 Hey everyone, we have a nice conversation to have here about Skyward Sword and how it's actually a bigger improvement Performance and visual wise then maybe we initially thought and even I initially thought When watching the trailer now throughout this video we're going to be having side-by-side comparisons of Skyward Sword's Wii version versus what we got with the Skyward Sword HD trailer Obviously caveat. It's an advertisement trailer who knows if it's really Representative of the final product. We obviously hope it is or hope it's even better than what we got in the trailer but I want to get into this because honestly there is still a massive debate over the pricing of this game and I Don't actually think despite it looking better Then you might think it does or be a bigger improvement than you think it is That that debate is gonna go anywhere, but we'll talk about that in a moment. First off Thank you so much for tuning in. We are giving away $99 Nintendo Switch eShop gift card head on to the description or the pin comment without further Do that's gonna do our first comparison now all of these comparisons are gonna be coming from other people's YouTube channels I'll be linking to each comparison if you want to hear any of their commentary on it Or any of their music or sound that they play along with it This is just not because I'm trying to be lazy over here one I just want to show you multiple different comparisons to I no longer own a Nintendo Wii or Wii U So I don't actually have the ability to capture my own Skyward Sword footage and unfortunately I didn't really make a video walkthrough for this back in the day when I ran Zelda Informer So I don't have any local footage Even from back in those days to try to create a comparison of Visuals so thankfully the rest of YouTube has already done this for us quite easily and get multiple angles from side to side Partial screen views to whatever we end up going without Throughout the conversation that I decided to hold here. So one thing I came away when watching all these different videos is The resolution bump actually matters now I talked about how the Skyward Sword art style was created in a way to look good on blurry screens because at the time The Skyward Sword came out and a ginomo knew this most people at that point had an HD television at least 720p most people at 1080p and remember this was happening about a decade ago and At that point most people had converted off of their CRTs and we're now into flat screen you know HD TVs so that had become kind of the standard in the home by the time this game came around and Ijinomo knew this so what he wanted to do is put an art style in this game that made the backgrounds Look good. Despite it being blown up So I take it a 480p image and blowing it up to 1080 you wanted it to still look good So you went with this painter-esque art style that made it where it didn't really matter if the game was HD or not The background was still going to look basically the same and for the most part when you look at these comparisons the background We're talking the sky objects way off in the distance for the most part don't look incredibly better But honestly side by side The difference is much more pronounced than I expected now. I've seen skyward sword in HD. I've seen it on Emulator, I've seen it up to 4k even so I know how much crisper an image can look just by increasing resolution on it And you know updating textures to take advantage of that resolution increase And while I don't really feel like there's been much texture work specifically done with skyward sword because They're likely already were HD assets that were being down sampled to 480 I do think that it's interesting seeing that the differences are more pronounced than I expected the game Definitely looks significantly better in my opinion In 1080p than it ever did in 480p now. This isn't to mean it's going to look Incredible this isn't going to be the kind of stark differences we saw with say well the wind waker back on gamecube versus the remaster or re-release hd of it on The on well We you why because nintendo actually went through and replaced all the character models And redid some of the looks use the new engine on it or at least an updated engine It was still technically the same engine, but it was an updated version of the engine And they had a bloom and all these other effects first-person mode technically And they did all this because they were experimenting with hd zelda development at the time So they were trying out a bunch of different techniques that obviously would lead into the next zelda game Uh, which was breath of the wild So the interesting thing is they used the wind waker as an internal testing ground Hence why it actually has a lot of different things going on in it compared to say twilight princess hd Which nintendo tasked tantalists were doing which literally it was like a retexture hd port Yes, they technically added new content without an amiibo all that jazz we know but for the most part It was a rather simplistic port jobbing comparison to the wind waker And now we get to scourge sword hd where to be honest it is maybe the simplest port job they have done yet Kind of so if you think about the twilight princess And how they brought that over and they kind of tantalists kind of re-textured things in a way Well, it's really hard to re-text your skyward sword Beyond character models and as you're seeing some of the models here You can definitely tell that there's been some slight alterations to the models to make them look a bit better in hd So there's definitely been some texture work done on the actual character models But it's hard to do much about the blurry Painter style background without just completely changing the art style So you're kind of stuck with it In a sense it does look better in hd, of course, but You're not going to be able to massively improve it without fundamentally changing the art direction of the game However, this is the first zelda game and this is just I don't know why people aren't Paying more attention to this because they talk about how there's no quality of life improvements, right? Well, they added More accurate motion controls They have taken the hud and massively shrunk the hud to actually make it Usable if you guys remember in the original we version of skyward sword and maybe you don't you didn't play it The hud was huge. It took up a majority of your screen It was like over 50% of real estate was spent on the hud It was insane and yes There was an option to turn the hud off But people often needed the hud to be reminded of what items they put on which button on or which thing on the d-pad and You know What buttons attack and what a shield like people needed reminders and that's what huds are for Are to remind you it was nice to be able to turn it off But still people also just turned it off either to record a really clear slow clear gameplay session or to get a screenshot um I like the fact they shrunk the hud down I like the fact that they did technically work on improving the motion controls and they did Map it to a controller and do all the testing necessary to make that work as well So nintendo did do quality of life improvements there But the biggest quality of life improvement is Did you guys know? Factually, this is the first traditional 3d third person perspective over the shoulder Zelda game to be in 60 fps Breath of the wild didn't do it. Breath of the wild struggles to maintain 30 When they ported the wind waker hd and twilight princess hd to we eu They also still ran at 30 fps Oh, what about ocarina of time 3d and major's master 3d 30 fps They have been using a 30 fps target for zelda games for a long time Now the original nes zelda back in the day was 60 or 50 if you were in those 50 hertz days Out in europe back when they were using a different standard for some reason but Reality is zelda hasn't met at 60 fps very often nintendo did bring it back with some of the handheld entries So only between worlds is a crisp 60 fps But the thing is 60 fps matters It is a massive difference and from what we saw in the trailer it looks Like a locked 60 fps. We were not going to know for sure till the game is in our hands But it's probably a locked 60 fps. And so instead of taking some of the capabilities of the switch and Really pumping a lot of work into redoing every minute detail of the world They chose to take the performance increase going from a we to a we you and put it into the frame rate It is no small feat to just double the frame rate of a game and have it run smooth at that given frame rate In fact, there's a lot of things you need to adjust in the code base to actually make the gameplay Work well because the gameplay was built with 30 fps in mind to bump it to 60 Sometimes the timings on things are slightly off So they would have had to fine tune the game to even run at 60 And the thing is I have to start to think do we really want them to do You know, here's here's where I'm kind of stuck in this conversation Nintendo had a choice tantalists or whoever did the port had a choice They could have focused on making it Possibly a little bit better visual looking some more blooms and more of this things that make it look more current, right? They could have focused on that And gave us 30 fps just like we got with with twilight princess hd and the wind waker hd Or they could give us a smoother gameplay experience and give us 60 I think all of us can agree 60 fps is Way more preferred than something that maybe is a bit more visually stunning In fact, I think what's so great about a potential switch pro coming Is that while breath of the wild 2 is going to be on the og switch one of the big differences between the pro model And the current switch and switch light is that it could be at 60 fps for that game instead of 30 Which to me makes a massive gameplay difference 60 fps gets more accurate controls more crazy things can happen The game just feels smoother feels tighter And it just ends up being a better gameplay experience So fundamentally scoured stores the first 3d zelda game at 60 fps Which means it should be one of the tightest controlling zelda games to date So they they did that improvement, which is a massive Massive quality of life improvement that people are just overlooking in addition to yes The game actually visually looks a lot better in hd than it did on the we I think people are just seeing still screenshots and being like hey look at this still screenshot Ha ha doesn't look that good, but watch the game in motion. It definitely is a marked improvement So this obviously comes back to the conversation of hey scoured sword hd is 60 dollars Is it really worth 60 dollars? And we've had a number of conversations on this and I think the grand takeaway from this is It's worth 60 dollars if you're willing to spend 60 dollars if you're not willing to spend 60 dollars It's not worth it. There is no right or wrong answer to this. There is a what you would prefer You could try to make it a question of morality, but this is what nintendo has done it only Honestly feels bad In light of the fact that mario galaxy Which to many people should be even a higher valued game from nintendo was given hd treatment and tossed on A collection pack for 60 bucks getting two other games to go with it And in hindsight. Yeah That actually does look like you know what? Yeah, skyward sword hd feels overpriced when you consider mario galaxy had two other games packed with it But at the same point I'm going to spend 60 bucks and i'm spending an extra 80 dollars buying zelda joy cons skyward sword to me Is one of the best zelda games ever released. I recently did a listing uh through live stream of all 35 zelda games I had 35 zelda games not all of them are can in but all of them uh were licensed by nintendo basically Including things like you know just just to toss it out their cadence of hyrule was on that list Twilight princess pic cross anyone remember that game? That's on the list. Thanks crossbow training all of the cdi games were technically licensed by nintendo So they're on the list. So yeah, it's a rather big list 35 games for 35 years of zelda So I didn't even realize When I was first collecting all the data for it that there was that many games even though I've technically Tried every single one of them in one form or another I mean we got online zelda games back in the 80s and bs zelda and ancient stone tablets So like there's just some crazy stuff in zelda's history that I went through but I'm not so sure there is a good answer what I can tell you Uh about the 60 dollar price tag is Nintendo isn't screwing anyone over nobody has to buy games buying games is an optional entertainment medium We all want games to be cheaper It's one reason why I love game pass on the xbox series x because it fundamentally makes playing games Cheaper, especially if you're interested in the games they put on that service. It's just like netflix. Why did netflix blow up? It's not just the convenience of live streaming. It's it made consuming Autonomedia cheaper than traditional cable combined with hbo and renting movies at that time They made it cheaper And that's exactly what game pass is doing So fundamentally we all kind of want things to be cheaper, whether we're okay with spending 60 bucks on skyward sword hd or not But at the end of the day What really matters Is do you have a great time playing the game you choose to spend your money on whether you spend five dollars ten Get it for free free to play fortnight Spend 60 for a port hd remaster By breath of the lot to You know spend what was it 50 or 40 bucks? Whatever it was for miles morales Or unless you got like the 70 dollar edition or 80 dollar dish. I can't remember where it came with the playstation 5 version of The original game no matter what you end up spending on your game So what matters is are you getting enough entertainment value out of that game for the money you spend? And that honestly is a question that is entirely up to the individual Nintendo is going to do what nintendo does other companies are going to do what other companies do The only anti-consumer practice nintendo really has going on right now is a noble Fixable issue with joy con drift that nintendo is refusing to do anything about at least up to this point And have barely acknowledged in many cases and sometimes even denied it before the lawsuits started landing So at the end of the day that's nintendo's giant Asterix of an anti-consumer practice right now Charging 60 dollars in valuing their games at a certain valuation. That's not anti-consumer It's just Not what some people feel they should be doing Maybe because of the pandemic Maybe because of mario galaxy being packed in with two other games Maybe because they don't think there's been enough done with scobber sword hd to justify a 60 dollar price point Which we should know the game doesn't come out till July. We don't really know Everything they've done with the game. I'll give you a prime example Amiibo functionalities included, but we did not see any amiibo functionality in the trailer. We also did not see Uh, you know Any mention of amiibo functionality in the original game because there wasn't any amiibos there was no functionality back in 2011 so There could be more to the puzzle that we don't know So until we get the full picture until the game's here until we could decide for ourselves if it was if our entertainment value Was worth the money we spent on it or didn't spend on it Uh, I feel like that conversation is something best that we return to after the game comes out Until then I am Nathan Robeljansford in center, but I hope you enjoyed this fresh look at skyward sword We version, uh hd version side by side the conversation I had along the way And you know, am I here to convince you that to buy the game? Am I here to convince you uh, what to do with your own money? I just like talking about zelda and if you made it this far in the video I guess I might as well tell you I am going to attempt to have a zelda video come out every single day, uh Either until Breath of the Wild 2 releases or until we get to the 36th anniversary. So Potentially 365 straight days of zelda videos Um, you might think that's insane But keep in mind I used to come up with conversations about zelda every single day for four years straight Doing it for one year won't be too bad Maybe For now, we have so much to talk about with Breath of the Wild 2 I could theorize Um, I can bring in conversations Thursday. I already know we have a zelda Episode of the podcast coming out. So like that video is already taken care of it's monday So I gotta come on two videos before Thursday. I think I can pull it off. All right, folks. I'll catch you in the next video