A good game with some great mechanics, but plenty of self inflicted flaws hold it back from being an all time great.
The game has a ton of good ideas, but fails to deliver on nearly all of them besides Wii Motion Plus swordplay. The sky, which was hoped to be a better version of the Wind Waker's sea, somehow manages to be even more barren than the sea: there's virtually nothing to explore there besides a bunch of tiny islands with nothing but optional chests on them and a restaurant that serves pumpkin soup. On the surface, the area design is pretty devoid of content outside of the main quest, which makes this feel like a very linear game, when in fact it's not. It just feels as such because there's nothing to do.
A second flaw that will vary from person to person on how annoying it is is the large amount of implementation of Wii Motion Plus into the game. Everything that can use the Motion Plus will use Motion Plus. Flying, swimming, skydiving, shooting arrows, using an oversized vacuum cleaner, etc. For pretty much all of these, I think a regular Wii remote would have worked much better, since the Wii Motion Plus has only one level of sensitivity and that level is very insensitive, and it will also need to be recalibrated every so often, but this is a flaw that will annoy some people less than it will others. I just wish they had put an option screen in to allow for change.
Sadly, I have yet to get to Skyward Sword's biggest flaw: The amount of hand holding in this game is flat out ridiculous. Fi, your partner for the game, will go out of her way to explain every single last detail of anything and everything to you. For example, if you're low on hearts, the game will beep at you, Link will bend over tired when he stops running, and Fi still feels the need to beep at your herself until you pull her out so she can tell you that you're low on health. She'll also go so far as to tell you that your batteries are low even after a blinking icon appears on the screen. Overall, the game relies a lot more on explaining things out to the player than any other Zelda game in the past, and this really hurts it a lot as it feels much more like you're being directed down an adventure than exploring and adventuring yourself.
Despite how much I've said against it, Skyward Sword is still a good game that can likely hold its own against most of the competition out there. The sword controls work well, and it has plenty of potential, but it fails to deliver on quite a bit of that while making some other mind bogglingly dumb decisions that hamper its replay value. If you can find it somewhere cheap, it's worth checking out so long as you own a Wii beforehand. Otherwise, pass it up, it's no more memorable than another AAA franchise adventure you can find for another system.