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

On my eighth birthday, I got a copy of Wind Waker, a strange looking game with a goofy elf kid on the cover from a series I’d never heard of. Coming off of Mario, I booted up the game and was met with a bright art style and a promise of another fun Nintendo adventure. Years later, today, I just rolled credits on my most recent playthrough, tears in my eyes. For a long time I have considered Wind Waker to be a solid mid-tier entry in the Zelda series, yet today I’ve never been more confident that this game is a resounding 10 out of 10. When I first played Wind Waker, I goofed around on Outset Island (the small beginning area of the game) for what felt like hours. I swam around, gazing out at the ocean and the distant islands far off in the horizon, as my small eight-year-old brain struggled to realize that you could use a sword to chop branches and get to the forest up on the mountain. It was enough to firmly place Outset as one of my most nostalgic video game locales today. When I finally did get through Outset, I excitedly embarked on my adventure only to absolutely SHIT MY PANTS at Forsaken Fortress. I was scared to death. It would be years later when I would finally finish the game for the first time, yet Wind Waker nevertheless became the first Zelda I ever booted up and the first I ever beat. Today, before confronting ganondorf in what is, in my opinion, one of the greatest game endings of all time, I made my way back to Outset Island. I stood up on the tall ladder platform and gazed out at the ocean at night. It was one of those Moon River kinda moments, where you’re simply taken in by the beauty of the world and the serenity of it all. I am no swimmer and I definitely suffer some mild cases of thalassophobia, but I LOVE the water, I love staring at it from the coast or cruising above it on a boat. It’s a contemplative, deeply personal experience, skimming atop such a strange-yet-familiar substance, bobbing atop the waves. In the phenomenal classic Zora Neale Hurston novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, there is a lot of mention of the horizon, of chasing it and reeling it in with a big net and claiming it as your own. I bring this up because I feel that somehow, Wind Waker, a Japanese swashbuckling Nintendo game, embodies this concept incredibly well. It’s a game about tradition, and breaking from that tradition. Living in a slow-moving fishing village and spending your days gazing at the horizon, and then, one day, almost too fast, you’re catapulted out there and before you know it those islands are in the foreground and you’re caught up in an exotic odyssey across the seas. From the beginning we are hit with a mural outlining the events of Ocarina of Time, now solidified as a legend of Hyrule, or at least the area that once was Hyrule. Yet within the first five minutes, Hyrule’s decline is apparent, now a series of isolated islands populated with small groups of people just scraping by. Thousands of years have passed since the legend we created. I bring this up because, in a way, Wind Waker, not Majora’s Mask, is the true sequel to Ocarina of Time (MM is more of a fever dream). This is a game about MOVING ON. Moving on from a legendary game which will continue to be a mark of comparison for all other single player games in the future. How do you follow up Ocarina of Time (and its nightmarish little sister)? You throw it all out the window, and - here’s the kicker - you tell the player to do the same. Seize control of your horizon. Not theirs, not the legend’s - YOURS. Link in this game is constantly looked down upon, constantly dismissed, and he’s framed as a tiny character next to the big grown-ups, but this game’s resounding thesis is nevertheless that this is YOUR land - the land of the young, of the new, of opportunity. Washing all the old away and starting anew. Few messages are more potent today. Alright. In all this talk about messaging and such, I’ve gone a stunningly long amount of time without mentioning the absolute key to this entire game - its art style. Everything that Wind Waker represents is amplified tenfold by its context within history. This game was ridiculed near-unanimously at its release, yet today it remains, in my opinion, the best looking 3D Zelda game out there. Comparisons to Spiderverse are very appropriate here. Here is a game which tries out a unique style and takes a massive risk, with shading which is as genius as it is a technical marvel of the time. What better way to tell people to let go of tradition and accept youth and newness than to actively go against the “mature” direction people were wishing for and to theme the game’s entire style and characterization off of something deemed “childlike.” Absolutely glorious, incredibly poetry right there. Much like spiderverse or Puss in Boots 2, I find myself absolutely nerding out to so many things that totally went over my head my first playthrough. The subtle palette shifts, the alpha vertex shading on the shattering statues, the splashing of the water as the ship moves along and the way it’s force is mapped to your boat speed, the glorious poofs of smoke and the wind currents. It’s the details that count, and Wind Waker is jam packed with them. I kicked off my latest playthrough with a watch of Wind Walker’s source material: the Japanese animated film The Little Prince and the Eight Headed Dragon. I highly recommend watching this movie alongside Wind Waker, as it provides insight into the fantastic style of the game (the first 20 minutes or so of the movie is nearly identical to Wind Walker’s opening). And, while I mentioned characterization: Link is at his absolute best here. He is so expressive and goofy and I have had such a massive smile on my face from watching his exploits. Tetra is a fantastic character (sans the complete 180 Zelda thing, the only real setback in the game’s story but one which is happily redeemed by its finale). And the side characters, while not holding a candle to Majora, still pack a punch and add a ton to the world, a step above generic NPCs. You have an extremely short interaction with Mila (rich-turned-poor shoplifting girl), but it was very striking and sweet to me and added a lot to the game - it showed that her father, that cranky rich guy, really did love his daughter more than all his riches combined, and showed Mila’s compassion as well. Again, this is a totally random side conversation. These alluded side stories are the things which make Zelda great (minus the BotW/TotK “plz gimme 20 bokoblin horns” losers). Finally, I want to touch on the gameplay. I always knew WW was great for its art style and such, but the holdup for me was always the gameplay. Mediocre dungeons and relatively empty world traversal. While the dungeons still feel very inoffensively mediocre, not great nor terrible, I still appreciate what they bring to the pacing of the game and they have much better theming than I remembered (the Earth temple was really the only bland-looking dungeon, and each dungeon is themed well around certain mechanics). That being said, the dungeons were not the source of my change of heart. The Great Sea is absolutely fantastic. Traveling between destinations is a meditative experience. At first I was irked by all the roadblocks: look I found an island! Nvm I need the hookshot. Oh look another island! Nvm I still need bombs. Another! Bow. Etc etc. Then I recognized what it really is - a negatively-spaced Metroidvania. It’s a game of memory on a swashbuckling massive scale. You get an upgrade and you are immediately driven to go use it across the map. It turns the segmented Zelda formula into a puzzle where the entire world is a big giant slowly-unraveling playground. And a playground it is indeed. There is so much to do and so many ways to do it. You can get like 10 heart containers during the Endless Night, for the lols. You can speed across the entire map and revive all the deku trees with one bottle without fast travel, for the lols. You can finish the triforce quest before finishing the last dungeon for the lols (you gotta exit the wind temple after snagging the hookshot to get the last two shards). It is so so fun. And it’s helped by the fact that a lot of the things you will find come from rumors you hear from NPCs and fish, no map markers or anything (there are sea charts but you gotta earn them in the first place)! A fantastic callback to the original Zelda, it makes the memory-based charting out of the land even more fun, especially as rumors are coupled with filling out the map from the fish. And now, the triforce quest. Shit was frickin awesome. This quest gets some of the most flak I have ever heard, which is crazy to me because I absolutely loved it. Its one thing to have your cream-of-the-crop rewards be heart pieces, it’s a whole other thing entirely to stumble upon a legendary triforce piece. You can ABSOLUTELY find these long before you’re supposed to and it feels amazing. I can understand the rupee fee being unnecessary but I was consistently rockin 5000 rupees anyways and I just felt even more rewarded spending my cash on that triforce bling ;) you only need around 3,000 rupees total, anyways! No big deal! Can’t believe people complain about this when it was the highlight of the game for me! One final thing of note: as far as my favorite speed runs go, I love Super Metroid for its route (40 minutes, perfect length, experience the entire game and tons of difficulty, just the right amount of rng, super fun community, etc). I love Ocarina of Time for its INCREDIBLE history (going from 20 hours down to 5 minutes!), but modern OoT runs admittedly suck to watch and do. But Wind Waker? Incredible balance between the two. Amazing history with the barrier skip and zombie jump fairy revival with a 2% chance of success, which was finally avoided (thank you gymnast). To date it’s still a great 1+ hour run with an incredible history behind it. Great stuff! Anyways, this has been very long and I’m not quite sure how to end this, but let me just reference a specific scene of this game. When Medli meets the Zora sage in a dream and they both play the title theme for the first time, I started to tear up and I’m not quite sure why. I think it’s the weight of tradition and the desire to move things forward while remembering those behind you. An incredible feeling. I do not actually recommend Wind Waker as a first traditional Zelda game. I actually heavily recommend playing Ocarina first, as this game is such a successor to the legend. And that’s really where I got so much more out of my second playthrough, with the bigger perspective on the series as well as life itself! I cannot believe how incredible this game is. May the wind be forever at your back, and remember that this is not Hyrule. This is YOUR LAND. (queue credits music) … WIND WAKER PLAYLIST: Outset Island - Hot Freaks Colleen - Joanna Newsom Sea Calls Me Home - Julia Holter Spring and a Storm - Tally Hall <the entire Ponyo soundtrack> Flying Man - MOTHER / MOTHER Revisited Dream Sweet in Sea Major - Miracle Musical Moon River