Game Discussion of the Week: LoZ Wind Waker

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Oh man, I've been itching to vent about Wind Waker for a long time now. While I enjoyed Wind Waker as a kid, mainly because it was my first experience with a sandbox game, I despise it as an adult. I have an incredible number of problems with this game, most significant of which is the art direction.

Oh how I despise Wind Waker's visual design. The cartoony look is unworthy of the series' adventurous tone and is objectively crude even when viewed on its own. The character designs look almost as simplistic as miis on the Wii's Mii Creator Channel. I vividly remember the backlash longtime Zelda fans had when the first trailer of WW was shown back in early 2000 something, and they had every reason to be outraged. There was absolutely no justifying changing the look of the Zelda series so radically. Nintendo should've just created a new IP if they wanted to make a cartoony Zelda game. Their decision in that regard was disgusting and unforgivable.

But sadly my problems with WW aren't limited to its visual style. Let me break down all my remaining complaints about the game:

-The gameplay is casualized. The newly introduced counter attack is brokenly overpowered and strips the combat of any challenge because of how easy it is to pull off. The dungeon designs and puzzles were streamlined as well, which further reduced the difficulty level.

-The dungeons are all extremely forgettable and too easy.

-The game is unbearably long. Normally this wouldn't be a bad thing, but due to the lack of challenging gameplay and boring level design it makes the experience exponentially more tedious.


I tired to give Wind Waker another chance recently but couldn't make it more than 2 hours into the campaign before I gave up due to how boring and depressing the experience was for me. Even playing it as a kid I only really got enjoyment out of screwing around rather than progressing through the storyline. Now I don't enjoy playing it at all.

I give Wind Waker a big stinking 1/5. I'm glad the public rejected it when it came out. I think a large part of the reason behind the Gamecube's underwhelming sales and polarizing reception at the time was due to Wind Waker, since Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask had been such landmark titles in the series' history (and in Nintendo history in general). I still enjoy playing OoT and Majora's Mask today, but not Wind Waker. Wind Waker is a step down for the series in every single respect.

I'll say meleemaestro's thoughts are pretty much what I was expecting from him.

I always enjoyed Wind Waker. I think the cell shaded look has held up remarkably well, even to the present day. The characters all looked distinctive and managed to be quite expressive. The great sea was an excellent change of environment, and a breath of fresh air.

It isn't without its flaws, like the shard hunting at the end, and the relatively slow pace of sailing. I'm glad the HD remake addressed those, and it was great fun to play through it again a few years ago.

I would also count the Oracle of Seasons/Ages games. And Zelda 2: it technically happens in Hyrule, but you go through the rest of the continent that was never explored in the other games (it's interesting how small the original Hyrule is inside Zelda 2's map).

About Wind Waker, I thought the art style was bad at the time, as I was expecting a more realistic Ocarina of Time. As time went on, I warmed up to it and like it a lot by now - especially since its graphics aged much better than the "realistic" Twilight Princess. It's just very expressive, and the cartoony textures simply don't get outdated. Cell-shaded graphics in general were a good choice for that generation, as they could hide the memory limitations for textures and complex 3d models - Wind Waker, Jet Set Radio and Okami all look great even nowadays, and even Mega Man Legends aged better (graphically) than the majority of PS1 3d games.

About the game itself, I don't have anything to say, as I only played very few minutes of it.

I dunno. I think cel shading is pretty subjective in terms of how well it ages. However one thing that does still impress me in Wind Waker is the character animations; they're extremely fluid for their time. It's especially impressive when you take into consideration that there probably wasn't much motion-capture involved in the animating process, either, given how cartoony the character anatomy is. It's an extremely well produced game, but then again that can be said about pretty much all Zelda titles...

Art direction and graphics aside, I still think Wind Waker is a bad game, though. It's just so ungodly long and boring. I'm glad I didn't pay anything for my copy (a childhood friend gave me his copy years ago).

MeleeMonk - I've heard Nintendo alleviated some boring parts in the rerelease, but I didn't play either version so I wouldn't know what changed.

stratogustav - The same with me. As a teenager, I would dislike games that looked "childish"; also, because of the evolution in graphics at the time, I was expecting every 3d game to be more realistic. Of course, a few years later, I would greatly favor creative and expressive art styles over realism - and the art/animations in Wind Waker are certainly some of the most expressive from that time.

I had kind of wondered if, between the tropical setting for both Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine, if Nintendo's designers were passive aggressively suggesting they needed a tropical vacation.