The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

"Not awful, but a huge disappointment. Flawed where it needn't have been."

Now is as good a time as any to have a look back at The Wind Waker: the next instalment in the Zelda series (and the GameCube's last hurrah), Twilight Princess, is looming on the horizon, and the man currently in charge of the franchise, Eiji Aonuma, has been quoted recently as saying he wasn't satisfied with how The Wind Waker turned out. Also, my PS2 broke today, so I fired up Zelda for the first time since May last year. I'll say one thing for Nintendo: their hardware is rock-solid, unlike Sony, whose products fall to bits if you look at them funny. Bastards.

But I digress. Let me make a couple of things clear from the beginning. Firstly, despite what's below, The Wind Waker is definitely A Good Game by any reasonable yardstick. Compared to the crap that gets released on a weekly basis by most publishers, it's a solid action-adventure with excellent production values and is much more worthy of your time than Wasted Movie Licence 3: This Time It's Terrible. If you've never played a Zelda game before, you won't be disappointed, and I've tried to keep this review from giving the wrong impression. But that's the second thing I should mention before I start: The Wind Waker split fans of the series more than any other instalment, and I fall into the group that was deeply disappointed by it. I wrote this review to defend a point of view that is often dismissed as a misunderstanding of the game by self-appointed Zelda purists. I'm not saying that the eighty-something other reviews here that give the game a 10/10 are necessarily wrong; it just depends what you look for in a game.

Graphics – 9/10

Ironically enough, what started as the most controversial aspect of The Wind Waker is actually the most indisputably good part of the game. Once you get over the fact that Nintendo chose an anime style over Ocarina of Time's realistic one and start looking at how they implemented that choice, there's no denying that both technically and artistically the graphics are very impressive.

Let's deal with the technical side first. For the two or three people who still don't know, The Wind Waker features a rendering technique known as cel-shading to give it its cartoony look. In a game without cel-shading, the graphics engine is constantly doing three main things. Firstly, it's drawing all the polygons that make up the objects on the screen. Secondly, it's applying a texture to all those polygons: the floor gets a mottled greeny texture to look like grass, walls get a rough stony texture etc. Thirdly, it's calculating where any light sources are and applying the relevant light effects to the textures: some objects glint in the sunlight, some are obscured in shadow, others might be affected by a flickering light source like a flame. In a game with cel-shading, there are two more stages. First, a layer is applied over the top of the textures to give a block shading effect. Second (although admittedly this isn't as obvious in Zelda as in other cel-shaded games), objects are given a cartoon-style outline that varies depending on where they are relative to the camera and to light sources.

The reason for the slightly drawn-out explanation above is to make clear just how great a technical achievement it is that The Wind Waker looks like it does. Far from being a cop-out that let Nintendo get away with simple block-shaded textures, going for a cartoony style demanded a more sophisticated graphics engine than a realistic style would require, so the potential for disaster was much bigger. You only have to look at some of the cel-shaded titles that followed The Wind Waker, most notably XIII, to see how easy it is to mess it up. There are a couple of minor graphical issues here – occasional slowdown when there's lots going on, and some objects have bizarrely low poly counts – but when you take into account the excellent animation, unbelievable draw distances and total lack of loading times, it's clear that the visuals are a major achievement.

The technical ability of the graphics engine is put to good artistic use. You'll either love or hate the highly stylised, super-deformed look of the human character models – I couldn't stand them myself – but they combine well with the enemy models and the environments to create more than in any game before or since the feeling that you're playing a cartoon. What it comes down to is controlled exaggeration: the proportions of characters and scenery are altered enough to give them interest, but not so much that they destroy the game's atmosphere. That idea carries through into the animation. For example, when you shoot a bat with an ice arrow, there's a slight Road Runnerstyle delay before it begins to fall. Other aspects of its movement, however, like the way it attacks, don't have that comedic edge, and are all the better for it. While we're on the subject of animation, I should mention that the fire, smoke and ice effects are stunning, and somehow Nintendo has managed to cel-shade large areas of water in an utterly convincing way without sacrificing the artistic approach to the graphics. All in all, The Wind Waker's graphics easily dispel the concerns that might have been voiced when the game was first unveiled.

Sound – 7/10

Here the cracks begin to show. The in-game sound effects strike a suitable balance between over-the-top cartoon noises and the more realistic clangs and bangs of battle – compare, for example, the silly boing you hear when you hit a chu with the metallic echo you hear when you hit a knight - but there the inspiration ends. The rest of the game's audio is pretty underwhelming. The menu sounds, for example, are a mess of little trills and chords that, while they initially seem like a nice change from the traditional Zelda sounds, soon grate. It might seem like a nit-pick, but with the amount you access the various maps and menus, they're the noises you hear the most. There's no voice acting – a good move on Nintendo's part, given the travesty that was Super Mario Sunshine's VA – but even so, the laughs and yelps of other human characters and the growls and roars of enemies seem cheap and hollow.

Those things, though, could be dismissed by the more sympathetic gamer as part of the cartoony experience that The Wind Waker seeks to offer. What's harder to stomach is the pedestrian music. The new pieces that Koji Kondo has composed lack the intensity that made the music in A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask so good. Where previous games had the pounding Gerudo Valley theme, the lilting Kakariko Village theme and the bizarrely brilliant Deku Palace theme, The Wind Waker has a collection of uninspired remixes of old favourites like the Hyrule Overworld theme accompanied by generic backing tracks that make the occasional half-hearted nod to the game's nautical theme. And speaking of which…

Gameplay – 6/10

If you've played a Zelda game before, you'll know roughly what to expect. If not, here's a quick summary: as Link, a little fairy boy (stop laughing) with a green tunic and balls like grapefruits, you try to save the world from a great evil by exploring dungeons, solving puzzles and killing monsters in an orgy of real-time action-adventure fun supplemented by various side-quests. It's a tried-and-tested formula that's been going strong since the NES and has produced some of the best games ever, so there's no problem with the core gameplay mechanics. Rather The Wind Waker's faults lie in the new things it's brought to the table.

The most obvious change from previous Zelda games is that the overworld isn't a landscape any more. It's a seascape. Hyrule's been flooded, and is now a vast ocean peppered by small islands (mostly uninhabited) which house the game's dungeons and towns. You get around in a small sailboat. In principle, it's a great idea: an oceanic setting creates the potential for lots of novel sea-based gameplay ideas, and gives the game's wind theme (more on that below) greater significance than it would otherwise have. The problem, though, is that the ocean is massive, the game's important locations are far apart and your boat is very, very slow, all of which means that after the initial excitement of the sailing gimmick wears off, it becomes a chore to get from one place to another. Some have argued that the boredom of sailing can be kept to a minimum if you play the game in an ‘organic' way, that is, by doing a bit of the main quest on one island, exploring the surrounding islands and doing bits of side-quest and thus breaking down the sailing into more manageable chunks. There are a couple of points to be made in response to that. First, there are still parts of the game when a long sailing journey is inevitable, and when many people admit to having pointed their boat at their destination and then changing the channel during the journey, you know there's something seriously wrong. Second, the ‘you played it the wrong way' argument is flawed. While it'd be completely unreasonable to expect a game to be just as fun however you play it, that doesn't mean that a game that allows you to play in several different ways should be boring unless you play it in one specific way. The game does make a concession to convenience, by letting you warp from place to place, but this comes more than halfway through the game and even when it does, you can only warp to a small range of places.

Sailing to one side, there are some nice ideas in The Wind Waker. The underlying theme of having Link control the wind is used to good gameplay effect at times; for example, a new item in the inventory is the Deku Leaf, which can be used either to blow gusts of wind or to float long distances, which makes for interesting new puzzles and fights. The problem is that ideas like that are pretty rare. Most of the game, despite its radical look and setting, simply rehearses the gameplay from the N64 Zelda games: you already know what to do with bombs, arrows and the hookshot and you know where to move statues, crates and mirrors, so there's very little thought required at all. This extends to the side-quests, too, many of which are centred around one island and consist of fetch or collect missions involving far-flung parts of the map. You could make the ‘organic gameplay' argument again here, but to be honest, it's difficult simply to be led by your curiosity in The Wind Waker because getting around is such a pain in the arse. Having said that, the two or three islands that actually have people on them are quite good fun; the minigames are entertaining and the few side-quests that don't involve sailing are interesting enough.
The easiness of the puzzles and quests isn't helped by the easiness of the combat. I didn't die once playing the game, and never needed to use health potions or fairies. That's never happened to me in a Zelda game before. There are a couple of reasons for the lack of difficulty. First, the enemies just don't have much health and don't do much damage; presumably that's a consequence of Nintendo's recent attempts to make games more accessible. Second, Link has a new move to use in combat: when an enemy's just about to strike, a little icon appears, and if you press A Link rolls around or jumps over the enemy and performs a counter attack. It's pretty cool to look at, but the vast majority of enemies can be defeated that way, reducing the bulk of the game's fighting to an exercise in waiting to tap A.

The lack of challenge in the game contributes to its brevity, but it'd be short even if it were harder. There are six ‘proper' dungeons in the game, which is two less than Ocarina of Time. It's true that it's two more than Majora's Mask, but the key here is focus. Majora's Mask was never intended to be an epic like its predecessor; the game is clearly constructed with the individual characters' personal stories as its heart (evidenced by things like the Bombers' Notebook); the main quest is just there to give the game an overarching direction. Hell, it was originally known as Zelda Gaiden. By contrast, The Wind Waker feels like a game that was built around its main quest, only for the main quest to be found wanting, leaving the game to prop itself up on a handful of uninspired side-quests. Nintendo has admitted that two dungeons were pulled at the last minute to get the game out when they wanted to (where they would've been is really obvious – you go to a place and are given two of the game's most important items without doing anything). In the place of those dungeons is a lot of filler material, based largely around sailing and collecting rupees. You also get the fun of fighting the same enemies all over again for no readily apparent reason. It's painfully clear where the cracks have been papered over, and unfortunately, the side-quests aren't enough to make up for it. Which brings me to my last point.

Story – 4/10

OK, so Hyrule's been flooded, there's a great evil in the land and you need to destroy it. The main story of Zelda games is never anything to shout about. Normally, though, it makes up for it with interesting characters and a sense of atmosphere that makes its generic plot something worth ploughing through. Here, though, that's not so. It could be that the lack of challenge forces you to focus on the characters more than you otherwise would, so their one-dimensional nature is more obvious, but I think that even without the gameplay defects the characters and story ideas in The Wind Waker would still be clearly shallow. No-one in the game has anything remotely interesting to say about anything, and everyone acts exactly how you'd expect: the tough pirate girl with a heart of gold and bumbling henchmen, the bad guy who's evil for some unexplained reason, the wise man guiding you through at every step and explaining things in patronising detail – all are present and correct, along with a supporting cast of generic townspeople plucked from any RPG you'd care to mention. The irritating parts of every game in the series are even more potent here. The source of the problem, I think, is that Nintendo overplayed their hand. The cartoon presentation could've been brilliant, and the graphics definitely are, but the story is too predictable, too obvious, too much like a TV show written for five-year-olds. There's a difference between childlike and childish, and where Majora's Mask and Link's Awakening manage to lace their apparent innocence with some quite sinister overtones, The Wind Waker is as twee as they come. It's a real shame and a wasted opportunity to use the cels in a sophisticated way.

Verdict

Like I said, it's not a bad game. It's definitely above average and hits home in fundamental areas like controls as well as having brilliant graphics. Unfortunately, a combination of rushed development and a lack of inspiration anywhere except the visuals means that The Wind Waker leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It's not an all-out disaster of a sequel like Devil May Cry 2 or Dr1v3r, but it's a huge disappointment.

7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/19/05