5/5 ★ – Poefred's review of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

My favorite Zelda right next to Majora's Mask. MM is still the most engaging and well designed one. This game's puzzles, combat, and dungeon designs are very easy. But this game excells at being an immersive and grand adventure in a way very few games truly do. This game is nonstop memorable setpieces with a very strong narrative full of recurring likeable characters. And it's cool to see the direction they were planning to take the series with this game before they got cold feet and made Twilight Princess to appease disgruntled fans who didn't give this game a chance. Ocarina, Majora, and Wind Waker were all directly connected and WW was clearly leading up to something before they changed course. The game gets criticism for having unfinished elements due to rushed development. But to me this just forced the team to break the Zelda formula in very progressive ways that for some reason are still often hated on to this day. For example, they had to cut some dungeons. You go through the first 2 dungeons very linearly with no freedom to go anywhere else. You're then prompted to go to the third dungeon. Very formulaic up to this point but when you arrive you discover the entire island has been demolished, it's completely in ruins. You find out the guardian has taken refuge back on your home island (which you haven't been able to return to since the intro) But you need to go steal some bombs from the pirates who you also haven't seen since they launched you into the forsaken fortress. On your way to where the pirates are staying for the night, you realize the world's been cursed with an endless night and during this whole section of the game it plays a more tense version of the typical sailing music with a hint of Ganondorf's influence within it. You make it back to this island which you've never seen at night before, with a lot of details relevant to that. But you sneak around and listen to the pirates as you see them kidnapping the bomb salesman who was trying to rip them off with obscenely high prices. You listen in on them and learn their passcode to break into their ship and steal their bombs. This moment's weirdly both tense and calming, as you need to make it back to your island before the pirates leave in the morning, but also there's not going to be a morning as the world's cursed. And also tense because leaving the current island means going back into cursed waters filled with raging seas and monsters and giant cyclones which genuinely horrified me as a kid. So staying and exploring this place at night is a very serene calm before the storm kind of feeling. The atmosphere is really good all around. Also worth noting this is the first time they allow you to chart your own course. I used to try my hardest to have a roundabout route where I wouldn't run into any cyclones or giant octopus but it's such a long trip you're bound to run into one, and at this point you have no tools to deal with the cyclone so it's pretty threatening. But eventually you make it home for the first time since the start of the game and you find monsters have started appearing here, and your grandmother is too sick to respond to seeing you. Thing about this bit where you're back on your island, it's 100% your own choice to even set foot on it. What you want is to just sail around back and blow open a hole to get what you need to actually progress. But that's what this game does so well. You naturally really want to visit your home island and see what's happening and help them out. You can totally just leave your grandmother sick but the game's just so good at blending what's optional and what's mandatory together, the line's totally blurred in a very immersive way. Stuff like how technically it's mandatory to upgrade your rupee wallet because of how much tingle charges you much later. Or how some side quests turn out to be major progression quests down the line. And in this way Wind Waker is way better than Majora's Mask. Because in MM it's always so clear what's optional content, and you generally know what your reward is (a piece of heart, or a mask that gives you a piece of heart in the end) MM's side quests are great and it's also a very immersive game. But I think Wind Waker was able to tie the side content and main progression content together in a way that makes it all feel more coherent as one strong narrative as opposed to MM's strong sub-narratives. Just a different approach, but it's surprisingly how well it matches and in some cases exceeds MM's immersive qualities despite not having the real-time focus. I say thank goodness they didn't have time to make just...another linear dungeon without a single challenging puzzle and a boss that dies in under a minute. I do like the dungeons in this game despite how laughably straightforward nearly every one is, I think they're paced well and still maintain the memorable set pieces and story I love from this game. But I'm glad there's so few of them, they really don't overstay their welcome. What this game accomplishes outside of the dungeons is worth more than even an amazing dungeon would have honestly added to the experience. But yeah the whole game just keeps building upon itself like this I really could keep going until the end. Another bit this game gets hate for is its triforce quest at the end. And to that I ask, why do people hate this game for going full open world? Imagine breath of the wild except with the strongest narrative in the series, filled to the brim with unique content. Like getting a chart for a ghost ship that tells you where it will be on which moon cycle, finding said ship and raiding it for its triforce chart. Again it's more of this game making ALL its content feel worth engaging with. Because honestly 3D zeldas are very easy to begin with, going for more heart pieces doesn't really feel worth it outside of the collectathon-type satisfaction to it in a lot of cases. But the structure of Wind Waker means playing hide and seek with some kids for a heart piece during the beginning of the game, will lead to you finding triforce pieces by the end. I understand the HD version shortened the triforce hunt by giving you less charts and more just straight up pieces. They cut the middle man out of a lot of it and idk, I kind of prefer having to get a crazy amount of rupees to pay tingle to decipher all the charts. Zelda games often don't give you anything to spend your money on so having a huge sum needed for mandatory progression does wonders for making all those hidden caves/chests/side quests who reward you with rupees feel more rewarding. And I reallly don't mind going out and fishing up the pieces from the sea as I'm already fully immersed and exploring this beautiful open world regardless. Besides an excellent story that caps off the original 3D Zelda trilogy very well, the game's oozing charm. One of the best soundtracks Nintendo's ever made, with a huge variety of tones hit perfectly. From goofy, to extremely somber, to epic and adventurous, to straight up bangers like molgera's theme. (Molgera's a great example of what I mean when I say the dungeons and bosses are so cool despite being incredibly easy) There's musical queues whenever you hit enemies, every single creature and NPC has boatloads of personality and there's a lot of small details. There's even side storylines that happen throughout the game as the main plot progresses, with or without your input that you can choose to pay attention to or not. So much world building. All packaged in an art style that's SO timeless that the HD remake arguably doesn't even look as good as the gamecube original. Amazing game.