Let’s Explore Zelda: Skyward Sword’s Lava Area

Nintendo
Let’s Explore Zelda: Skyward Sword’s Lava Area
By Stephen Totilo on October 22, 2011 at 9:00 AM

A few weeks ago, I played a lot of The Legend of Skyward Sword. I got up to what I’d call the lava temple, but Nintendo calls it the earth temple. OK. There’s lava in there, Nintendo.

I ran out of time while fighting through the temple. By then I realised that everything I’d seen in trailers had come from moments of the game leading up to that second temple in the game. Maybe I’d missed some trailers, but the feeling I got was that Nintendo’s really only shown us the beginning of Skyward Sword, despite how much they’ve appeared to reveal.

Today, they released a trio of trailers that show some of what I played in my final hours with the game. I’ll try to explain what’s going on…

First up, we’ve got the Eldin Volcano area. As with other areas in the game, you plummet to it from Skyloft, the hub world and main town of Skyward Sword. In this opening area, I met the Mogma, little ground-burrowers who taught Link how to use bomb plants. Since Skyward Sword uses Motion Plus, Nintendo’s designers are able to create challenges that require you to bowl bombs with a half-bowling/half-wrist-flicking motion. You can also toss bombs with an overhand throw. The bowling part was tricky — I had to do it standing up — but it enabled some clever puzzles. I liked some of the toss puzzles, one of which had me lobbing bombs into the holes on the shells of turtle-like enemies. A Nintendo rep told me I’d eventually be able to re-plant bomb plants, but I didn’t get to that.

I also acquired the Digging Mitts, which let Link dig up buried treasure. Nintendo wants people to think of the pre-dungeon areas as dungeons themselves. The Volcano area would qualify, as it was full of puzzles and required as much thought and ingenuinty as a Zelda dungeon usually does.