The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has been out for almost a month now, and I am sure that most of you have already beaten the game, or are about to seeing as how the game could actually take up to 60 hours just to beat. You may or may not have heard about the second quest that is available after completing Skyward Sword for the first time called “Hero Mode”, but before you decide to take on this epic journey, you may be wondering whether you should even bother. After putting in over ninety-one hours into this game with over fifty of those hours being in “Hero Mode”, I am here to tell you that it is not, and here are five reasons why.
1. Fi becomes extremely annoying and 99.99% useless
Gamers quickly noticed Fi’s inexplicable ability to state the obvious. We were even given the option to call upon Fi for quick recaps of our current objective (here one and only way to be useful), advice, or analysis of the area Link is currently in. Her “Advice” consists of going over tutorials, or explaining how to catch Deku Hornets regardless of the fact that you already have 86 of them in your collection. Throughout “Hero Mode”, you will constantly find yourself screaming at Fi to just “shut the front door and let me play my game!” There is absolutely no use for Fi whatsoever as you already know where everything is, not to mention the many occasions when she suggests dowsing for items after you have already collected half of what you were searching for.
2. Dialog barely changes
When you start Hero mode, several of the NPCs mention the fact that you are playing in Hero mode; many of them even allow you to skip certain tutorials because you “already know what you are doing.” This made me jump for joy as I thought I was just going to be able to enjoy the best part of this game: gameplay. Then, about thirty minutes in, I started to notice that no one was recognizing that I had done all this before. The game began thrusting tutorials upon me once more as items like the slingshot were explained to a point of redundancy. Hero Mode quickly became nothing more than New Game+ utilizing a different name as a tepid attempt at being different.
