Still not off either my 3D Zelda or my GameCube kick, I decided to start playing this game right after I finished with Pikmin 2. Wind Waker is a game I played a bunch when I was little, but it's been SO long since I last played it I genuinely can't remember. At any rate, it was definitely when I payed less attention to game design, so it was high time that I gave it a replay to see just how well it held up. It took me around 25 or 30 hours (rough guess, as the game doesn't count playtime) to finish the Japanese version of the game on original hardware.
Wind Waker starts out in a world flooded with oceans with only a few islands poking above. You, our hero Link, live on one of these islands with your little sister and grandmother. You peacefully live until one day a giant bird carrying girl comes to the island. Long story short, you end up saving her, a pirate captain, and your sister gets kidnapped instead. You join up with the pirates to save her, eventually finding yourself on a larger and much more treacherous journey to save all of this ocean called Hyrule. Wind Waker's writing is well remembered for a reason. Characters and their expressions are super well animated in a great art style, allowing Link to have more character than ever despite still basically being non-verbal. The characters and islands you visit and help out all follow a larger theme of succession and looking towards the future. It's a very hopeful and remarkably topical game in how it so often shows an older generation, despondent in how they've allowed the world to decay, giving the world to the younger generation with the wish they might still be able to make something despite the failings of the past. That said, Wind Waker's story and design really do show the pock marks of its troubled design. It's known that Wind Waker had to have two whole dungeons scrapped in order to fit the release schedule of a holiday release, and it's my opinion that this is likely the cause of the game's wild pacing problems. You have a really tightly choreographed first half, an SUPER strong ending sequence, but a really meandering and poorly signposted second half that does a lot to sour that. It isn't experience ruining, but it definitely left me with a lot of ideas of what could've been had they gone for a March release date instead of a holiday one. The gameplay design of Wind Waker is similarly hit or miss. The dungeon design is really as solid as ever, with the games dungeons and mini-dungeons providing that 3d action and puzzle solving the series is so good at just as good as it ever has. The swordplay has been spiced up a bit from the tried and true Z-targeting of the N64 era. Now in addition to that, you also have special counterattacks you can do by pressing the A button when you hear a sound cue. The way your sword strikes make musical emphasis when you land blows add a ton of cool atmosphere and flavor to the game that really make even normal combat stand out in a way I really appreciated. The "miss" part of that hit or miss is generally in the form of the overworld and the bits in between dungeons. Infamously, a lot of your time in Wind Waker is spent sailing on that ocean whose wind you're waking with your magic baton (this game's ocarina playing, which is incidentally the Japanese title of the game "The Baton of Wind"). The sailing itself isn't *that* bad, but it IS that bad when combined with what you're actually finding on these islands you're going to. What you're finding is, generally, things you can't interact with because you don't have the dungeon item for it yet. It means that your time is best left totally ignoring exploring until the big Triforce shard hunt at the end. I don't mind the Triforce chart hunt, but even that has its own bad reflections on the design of the game. Coming off of Majora's Mask, a game brimming with interesting and character-important side quests, Wind Waker has virtually none, and really not much meaningful side content at all other than treasure charts. Treasure charts are things you'll need to get lots of rupees (which you'll need A LOT of at end game to get your Triforce treasure charts deciphered), and it's just following to X-marks-the-spot somewhere in the ocean. It's not awful, sure, but it's painfully dull. A lot of this really just comes down to the whole ocean as a concept feeling very poorly executed. I don't really think this would've been solved has the game gotten its originally intended development cycle, but adding the ability to speed up the sailing in the Wii U port is definitely a huge upgrade to the overall flow of the game. Presentation-wise, it's a heckin' Zelda game, so of course it's great. Music is absolutely fantastic, the graphics and character designs are (as already mentioned) very good as well. The cartoony design everything has makes it so memorable compared to just about any Zelda game before and after, as nothing quite looks like Wind Waker (other than the 2D Zeldas its art style inspired, of course). Nintendo always swings for the fences with the presentation of their main line Zelda games, and Wind Waker is no exception. Verdict: Recommended. This game has too many negative and grating aspects for me to give it a highly recommended verdict in good conscience, but it has WAY too much good stuff for me to give it anything lower than this. It's a mixed bag, but the good manages to outweigh the bad to the point that it still manages to be great. Its quirks will likely turn off some people, but there's a great adventure and story waiting to be found here if you can manage to get over the ocean to get there X3
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
|