The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

What’s The Game? The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (that’s the original, not the HD remaster with quality of life improvements)

What’s It All About, JG? Being the cutest darned game in the whole of toon town! But aside from that, while Link is having his coming of age ceremony, Tetra the pirate is dropped on Outset Island, his home, and Link rescues her. In the meantime, his sister is abducted, which means our feisty little fella needs to set out on the high seas to rescue her! Tetra’s along for the ride too, agreeing to help get his sister back. That means finding a special talking boat, the King of Red Lions, to safely ferry him across the open waters (and explaining any relevant plot details – Link very much sails the good ship Exposition in this game). Tetra and Link are eventually able to rescue Link’s sister, where a confrontation with Ganondorf reveals that Tetra has a Triforce necklace and is the descendant of Zelda herself. After visiting a sunken Hyrule under the waves, where Tetra is revealed to be Actual Zelda, not just a descendant, Link assembles the shards of the Triforce, using them to defeat Ganondorf in the final battle. But, in a twist, the King of Hyrule – Link’s boat, obviously – decides that the old order should be washed away and Ganondorf is turned to stone. Link and a restored Tetra escape while the King, Ganondorf, and old Hyrule are swept away forever.

What Was The Experience Like? Well, the first and most obvious thing to comment on is the graphics style because it’s the one thing that immediately hits you straight out of the gate. Abandoning attempts at anything even faintly realistic, Nintendo has instead gone for an intentionally cartoony style. This is one of those moves that has turned out to be incredibly canny since it means the game has, despite being originally released in 2002/2003 (depending on your territory), pretty much not aged in the slightest. The cartoon style is pretty much timeless, and that means this looks as good today as it did back then. Sure, you could quibble about the amount of detail enemies have or the repetitious movements they undertake but that really would be quibbling. The fact of the matter is The Wind Waker looked fantastic then and it looks fantastic now.

Part of that look is, of course, the character design and in this we have what is probably the single most adorable Link of all time. Now don’t get me wrong, Link’s Awakening 2019 Link is absolutely adorable too – a spinny, jumpy, feisty Link. But he’s the second go-around at a cartoon Link. The Wind Waker Link is the first, the original, and still the best. For one thing, he’s just incredibly expressive, with huge, wide eyes always helpfully pointing towards something that might be of use. He’s still got his traditional green outfit and cap, but its a simplified, cleaner look that befits the cartoon nature of the game. Whether he’s conducting the various songs and ballads to control the wind, looking exhausted when running low on hearts, or simply doing a classic forward roll, this version of Link is never anything other than utterly charming and delightful.

That extends to the other characters, too. Tetra is just as expressive as Link, which makes them work well together and makes them very much feel of a piece with each other. That her character is a rather spunky pirate girl helps a lot too – she’s not one to hang around needing rescued and is often more on the front foot as to what’s going on than Link is, her real world experience contrasting with his relatively sheltered island upbringing. This isn’t over-emphasised but rather is simply left to be self-evident in the text – the correct approach.

The enemies, too, have a generally great design. In fact, their repetitious movements rather lend themselves to the cartoon nature of the game – a lot of classic cartoons, from Hanna-Barbera to Loony Tunes, use repetition as part of their animation to cut down on time and cost so having a similar type of repetition here subconsciously connects The Wind Waker to that tradition. While the beyond-infurating ReDead do look a bit clunky and of 2002, most of the rest look fine and fit in well with the visuals and tone of the game. Their sound design is some of the most earwormy and annoying of any Zelda game but that’s clearly deliberate. It’s not to everyone’s taste (in this case, everyone very much includes me) but it’s obvious that they went for a specific type of sound for the enemies and that carries through all of them.

Another absolutely fantastic part of the game is the King of Red Lions. A sentient boat that delivers both security and exposition for Link ought not to be as successful as this but it really just works. The boat retains the cartoon feel, of course, and wobbles in pleasing ways when Link jumps in and out or when they need to grapple up some treasure from the deep. The reveal that the boat is, in fact, the last king of Hyrule works well too, almost to the point where you wonder why it didn’t occur to you before the actual reveal itself. And when it comes to the King, there’s definitely something here worth talking about.

Because one of the absolute best parts of the game is the fact that, for once, the King isn’t there to restore the status quo. He’s there to sweep the old order away and give the new one a chance to grow and flourish. This ends up being Ganondorf’s miscalculation and the one that brings him to ruin – he expects the King to defend his kingdom but instead he understands that the old kingdom has passed and that stopping Ganondorf is the final part the old kingdom has to play before it’s gone forever. To have a monarch, of all characters, argue that it’s time to replace the older order with something new is not only a unique perspective for a Zelda game but just incredibly refreshing overall. Sunken Hyrule, under the waves and frozen in time, is a remarkably arresting image, and when it comes back to life, it feels only natural that the kingdom will be restored to its old glory. But that’s not what happens and it’s a huge plus for the game.

Now, all this is sounding hugely positive and the truth is, there’s a vast amount to love about The Wind Waker. Unfortunately, though, it’s not all perfect and the best place to start approaching that is with the baton that lends its name to the game. The idea of Link “conducting” the wind is at once charming and rather beautiful, and it feels like the sort of story you would stumble across in some old mythology. Link can use the baton to conduct the winds, control certain characters, and call forth a gale to zip him around the oceans. It’s a lovely conceit. It’s also incredibly tedious to have to do it Every. Single. Time Link needs to change the wind’s direction (which is a lot), and each time Link conducts anything, it comes with an unskippable animation that drags whatever’s happening to a standstill while it completes.

And speaking of tedious, unfortunately there’s quite a lot of it here. While much of the conceit of the game – allowing Link to roam the ocean free – is a perfect fit for a Zelda game, the reality of it is often quite dull. This is especially true when it comes time for Link to fetch all the Triforce shards, which are pretty much identical and just feel like make-work to extend the game. Actually, there’s quite a lot of that in The Wind Waker and it’s one of the game’s significant flaws. Getting the charts for each region of the map Link needs is often just boring, a go-there-do-that fetch quest with little to distinguish one from the other. That’s even more true of the maps Link needs to find the Triforce shards, even before he can start collecting them – he needs to gather the charts, take them to Tingle for translation (which costs Rupees), then finally get on with retrieving the shard already. I mean, having to visit Tingle is bad enough but for this? The wide open seas are a great vista but what happens there is repetitive, plodding, and never amounts to all that much.

That’s a shame because early on in the game, exploring Outset Island, Dragon Roost Island, and the Forest Haven promise many exciting locations to explore. Some of these are better than others but still – they’re concrete locations for Link to get stuck into and also distinct from the classic dungeons he needs to work through while still having plenty to do in them. The main three dungeons themselves aren’t the finest in the series either – they’re often fairly straightforward and don’t contain much that can’t be found in other, better Zelda dungeons. It’s also painfully obvious that there’s only three dungeons and instead of completing the fourth, you just mess about on an island for a while until the game just gives you what you need to find, which is pathetic. Even the final approach before you encounter Ganondorf involves just fighting the same four end-of-level bosses you’ve already defeated (but this time in black and white, as the director intended!), which just gives the sense of stuff being stuck in to extend the game rather than because it’s in any way relevant.

These flaws riddle The Wind Waker and seriously undermine it as a game. It’s not, by any stretch, a bad game but part of the frustration of playing is that it’s easy to see how much better it could be with a little more time and care. Deadlines are often lethal to creativity and it’s not exactly an obscure fact that the one Nintendo imposed on the developers of The Wind Waker ended up doing serious harm to the game. It shows. There’s a difference between something being slow paced and something being boring and far too often, The Wind Waker finds itself on the wrong side of that division. Yes, some of this gets fixed in the HD version (especially the ability to sail much faster, greatly cutting down tedious slosh-across-the-sea sequences) but the flaws are more than just something that can be fixed with a few graphics updates and the odd quality of life improvement.

To take another relevant example – Tetra. She’s a great character right up until the moment she isn’t. Tetra’s been strong, capable, more worldly-wise and aware than Link, and just a great character overall. Then, when we find out she’s actually Zelda, she’s stuck in a room for the rest of the game, completely ignored until some half-hearted effort to include her in the too-easy final battle against Ganondorf. It’s terribly undermining for her as a character than the game in general. I mean, you wouldn’t want a princess to do something useful, would you? Heaven forfend! It’s a bad miscalculation and there are a few of them in the game. The motivating factor to get Link involved in all this nonsense is the rescue of his sister (another helpless female character that needs rescuing). This rescue happens less than a quarter of the way into the game then she’s simply forgotten about, not so much as mentioned again. Marvellous.

Also, and I know this isn’t the fault of the original game, but playing it on a Switch controller is a massive pain in the arse. I’m not going to deduct points from the game for it because, well, it’s meant to be played with a GameCube controller and I don’t have one of those and that’s my fault, not the game’s. But it’s hard to imagine that even if I did have one that lining up that bloody grappling hook would be much easier. Or the hookshot, for that matter. It’s fiddly and irritating and dreadfully off-putting, especially when precision and timing are required to defeat an end of level boss. And I’d guess most people playing these days are going to be playing on a Switch controller as well, so I’d be amazed if I’m the only one who had those issues.

The frustrations of The Wind Waker aren’t picky, incidental details, they are baked into the nature of the game. One of the reason they are so frustrating is that there’s just so much about The Wind Waker that works, and as a game, it ought to be very much better than it is. The cartoon style is charming beyond words. The conceit of the Wind Waker itself is brilliant. There’s plenty of colourful locations to explore and characters and side-quests to indulge in. But there’s also much that’s slow and dreary. There’s too much repetition. Too many fetch quests that extend the game at the cost of doing anything actually interesting. It’s easy to see why people respond to The Wind Waker with so much joy and while it’s a charming and delightful game, that’s often all it is. It’s an easy game to fall in love with. It’s just not that easy a game to actually like.

Sores On The Doors? 6.5/10