Zelda Wii Delayed; Zelda 3DS Speeds Up

Breaking news, everyone! As we here at GameCola totally predicted, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is being delayed yet again!

To be sure, we suspected that Nintendo’s spring 2011 release date was less than truthful—after all, Amazon.com had a completely different release date—but now the game’s delay has been officially confirmed by Shigeru Miyamoto, the game’s producer.

Nintendo put a positive spin on the announcement, saying that the game is about halfway done, after having been in development for four years. Further, they say the game is taking a long time to produce due to its unique gameplay, which was described as “very dense.” Just like the game’s production team! Seriously, who uses the word “dense” to describe gameplay?

As usual, Zelda fans who are now suffering from Stockholm Syndrome are making overly optimistic comments about how the delay is a good thing. That just means Nintendo wants the game to be high-quality! They aren’t going to rush a game through production just to make money! Because, quite clearly, if Nintendo released the game in 2011, in its fifth year of development, that would totally be rushing things.

These arguments about Nintendo refusing to rush games through production, of course, ignore the fact that Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker were both rushed. In Wind Waker‘s case, two unfinished dungeons were cut out and replaced with Tingle’s Hellish Map Quest. Um, yeah, good call, Nintendo. In Ocarina of Time‘s case, rushing the game through production resulted in the gold cartridge fiasco, which was actually kind of good because the uncensored gold cartridges were better than the censored copies.

And speaking of Ocarina of Time, Nintendo is hard at work on Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3DS. This game was released as a tech demo for E3 this year, but the reaction was so positive that Nintendo has decided it should be a launch title. They’ve been putting all their effort into rushing the game through production, I mean, “making sure that it’s the best game possible.” This is probably the real reason why the Wii Zelda game was delayed: Nintendo is focusing on the DS Zelda game. We also have some cool pictures of Zelda 3DS!

The control screen of the game, as you can see from the above picture, assigns item use to the X and Y buttons, leaves the B button for the sword, and has the A button doing something in the top screen, but I don’t know what because I can’t read Japanese.  The L button in the upper left switches to first-person view, the R button looks like it handles items, and…the bottom of the screen has a whole row of buttons, but there aren’t any more buttons on the DS itself, so I have no idea what they correspond to.

This could mean, unfortunately, that most of the buttons on the bottom screen are controlled by the touch screen. I say “unfortunately,” because I use my right hand to hold the stylus. So I will have to constantly go back and forth between using the stylus to pick weapons, then dropping the stylus so I can use the weapons. This seems like it could be problematic, given that this is an item-heavy game, but Nintendo promises that their unexplained item selection setup will be really well done.

And going into fanboy mode for a moment here, why does the screenshot of Link in the Deku Tree dungeon show Link as having the fairy ocarina, an empty bottle, and an adult’s wallet? Those are all items you get after the first dungeon! Either the game’s setup is very different from the original, or they were just put in the screenshot to make it look pretty. Take your pick.

In conclusion, things aren’t looking good for Wii Zelda yet, but things are looking better for 3DS Zelda.