Skyward Sword HD, Part Two

Things I like about Skyward Sword:

- the story
- the characters
- the pastel color palette
- the dungeons (best in the series imo)
- the flying beetle device
- Beedle the character
- Groose my beloved
- the relationship between Groose and Impa
- the love story between Link and Zelda in the game
- the love story between Hylia and Demise in my head
- the pumpkins, Kikwis, and other small round objects

It’s a shame that I have to remind myself why I like this game; but, to be honest, Twilight Princess is the same way. A lot of games from the PlayStation 2/3 era have “tech demo” intro sections that you really have to sit down and endure in order to get to the game proper. One of the worst examples I can think of is Final Fantasy XII, which happens to be one of my favorite games of all time.

Since the controls for Skyward Sword make my left hand cramp up, I’ve been playing it in twenty-minute sittings. In the meantime, I finally returned to Blossom Tales, an indie homage to A Link to the Past rendered with early SNES era FFIV-style graphics. I’d gotten about halfway through the game around this time last summer and put it down because I accidentally got sucked back into Animal Crossing, but it’s been a lot of fun to return to it. I don’t think Blossom Tales is that long; so, if I finish it, I might go wild and actually sit down with the Zelda-like indie darling Anodyne, which I keep buying and downloading but never playing.

In other words, I’m playing Zelda games in between sessions of a Zelda game so that I can use Zelda games to better enjoy a Zelda game because sometimes fans make better games than Nintendo.

Shinra Electric Power Company is here to light the way!

I applied to be a meta writer for Return to the Planet, an upcoming zine about Final Fantasy VII. This was my pitch:

I'd like to write an essay in the range of 1,500 to 2,000 words about the Japanese cultural context of the original release of Final Fantasy VII. Specifically, I think it would be interesting to situate the game within the "Lost Decade" of the 1990s, when the implosion of a real-estate speculation bubble caused the stock market to crash, resulting in an extended economic depression. It was during this time that the intelligentsia in Japan began to question the "Japan Inc." connections between the government and the corporate sector, and I see Final Fantasy VII as one of the defining works in this vein of social critique.

I'd therefore like to write about the game's depiction of the Shinra Corporation as a send-up of Japanese corporate culture, especially with relation to its effects on class inequality and environmental destruction, both of which were major concerns in progressive Japanese media of the 1990s. Essentially, I want to talk about how Barret was right about everything he said.

I think I'd like to write this essay even if I'm not accepted to the zine. If that ends up being the case, I'd probably pitch it to First Person Scholar, and then to a few other places (like Waypoint and Entropy) if they're not interested. Really, though, I'd just like to be on the Discord server for this zine.