So as I embark on my journey through the Gamecube’s library I thought I might as well start with one of my favorite games of all time, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
Cards on the table, while I did own a Gamecube growing up, I didn’t actually own all that many games for it, so as I cover the various titles for this underrated console I will actually be able to judge the majority of them neutrally without any nostalgia or rose tinted glasses getting in the way. But that will absolutely not be the case when it comes to Wind Waker, as it was one of the games I did own, and it along with the Gamecube ports of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask played a key role in shaping my childhood and my love of video games as a medium. So try as I might, I won’t be able to be unbiased on this.
So in order to keep this review more interesting, and to avoid saying things that have already been said countless times before, I’m going to be playing devil’s advocate, and focusing on the handful of things I didn’t like about Wind Waker. So in that spirit I’ll quickly go over everything that’s good about the game. Gorgeous visuals, solid gameplay, imaginative setting, lovable characters, excellent music, simple but effective story, all around a good fun adventure, and despite all the horrible things I’m about to say it’s still one of the best games of all time. Now with that out of the way, let’s get to the negatives.
The first major downside of Wind Waker is that, while the gameplay is good, I did notice a slight, well, dumbing down in terms of the difficulty when compared to its N64 predecessors. Part of it was in how the game is balanced, I’ll get into that more in a bit, but another area that felt a bit lackluster was the dungeon design.
The thing that made the dungeons in Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask really special was that they were very well designed, because most of the time they were effectively one giant interconnected puzzle. In the Forest Temple the entire dungeon is built around tracking down the four Poe sisters and relighting the torches. In Snowhead Temple the entire dungeon is built around reaching the very top. And while a lot of people hate on the Water Temple and Great Bay Temple because the iron boot switching was annoying and complaining about water levels became a meme, the reality is that they were well designed dungeons where the entire place was built around redirecting the flow of water and using that to reach the end. Even relatively simple dungeons like Dodongo’s cavern and Woodfall temple were still fairly interconnected.
In Wind Waker though the dungeons are rather lackluster. Don’t get me wrong, the environments are great, but the actual puzzles and layouts are underwhelming. For the most part you just go to an area, solve one self-contained puzzle, go to the next area, solve another self-contained puzzle, rinse and repeat until you reach the end. That’s not to say that there’s no interconnectivity, but it’s more minimal, and a lot of times it feels like they could have swapped the rooms around and it wouldn’t have made any real difference, something that was not true at all of the N64 dungeons. There are still some clever puzzles, but the sense of each dungeon being one giant puzzle is lost, and the dungeons feel a little underwhelming as a result. Of course this trend of dumbing down the dungeons was continued and made worse in Twilight Princess, but I’ll get to that another time.
However, I’ll admit that my gripe with the dungeons is somewhat nitpicky. But a bigger problem is with how the game is balanced. It’s a good thing that adventuring and sailing across the sea is fun and fulfilling in and of itself, because the rupees that are the main reward the game has to give you most of the time are largely useless. This was a problem that was also present in Ocarina of Time, where you could collect a lot of rupees but had almost nothing to spend them on. I know some people will just dismiss this issue because it’s a common one in a lot of Zelda games, but just because a problem is endemic doesn’t mean it should be ignored, nor does it mean it should be given a free pass. While the problem was bad in Ocarina of Time, at least in that game there was a small chance of your shield and tunics being eaten, forcing you to spend some rupees to replace them. In Wind Waker the only expensive things you can purchase with the rupees are Tingle’s services in decoding the Triforce charts. Everything else is either dirt cheap or just lying around for free. So while you do admittedly need a fair amount of rupees to beat the game, there will still be tons of rupees leftover that won’t serve any purpose except making you wish it was that easy to get money in real life.
As a bright eyed kid I thought the concept of the spoils bag and collecting monster parts was so cool, and the novelty of the idea was enough for me at the time. But as a jaded adult I can now see that the system is pretty underwhelming and limited, especially since later games like Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild managed to make the monster parts you collect from enemies actually useful. In Wind Waker each type of monster part has exactly one use and one use only. For the Joy Pendants you give them to the teacher on Windfall island for a certain reward, for the Knight Crests you give them to Orca on Outset island for a different reward, and so on. Once you’ve collected all of the rewards from these people, the monster parts are completely useless, except to sell to Beedle in exchange for yet more rupees.
This brings up another problem with how the game’s economy is balanced. Typically in a game you want the difficulty of acquiring an item to be directly proportional to how useful it is, so that way the player is rewarded accordingly for the work they put in. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case here. One rather infuriating example is that there are a lot of hard to reach chests in dungeons that contain a Joy Pendant, indicating that it’s a rare and valuable item. Except it’s literally not, because Joy Pendants are dropped by Bokoblins, one of the most common enemies in the game, so why would getting one in a chest be a good reward when you can easily get them elsewhere?
Another example is that on Windfall island there’s a guy who can turn chu jelly into useful potions. He can give you a red potion that restores your hearts, a green potion that restores your magic, and he can give you a blue potion that restores both hearts and magic. However, in order for him to make the blue potion for you, you have to track down all of the rare blue chus that are scattered on various islands throughout the sea, which is a fairly difficult and time consuming task.
Or you could just say screw it, and give a bunch of boko baba seeds to the potion Korok in Forest Haven and get a blue potion that way. Much easier.
Or you could just go to your grandma’s house and get her soup, which not only has the same effect as the blue potion, but also temporarily boosts your damage and has two servings. All for free.
Or, let’s be real here, you could just forget about potions altogether, since odds are good you’ll never need them.
Which brings me to the biggest problem with how the game is balanced, and why the game feels so easy despite having some pretty tough enemies. It’s those damn treasure spheres. From a certain point on in the game you’ll be fighting enemies that will almost always drop one of these things, which upon being hit give you tons of health, rupees, arrows, and bombs, so you are never ever in danger of running out of anything. During my most recent playthrough there was one island where I got into a tough fight with a whole horde of enemies, and I took a lot of damage. When it was over I was relieved that I had had the foresight to bring along a potion, only to quickly discover that I needn’t have bothered, as all of the treasure spheres left behind by the defeated enemies restored my health completely.
I like the idea of the treasure spheres, but the fact that they appear constantly ruins the fun, as well as destroys the game’s difficulty. In order for them to work, it would have been better for them to be much more rare. For weaker enemies there should have been like a 1% chance of one appearing after they’re defeated. For moderately stronger enemies like moblins the chance should have been maybe 20% or 25%, while for really strong enemies like darknuts the chance should have been around 30% or 40%. The appearance of a treasure sphere should have been an occasional pleasant surprise, not a constant and guaranteed occurrence.
Another problem is that the latter half of the game feels a bit underwhelming, especially compared to some of the earlier Zelda games. In a Link to the Past you spend the first part of the game gathering three pendants in order to obtain the Master Sword. You then confront Agahnim in Hyrule Castle, only to be thrust into the Dark World and realize that the true adventure is now beginning. In Ocarina of Time you spend the first part of the game gathering the three sacred stones in order to open the Door of Time. You then obtain the Master Sword, only to be thrust seven years into the future when Ganondorf has taken over Hyrule, and you realize that the true adventure is now beginning.
Meanwhile in Wind Waker you spend the first part of the game gathering the strength to fight Ganon and rescue your sister, and eventually you obtain the Master Sword. You then confront Ganon, only to find that the sword doesn’t work, and you are forced to flee. But instead of the world opening up or a whole new epic quest beginning, you just complete two more dungeons to restore the Master Sword’s power, collect the eight fragments of the Triforce of Courage that have been scattered across the sea, and then fight Ganon, and that’s it. It’s just a bit anticlimactic.
There’s evidence to suggest that just like how A Link to the Past had the Light and Dark Worlds, and Ocarina of Time had the Young and Old time periods, Wind Waker was also going to have a dual world mechanic between the Great Sea and the land of Hyrule. Unfortunately it seems that this idea was ultimately scrapped due to a mixture of hardware limitations and looming deadlines. I think the game overall came together pretty well, and it is really good, but you can still tell that it was rushed toward the end.
Probably people’s biggest complaint with the game was the Triforce fetch quest toward the end. And, yeah, that is pretty annoying. It isn't a deal breaker for me, but it is undeniably very tedious to get through, and it is the weakest part of the game. Personally I would have changed it so that there were three or four shards you had to find scattered throughout the Great Sea, and then the final shard would be found in a dungeon, either another Tower of the Gods type of place to test the hero, or else make the Ghost Ship into a full dungeon, kind of like what they did in Phantom Hourglass.
While this review is mainly about the Gamecube version of Wind Waker, I would like to take a moment to talk about the HD remaster that was released for the Wii U, which I played for the first time fairly recently. I have rather mixed feelings about the remakes the Zelda games have been getting. While I enjoyed Ocarina of Time 3D, in many ways it really was the exact same game again with a fresh coat of paint. I love Ocarina of Time, but I will be the first to admit that it is not perfect, and while everything relating to the main story and the main dungeons is solid, there were some aspects of the game’s economy and side quests that could have used some reworking. But the remake was loyal to a fault, only making a tiny handful of changes, not all of which were positive. Ultimately I don’t really see OOT3D as preferable to the N64 version unless you really can’t stand dated graphics.
After feeling underwhelmed by OOT3D, I was hesitant about trying out Wind Waker HD, hence why I didn’t play it until very recently. I was also worried because I noticed they had altered the visuals, which didn’t bode well. Unlike Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker’s graphics and visual style have aged extremely gracefully, and so messing around with it seemed like a bad idea. Plus some of the early screenshots were overly bright and made the characters look plasticy and fake, so I was concerned that they had ruined the original art style in order to disguise the fact that this was more or less a port of a Gamecube game.
Fortunately when I actually played the game I found that the new visuals actually worked incredibly well. While there are a bunch of new lighting effects, they managed to blend them so that they complement the environments and character models while keeping the original art style intact. The original game looked gorgeous, and that still shines through in the HD version.
In terms of how it plays, well, in many ways it’s the same to Wind Waker as OOT3D was to Ocarina of Time, namely loyal to a fault. Almost none of the problems with Wind Waker I mentioned above were fixed, the sole exception being that the Triforce fetch quest was streamlined a bit to be much less tedious. It’s rather disappointing, as it shouldn’t have been that hard to rebalance the game’s economy in a way that makes more sense. It would also have been nice to see more of the ideas that had to be cut from the original due to deadlines and hardware limits restored in this version.
But at the same time I can sort of understand them erring on the side of caution, because if you change too much you risk breaking what made the game work in the first place. And ultimately I came to appreciate the HD version because it made a ton of small but significant quality of life improvements to the game. From speeding up the grappling hook animations, to revising how the Wind Waker itself works to be less tedious, to not being tossed out of the ship every time you take damage, to there being an aim assist to the cannon that makes aiming less obnoxious, to the fact that you can get a faster sail that makes getting around much easier and less time consuming, there are tons of little touches that make the game much smoother and more enjoyable while still keeping the core experience intact. There were a handful of changes from the Gamecube version that I didn’t like, but they are all so unbelievably petty that I’m not even going to mention them.
While I’ve spent most of this review complaining, in all seriousness Wind Waker is an amazing game, and one that deserves to be played. I will always have a soft spot for the Gamecube version, since that’s the one I grew up with, but the HD version for the Wii U (and, hopefully, eventually for the Switch) is the best version, and it’s the one I would recommend to people who haven’t played it yet. In a series full of grand adventures, Wind Waker still remains one of the best.
Final arbitrary score: 9/10 (Outstanding)
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