It seems that Eiji Aonuma and his developers were fresh out of ideas when they were developing Skyward Sword. In a recent interview on IGN Aonuma stated that he had a little help from the Mario series to create Skyward Sword. Basically the idea of the maps and how you get to basically any point that is available to jump down into came from the Mario series.

“In terms of deciding to use the sky theme and the bird theme, it really started with that idea that we didn’t need to have a big large field that you just simply move through to get to places. That’s not a compelling use of the land and the terrain. What we started to think about was the way that the Mario games are structured. You sort of have this simple map that you can move around, and then it opens up into the next level or the next course that you work your way through.

Jump inside to see what else Mario had an effect on.

“One of our ideas was what if we have a means where you can very quickly get to the area that you’re going to be exploring? That should work great, but when trying to find a way to apply that to a Zelda game, where still you need to feel like you’re in a cohesive world. One of the things that we thought would be great is if you have this one area that you always continually go back to, and then from that area you’re quickly and easily able to get to the other areas in the world.

“In that sense it made sense to have that area be up in the sky, and then you would drop down from the sky to any of the areas below that you wanted to get to. But then as we were thinking about it more we thought well, it’s just kind of silly that you would just drop out of the sky and land down below and you need to have some kind of mechanism for travelling around and that’s where the idea of the birds came in.”

Source: IGN