for many years of peace, and I’m wanting to say it’s the only Zelda game where Link and Zelda grew up together. SS Zelda in fact starts not knowing her “true self”, similar to wind-waker’s Tetra, but it’s still a different enough setting to compare those either. With that in mind, she is pretty much able to grow up as a mostly typical girl in a peaceful town with whatever personality she has. And in that setting like that, usually a typical girl doesn’t concern herself with besieging enemies or world ending events that aren’t apparent, but considering about who to spend the rest of their days with. And looking at SS Zelda’s prospects, I’d like to think that Link is one of her best choices. So if that’s what she decided, of course she will be “Link-obsessed” in a manner of speaking, or probably better said, is fond of him. She’s outgoing enough to be Link’s friend, and I’d say she’s smart in the way she goes about singling Link out before any of the other girls get to Link (like the item shop girl… I guess). Just like how Pipit almost (but not really) lost his girl to Cawlin for not dating Karane sooner. Zelda stands up for Link and confronts Groose when he’s being a jerk doofus to Link. However, her personality does change a lot when the real story begins as she takes on her new role to stop the return of Demise, becoming more solemn as well as less outwardly fond of Link as she becomes more determined to do her duty as asked of her. In the end, she has changed a lot from her former innocent self.

Anyways, I could probably go on, but I’ll stop there. My point again is that I feel it’s really unfair to say she doesn’t have a personality except for a few minor things.

As to “RNG” for item appearances in SS, but it’s really not that bad as you say it is (although for rare items, I would concede). It’s more like sometimes you’ll find 4 beetles on the wall, sometimes 3, 2, 1, and occasionally nothing, but it all evens out to the average that you’ll find. But there are places where items/bugs are static, like specific trees will always drop a single specific beetle when you roll into it, and there are also chests that you find that contain specific items.

I still think it comes down to not really being as different as many other Zelda games where many players exit a building and re-enter to smash pots for more rupees, even while the rupee amounts don’t vary. Or even closer example is grass cutting, where there is RNG, hoping a green rupee will fall out but sometimes not, and occasionally excited when a blue/red one does (as well as the RNG for hearts).

And really, there’s other RNG in other games if you think about it. Unless I’m mistaken, I think I recall that there’s a bit of RNG on the OoT fishing lake for the fish weights, and that exiting/re-entering RNG resets the fish weights in the lake. I want to say it’s almost similar for TP fishing. It’s been too long though, so I might be remembering that wrong; time for a re-play though I guess.

Man, you’re the only person I know who enjoyed the flying. I spent most of my time in the air wishing I could be back on my two feet instead of slooooowly going from place to place with no particularly interesting air-borne enemies to fight in the process.

Certainly I can’t complain about the technical aspects of the game: the aesthetics weren’t exactly my taste, but they were fine, and the fact that the soundtrack was orchestral doesn’t hurt…except that I also find Skyward Sword the weakest of the Zelda soundtracks in terms of composition, so sound really isn’t a notch in its favor for me.

I…think we’ll have to agree to disagree on the sword-fighting. I can’t understand what there is to enjoy about it. You get a tiny fraction of the awesome combat options you had in Twilight Princess, compensated by…the ability to choose which way you’re swinging? Oh, wait, that’s been in EVERY 3D Zelda game, even OoT. And Ghirahim in particular ruins the sword-fighting with his hilariously bad AI. (Not that _any_ of the boss fights in SS are at all satisfying; the final fight with Demise on my first playthrough took well under a minute, although at that point I was happier that it was over than I was annoyed at the anticlimax.)

Since you like motion controls…ever played The Conduit? I absolutely adore the controls in that game, even if the rest of it has its flaws. Full UI customization and precise dead-zone and sensitivity settings make you feel like you’re playing a PC FPS with an even more intuitive control scheme than a mouse can offer.

I’ll second Groose’s theme. Honestly, Groose was far and away my favorite part of SS. Does that sound weird? It probably sounds/is weird.

I don’t know if it’s at the E-Shop; I picked it up at Gamestop used a few years ago, as usual. I wouldn’t recommend the game anymore, though; I was just curious as to whether or not you’d played it and would still rank it above Metroid Prime’s motion controls. Conduit’s singleplayer campaign isn’t stellar, due to an iffy story (I’m probably alone in liking the plot, but even I dislike the plot _pacing_) and the like, so the real draw of the game was in the multiplayer lobbies, but those don’t really exist anymore.

I’d third Groose’s theme. While I disagree with your assessment of SS Zelda, Groose by far has the biggest personality and biggest character development of everyone in SS, probably the most than I’ve seen from any Zelda game. Some of the TP characters come close though.

Can’t argue about Wind Waker’s overworld. I love that game to death, but that one flaw in it is pretty much the most glaring flaw of any Zelda game. That said, it’s still not inherently that terrible as an overworld due to the entertaining things you can do on the way; the main issue is just that WW takes too long to give you the now-standard LoZ overworld-teleport, so you have to deal with it all the time.

……..That and the horrific multi-part fetch-quest-that-shall-not-be-named.