IGN gave Skyward Sword a perfect 10. Nintendo later sold the fix for $60.

A 10 out of 10 is not an opinion, it's a mathematical claim. It asserts zero defects. Total perfection. A statistical event so rare it should come with a press conference. IGN awarded this unicorn to a game whose primary input method was waving a television remote until your shoulder filed for workers' comp, a control scheme so beloved that ten years later Nintendo shipped Skyward Sword HD and the single biggest bullet point on the box was 'now with button controls.' When the manufacturer's flagship selling point is removing the thing you scored perfect, that's not a remaster. That's a recall notice with a price tag.

Let's run the internal numbers, because a score only means something relative to the other scores in the same spreadsheet. IGN gave Twilight Princess a 9.5 and Ocarina of Time a 10. So by IGN's own ruler, Skyward Sword — the game that makes you fight the same pickle-shaped boss three separate times and dredge a flooded forest for musical teardrops like an unpaid intern — is exactly as flawless as Ocarina of Time and measurably better than Twilight Princess. That's not a ruler. That's a ruler made of soup, and someone at IGN was drinking from it.

And what does 'flawless' contain, precisely? It contains Fi, a tutorial companion who interrupts gameplay to announce there is a 90% probability you already know the thing she is about to tell you, and — I want to be clear this is real — pauses the greatest Zelda game ever created to warn you that your Wii Remote batteries are low. A perfect game includes a battery meter with a speaking role. If I submitted a dataset where the margin of error had its own dialogue tree, I would be escorted out of the building, and rightfully so.

Here's the final regression: IGN scored the controls a 10 in 2011, Nintendo charged $59.99 in 2021 to make them optional, then put fast travel inside a $24.99 plastic bird. The market spent a full decade repricing this review downward while the 10 just sat there on the page, appreciating in embarrassment like a bond issued by a haunted house. Perfection with a patch, a recall, and an accessory fee. The math aint mathing.