Skyward Sword is the best Zelda game I’ve ever played. Granted, it’s only really competing in that race with Breath of the Wild which, while I recognise its genius, was not for me. That’s why I hope I hate Breath of the Wild 2. Still, it’s not just better than a game I didn’t particularly care for, it has finally sold me on why the video game community at large loves Zelda so damn much. With my limited Zelda experience, I’m now ready to buy in. Nintendo doesn’t make tracking down older versions especially easy, but – BOTW 2 aside – I’m firmly aboard the Zelda train. There’s just one issue – Lord Ghirahim can suck it.
Lord Ghirahim is the central antagonist of Skyward Sword, and so far I’ve fended him off once, only for him to flee. Given that there are three corners of the map to explore, I’d wager I’ll be fighting him twice more, and possibly a fourth time in an ultimate showdown. The knowledge that Ghirahim is probably waiting for me is what keeps pulling me to Pokemon Unite or NEO: The World Ends With You instead of just getting my head down and saving Zelda once and for all. It’s not just that he’s difficult, it’s that he’s impossibly annoying.
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Difficult bosses I can take. I beat Cuphead not through skill or strategy, but through brute force. Failed? Try again. Failed? Try again. Fall down six times, get up seven – the test of a true champion is to stand up a mathematically impossible amount of times. It would frustrate me if Ghirahim offered a massive difficulty spike, but that’s not even what happened. The problem is he is Skyward Sword’s worst mechanic made flesh.
Skyward Sword was originally a Wii game, and it comes with the motion controls to match. On the Nintendo Switch, you can play with these controls as nature intended, standing in your living room and flailing your hands wildly if you want to. You can also turn them off, but they’re so hardwired into Skyward Sword’s DNA that they never disappear completely. With them disabled, rather than tapping B to swing your sword and A to jab, you instead need to flick the right stick in all manner of directions to mimic the swishing of Link’s wrists. In regular combat, this is manageable. In fact, since it’s much faster to flick your thumb than it is to wave your arms around, it makes fighting off beasties a doddle, since they weren’t designed to deal with this increased speed.
Unfortunately, Lord Ghirahim is not so simple. Though neither the game’s instructions nor Fi’s advice tells you this particularly clearly, Ghirahim can read your mind – kind of. He reacts to your body language, meaning you need to feint one way then quickly swing your sword the other to get a hit on him. Once you’ve done this enough times, he’ll teleport behind you, which means quickly using infuriating camera controls while maintaining control of your weapon. Finally, he’ll come at you bro, but the camera controls again make it difficult to see exactly where he is and whether he’s about to attack with his sword or launch projectiles.
Clearly, the fight is designed to showcase the motion controls at the heart of Skyward Sword, but here’s the thing – the motion controls stink. Every other fight is just a normal battle with motion controls, so you can just about get by. With Ghirahim though, him and that slippery little tongue of his can suck it.
Before encountering Ghirahim, when I had barely left Skyhold, I wrote that Skyward Sword was a much better advert for Zelda than Breath of the Wild. That’s still true, but it’s clear now that it’s for a very different reason. Where Breath of the Wild excels – and it does excel, despite my personal opinion – is in how it changes the Zelda formula. How it makes use of negative space, how it strips Link of his power and quest, and how it allows you to be an aimless being, manifesting their own destiny. Skyward Sword, though equally experimental in its attempt to rewrite the Zelda rulebook, succeeds when it stays close to the tried and tested formula. Lord Ghirahim’s battle is a Zelda experience unique to Skyward Sword, and it's the game’s biggest misstep.
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