Okay, so the topic title is kind of absolutely not true: the game is still one of the worst Zelda-games ever, but it's also one of the prettiest, and it does have a pretty cool story, so I've always wanted to play through it. My biggest gripe with the game aside from it's boring level design, is of course the motion controls. I cannot stand them. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, or maybe I have this idea that it should be working better than it does, but I'd rather just use buttons.
Thing is, you can. Use buttons, that is. See, I got the game working with an Xbox One-controller. That's right, I got the game that was impossible to get working with a controller, to work with a controller, and it's entirely playable. It's not perfect, and swinging your sword can still be a bit tricky, but now that it's all tied to the buttons and the analog sticks, I feel that it's much easier to get it into my muscle memory.
It should be noted that you can only use this if you're running Dolphin (a Gamecube/Wii emulator), and you've got a controller (obviously), and the willingness to spend some time mucking around with settings, .ini files and so on. And no, I can't really help you, because I'm too lazy to write you a tutorial, but google will gladly help you. Word of warning though: you will have to find a special version of Dolphin to get this to work, seeing as the official builds no longer have what's called 'Motion Plus Emulation' available. It's just what it sounds like: it makes Dolphin think you've got Motion Plus, but you still need some kind of input for it to work. You could map it to keys on the keyboard, movement of the mouse or whatever, but I went with the Xbox One-controller, as that's what I wanted to play with. Meaning you can play the game with mouse and keyboard if you really wanted to. It might even be easier to map than the controller, but the reason I wanted to do this to begin with was to emulate the feel of playing Skyward Sword on a controller-based console.
I recorded some gameplay so you can see that it does indeed work. You can't see me using the controller here, but if you look at the movements and so on you can probably see that it looks a tiny bit different than it would on the Wii.
http://youtu.be/IoHr8_Io_F4
There are of course some limiatations, and though I'm sure you could iron most problems out with some clever keymapping, I've come to the point where the game is totally playable now, and I feel like any further tinkering is just going to mess something up. Right now, the only thing I can't do correctly is balancing on ropes. It's possible to get over them, but it takes a little bit longer than it would if you had an actual Wiimote, but other than that it works fine.
It's obviously not as smooth as it would be with the original control input, and seeing as you have to map a wide range of motions to the analog sticks, you're going to have to be clever using buttons to add on to the effects. For example, I have it set up right now so that if I hold R1, my swings will be much faster, and thus I often hold R1 during combat. If I want more precision movement, for things like aiming, charging my sword and so on, I let go of it. And so on.
Also, just in case I didn't make this clear: this is not my 'invention'. I just did some googling and game across a couple of different ways of doing this. My biggest problem was finding a version of the Dolphin emulator that had the motion plus emulation enabled. I found a build made by some guy on some forum, but I sadly lost the link since then. Don't fret, google will help you as it did me.
Your computer will of course need to be capable of running this game if you want to try this out. As you can see in the video, I'm also running the game in HD, with a couple of extra visual effects added on top. You can reduce these in order to get it to run smoother on lower end hardware, but I'd still recommend that you've got some juice if you want a playable experience.
And finally; is this something that interests you guys? I do intend on playing through this game this way once I get my graphics card back (I had to RMA it), and I was thinking maybe I'd record some more gameplay for you guys. I'm not really talking about a full 'Let's Play', but let me know if you guys want to see more of this game played with a controller.