PSA: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has a game ending bug

Nintendo released a statement today detailing a bug in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword that can potentially permanently halt progress late in the game. Warning: This post contains necessary spoilers for Skyward Sword

Nintendo released a statement today detailing a bug in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword that can potentially permanently halt progress late in the game. Warning: This post contains necessary spoilers for Skyward Sword

Late in the game, Link is tasked with collecting several pieces of a certain song by speaking with three different dragons, one in each of the game's provinces, which can be visited in any order.

If the player chooses the Lanayru Desert province first, he'll meet with a dragon, and have to start a subquest. After starting this subquest, don't talk to Golo the Goron in the mine, and after completing the subquest and getting the dragon's part of the song, certainly don't speak to Golo a second time. This will prevent the necessary dragon-related events in Eldin Volcano and Faron Woods from occurring, making progression impossible.

It doesn't sound like there will be a patch to help players who are already stuck, or to prevent future players from encountering this bug. Wii games themselves can't be patched, though Nintendo does sometimes fix bugs with Wii firmware updates.

Fortunately, you don't really have any reason to go to the mine after meeting with the dragon in question, as most players will just return to the sky through a save point and later return to the desert using the same save point. Knowledge gained about the game world up to that point will probably lead most players to Faron Woods first anyway. But still, hitting a wall after playing for a good 30 hours would be pretty terrible, so it's good to know about this problem in advance. Just save Lanayru Desert for last.

Staff article by Rhody Tobin (December 06, 2011) Rhody likes to press the keys on his keyboard. Sometimes the resulting letters form strings of words that kind of make sense when you think about them for a moment. Most times they're just random gibberish that should be ignored. Ball-peen wobble glurk.