Skyward Sword Fi: What The Sword Spirit Does, All 19 Dowsing Targets

Fi is the spirit who lives inside the Goddess Sword, created by the goddess Hylia to serve whichever hero came to draw it. She is also the reason a good number of players bounced off this game in 2011, and the argument about her is usually about the wrong thing. Fi is not a hint system bolted onto Skyward Sword; she is the game's search function, and dowsing, the one mechanic she personally runs, is what half the quests in the game are built to be solved with.

When she shows up

Link meets her the moment he pulls the Goddess Sword from its pedestal inside the Statue of the Goddess, which our items page places in the hours after she has been dragged below the clouds. She pledges herself to the search for Zelda on the spot, and the sword and the guide arrive as one object: there is no point in the game where Link holds that blade without Fi in it. She teaches the Skyward Strike, reads areas and enemies back to him, repeats the current objective when he asks, and announces each time the sword itself is upgraded.

Dowsing, and the 19 things it finds

Dowsing is held on the up button, which opens a wheel of everything Fi currently knows how to look for. Pick one and the view drops into first person with a circle that beeps faster as you face the target and point an arrow at it when the heading is right. Targets are not found, they are granted: the story adds them when a character explains what has gone missing, side quests add them when accepted, and a third set arrives later for things nobody asked you to look for. Nineteen exist in total.

That last set is the one that changes how the back half of the game plays, and it is tied to the sword rather than to a quest. Our items page notes that Nayru's Flame turns the Goddess Longsword into the Goddess White Sword and widens what dowsing can take in; the five loot targets are what it widens to. Dowsing for treasure pays the Scrap Shop recipes in our items guide, dowsing for Goddess Cubes closes out the six chests on our Heart Pieces page, and dowsing for Gratitude Crystals turns the fifteen loose ones from a night-time search into a route.

The HD version put her on a button

The loudest complaint about the 2011 release was that Fi interrupted, and the HD release answered it by making most of what she says optional. Rather than stopping play to deliver a thought, her icon flashes on screen and waits; pressing down on the d-pad hears her out, and ignoring it costs nothing. The same pass trimmed the item descriptions that used to appear every time Link picked up something he already owned, so most items now explain themselves once. If you bounced off the original game because of the talking, this is the change that matters, and none of her actual functions were removed to get it.

Ghirahim is the same kind of creature

It is easy to miss on a first run, because he behaves like a theatrical villain rather than a tool, but Ghirahim is a sword spirit too, and his true form in the last act is built to resemble Fi closely enough that the point is unmissable. Both are servants living inside a blade, pointed at each other by the people holding them. The three fights he puts up are on our bosses page, and the master he spends the entire game trying to wake is on our Demise page.

How she finishes

Once Demise is beaten and sealed inside the blade, Fi asks for the thing she was made for to be ended: Link returns the Master Sword to its pedestal, and she goes into a sleep that the rest of the series never wakes her from. Every later game that hands Link that sword is handing him the one she is asleep in, which is why the games that follow quote her theme in fragments rather than playing it out.