The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

System: Gamecube
Release Date: 2003
Published By: Nintendo
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

The game looks better live than it does in screen shots. Trust me.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is, in fact, one of the few cel-shaded games I've encountered that don't look awful. It looks polished, vibrant, and full of life. The visual design is actually one of the game's strongest points; while I agree that Ocarina of Time would look beyond foolish in this style, Wind Waker was designed around it.

The game is also marvellously cinematic, featuring what is easily the best opening sequence I've seen in years. There is, per Nintendo standard, no voice acting in the game beyond grunts and growls, but that is to my thinking a good thing. In the place of the voice acting, we get tuneful muttering and suitably epic background music, which does more to bring the characters to life than the usual sub-par voiceovers ever could. Witness the penultimate scene (which I shall not spoil here) and explain to me why exactly that needs anything added to it.

Of course, here's the trouble. I've gone on for two paragraphs about the visual design and the sound and the (gasp!) cutscenes, and I haven't mentioned the gameplay yet. For somebody who usually devotes most of the review to the play, that's not a good sign. Really, it's not that the gameplay in Wind Waker is bad so much as it simply isn't around all that often. The quantity of actual dungeons in the game is strikingly low; if I remember correctly, there are seven, which is not much dungeon to support an awful lot of cutscene. But there are deeper problems still.

The game's core mechanic is sailing. Link jumps on the boat, unfurls the sail, and hey presto! He's off. And you know what? It's fun. It's a lot of fun, actually, just sailing around and seeing the world and experiencing the freedom and the adventure. But it's not fun for quite long enough. Eventually, you've been everywhere, and you've seen everything, and you just want to get on with it. And just right then - right when you've decided you've had enough of all the sailing - the game throws you a quest that involves sailing around mostly at random to find several sunken treasures. My impromptu survey shows that this is the point at which most people stop playing the game.

Combat suffers from the same problem. It's really fun for a while, especially as you learn how to do Link's kickass dramatic riposte, but it gets boring and repetitive as time goes on. It doesn't help that there is an absolute paucity of monsters in the game; Darknuts may be hella fun at first, but there are only so many times you can fight them before they become humdrum. And the final few boss battles, I'm afraid, are dumb. The cutsenes that encase them and the ambience during them and all that, that's cool. But the battles themselves? Dumb.

While the gameplay suffers in large areas, it shines in the small details. Nintendo can take odd things and just make them fun. No explanation is forthcoming as to why - for example - it's so much fun to run around Outset Island chasing pigs, and yet, it is. Once again, the impromptu survey says that I'm not the only one who feels this way, too; there's just a marvellous amount of fun to be had playing with the pigs. The point of all this is to emphasise the reason why I rated the game so highly, despite my condemnation of pretty much the whole thing, which is this: there's plenty of fun to be had here, it's just not necessarily where the designers wanted it to be.

Oh, one parting note: Salvatore is the best NPC ever to appear in a video game.

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