After waiting an hour and a half for my 1o minutes of hands on time my excitement for this new Zelda had started to fade. The constant drone of the theme music and the inane chatter from the two guys behind me put me in a fairly surly disposition by the time I got up to the system. Of course, this is Zelda and you can’t stay mad at Zelda for long.

In the line there were illustrations of the moves and how to do them and they touted a variety of different sword moves utilizing Wii Motion Plus and it looked like they were offering 1 to 1 motion control. You swing the remote horizontally, Link will swing his sword horizontally. You swing the sword vertically, Link swings vertically. This is a big step up from the simple waggling and shaking of Twilight Princess.

So I was very curious when I stepped up to see how it would be. The controls are interesting because it truly does involve a lot of unique hand motions and many of them map pretty close to the actual movement, particularly the horizontal strikes. What I had a problem with was that when I would try to do the vertical strikes I would get a diagonal slash which would be fine but there are enemies who can only be killed with a specific vertical strike. That I was having a hard time doing that was a problem and took up a lot of my demo time. Even the girl there to help me seemed to be confused as to why I wasn’t getting the right strike although she seemed to think it was a timing issue. I saw other people have no problem doing the verticals so maybe it was me or there was a calibration issue with my console. I am not sure but it is hard to say ‘yeah this is 1 to 1’ when it certainly wasn’t during my play time.

That being said some of the other moves worked just fine. To use your shield you have to raise the nunchuck as if you were raising a shield and there are segments where you have to reflect rocks spit at you back at the enemies to defeat them by pushing the nunchuck forward and that mechanic worked great. I had zero problem with that. Likewise the archery, while a little more complicated than it needs to be, works well and is essentially the same archery from Wii Sports Resort (and archery for the move more or less).

The graphics take a pretty big step up from Twilight Princess, which itself looked pretty good. The art style is a little brighter and more cartoony but certainly not so far as to get into Wind Waker territory. The animation ran smoothly, especially with the movement tracking of things like how you are holding your sword as you run. It never looks stiff or forced and everything runs very smoothly.

Even after a long, cranky wait for the demo I came out being really excited for Skyward Sword and honestly wanting to go back and finish up Twilight Princess as circumstances conspired against me finishing that one. The Wii has kind of been ruined for me based on events in my life when it came out and it is easy for me to get cynical about it especially when you partner those feelings up with the copious amounts of shovelware that plague the system and I forget how great first party Nintendo games are. Even if it doesn’t offer pure 1 to 1 motion control, Skyward Sword looks to be another high quality Zelda game with enough new stuff to keep it interesting and enough of the same to keep it familiar.