Slash, wheeze, slash, wheeze

[Neo]

Run around this area you've already explored to collect all these orbs in the time limit

This is actually a conscious design decision. They took the tear quest from Twilight Princess and placed it after you've already explored and become familiar with the terrain, so they can pull a Phantom Hourglass and put in nightmare-inducing guardians that kill you in one hit. It's cleverly done and fixes what was one of the worst parts in Twilight.

If you're playing this game with the old goal of "getting to the next dungeon", you're just setting yourself for disappointment. There are only six dungeons in the game, two per area, plus the one medley dungeon which takes place SOMEWHERE ELSE!?, with a lot of content instead being doled out to the overworld to fix the "large open area filled with absolutely nothing" problem that started with Ocarina of Time's Hyrule Field and culminated in Twilight's complete disaster.

You might not appreciate having to go through the same areas multiple times, but there are also a lot of fans of this more Metroidvania take on things. The game still gives you a new item inside of a dungeon like usual, but this time it also gives you one before you even enter it so you get to play around with shiny new toys on the overworld a lot. Contrast with how many times Twilight Princess ever allowed you to use anything outside of a dungeon.

Personally, I enjoyed the new balance they gave to things. I liked the Silent Realms, climbing the Great Tree, riding fucking rollercoasters and

goddamn escort quest

okay that one was considerably shitty

Don't get me wrong, Skyward Sword has a lot of irritating flaws, a lot of stuff that is just plain wrong and I know it's wrong and I know why it's wrong and it really annoys me how they supposedly spent 3 years making the game and somehow didn't notice it, but at the end of the day the overall experience was quite enjoyable. Of course the feeling that invariably prevails is one of anxiousness, because I can't wait to see what they come up with in the next one. I don't think they're going to drastically rebuild the game from scratch any time soon, so a new Zelda can't be that far off, can it? 2013? 14? Please?

I definitely prefer this kind of active, get-shit-done Zelda, even if it's partly off camera like in WW.

Spoiler: During the credits you get to see the story from her perspective. Yes, they bothered making cutscenes for Zelda arriving at the surface and going to pray at the temples and everything. I don't know why, it's not particularly interesting.

[Green Gibbon!]

This is actually a conscious design decision.

Oh that clears it up, I thought it ended up in the game code by accident!

Remind me again what the "tear quests" in Twilight Princess were. Because I don't remember anything as annoying as Skyward's silent realms.


Backtracking is not what bothers me, but the way the overworld segments in Skyward are laid out, they're almost like mini dungeons in and of themselves. They're not overworld maps, they're levels. It's big fun the first time you do it, but it's like going back into a labyrinth that you're forced to return to constantly. I'm tired of dashing up those fucking sand slopes while avoiding boulders from the goblins already. Once was enough. Gimmicks like time limits and escort quests are just lazy design and the game would've been better without them.

[CM August]

Were there any deals in the US that had the game packaged with the required Motion Plus peripheral? Just asking since there was nothing like that here, or even the attachment on its own. That would have been nice, as opposed to paying $157 (the game, and the improved remote) just to play the fucking thing.

A lot of people mave made good points about the gameplay, so let's talk about the plot. It hasn't been very good so far. I'm on my way to the fifth dungeon myself, but for a game that has you mastering arguably the most sophisticated doodads to date and collecting sacred artifacts by the dozen, the storyline sure makes you feel like a weakling. It's like everything's made out to be just one big test, with everyone looking down their noses at you no matter how many dungeons you've cleared out.

Nobody's even mentioned what it's all for! Everyone just seems to dance around the subject and talk about 'destiny' instead, and the mysterious evil Gaylord character has been almost completely ignored by the plot despite showing up like 5 times. I really hate this kind of storytelling, where half the suspense is simply because nobody explains shit. By the two-hour mark in Ocarina of Time you knew who Ganondorf was, what he wanted and what was at stake. Nobody acted all coy about it, which sold the threat a lot better. The plot is Skyward Sword is apparently supposed to have an air of urgency, right? It's weird that a game with such excessive hand-holding in other respects would be so muddy and pretentious wherever the plot is concerned.

There's still another half of the game to play of course, but those have been my thoughts so far.

[Cuckooguy]

Remind me again what the "tear quests" in Twilight Princess were. Because I don't remember anything as annoying as Skyward's silent realms.

Took me a while to remember, but now I remember. Any time you went into a new area eclipsed by Twilight you'd have to search for these bugs in the area that held tears, whereupon killing them you'd obtain tears for this thingamajig on behalf of some majestic light creature to restore normalcy to the area. You only do this like, 4 or so times throughout the whole game (all within and before the 1/2 way mark of the game) so I can see why it's easy to forget.

Anyway I just started the game today and met my first Goron. So far it's okay, still pretty early, but I sucked so much at the landing in the circle at the end of the Ceremony and it was annoying having to listen to Zelda explain how to do it every time I failed.

[Green Gibbon!]

Okay, so that wasn't just me! I thought maybe I misunderstood the explanation. It took me the longest time to get the hang of falling - you really have to tilt it.

Any time you went into a new area eclipsed by Twilight you'd have to search for these bugs in the area that held tears

Okay, that's right, I remember it now. Yeah, that was a little tedious, but there was no time limit and you didn't have to start over if you take a single hit and there weren't cheap-ass traps everywhere like glowing liquid and searchlight ghosts.

And yeah, the storytelling is not as interesting and neither is the character design. The game is not bad, but because the annoying stuff is placed so prominently, it feels like there's more than there probably actually is. To the game's credit, the dungeons are well-designed (the best part by far) and there's actually some new power-ups, most of which are pretty interesting. Either way, though, this really isn't in the same league as Twilight Princess.

[Crisis]

Skyward Sword has so many parallels to Wind Waker (both good and bad), I'm suspecting it was made by the same team - the B team, I'm afraid.

My general observation is that Miyamoto's forte is level design. His best work is when his game is as abstract as possible and the narrative is mostly told through gameplay. That's why he's so fond of silent protagonists.

Mario Sunshine and Wind Waker both stand out as games that have less of the rigorous level design we've come to expect, but they did attempt to have more complex narratives than their predecessors. Skyward Sword definitely seems to be pushing in this direction.

The problem seems to be that there's a massive disconnect between the narrative told by the gameplay and the narrative told through cutscenes. All the stuff that CM August mentioned, basically.

[Neo]

This is actually a conscious design decision.

Oh that clears it up, I thought it ended up in the game code by accident!

What I meant was, it became awful (by your standards, anyway) on purpose, it wasn't just a crapshoot.

Remind me again what the "tear quests" in Twilight Princess were. Because I don't remember anything as annoying as Skyward's silent realms.

Any time you went into a new area eclipsed by Twilight you'd have to search for these bugs in the area that held tears, whereupon killing them you'd obtain tears for this thingamajig on behalf of some majestic light creature to restore normalcy to the area.

What he said. The tear collecting quests were one of the most reviled thing in Twilight Princess, second only to the empty overworld with nothing to do once you beat the dungeons, and I thought they did a great job in salvaging something they could have just easily tossed aside.

Okay, that's right, I remember it now. Yeah, that was a little tedious, but there was no time limit and you didn't have to start over if you take a single hit and there weren't cheap-ass traps everywhere like glowing liquid and searchlight ghosts.

Easy, geezer. Watch your blood pressure.

There are much worse parts in the game, like your first trek through the desert where you have to dash across quicksand 57 times, and stuff that you haven't even reached yet so I'm not going to spoil for you. In retrospect, the Silent Realms are among the parts of the game I remember most fondly. Then again, I loved the Temple of the Ocean King in Phantom Hourglass while everyone moaned about how it was just a dungeon you had to repeat 3 or 4 times (which you didn't, but that's besides the point), so I dunno.

A lot of people mave made good points about the gameplay, so let's talk about the plot. It hasn't been very good so far. [...]

Nobody's even mentioned what it's all for! Everyone just seems to dance around the subject and talk about 'destiny' instead, and the mysterious evil Gaylord character has been almost completely ignored by the plot despite showing up like 5 times.

Maybe you haven't been paying enough attention? You have this big demon thing that's trying to escape its seal, and whenever you meet Ghirahim he reaffirms his goal of reviving his master. 2 + 2 = ?

[Popcorn]

Why wouldn't the same team pump them out every time? It's not like TP wasn't stuffed full of mediocre filler too (like those goddamn werewolf sequences, which felt especially crummy after Okami), but at least it was better than Wind Waker. Wind Waker's final fetch quest sticks in my mind as one of the most gruelling sequences of video game bullshit I've ever played through. I doubt I'd have the stamina for it now.

So I'm somewhere between the fifth and sixth dungeons and holy crap does this game have a lot of filler in the second half. Run around this area you've already explored to collect all these orbs in the time limit, go back into this old dungeon, fight this old boss, and oops, you can't progress here until you fly all the way back over to this other area and get this item from this NPC, and oh by the way, have a goddamn escort quest.

But but but Edge wrote in their 9/10 review: "When later acts see entire regions double back on themselves – either reinvented as terrifying stealth scrambles or disrupted by ill-tempered deities – you wonder if Nintendo has found the secret to infinite level design." I haven't played the game yet but I read that and nearly spat out my Weetabix.

[Crisis]

Weirdly enough, I've played through Wind Waker 3 or 4 times and the triforce hunt has never bothered me once. It's not my favourite part of the game, but I never had a strong hatred for it. I often wonder if people are misremembering it, or if I just took a different approach, because their experience of it never seems to match mine.

One of the things I like about Wind Waker is that the world map is compartmentalised. Whenever you decide to go exploring - there isn't any particular pressure to do so until you need the triforce, but I like to do it as soon as I can sail freely - all the islands fit into a neat grid and there's always something to get out of visiting them. Even if it's just a segment of the map and the name of the island. But usually there's either a visual set-piece, a treasure, a secret, or some combination of the three.

(The ocean also feels much more alive than other 3D Zelda overworlds. There are ships and cannons and divers and sea monsters and watchtowers and rafts and whirlwinds and seagulls and treasure chests. People often complain that it feels empty, but I don't often feel that way. The ocean is really big, but the boat also moves really fast, much faster than Link can move on land, and there's always a distraction between islands.)

Wind Waker feels like a great big treasure hunt. A big part of the game is cross-referencing sea charts and other clues to locate things. If all you do is wander randomly, then the game punishes you for it.

Similarly, getting the triforce feels like an impossible endeavour at first. But it easily breaks down into dozens of smaller challenges. For instance, you need over 3000 rupees to decipher all the maps. That's a lot of rupees! Especially since the game has never really required you to grind for rupees before. In fact, chances are high you're not even capable of carrying 3000 rupees. (It's possible that you can only carry 200 rupees, which isn't enough for a single map!)

But that's the clue. It's not something you're supposed to grind out all at once. There are sunken treasures and rupee caches all over the map. Those treasure maps that have been lying, untouched in your inventory? You're about to go on a treasure hunt, so now might be a good time to open those up.

This breakdown of large challenges into smaller ones is the reason why Wind Waker is the only Zelda I've 100%'d. (Well, it's not the only reason, but it's the deciding one.)

[Neo]

But but but Edge wrote in their 9/10 review: "When later acts see entire regions double back on themselves – either reinvented as terrifying stealth scrambles or disrupted by ill-tempered deities – you wonder if Nintendo has found the secret to infinite level design." I haven't played the game yet but I read that and nearly spat out my Weetabix.

Those things end up happening but they're not nearly as epic as that review makes them out to be. "Insipid" would be a far better word.

I think one the game's greatest flaws is that it's so formulaic it's yawn-inducing. There are three distinct areas on the map to explore, the woods, the volcano and the desert, but let's make sure you do exactly the same things in the exact same order in all of them. That's why the dungeons are so great in comparison, because although they all have dungeon maps, a unique item and a boss key, they're free to do anything they want in between.

The desert is also by far the largest of all the areas, which makes it the most fun because there's very little repetition. (The desert Silent Realm is effectively the only time you're forced to play in the same area again.)

[gr4yJ4Y]

Weirdly enough, I've played through Wind Waker 3 or 4 times and the triforce hunt has never bothered me once. It's not my favourite part of the game, but I never had a strong hatred for it. I often wonder if people are misremembering it, or if I just took a different approach, because their experience of it never seems to match mine.

It's not something you're supposed to grind out all at once. There are sunken treasures and rupee caches all over the map.

This breakdown of large challenges into smaller ones is the reason why Wind Waker is the only Zelda I've 100%'d.

The triforce quest goes against the game's small-medium-large reward pacing system familiar to the Zelda franchise. Most dungeons in Zelda games have you reaching for little rewards (rupees), medium rewards (compasses, small keys, boss keys), and large rewards (new useful item, heart pieces). For the medium and small rewards, there's a maximum amount of work you should have to do to get them. To get a little or medium reward, you shouldn't have to work as hard as you did for the hard-to-get large rewards. The triforce quest asks you to work hard to get a lot of little rewards that eventually leads up to a new large reward. For most players this didn't seem fair and gave a drawn out feeling.

[Crisis]

The triforce quest goes against the game's small-medium-large reward pacing system familiar to the Zelda franchise. Most dungeons in Zelda games have you reaching for little rewards (rupees), medium rewards (compasses, small keys, boss keys), and large rewards (new useful item, heart pieces). For the medium and small rewards, there's a maximum amount of work you should have to do to get them. To get a little or medium reward, you shouldn't have to work as hard as you did for the hard-to-get large rewards. The triforce quest asks you to work hard to get a lot of little rewards that eventually leads up to a new large reward. For most players this didn't seem fair and gave a drawn out feeling.

That makes a lot of sense.

It occurs to me that there's also a 3-tier structure to the level design in most Zelda games. You have the overworld as the highest level, and then the dungeons, and then individual rooms within dungeons. The dungeons provide context for the individual puzzles, and the overworld provides a context for the dungeons. The overworld is particularly notable because it's the yardstick by which you measure your abilities; clearing dungeons gives you the tools to fully explore the overworld, and provides challenges that remain static while the player develops.

It's a proven formula. But the problem with formulae is that they get stale. Wind Waker was clearly an attempt to disrupt and subvert some of the classic Zelda tropes. It didn't quite work out - but at least it felt like it had its own identity (unlike Twilight Princess, which was clearly an attempt to return to the norm).

[Blount]

I didn't mind the Triforce quest. By that point I was all ready to start exploring the entire ocean and fill up my map, so getting the Triforce pieces just happened naturally as a fruit of that labor. I had a lot of fun finding out what I was gonna find on the next unexplored island. Wind Waker really did have an enormous overworld with a lot to do in between. The only problem I had with it was playing the same two melodies over and over every time I wanted to set sail.

Skyward Sword is weird with its overworld scheme. Skyloft is the only real town with any relevant NPCs to encounter, and it's fully fleshed out. I'm one of those players who enjoys the occasional side-quest, and Skyloft is filled with them. Speaking of, are there multiple outcomes for those? I made the Item Check chick Link's love interest through repetitive, dubious dialogue choices, and it looks like I could have easily used that stupid fat guy's love letter as toilet paper for whoever's got the runs at night. I guess that'll give me something new to do if I ever replay the game.

Once you get out of Skyloft, you just have this massive, empty overworld that has nothing going on. I know it's not the focus of the game, but it's no excuse not to make it more enjoyable. You still have to travel around it often if you like exploring, but getting from one point to another is such a bore! I'm always craving one of those rocks with rings in the middle just so I can go a little faster. Why couldn't it be more like the ocean in Wind Waker (minus the tedious baton bullshit)?

And then, like GG said, you've got the ground-level overworld, which plays more like a platformer/hack-and-slash. I'm mostly okay with it because I get around it easily, but there are three things that annoy the hell out of me:

One, Link has the stamina of an obese couch potato. The lands are too vast to get anywhere quickly without sprinting, and Link can't do it for more than a few seconds straight without nearly coughing up a lung. This gets really annoying when you need to move your ass fast for some reason and you have no stamina left, because then you basically get crippled for a little while. It doesn't help that anything involving too much physical effort has an effect in this. I don't know who thought it would be fun to pick up fruit so you don't get killed by some inconvenient hazard, but it's irritating.

Two, those damned item descriptions that pop up over and over again. I know what an Amber Relic is! Who thought it would be a good idea to interrupt you from playing every time you get the first item of its kind whenever you load your game? Fuck! I've actually stopped hunting bugs because of this.

And three, Fi is the most annoying exposition fairy I've ever had the displeasure of working with in a video game. "Master, find some hearts before you die! Master, your batteries are nearly depleted! Master, allow me to explain something you've just learned with percentages I pull out of my ass!" I think I actually miss Navi.

So yeah, the game does have some glaring, very annoying flaws for something that's been in development for so long. The worst part is that they all seem to have been done on purpose.

[Locit]

So yeah, the game does have some glaring, very annoying flaws for something that's been in development for so long. The worst part is that they all seem to have been done on purpose.

I'm wondering if these aren't actually because of the long development time--the result working on a game so long that you become attached to certain ideas and features that are better left out.

[Neo]

And three, Fi is the most annoying exposition fairy I've ever had the displeasure of working with in a video game. "Master, find some hearts before you die! Master, your batteries are nearly depleted! Master, allow me to explain something you've just learned with percentages I pull out of my ass!" I think I actually miss Navi.

I'll note that all these are completely optional. You have to explicitly press the button for these messages to ever show up, so if you've already decided you dislike Fi, the only reason you would bother doing so would be so you could later bitch about it on an internet message board.

I don't know where the "here's a detailed description of an item you have already collected 10 times before" shtick came from, but boy am I glad they got rid of the rupee one from Twilight Princess.

Speaking of which, did anyone notice how they streamlined the rupee system? There are only green, blue and red ones now, worth 1, 5 and 20, respectively, while yellow, purple and orange (10, 50 and 100 in Wind Waker, respectively) have been dropped. Were they afraid players would be confused due to all the different colors and lower the game's rating on Amazon or something? Because then it makes stuff like the 50 rupee space on the diving minigame needlessly atrocious by painting two red and two blue rupees on it (2 x 20 + 2 x 5 = 40 + 10 = 50!) instead of, you know, fucking purple. It's like, why would they even bother changing that?

And then they keep both silver AND gold rupees! With gold being worth an odd 300 rupees and being used in like, two places in the entire fucking game! Doesn't that get you mad!?

[CM August]

Fi does show up an awful lot even if you don't call her though. Her text feels like it scrolls a lot slower than other NPCs for some reason. Oh hey, anyone remember the days when you could skip most nonessential dialogue by pressing B? They also removed the skip cutscene feature Twilight Princess introduced. Guess it is the Wind Waker team!

Maybe you haven't been paying enough attention? You have this big demon thing that's trying to escape its seal, and whenever you meet Ghirahim he reaffirms his goal of reviving his master. 2 + 2 = ?

I don't actually think that's much of an explanation. It's not that the story's hard to figure out, it's the way it's being told. That's why the comparison to Ocarina of Time is so apt; if that game had Skyward Sword's storytelling, the only thing you'd know about Ganondorf was that he wanted the spiritual stones. Instead of deeming you unworthy or something (hey, you're just a kid right?) Zelda tells you all about the Sacred Realm, Ganondorf and the Ocarina, giving things a lot more weight. It also sets up the huge curveball later on to catch the player off guard, throwing them into the harsher second act - something Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and even A Link to the Past pulled off excellently as well. In Skyward Sword there's... uh... Act 1: Part 2?

Sure, arguably the "Zelda story" is heavily formulaic and deserves a mix-up too, but this game STILL starts with you schlepping across creation to find three magic stones anyway. That seems to me less like a clever subversion and more like bad writing.

[Green Gibbon!]

There are much worse parts in the game, like your first trek through the desert where you have to dash across quicksand 57 times

See, now that didn't bother me the first time, but being forced to do it all again (such as in the silent realm) is incredibly lame. A time limit and stealth quest does not make it fresh.

Someone in this thread, and I'm too lazy to scroll back up and see who it was, made a good point when they mentioned that the game essentially has only three areas, the forest, volcano, and desert. After the third dungeon, except for the rest of the dungeons, it really feels like you're just retracing your steps ad nauseam.

But but but Edge wrote in their 9/10 review: "When later acts see entire regions double back on themselves – either reinvented as terrifying stealth scrambles or disrupted by ill-tempered deities – you wonder if Nintendo has found the secret to infinite level design."

Yeah, you wanna know why I stopped reading game magazines?

[Neo]

To me, it isn't so much as Act 2 being a repeat of Act 1, but that Act 1 repeats itself three times before moving on to Act 2, which does the exact same thing.

(Massive spoiler alert.)

Act 1:

You reach the woods. You get the Slingshot. You find all the Kikwi creatures. You enter Skyview Temple. You return to sky.
You reach the volcano. You get the Digging Mitts. You find all the pieces of the key. You enter Earth Temple. You return to the sky.
You reach the desert. You get the Hook Beetle. You find all the power generators. You enter Lanayru Mining Facility. You return to the sky.

Act 2:

You learn Farore's Courage. You enter the woods' Silent Realm. You get the Dragon Scale. You enter Ancient Cistern. You return to the sky.
You learn Nayru's Wisdom. You enter the desert's Silent Realm. You get the Clawshots. You enter the Sandship. You return to the sky.
You learn Din's Power. You enter the volcano's Silent Realm. You get the Fireshield Earrings. You enter Fire Sanctuary. You return to the sky.


(There's a bit more to Act 2 than what I mention, but that's the gist of it.)


The desert is by far the most interesting area due to the large gaps between each two events. You explore a lot of areas before you get the Hook Beetle. Once you get it, there's still a lot of ground to cover before you reach the power generator part. The power generators themselves are also kind of like mini dungeons in of themselves, rather than just an X on the ground you need to dig at.

In Act 2, after you get the Clawshots, you have the whole Lanayru Sand Sea to explore, which is almost a fourth distinct area in the game. The Pirates' Stronghold could easily pass for half of a dungeon, with Skipper's Retreat and the Shipyard serving as a pretty damn neat second half.

[Neo]

Oh, and don't get me started on how they reuse the third dungeon's boss (Moldarach, the scorpion thing) with no prior fanfare and for no reason at all! (It's guarding a big fat mandatory dead end.) Game of the Year, Nintendo.

[Popcorn]

The Wind Waker Triforce bit really is unpardonably awful and I'll ban anyone who differs. I remember I didn't have a wallet big enough to hold the outrageous number of rupee Tingle demanded, so I had to do some fucking fetch-quest to get the bigger wallet. And I hadn't had the fish guys mark my map as I played through the game, so I had to sail round the fucking world for a hundred hours doing that. (People have told me that was my own stupid fault, but fuck you: if it was something the game demands you do, why make it optional? Why allow me to get so far without doing it?) Then I had to do the fetchquest proper. Oh, it was grim. I think something in my gaming patience snapped then and my tolerance for bullshit has been paper-thin ever since. I worry I've missed out on some good games because of it.

Twilight Princess was no walk in the park, either. I think Zelda's fucked as a franchise. Getting it so right the first time (Ocarina, I mean) was a bad move; any further attempt to innovate feels gimmicky and thin, but without new shit, what can they do?

[Esrever]

Maybe it's because I didn't play them in the order they came out (I played TP first), but I felt like most of the tedious elements found in other 3D Zelda's were present in that game as well (although maybe not QUITE as much). When I played Ocarina, I certainly felt like I was experiencing my fair share of tedious re-traversal for the purpose of widget transportation. I think maybe it's less an issue of getting-it-perfect-the-first-time and more an issue of audience-slowly-becoming-less-tolerant-with-each-game.

I've finished Skyward Sword now. When all was said and done, I'd say about three quarters of the game was really enjoyable. Like, super great! Gold star. The other quarter -- which ran the gamut from dull to excruciating -- was comprised of the more gratuitous and boring of the asset-reuse segments, most of the minigames, most of the personal quests, nearly every word of dialogue, and every second I spent on the bird. 75% great is not a bad ratio... but when your game is over 40 hours long, we're talking about ten hours of bullshit, here. Just cut it, for god's sake! You don't need padding.

What I really didn't expect was for the game to feel so... tame... compared to Twilight Princess. I mean, TP was a game where you walked on ceilings and rode on a top and controlled statues and made friggin' Yeti soup. Skyward Sword is a game where you use a whip to flip switches. At the part of the game where TP sent you to a flying sky temple and a snow mansion and the twilight tron show, Skyward Sword sends you to a string of dungeons that are very thematically and mechanically similar to the first three. And then to another dungeon that repeats those themes AGAIN.

Outside of a couple of the biggest boss fights, nothing ever feels "big". And narratively, there are few moments that feel like there are any real threats or stakes propelling you to do anything. Even the villain doesn't care about you. You're just completing a laundry list of tasks, basically to prove you're worth fighting the final boss. Those tasks are mostly enjoyable -- and don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the design of the dungeons and the mechanics of the combat a lot. But compared to past games, it all just feels kind of... mundane.

[Blount]

I'll note that all these are completely optional. You have to explicitly press the button for these messages to ever show up, so if you've already decided you dislike Fi, the only reason you would bother doing so would be so you could later bitch about it on an internet message board.

Okay. I'll guess I'll just get back to this epic monster scene uninterrup-

[Esrever]

Fi can die in a fire. She pestered me about how my wiimote batteries were "nearly depleted" for, no joke, four hours. She probably would have kept doing it for even longer, but then I beat the game. Still without changing the batteries. SO I GUESS THEY WERE STILL GOOD.

It's not so much that she natters on any more than any of the other NPCs. But because she's a robot with basically no personality whatsoever, her dialogue is completely devoid of any charm or character. Which means that whenever she opens her mouth, it's only to give you an order or dump some exposition... none of which are things that will endear her to the player. It just makes her feel like a nag.

I missed Midna.

[Crisis]

It's kind of a shame, because she actually offers useful advice that seems to be based on context. Did Midna do that? I can't remember.

(I haven't even reached the first dungeon yet, but so far she's been nothing but helpful, if uninteresting.)

[Blount]

Midna offered you advice if you asked for it, or if it took you too long to solve a certain problem. Fi tells you that a boss key chest has an 85% probability of containing a boss key.

I probably wouldn't mind her so much if she didn't treat the player like a retard.