14 DAY TRIAL // Shigeru Miyamoto unveiled The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword during Nintendo's E3 press conference held yesterday in Los Angeles, California. The game will ship exclusively for the Wii next year. The control scheme will rely on Wii Motion Plus, mixing the Nunchuk movement for the shield and the WiiMote swinging for the sword.
The precise tracking of Wii Motion Plus permits a host of other actions to be performed using the remote. One can select various items from the inventory by moving the WiiMote in the same way one would take out bombs from their pockets, arrows from their quiver or whatever else they need. Aiming the slingshot will also be achieved in an original way, not by pointing the WiiMote to the screen, but by holding it in front of the face, just like with any real slingshot.
Using bombs is quite flexible because of the Wii Motion Plus, as players will be able to flick the remote to throw the bomb, but additionally to perform more subtle moves with them too, like rolling them on the ground for a more precise placing. The sword can be raised to the sky to be charged from the sun and then used to shoot glowing light bolts at the enemies.
As usual in the Zelda series, the main character is Link and the cel-shaded visuals are inspired from the GameCube iteration of the franchise, The Wind Waker. The developer motivated this decision, saying that, “There will be lots of visual cues to identify enemy attacks and weaknesses, and the best way of relaying this to the player is through over exaggerating character designs, so full realism just wouldn't work. If we used the same graphics from Twilight Princess, the game would already be done, expressing why the cel-shading was used, as opposed to the realism of Twilight Princess.” On top of that, Miyamoto mentioned that this was an early build of Skyward Sword that was subject to change at any time. The HUD elements were said to be a temporary replacement especially designed for the E3 presentation.