It has been reported that Skyward Sword will actually have a three layered world that Link travels through, the sky, the overworld and the underworld. We have not seen the title “underworld” since the original Legend of Zelda game (JP title LoZ: The Hyrule Fantasy). Ganon’s lair was located underneath Hyrule at Spectacle Rock connecting all the dungeons Link traveled through during his quest. This area was referred to as the underworld, and at the time was just referencing Hell, Ganon was the King of Demons. So with Skyward Sword going with this same formula as evil rising from the underworld to take over the overworld to search for this ultimate power (the Triforce) gives a lot of throw back at what the Zelda series started with.

The gaming site 1up had this to say about it…

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is mixing things up, and — for the first eight hours of the game, at least — the results are pretty great. Skyward Sword’s design makes the distinction between overworld and underworld much muddier than in past games. Perhaps that’s appropriate, since this adventure divides its world into three layers rather than the usual two. Above the dungeons, you have the overworld; meanwhile, above it all is the realm of Skyloft, best described as an aerial take on Wind Waker’s sea. At the heart of Skyloft is a large city held aloft by (one assumes) ancient magic or technology or something, but the skies are littered with floating islands, and Link travels between them on the back of a huge red bird.

Dive into certain points in the cloud barrier below, though, and Link plummets from the world of the skies to the earth below. This is where the game’s dungeons are located, but it’s not a straight shot from the sky to the underworld. Players have to work their way through an in-between space, one that doesn’t simply divide the areas physically but also sits between them in terms of function and structure. Skyward Sword’s external ground-based areas link the game’s dungeons, but they also stand between the player and his objectives. Unlike Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule Field, the first of Skyward Sword’s overworld portions we’ve seen (Faron Woods, an overt reference to Twilight Princess’ Faron Province and the goddess Farore) is an open but convoluted space crammed featuring puzzles to navigate and quests to complete.

Reaching the temple itself — called Deep Woods — requires the completion of a small sidequest which sees Link tracking down cowardly birds called Kikwis with the aid of a secondary ability of the Goddess Sword, a divining function. This also reveals an interesting fact about Skyward Sword’s controls: It’s now possible to move around in a first-person view, aiming with Motion Plus. The first-person perspective isn’t ideal for more than simple, brief tasks, but it’s an option.

Faron Woods isn’t structured exactly like a dungeon; the Deep Woods area features a handful of rooms intricately designed to force extensive backtracking and puzzle solving. In contrast, the outer woods are more spacious, with a layout not unlike that of a Metroid game. Divergent paths loop back on one another, and Link can push logs from ledges and employ other similar tricks to create shortcuts through areas that were initially inaccessible. Not every trick here is perfectly designed; particularly annoying are a handful of tightrope sections that require players to balance Link with Wii Motion Plus and could use a few rounds of fine-tuning before the game goes gold. Still, even these sequences reward clever players: Tightropes are often guarded by goblins eager to pummel Link and knock him into the pits below, but you can draw them out and preemptively knock them to their doom instead.

Neither Faron Woods nor the Deep Woods dungeon is brimming with concepts that haven’t been explored in a Zelda game before. Fetch quests, hunting for keys, raising and lowering water levels to reach new areas — it’s all tried and true material. What makes it all feel fresh in Skyward Sword is the manner in which it’s presented. It takes longer to reach the Deep Woods than to clear the dungeon itself, and for the first time the path to a dungeon is obstructed by the intricacy of the landscape rather than sheer distance to be covered or arbitrary plot-key tasks gathered in a nearby town. The means to working your way through way through the woods are found in the woods themselves; the area is a self-contained puzzle. In that sense, it really does play out like a dungeon. You even acquire a new tool, the slingshot, in the course of locating the Deep Woods. Skyward Sword’s entire lower world could arguably be seen as a series of nested dungeons. We’re not talking Celtic knotwork levels of intricacy here, but there’s a sense of purpose to the world outside of Skyward Sword’s dungeons that is usually lacking in Zelda games.

This article was posted on Sunday, October 9th, 2011 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Skyward Sword and was written by Crono.