In this review, we set out to sea in the Gamecube game The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. we find out how well this adventure game plays.
This game was released in 2003 and is yet another instalment in this substantial series.
We know quite a bit about this series. First, we played The Legend of Zelda. That game got a very solid score here. From there, we played Zelda II – The Adventure of Link. That game got a great score here. Then, we tried The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. That game also got a great score. Next up is The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. That game got a stunning near perfect score. After that, we tried The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. That game also got a great score. Additionally, we played The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap. That game got a great score.
So, it makes sense that we continue with this series given how many games keep scoring so high in the first place.
When you first start the game, if you’ve played many of the other games in the series, it will be a very familiar setup. Just select a file, custom make your name, and get ready to set off on your adventure.
The story is that legends have told of a young person in green clothes fighting and sealing Ganon. Unfortunately, evil forces are once again wakening up. So, as is tradition, the people dress up their children in green clothes once they reach a certain age. The hope is that they will once again find the Hero of Time. This is because their prayers for the return of the Hero of Time go unanswered. On the small island called Outset Island, the character you play has finally reached that age. Your character is reluctant to fulfill the rituals. Even the clothes make you cringe. Nevertheless, you are tasked with fulfilling the rituals anyway.
At some point, your sister is kidnapped by a giant bird creature. You then find yourself vowing to rescue her. Your only hope is to join with pirates to help you sail to the forsaken island in an attempt to rescue her. Gathering a few essentials, you sail off in your effort to rescue her.
If you are like us, you’ve played both the N64 titles and have some familiarity with the controls already. Combat has been tweaked, but basics like targeted attacks, guarding, and attacking remain largely the same. Like Majora’s Mask, there is even the option to practice your skills against a master fighter even.
Useable items have been tweaked a bit to compensate for the new controller. Instead of setting an item on your C buttons, you set them to your X, Y, and Z buttons.
Item handling in the pause menu has been altered a fair bit. Instead of having one large grid housing all of your items, you’ll have three separate items to hold some of your usable items. This can include a bait bag, spoils bag, and a mail bag. The end result is that the large grid has been shrunken down a fair bit. Bottles make a return. You can hold certain bottle exclusive items in them, but you’ll need a bottle to house them. An example is the fairy that restores your health if you have fallen.
As you venture forth, you’ll also collect special items. These items are generally required to advance through the game. There have been adjustments to some of these inventory items. A great example is that you now have a hook and line instead of a hookshot at the beginning of the game. It’s generally much slower, but have very similar effects to the hookshot in previous games. The novel new concept is that you are now able to hook onto a bar and swing back and forth. The boomerang has also been adjusted to be able to target multiple enemies or targets in a single attack. Those are two examples of how things have been tweaked.
There are, of course, novel new special items you can collect as well to help spice up the game as well.
While the general dungeon concept has remained largely the same (keys open doors, boss battle, compass and map, special item, etc.), there is one very large change: the outdoor world. In pretty much every other game, you are given a massive sprawling land for you to explore. You can encounter rocks that hide small areas that contain treasure. There are occasional enemies you’ll come across as well. You might even find hidden loot or helpful people throughout. In this game, however, you have a dramatic change in that this massive sprawling land is replaced by one giant ocean.
While you might be able to use Epona to traverse these lands in some games, Epona has been effectively replaced by a talking boat known as the Kind of Red Lions. Not only does this talking boat enable you to travel, but the boat also drops hints on occasion on where you need to go. Initially, the King of Red Lions isn’t that useful. This is because you require a sail which you do get early on. Later on, you can use bombs to add a cannon to fight off enemies. So, there needs to be some upgrading for your boat to begin with, but you’ll eventually have it up and running.
This leads us to another element that plays a role in this game: wind. Initially, you don’t have any control over it. However, after a bit of adventuring, you’ll be given an item known as the Wind Waker. The Wind Waker is basically the substitute for the Ocarina of Time. A bit difference, however, is that you are no longer just belting out notes to form a magical song. Instead, you are simply using C buttons to set a note. When the indicator passes through the centre, that note will register and you need to hold down the second note. This requires a bit of timing on your part, but the timing requirement isn’t that bad. All it takes is some additional getting used to first.
Once you have the first song remembered, you’ll be able to change the winds as you please. This has a big impact on your ability to go across the oceans. You can’t really sail against the wind, but you can sail in various directions along with the wind.
Towards the first portions of the game, you are actually limited to where you can go. Essentially, unless it is on the way to your next goal, the King of Red Lions will simply redirect you back on the path. So, while you still get options in the beginning, these options are limited.
Another big change is how the world map is used. Once you got your sea chart, you can tap up on the D-pad and access the chart itself. You’ll notice that there really isn’t much, but the chart is good at telling you where you need to go to next to advance the plot. The sea is divided into a 7×7 grid and each square is pretty substantial in size. Each square has its own island which sounds much more substantial then it really is. Most of the islands we encountered can be traversed easily in under 10 seconds. So, we’re talking about a very small payoff for finding the squares island. The square you need to go to will be highlighted.
You’ll also notice that most of the map isn’t drawn in. This is because this is one of the many things you get to collect along the way: chart updates. At some point, you’ll be able to buy a bait bag and some bait. The bait is used to throw onto the surface of the water if you happen to come across a fish splashing about. The fish will draw in the shape of the tiny island and offer some information about the area. In the grand scheme of things, you are about as likely to find the island as you are to find the fish in the first place. Really, the challenge is to find both in the end.
That’s a general rundown of the game itself.
For me, coming into this game, I was quite excited. All the potential is there to have a great experience. U have Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and even The Minish Cap as a backdrop for this series. Now, we are going into a more powerful system expecting even bigger and better things. Even the reviews out there now offer countless perfect scores. So, it has to be a great game, right?
Well, not so much as it turns out. A lot of people look at this main franchise and can easily say that it’s very hard to go wrong. As long as the game was released on a Nintendo game, it’s going to be a great experience at minimum. So, I am just another person who happens to be a fan of this franchise. So, imagine going into this with all these great expectations only to find a dud. Yes, this game simply is a dud and probably the first dud I’ve ever played in this whole franchise.
This game suffers similar problems to another game I’ve played a long time ago, Banjo Tooie. That problem is, bigger is not always better. It always sounds promising when the world is increasing in size. Of course, the challenge isn’t necessarily expanding the field of play, but rather, filling it with things that keep the players interested. If you have three items in a small room, it seems like there is stuff there. Increase the room ten-fold with those same three items spread further apart and the room is much more boring and tedious.
The first big problem for me is a problem that is definitely cited by others: the sailing. It’s not so much having to figure out the Wind Waker (in and of itself has a seemingly unnecessary learning curve at the beginning) that is the problem. In fact, that is at least remotely interesting. What follows after is what is very painful. You set a general direction and just let the game play itself. It’s not to the extreme seen in Space Shuttle, but this is probably the closest example I’ve seen to that huge problem.
You simply let the King of Lions carry you in the direction you want to go. While this is happening, you can eat a sandwich, browse Freezenet for news, or play around with a paddle and ball. Literally, no input is necessary if you don’t really encounter much and you could spend several minutes doing this until you finally arrive at your destination. There are two exceptions to this: if you encounter land along the way (one of the small number of islands spread over this literal ocean of nothingness) or if you encounter an enemy. At least with the latter, the music will change and you can adjust your course accordingly. Otherwise, you are stuck with a nice amount of thumb twirling as you play.
This would normally be an annoyance for most games, but in this game, this takes up at least half of your game. After quitting part way through, I read that this problem is smallest in the beginning and gets even worse as you go along. I almost feel fortunate for having quit when I did out of pure boredom playing this one. Going down a super long coast is one thing. I might call it an annoyance, or I might even forget about it by the time I write the review depending on how painful that moment is. In this game, it’s terrible enough for me to say it ruins the game for the most part.
Of course, dungeons also play a role in this. If I say the sailing wrecks half of the game, what about the other half where there is actual content? This can be quite hit and miss, unfortunately. The first big quest is to obtain three pearls. The first one has a very small city, then an entrance to a half decent sized dungeon. The boss battle is a pretty straight forward fight once you find a weakness, but overall, it’s a decent dungeon.
Meanwhile, the third pearl is almost just handed to you. It was like the developers decided that they weren’t going to bother with the process of making a dungeon and just hand you the key item like they were already giving up on the game. You sail to one island, navigate a ledge, climb a single set of vines, enter a single room house, obtain a password, go to a ship, use the password, go down a set of stairs, and complete a small single room challenge to get the key item. After that, you blow up a wall with the bombs. Presto, pearl is yours. No complex dungeon to solve, no intricate boss fight to take on. The game just hands it to you after.
Now, contrast this with Majora’s mask. In all four directions, you get a preview of some of the enemies found in the later area just by getting close to the entrance. After that, you encounter some storyline problem you have to overcome. You navigate a dungeon to complete the storyline dungeon. After that, you make your way to the temple. You can collect shattered fairies to get an upgrade while in there. Complete the dungeon and you take on another boss fight. After all of that, you get the key item. I compare that with this game and find myself asking, “what happened to Nintendo?” It’s effectively the same question I asked while playing Super Mario Sunshine, really.
To add salt to the wound here, some of the controls can be very hit and miss. This involves hit boxes. Some are decent, but others are very finicky. You have to line yourself and the camera up right in order to trigger the action button to allow you to perform simply actions. Getting on the boat or opening some chests require some manipulation of you and the camera to get right. It’s certainly possible, but annoying nevertheless. I don’t recall encountering this problem previously, so I half wonder why this ends up being such a big problem now.
Generally speaking, I was going into this excited for this. High reviews and a great track record all pointed to this being an easy slam dunk in terms of finding a great game. All I got was disappointment. With endless boring sailing taking up at least half of the gameplay, finding positives wound up being a bit of a search. Some dungeons are decent while others are borderline non-existent. Controls and hitboxes can be annoyingly finicky as well. At the end of the day, it seems like this is an experiment gone badly wrong.
Graphics have some give and take. On the one hand, the art style of cell shading and cartoon style works quite well. It really takes the art style found in the previous couple of games and offers a fresh new take. On the other hand, this also means that a lot of those nice textures that made the previous games absolute eye-candy have been replaced with mostly blank single colour effects instead. It’s a bit surprising that, given the hardware capabilities being increased, walking back on textures seems like a backwards idea. That leaves special effects. This actually has been upgraded nicely. Instead of largely 2D transparent GIF animations, you actually have full 3D effects such as puffs of smoke. So, the special effects does pick up some slack.
Meanwhile, the audio is pretty good. The music works nicely throughout the game. This is largely thanks to throwbacks to previous game themes. Outside of some added jingles, it’s quite hard to find much that is new that this game brings to the table. The only pitfall is a lack of any real voice-acting which hasn’t really progressed since the much more limited N64 cartridge. It’s hard to criticize this game on this front, but it is also hard to really praise this over and above most other games out there by this stage as well.
Overall, this game represents a huge disappointment for me. With endless sailing taking up half of the gameplay that rarely requires user input, any fun present in this game gets sucked right out in short order. Some dungeons are good while others seem to be largely absent. Additionally, controls can be quite finicky at times. Graphics are decent, though can, at times, represent one step forward, one step back. Audio is decent, but relies heavily on previous content to prop it up. I really wanted to like this one, but couldn’t. So, a barely passable game that can be skipped over in the end.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Accessed the Tower of the Gods.
General gameplay: 14/25
Replay value: 3/10
Graphics: 7/10
Audio: 3/5
Overall rating: 54%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
