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
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