What I'm Playing (Volume 131): The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Improving my Zelda experience has been one of my primary goals since beginning collecting back in 2011 or so. At that time, the only Zelda game I had ever beaten was A Link to the Past, so despite my love of the series, I had actually experienced very little of it. In the time since, I have beaten a number of the games (The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time, Minish Cap, A Link Between Worlds, Phantom Hourglass, Breath of the Wild, Link's Awakening, Oracle of Ages, Oracle of Seasons) and reviewed several of them here, shoring up my knowledge significantly. I hadn't really wanted to jump into Wind Waker due to some of the negative connotations that are associated with the game in popular gaming culture, but I finally broke because I wanted to clear a new Zelda game, and I really didn't want to play Majora's Mask or Zelda II. 

Wind Waker took a lot of unwarranted criticism at the time of its release for its cartoony, cel shaded graphical style. While there is some element of truth to this criticism, it mostly falls flat. Sure, some of the still images of the graphics are positively nauseating, but in motion and practice, the game looks fantastic, and certainly looks better than other games of the era, and other Zelda games from the era. Wind Waker looks so much better than Ocarina of Time that its ludicrous to even compare the two, and it even looks better than Twilight Princess, which was released years after on the same console. I liken it a bit to a Picasso or a Monet or other impressionist piece. It's meant to be taken in as a whole, and the more you dive down into the out of place body parts, impressionistic dots, or whacko facial features, the more disturbing it gets. But there's really nothing here to complain about, particularly in comparison to its more "realistic" peers that almost universally look worse in 2020.

The other primary complaint about the game at the time was the sailing portion of the game, and I found these complaints to be the most fair. You will spend a lot of time sailing on your ship, and boy does it get tedious. Nintendo seemed to know it, too, and spent some time populating the seas with barrels that rise up that will reward you with rupees for sailing over them, or giant squid monsters which attack without warning, or periodically shifting enemies and ships here and there. Most of these encounters are dull, mostly because sea combat is so very boring. You can't sail and use your cannon at the same time, and there's no way to really know which way you're pointing your cannon without firing it and course correcting. Pretty much every square on your sea chart features one island with a handful of things to do on it, and charting these is also annoying. You have to carry around a lot of bait to bribe fish to fill in your chart, and if you run out of bait, have fun sailing all the way to the nearest merchant to buy some more! Oh, and your bait bag is pretty limited in space, and you may need it for other things too, so this will happen to you several times.

The sea chart itself is an irritant, because it doesn't allow you to mark on it in any deliberate way, only updating automatically once you've found items on the treasure chart. The approaches in Breath of the Wild and Phantom Hourglass remain the gold standard for maps in video games, and this one is a dreadful mess in comparison. Weirdly, Phantom Hourglass nailed a ton of things in the same Zelda universe that Wind Waker fell short of, despite the obvious hardware limitations on a handheld. The sailing was wonderfully fun in that one, and the map experience was an absolute joy.

The gameplay itself is actually very fluid and fun, particularly in comparison to the clunky mess that is Ocarina of Time. Combat feels quick and intuitive, and Nintendo packed the dungeons with lots of fights, knowing this to be a strength of the game. You'll face a wide range of enemies, and the strategies necessary to beat them are much more diverse and thoughtful than in Ocarina of Time.

The music is extremely good, and strikes the right notes at exactly the right time. The main highlight of sailing was listening to the sailing song, which never ever gets old despite the tiresome task with which it is associated. There are plenty of extremely creepy minimalist times in which the music drops out entirely or is severely stripped down, making for an excellent audio experience.

The puzzles in the dungeons are clever without being too difficult. Like A Link Between Worlds after it, the game really seems to strike the right balance of challenge and fun with the dungeon designs. It did feel similar to Minish Cap in that I was left wanting more puzzling and dungeon exploration. There are fewer dungeons here than in Ocarina of Time, which seems wrong.

I found Wind Waker to be a very good game, but short of being excellent. The game's design dictates that you will spend probably a third of your time performing an activity that isn't very fun, which severely detracts from the time in the game that is well designed and crafted. Phantom Hourglass is the superior game in the Wind Waker extended universe, but don't let that keep you away from this one. There is a ton of charm here, and plenty enough quality to keep you through the end of the game. I'll give Wind Waker an 8.6/10.

Up next on the home console version of What I'm Playing is a game I've been looking forward to for a while, and have finally gotten my hands on. See below for a teaser...

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 130): WWE 2K19

I like wrestling. There is an astonishing amount of wrestling on TV every week, so I hardly consider myself an expert on the art form. Basically, I'll watch any WWE pay per view in retrospect that seemed to have excellent matches on it, and I really enjoy going through the WWE Network to watch older matches at my leisure. There have been stretches in the past few years where my wife and I have watched every episode of Raw or Smackdown (never both at the same time), and there have been times in the last few years where I've gone months without watching any Raw or Smackdown. For a lot of wrestling fans, it seems like they exist for wrestling rather than vice versa, and when it feels that way for me, I just tap out and take a break, and haven't really noticed any real issues getting back into it when I feel the itch.

Professional wrestling is a fun and greatly misunderstood art form by the general population, whose perception appears to be "don't you know that it's fake?" Yes, the wrestlers are not actively trying to bludgeon their opponents into submission or unconsciousness. Yes, the ending of wrestling matches and several spots throughout are planned ahead of time. Yes, I still like it. It's live stage fighting that requires an incredible amount of athleticism and acting ability to do well, and if you enjoy watching staged fights in John Wick or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it's not that much of a stretch to enjoy some good old fashioned wrasslin'.

We recently introduced our son to wrestling, and he, like all 11 year old boys, adores it. He's asked over and over for a WWE game for him to play, and so we got him WWE 2K19 for Christmas. As someone who hasn't played a wrestling game at all since WCW/NWO Revenge, I decided to give this one a go, since it was in my house and all. I also decided not to buy the newest one due to the awful reviews it got.

Like most sports games, I jumped right into the "My Career" mode, which has you creating your own wrestler, and taking him through a story mode in which he has to progress from down on his luck independent wrestler to the top of the WWE universe. The character creation options were a bit weird. It was hard to find a lot of stuff after creating your character. For example, I couldn't edit my guy's hair at any point after creation (I'm sure it's there, but it wasn't easy to find), and I could never get my guy to be truly clean shaven. He had these hideous five o'clock shadow sideburns the whole game that drove me nuts. But the breadth of options you have for creation are pretty impressive, even if the UI isn't the best. You can edit your guy's teeth, removing any you want, or making them into pointy vampire fangs. He can have a lot of body oil, some body oil, or no body oil. His skin can take just about any tone you want, from white to black to Satan red. You can put him in robes, pants, shorts, tank tops, sheep masks, etc. You can pick from a wide variety of wrestling styles, and the game defaults your character into a moveset that fits that style. You can also edit this moveset with dozens of additional moves as you please.

The actual game play is...ok. The game seems to revolve around a strategy that mimics how a "real" wrestling match happens. The participants trade offense, building up momentum until a finisher is unleashed, and the crowd holds their breath and waits to see if a 3 count will happen. You can reverse your opponent's attacks by precise inputs, and you have the opportunity to work individual limbs to soften up your opponent for submissions on those limbs, or finishers to them. The hit detection can be very weird at times. You can be facing right at your opponent and run at them, and instead of a dropkick hitting them in the face, you'll go sailing off in a weird direction. This is particularly exacerbated in matches featuring more than two wrestlers, as you'll occasionally get distracted by other wrestlers and shift your focus without your input. This inputs are particularly frustrating when trying to get into and out of the ring. If you can figure out exactly how to get your wrestler to step through the ropes and stand on the apron instead of going all the way out of the ring every time, you're a better man than I. And if you try to step out of the ring but are too near the turnbuckle, you'll just hope right up. Oh, and don't try to get back in the ring if you're too near to the steel steps, or you'll grab the steps instead. I did enjoy the matches on the whole, but am also totally burnt out upon finishing the story.

It's also plagued by weird bugs, which is funny given that apparently the newest game is even worse on this county. There was one match in which my son's opponent literally levitated in mid-air with his feet behind his head wiggling wildly, looking like some sort of bizarre flying octopus. I also had matches end with my team getting pinned, but was credited with the victory anyway. Sometimes your tag attacks will be executed by you and an invisible phantom ally, as your real tag partner waits happily on the apron. These are just three of the many weird bugs that happened during my time in the game.

The commentary is REALLY poor. There were tons of times I would be in singles matches and it would be talking about how great these two tag teams are. I don't know how many times I heard the same comment when doing a move that I was going to break my opponent's arm, sometimes ten times in a single match. Sometimes while chaining together a bunch of moves in succession, the commentators will simply list off their reactions to them in order, even if there commentary is now about ten seconds behind the actual move on which they are commentating. Of the many modern sports games I've played, this one has the worst commentary.

The actual story involved in the My Career mode was really delightful, to be honest. It leans into all of the tropes of professional wrestling, but as it only really has to focus on adequately "booking" a handful of characters, rather than a roster of dozens, it's able to tell a longer and more focused story that builds characters in a more intelligent way than most wrestling storytelling is capable of doing. The pacing felt really weird and non-WWEish, in that my character went from (spoiler alert), an indie wrestler to main eventing Wrestlemania for the Universal Title in one calendar year, but I understand why that is. Some of the character development arcs didn't make enough sense, particularly that of your relationship with Triple H. But some also really shine, like the story featuring Bray Wyatt and "Woken" Matt Hardy that culminates in a brawl outside the Wyatt Family compound and a trip to the Multiverse to wrestle Bret Hart (if you don't like wrestling, you have no idea what I'm talking about, but then again you probably also never clicked on this to begin with). And the final swerve and match setup are really great long burn stories. I would have loved it if they could have made separate stories for a tag team, a heel, and a face, but there's a ton of voice acting and work that went into this story, so I get it. And you can at least make some heel choices throughout if you want to.

There are a TON of wrestlers to pick from, but a lot of them are pretty shamelessly put behind a paywall. To 2K's credit, all of these wrestlers can be bought using in-game currency that you can earn by doing pretty much anything, but if you really want to broaden your roster beyond the current WWE roster and live out all of your Sting vs. Undertaker fantasy matches, get ready to grind or get out your credit card. A few more freebies of some icons would have been nice, but at least you have the option to get all of the greats.

There are modes in this game. Lots of modes. I don't know what most of them do. But if you want to do it, you probably can. They have enormous amounts of customization options for your matches, from managers to rules to venues. If you want to battle at Hell in a Cell, go for it. Elimination Chamber matches? You got it. Money in the Bank? Yup. The Royal Rumble? Go  wild. Ladder match? Do it! And so on, and on, and on. Remembering all of the rules about how you climb the ladders/cages, grab stuff, and interact with your various environments can be challenging, and information about the controls is buried within layer upon layer of menus, so good luck. But with this many different ways to play, and the huge amount of actions possible in professional wrestling matches, a bit of control overload is really impossible to avoid.

I enjoyed WWE 2K19, but it is definitely for a certain audience: kids and hardcore wrestling fans. I'm not hardcore enough to explore more deeply, and this is coming from someone who truly enjoys the art form. Maybe I need to check out Fire Pro Wrestling, but I feel remarkably burnt out on wrestling games for the time being. This game is way to buggy, weird, and complex for the average person who just wants to smash someone across the back with a steel chair. I'll give it a 6.5/10.

-TRO

The 2019 reTROview reTROspective!!!

This is a Game Boy Advance

It's time for my favorite post of the year, the year in reTROspect! My faithful reader and I look forward to this with baited breath each year. This post will summarize the games I completed for the first time with no evaluation trickery to speak of. I accept using save states in ways that I could replicate on a physical console (using a save state instead of having to put in Mega Man passwords, or a save state rather than simply leaving my physical console on if I have to go somewhere), but I actually did very little in terms of emulation this year. Of the titles I played, only Darkwing Duck, Super Star Wars, and Wario Land 3 were emulated, and all of those were on official collections. Here are the games I completed in 2019:

Advance Wars

Animal Crossing

Azure Striker Gunvolt

Darkwing Duck

Dragon Warrior

Dragon Warrior 2

Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright

Game & Watch Gallery 4

Golf Story

Jeanne D'Arc

Mario Golf: World Tour

Marvel's Spider-Man

Metroid Fusion

Metroid: Zero Mission

NBA 2K19

New Super Mario Bros. 2

Phantasy Star

Pokemon Let's Go Eevee

Pokemon Sword

Super Mario RPG

Sonic Mania

Super Punch-Out!!

Super Star Wars

Warcraft III

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne

Wario Land 3

Wario Land 4

Xenoblade Chronicles

Here were last year's gaming resolutions, and how I carried through on them:

1. Clear out 25 unbeaten games

I cleared 29, including some really long ones! Check.

2. Clear out more unbeaten games than I buy new games for my collection-not including Humble Bundles

Miserable failure, and I didn't even buy any Humble Bundles. I bought 60 new physical games this year, mostly on a handful of big local lots. They were great deals, so I'm really happy I didn't stick with this one.

3. Spend more time revisiting some old favorites just because I'm feeling like it (potential candidates include Donkey Kong Country 1-3, Super Mario RPG, and Punch-Out!!)

Great success! I played through DKC 1 and 2, and quit halfway through DKC 3 as I was getting a bit bored. I played through Super Mario World and Link to the Past again, and also beat Super Mario RPG

4. One of the 25 unbeaten games must include Bahamut Lagoon, and another must be Secret of Mana

Ouch. I actually played a ton of Bahamut Lagoon, and am knocking on the doorstep, but got waylaid several times by shiny new games and didn't actually finish it. I turned on Secret of Mana once, got bored, and didn't finish it. Let's roll this one over!

5. Play more new (defined as being originally released on a system capable of outputting in HD without modifications) games

Well, I finished 7 games between the Switch and PS4, and in total completed 11 games from the 2010s, so I'll say this is good enough.

6. Spend some time playing Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn-whether I beat the main campaign or not

I jumped on every free login promotion, and even subscribed for a month. I'm now level 43, and think two or three more free weekends should be enough to get me through the base campaign. Check!

7. Feel free to dump egregiously bad games and review them without finishing them if I feel like it

I really didn't play hardly any egregiously bad games this year, save for Super Star Wars, and I rather enjoyed that one despite the fact that it was not good at all. So I'll say this is good enough.

Five out of seven is pretty good for me, and one of them I don't regret breaking at all, so I'll say 2019 was a great gaming year. I finished a game every 12.6 days, which feels like about the right pace for me. One every two weeks is great.

Here are a few delightful visualizations of my low sample size year in review:

In 2019, I doubled down on my favorite genres, RPGs, sports, and platformers. I also played several Metroidvania games, as I've really grown fond of the genre in the last few years.

Buoyed up by two flawless games, RTS is the king of 2019. I loved Warcraft III so very much at release, and very little has changed. It rules. The true king of the year is probably Metroidvania games, as I played three separate titles for an average of nearly 9.0. Run 'n Gun games were obviously driven down by Super Star Wars, but that genre isn't exactly my favorite in any case. The big takeaway is that I played a lot of good to great stuff this year!

I was a bit surprised to see the GBA so high up here, as it felt like I played my 3DS a lot more. And I truly did in terms of total time, especially considering the lengthy run I had through Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, which is counted here as a Wii game. My runs through GBA games were also very short Metroidvanias in general, with only Advance Wars taking me more than a few days to beat.

The PC is king here thanks to Warcraft III, but I really enjoyed the vast majority of the systems I played this year. The PS4 was probably the highlight in general, with a ton of joy derived from Spider-Man, Sonic Mania, and NBA 2K19.  It was a very disappointing year from the Switch for me, with subpar Pokemon experiences, and a very dull run through Golf Story.

Nintendo weirdly dominated this category despite me playing fewer Nintendo games than usual (12 in 2017, 14 in 2018, and a mere 8 in 2019). I was a bit more democratic in selecting games this time around, and also played fewer in total.

I know. You get it. I love Warcraft III. In non Warcraft news, Nintendo killed it again with a rating near 9 on 8 games. Most other developers were in on a single game, so there aren't a ton of trends here to see.

This is the most even split I've had between home and handheld since I started counting. Typically, I play a lot fewer games on handheld because I play so many RPGs on handheld to burn time. But this year, I played several Metroidvania handhelds and shorter RPGs that let me keep things more equal.

This was also a very even year in terms of quality. Home barely edges out handheld by .03!

When I said that I played fewer Nintendo games than usual, I worry that what you heard was that I played fewer games on a Nintendo console than usual. That is obviously not the case. I did play fewer Nintendo developed games than usual, but Nintendo's firm grasp on my gaming time continues to reign supreme.

While Nintendo may remain the king of quantity, I'd have to give the quality crown this year to Sony, which managed to maintain a rating of over 9 with four separate games.

I really kept my word to play more newer stuff in 2019, as displayed here. It also helped that I've played most of the stuff from the 80s and 90s that I want to, and that I've gotten a bunch of good deals on some newer stuff in the last few years.

The 2000s had a really well-reviewed decade here, with ten games averaging slightly more than 9.0 a piece.The 90s are the clear loser, with four other good games drowning under the weight of Super Star Wars.

And now for our annual reTROview Awards!

Game of the reTROview Year: Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne

This expansion and the base game are as good as RTS get. I was so thrilled to revisit these, and even more thrilled at the thought of a remaster coming, with some actual people against whom I can play.

Stinker of the reTROview Year: Super Star Wars

In truth, this is the kind of bad game that's still its own kind of fun despite being bad. It doesn't even compete with previous award winners that simply had no fun at all, but it was definitely the worst game I've played this year.

Median Game of the reTROview Year: Wario Land 4

Giving top ten lists and measures of central tendency for sample sizes this small is an exercise in silliness, but this one feels right. I enjoyed it, it wasn't among the standouts, and that's about it.

Newest Game reTROviewed: Pokemon Sword

This is about as new as it gets, and it's also the only game released in 2019 that I played this year! It was extremely disappointing.

Oldest Game reTROviewed: Dragon Warrior

I played the port of Dragon Warrior, but I really liked it!

The reTROview 2019 Top 10:

10. Animal Crossing
9.  Xenoblade Chronicles
8. Super Punch-Out!!
7. Dragon Warrior
6. Bravely Default (I didn't finish it yet, so spoiler alert for one of my next reviews!)
5. Advance Wars
4. Sonic Mania
3. Marvel's Spider-Man
2. Wario Land 3
1. Warcraft III/The Frozen Throne

These are all really good games, and I would recommend them to anyone.

The reTROview 2019 Bottom 10:

10. Metroid Fusion
9. Pokemon Let's Go Eevee
8. Phantasy Star
7. Darkwing Duck
6. New Super Mario Bros. 2
5. Azure Striker Gunvolt
4. Game & Watch Gallery 4
3. Pokemon Sword
2. Golf Story
1. Super Star Wars

Due to my top heavy selection of games this year, I can only honestly say that one of these games is truly "bad". Super Star Wars is a total mess, so avoid that one, unless you really love Star Wars, bad games, or run 'n gun shooters. But I rated Golf Story as a 7, and Pokemon Sword at a 7.5, so I would say "average" is a more accurate rating for most of the games on this list. And I actually thought that Metroid Fusion was quite good, but when you only beat 28 games in a year, and the vast majority of them are pretty good, the top of your bottom ten is going to be filled with pretty good games. Maybe I'll just do a bottom 5 next year if I do a similar workload.

Now for my gaming resolutions for the upcoming year:

1. Complete 30 previously uncompleted games

I feel like I can play more this year as my infant son is a toddler now and a bit more self-sufficient. My wife has also pledged to play a few co-op games with me this year, so it's likely I'll pick up a few cheap ones there I would have previously filled with watching The Masked Singer. I also have 3 or 4 in the pipeline that are half done or more, so I think I should be able to do 30. It also makes doing top and bottom ten more interesting if there are a few games on neither list.

2. Buy all the new games I want, as long as it's a good deal. Also, add a really pricey game (more than $80) to my collection just for fun. Maybe Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance or Lufia II.

Last year's resolution to cut back collecting was just dumb, and this year I'm doubling down on collecting. I'm in the market, baby!

3. Replay some old favorites again

I can't tell you how enjoyable it was to run through some SNES favorites last year, and this year I'm going to do the same. I feel the urge to run through Mega Man 2, Mega Man 3, Mega Man X, and Chrono Trigger this year, along with my customary Super Mario World and Link to the Past runs. It has been a decade since my last Chrono Trigger playthrough, and that's unacceptable.

4. I MUST finish Bahamut Lagoon

If I don't finish it this year, I pledge to the internet that I'll sell my copy of Earthbound. I really am fine with not playing Secret of Mana, though, so I'm not going to pledge it.

5. Finish the main campaign of Final Fantasy XIV once and for all

I have been really enjoying short bursts of the MMO, and could easily see myself subscribing for two months out of the year this year. This one is very doable.

And that's a wrap for the previous year. Hope you guys have a great one!

-TRO