Review: The Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker
By the time The Wind Waker released, Nintendo had largely set the formula of the Zelda series in stone: top-down games on handheld to elaborate on the Link to the Past style, while the large-scale 3D games were the major projects of Nintendo's current home console. With better hardware comes a bigger project, and the leap between The Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time can only be compared to that of the NES Zelda games, as the sheer breadth of the world was staggering. While Ocarina of Time was a generally smaller game than Wind Waker turned out to be, the general idea translated much better into an open world than the likes of Zelda II: Adventure of Link. Taking a small chunk of Hyrule and allowing players to explore a smaller world worked well in the original Zelda and A Link to the Past, so Nintendo would naturally want to attempt bigger and more elaborate worlds when approaching their 3D games as the world could be created with far more detail.
The Wind Waker follows a mixture of the design found in both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask: while the open world is enormous, far bigger than Ocarina of Time, the dungeon count is much smaller and the game length can tend to be shorter as a result. While at a short glance it might feel like The Wind Waker is a worse value proposition, the truth is the design of the world is such that no other full-scale Zelda could work with such impressive results.
Before delving into my thoughts on the design of The Wind Waker, I want to take a moment to address the story. Despite Miyamoto's insistence that Zelda is a gameplay-centric series, The Wind Waker places a much larger emphasis on story and as a result, the very first chunk of the game suffers for it. That's not to say the story is bad, but it definitely feels like a step back from Ocarina of Time.
The game opens with a brief recap of Ocarina of Time, describing (in a very creative way) the events leading up to Ganon's defeat. The people of Hyrule celebrate the victory of the enigmatic Hero, but the peace doesn't last. Ganon escapes the last-minute seal placed on him by the Seven Sages, but because the future Link was allowed to live out his childhood in his own timeline the spirit of the Hero is absent from the future. Ganon conquers Hyrule unopposed, and the story mysteriously implies the kingdom of Hyrule vanished. Years later, young boys across the never-ending Great Sea are given garb to celebrate the Hero of Time while awaiting his return.
The narrative proper begins on the player character's birthday, where the protagonist is given his clothes to celebrate the Hero. A pirate crew happen across the island, chasing their captain Tetra who has been captured by a giant bird. After a series of mishaps Aryll, the sister of the protagonist--known from here as simply Link--is captured in Tetra's place. A member of the winged Ruto tribe give the crew their coordinates: the Forsaken Fortress far to the north. Before they leave, Link has a genuinely sad parting with his grandmother who is probably the sweetest old lady in video game history.
At the Forsaken Fortress, Link is separated from his sword and sneaks through the tower until he recovers it, shortly before discovering the kidnapped girls. The Helmaroc King finds him before he can rescue the girls and brings him before a menacing figure then tosses him across the Great Sea. Link is found by a talking boat called the King of Red Lions, who reveals the figure was the evil Ganon of legend. After the two find a sailthey make their way to Dragon Roost Island for assistance on their adventure.
This plot set-up works very well and draws the player into the larger world naturally while supplying decent motivation, but the flow of the story is incongruous to the gameplay flow. After Tetra falls into the woods at the beginning, the player has to finish a full tutorial over the combat mechanics before they're given the sword--for such an urgent moment, Link sure takes his sweet time getting to the woods. The first Forsaken Fortress attempt is a decent introduction to navigating dungeons, but it's ultimately pretty frustrating since a single misstep can get the player thrown in jail. It's a very short dungeon, but I say that as someone who has played The Wind Waker to completion more times than I can count. For a new player, the search lights and winding floors can certainly seem daunting.
When the player arrives on Windfall Island, they're given the first major call to adventure: in order to save Aryll, Ganon is going to have to be defeated. Again, despite a clear motivation the player has to search around the entire island to find Tingle, get the sail, and leave. It's clearly there to make sure the additional content Tingle gives out lands in the player's hands, but considering this is given such a dedicated amount of time when an item as supremely important as the titular Wind Waker is literally thrown at Link's feet makes it seem like the wrong parts were given priority.
After Windfall, the player is forced to sail to Dragon Roost Island, where a slightly smaller village is nestled next to the first real dungeon. The player is allowed to veer right and left on the ocean, but since the Wind Waker hasn't been given by the King of Red Lions there's no way to change the flow of wind and go off course. Since the ocean is so much bigger than Hyrule Field and the boat controls significantly different from Epona, if the player even elected to finish that side quest in Ocarina of Time, I can see why Nintendo might have wanted players to become familiar with the controls even if it is patronizing.
All of these early-game problems are exacerbated by a snail-paced text crawl, which persists throughout the game but seems so much worse when the game is front-loaded with so much dialogue. Furthermore, railroading the player is an obvious tutorial and it can seem very patronizing when the end goal of each tutorial is to teach players how to simply press a button; we don't need to know that pressing A will parry, because the button flashes on screen and is accompanied by a ring when the parry window is open. Each of these examples could have clearly been implemented much more smoothly, but it's all worth it after finishing Dragon Roost Island. After learning the Wind's Requiem, the entirety of the Great Sea is open for players to explore. Like the original Zelda, some areas and events are sealed off from the player but the game doesn't simply hide the content from the player.
This was a problem present in Ocarina where certain events, like learning Saria's Song or entering The Bottom of the Well, required the player to pass a certain point in the story before the event would become available. Instead, The Wind Waker presents the later challenges of its massive Great Sea like a badge of honor: players can swim into an octopus whirlpool completely unprepared, waste all their bombs, and get utterly destroyed. Cyclos can be encountered at any point while sailing over his designated areas, and since players don't find the item necessary to beat him until roughly the halfway point of the game it's likely they'll have to deal with him on more than one occasion.
Players can also approach each island individually and even if they're unable to access them due to a missing item, a rudimentary note-making system exists in the form of the fish. These guys are fantastic additions to the sailing for three main reasons: one, they give the player something to look for while sailing in the early stages of the game; two, the fish give players incentive to explore each of the Great Sea's frankly silly amount of grids; and three, players can opt to only have the fish mark his map on islands of note, leaving the smaller locations for a later stage of the game and keeping the important islands in mind when the opportunity finally arises to investigate them.
The main thematic element of exploration is taken to its most ridiculous, and most fulfilled, level in The Wind Waker, though some islands can be underwhelming. The sheer number and variety should leave most players satisfied, and since the game is overall shorter than Ocarina of Time it's easy to jump in, feel like you've gotten a full Zelda experience, and jump right out.
The shorter length of the game also allows for an interesting approach to the typical Zelda formula. Link is still tasked with finding three objects to prove he's worthy to wield the Master Sword, but the story throws in interesting twists: because the player character is not a reincarnation of the Hero of Time, the only obstacle between him and the Master Sword is simply the fact that Hyrule Castle is completely flooded. Unlike previous games in the series, players now have to explore a dungeon before obtaining the Master Sword and after that, Link challenges the Forsaken Fortress again. When the player is finally bestowed the Triforce of Courage and given the moniker Hero of Winds, it feels like they've accomplished a brand new feat rather than retreading an old one.
The narrative flow feels far more like an adventure than a series of check boxes which, while working well for Ocarina of Time, come off as more of a cohesive whole as a result of the dedicated focus to the plot. Rather than "now I need to collect the Shadow Medallion because I just collected the Water Medallion," the plot focuses more on the bigger picture. The player retrieves the Pearls to raise the Tower of the Gods in order to retrieve the Master Sword so Link can defeat Ganon and save his sister. "This happened because of this, so that will happen after this." The story is a narrative arc this time around bolstered by an unbridled amount of content to explore, and because of the relaxed tone of the game there's never any disconnect between the player wanting to explore and Link just deciding to take the day off to grab some treasure.
After the second Forsaken Fortress attempt, the player must awaken the Master Sword in order to defeat Ganon. Since the sages responsible for powering the Master Sword are long dead, the task is up to the player to revive their spirits. Again, this doesn't feel like a series of check boxes as much as it does a narrative crux: Ganon is too powerful to be defeated by the Master Sword, so players must bolster the sword to defeat him. Instead of anywhere from five to eight dungeons during the second half of the game, the player only needs to awaken spirits from two temples before the sword is powered fully. I don't think this really needs to be said, but the Master Sword power-up is one of my favorite objectives in any Zelda game period. I was always invested in the power-ups in past games in the series and hated to see it all but dropped in Ocarina of Time, so to see it become a major part of the plot feels like fan-service directed to me in particular.
The Wind Waker also juggles an element from the handheld games that I'm finally glad to see done right: players need to explore a very large amount of the Great Sea for specific items or power-ups before they can fully access the next batch of dungeons. Since the player has access to the bow at this point, they can finally take down Cyclos and learn his warping ability. I appreciate fast-travel mechanics which are sort of limited and require players to finish a certain amount of the game before they're unlocked, and this is one of the better examples of that. Furthermore, players can only access the fire and ice arrows through the use of fast travel, though I get the feeling this part of the game might trip up players unwilling to explore all their options. After getting the fire and ice arrows, the player still needs to clear mini-dungeons attached to these arrows before they can enter the next dungeons, and before that they need to find the reincarnated spirits.
All of this is presented with far less interruptions from the King of Red Lions, who is ostensibly the replacement for Navi. The King of Red Lions never interrupts the player while they travel but can still offer information if the player decides to hop out of the boat and ask--for reference, this is pretty much exactly what I wanted out of Navi. I hate being bothered when I know what to do, but if I ever get lost it's nice to know there's an in-game hint less than a foot away from my character at any time. Tetra does give Link a hint stone for help in dungeons and brief tutorials, but it's used very sparingly.
The biggest flaw of the game, and the one you're most likely to hear of now, is the Triforce hunt after unsealing the Master Sword. I'll admit, it's awful. It's simply terrible. The HD version remedies almost all of the headache surrounding this quest, but I feel it's unnecessarily tedious. It's obvious a significant amount of content had to be altered before the game was released, but I can't imagine it would be very difficult to simply streamline this part of the game. What I hate most about this is definitely the Ghost Ship shard, which requires players be on a specific tile during a specific phase of the moon. It's entirely too obtuse to actually be fun and I can't imagine anyone at Nintendo thought it would be. It's nice that The Wind Waker actively pushes for players to start exploring, but each Zelda needs to have a fair balance between exploration and dungeons. At the end of The Wind Waker the game focuses entirely on exploration, and none of the Triforce shards offer better equipment or Pieces of Heart--it feels like it's just there to distract the player long enough for them to feel like they got their money's worth.
I really want to stress this, but a video game doesn't need to be a certain playtime or hit specific marks to succeed. I personally won't buy a game I won't replay at some point; it might be a year or a decade, but if I feel like I'll ever revisit it, I consider that game a worthy investment. Cave Story lasts five hours but even though it can be obtained legally for free, I've still bought the game three times just because I appreciate what it accomplishes and love to replay it. And look at Majora's Mask: the game features far less content than The Wind Waker even without factoring in the Triforce shards, and it's more than earned its place as one of the best games in the series. The Wind Waker deserved either an extra dungeon or two or it deserved to go straight to its ending. Casually throwing in a line about Ganon mustering his forces and creating a barrier at the Forsaken Fortress isn't good enough, especially for such an excellent game.
Speaking of Majora's Mask, I want to speak briefly about tone. The tone of both games seem at first glance to be very different, but if you look at the narrative of both games under the shallowest layer it becomes clear that both games are very dark at their core. While Majora's Mask deals pretty openly in an oppressive atmosphere with themes of death and decay, The Wind Waker takes a much more subtle approach and is elevated because of it. At a certain point, the story told in scrolls at the beginning of the game is finally completed for the player by different characters: after Ganon broke free from his seal, the Gods of the world simply flooded Hyrule to keep Ganon at bay as long as possible. It becomes clear that this isn't simply a particularly oceanic area of Hyrule--the Great Sea simply is Hyrule. In retrospect, the game feels far more apocalyptic and hopeless than anything in past games in the series, though this morbid story element is completely offset by the game's unbelievably endearing art style and hopeful messages.
The Nintendo 64 Zelda games did the best with what they could, but it was hard to discern a specific art style if Nintendo had been aiming at any in particular. In those days, developers had to make a serious choice between stylized 2D sprites and realistic, though ugly, polygonal models. The jump from the fifth generation of consoles to the sixth was enormous, though ugly models didn't go away for several years into the console's lifespan. Let's go a generation up and look at Super Smash Bros. Melee: many of the playable character models look fantastic, but every other model in the game is utterly hideous.
Because The Wind Waker was such an important game in the series and even the burgeoning Gamecube's life, Nintendo decided to work with a timeless cel-shaded graphical look. Rather than compromising on detail, The Wind Waker is given a heavily stylized look while maintaining the 3D gameplay innovated upon in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. I still desperately hate the idea of games losing their value over time by virtue of age, but this is the game I'd say highly exemplifies why, visually at least, that argument holds some weight. Weight that I'd argue with and you will never move me on, but when looking at some of the more hideous games of the fifth generation of consoles it's hard for even a contrarian like me to deny it. The cel-shading of The Wind Waker met the potential scourge of aging and went all-in with a unique style which is completely separated from the development issues of its day, and because the style is so striking it's created its own "toon" designation for this version of Link.
Link is far more expressive, colors are bright and stark, characters are all unique and full of life, and every single area of the game is memorable. Since less time was spent on churning out bleeding-edge graphics, more time could be spent on important elements like writing and gameplay. There really wasn't much wrong with the gameplay in Ocarina of Time, but it was a bit barebones and could lead to some long poking matches. One simple addition was made to The Wind Waker in the form of parrying, which allows players to take advantage of an enemy's attack and strike back. It gives combat an interesting dynamic and allows battles to feel engaging without sacrificing the weight of the Nintendo 64 games. And as I mentioned, the writing is simply on a class of its own--just look at Ganon's speech before the final battle to see what I mean. And oh man, that final battle. Set on top of a collapsing tower as Hyrule falls back into the sea, The Wind Waker's battle with Ganon is the pinnacle of boss fights in the series--I'd go so far as to say it's one of my favorite final bosses of all time.
Verdict
While the beginning of the game drags and feels far more restricted than the past 3D Zelda titles, once the game opens up it takes everything up to 11. Gorgeous, endearing and simply a blast to play, The Wind Waker took everything from the fifth generation Zelda games and improved on every single aspect of them. The game clearly had to have content taken out, but the game runs with its own style and never looks back. I sang Ocarina of Time's praises for its contribution to video games, but as a game on its own The Wind Waker is a step above every single Zelda game for me. When going through my list of games I needed to play for this retrospective series, I was most sad to see that The Wind Waker was one of the titles I would have to skip. It's a timeless masterpiece and it'll be there when this is all over, and I hope you look past its unique art style and quirky flaws. If you allow it to win your heart over, you'll find a game that grabs your attention and never lets go.
As for the Wii U remaster, I've linked my mini-review of that below. I really need to reiterate that while all the major gameplay flaws have been completely fixed, the new realistic lighting clashes horribly with the cel shading of the original game and can look outright ugly at times. The original is completely playable, but if the little touches sound important then I'd say just go ahead and get the HD remaster. A Switch re-release with an option for the original lighting and the new would be an instant recommendation, but you should consider your options before picking which version to play. Whatever you do, just make sure you play The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
Zelda 3D remaster mini-reviews:
http://subjective-objective.blogspot.com/2016/03/mini-review-zelda-remasters.html
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