What I wanted to do with this blog is just cover the positive and negative aspects of the Wind Waker. More importantly I wanted to write about why people hated it or loved it. I'm not speaking only about the Dtoid community but the reaction to the game in general. Go ahead and correct me, tell me why you hated or loved this game and what I could do better about my blogging.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is more of a spiritual successor to the Nintendo 64 games then a true sequel. You don't play Link necessarily. You play a hero in green instead (so much different I know). That isn't what got people riled up though. It was the games graphics. Nintendo chose to use cell shading for the Wind Waker and I think that was the perfect choice for what they did with the game. This style of graphics was so completely different then just about everything out there. Another unique thing about the game was that it is all based around the sea. You will probably be sailing for at least 30 percent of the game if not more.
The game starts off with you on your home island. Eventually your sister gets stolen and you go off on your epic adventure. Now to say the world in which you have this adventure is large is an understatement. The world is massive. It is a giant sea with dozens of islands. Like Zelda games that came before Wind Waker you are free to explore the world. This is however another place where people got angry about the game. Instead of riding your horse over epic locations, you sailed. After you sailed you would sail some more. This is really where some people got turned off of the game. Others like me found this intensely satisfying.
Sailing, I think, is where the games graphics completely make the game. The reason being is it gives you fantastic draw distance. So while you are sailing you can see islands popping up on the horizon. Another fantastic thing about the sailing was the weather. It could be sunny one minute and then you could be in a giant storm under attack from one of the many ocean dwelling enemies looking for an island to get to safety. The wind in this game was a factor as well. Since you are sailing, you know, with a sail it depends which direction the wind is blowing. This is where the magical conductors baton the Wind Waker comes in. It gives you to ability to control the wind, the time of day and it even lets you use whirlwinds to transport you all over the map.
Hopefully you liked this very short summary on some of the controversial subjects of Wind Waker. This game was one of the most under unappreciated Gamecube games out there. If you haven't played it and own a Gamecube or a Wii go out and buy this game!
NotAZombie's blog
follow this blog
subscribe via RSS
send message
invite to meetup+play
Wow, that ended abruptly...
Anyway, I never saw why people had a problem with this game. The story's great, the graphics are different and purty, and it's just a lot of Zelda-ey fun.
After reading your post I started to remember how much fun I had with this game and the little things that made the game great starting to pop-pop-pop in my brain.
Thanks, now I want to play it again.
There are very few games where the graphics are so horribly mismatched with the game play that it turns me off completely. Wind Waker was one of those games.
@ blehman
Ehh your right I should have actually had a closing paragraph haha I'll get that next time.
I remember way back in the day reading about the reasoning behind wind waker's graphics.
From what I remember it was always the intentions of miyamoto to make link like a cartoon. and he was happy to satisfy that want since the beginning. I give him credit for going with what HE wanted to do, instead of just going off the success of OoT.
as for the sailing, he always wanted to play with wind in a game. In another interview he talked about this, and he wasn't really able to do it as much, so I think he just decided to have fun with the wind aspect. Can't find links to those interviews right now, but I do recall them.
Im at the part where you have to find all the pieces of the triforce... arg its so annoying. But other than that, I love Windwaker, its my 2nd favorite Zelda games (behind Majora's Mask... Thats right, OoT is 3rd. WHAT NOW)
The visuals fit the enviroment completely.
I couldnt imagine a game with so much ocean like this one with Twilight Princess graphics...
@MrSadistic Moving Zelda to an ocean and keeping the hero a young boy requires a different perspective than that of the Link in OoT. OoT falls into the camp of epic fantasy world with a more mature feel, largely because it's land-based and Link is a teenager for most of the game. The archetype of the hero riding horseback across the kingdom evokes a different aesthetic than that of the hero sailing off to adventure. Wind Waker's graphics are bright and stylized to reflect a sense of youth and exploration on the high seas, which is why I think the graphics complement the story and gameplay nicely.
Needless to say, I love that damn game.
@ king
That was one of the most annoying parts of that game I agree. That or when you had to water all of the trees.
Awesome game. I loved Wind Waker. Yeah the sailing sucked in the early going when you didn't have the cyclones to warp you around, and the finding all the Triforce pieces sucked too, but other than that it was great.
I'm just finishing up Phantom Hourglass right now, it too is awesome.
I really enjoyed the sailing. The fact that i had to realyl travel to these places, and that the travel was augmented by random weather, and area specific obstacles really brought in a very active and engrossing dynamic to the game. The style of it all really pulled me in.
I was one of those people going "arrrgh why?!" when Wind Waker first made its appearance, and that's because the game looked like (and did) take an entirely different tone than the previous games. It's mostly lighthearted, while the older games did joke around, the atmosphere was much darker. Link, our little non-verbal protagonist, was very much alone in the world.
This new little fucker makes smarmy faces. He's pouty. He's lazy and doesn't want to wear the cool green Link garb we gamers are so fond of. In Wind Waker he has a lot of personality, and why that's usually good, in a game, all the gamer types had formulated their own idea of what Link was like -- so to see him defined as something different was surprising. Although admittedly there isn't much character in there, it's just enough, and it's borderline badittude, which is never good (see: the decline of Sonic the Hedgehog).
All that said: the game is awesome. I love the design of everything but Link. All of the other characters, the water, the world ... perfect. Gorgeous. Luckily, you spend most of the game looking at the back of Link's head, so it's really only during "plot moments" that his eyebrows come glaringly into view.
I loved the graphics and the sailing, it was a nice change up from the norm. That being said, the only major issue i had was the difficulty. The last 3d Zelda was Majora's Mask (my favorite Zelda), which was pretty damn hard. WindWaker was a cakewalk in my experience (i never died once and beat the game in two days). The later Zelda games didn't get much harder either. Same with the Mario and Metroid series. Unfortuently, it seems like easier games are the future with Nintendo's new casual gamer mentality...
I hate EVERYTHING about WW, not just sailing.
Shut up Snaileb. ;)
played the first hour, just couldn't get into it. it wasn't the graphics per se... i think i had just reached the point where i had played one Zelda game too many.
Still my #1 favorite Zelda game of all time. Twilight Princess was pretty good, but it just felt like more of the same. God knows where Miyamoto's gonna take the series next- maybe he really will do that steampunk Zelda everybody's been squawkin' about...