Okay, SS came yesterday.

Was to busy playing to blog.

Here's my thoughts so far....

Opening Sequence:

Relative to past games, the opening tutorial in SS is pretty easy to swallow. None of that goat herding baloney or anything. I'm a little on the fence about the bird: I'm not sure how much I like the whole "islands scattered in the sky to visit" thing.

It was surprisingly quick getting the Master Sword in the game, too. Oh, but...did they REALLY have to make Kaeora Gaebora a character again? Whenever I see him, I think he's going to tell me something useless and trick me into reading it five times.

Motion controls seemed a liiittle off at first (more on that later), but it became clear as I moved I was just being imprecise with my movements.

So then, with the whole opening taking maybe an hour, you go down to the surface world. This is where motion controls become important. Right off the bat, the Deku Babas are going to maul you if you don't fight them correctly. There's a large scary hole right next to you, so naturally you go down and do the things that a scary voice out of nowhere tells you.

This is where dowsing comes into play.

Faron Woods:

Zelda was taking and dissapeared down here, so naturally you point your sword around to find here. This is another area I'm a little on the fence about. For the first time in the series, you can move around in the first person. This is mildly useful, but it gets a bit tedious in the next section. More on that in a moment.

So you make your way through a section of (surprisingly large) forest, and you meet a Goron. Hooray, series standby! He's being harrassed by some Bokoblins (resident grunts in the game) who you need to slay. This is where motion controls got interesting. Although the good ole' Spin Attack is pretty much unstoppable as usual, it's surprising how difficult it is to defeat them with regular attacks. They actually predict your movements, so you have to trick them into thinking you'll slash from one direction then attack from another. What I ended up doing was holding my sword up then slashing them horizontally. I must admit I was rather at a loss when the SECOND MINOR ENEMY IN THE GAME was giving me a run for my money.

So you help him out, and he tells you he's researching the area. (Well actually, I wasn't actually paying too much attention to him. =P ) You progress a little farther, and you find a little mutant squirrel with a big tail being harrassed by MORE Bokoblins. You rescue him and he proceeds to run away. Yes, because my tiny mouth can clearly fit your entire body in it. Well, whatever.

Chase him down a few more times and he'll eventually realize you haven't been trying to hurt him or eat him and don't even really look intimidating whatsoever. He has the dowsing....scent? of Zelda, so you ask him about it. He's called a Kikwi, apparentally, and he mentions Zelda. He sends you to his elder.

The elder is GIGANTIC compared to the normal Kikwis. Like, I would be a lot more afraid of being eaten by him than bein eaten by Link. He tells you there was a bit of a scuffle here over Zelda and a few of his Kikwi underlings went missing. So you have to track them down.

45 minutes later, I was starting to realize how much I hate dowsing.

Once you round 'em all up, the elder is able to remember what happened to Zelda. (Big #####. ) He also gives you the slingshot which...I guess maybe the Kikwi need for...I don't know why the have it.

So go through a bit more overworld, encountering the Goron again, and reach the first dungeon. Wait, I wasn't already in a dungeon? =P The entrance to the dungeon...is kind of hard to figure out if you go about it the wrong way. As in, not looking it up online.

That'll wrap it up for now...I might add my thoughts about some aspects of the game later.