Looks like this is the last game I can play before I finally need a kneeling chair for my desktop. Between this and The Minish Cap I guess I just can’t get through a Zelda game without injuring myself.

Out of all the non LTTP Zeldas I like this one the best. The hero in this one is finally a real person! He wants something very specific and he makes choices to get that thing, and he reacts to what other people say and do to him. Check out this little scene, for example. It’s sad cause he misses granma Link! And then it’s funny, because Tetra is a sassy pants to Link! He emotes now! The whole game is like this too, a cute lil Link who does cute fun stuff and then there’s fun sailing to get lost in if you want the heart pieces and sometimes the dungeons and fetch quests are a little bit of pain in the ass. You know, a real Zelda game! Oh, but it’s not a hundred hours long with a huge sandbox open world that’s been repurposed twice and full of swords that break after ten swings, so I guess it’s not the greatest game of all time

Also, thank you everyone on www.backloggd.com for letting me know about the late-game triforce fetch quest. It's exactly the kind of blatant padding I don't want to participate in, and a major reason why I just put in a code that put the triforce already on my hand. In-emulator cheats are a hell of a drug. I suppose I should take off a star because I'm sure I would have disliked it if I DID choose to make it my problem, so, four stars.

Also, why is the wind palace earthy and the earth palace windy?

Still not off either my 3D Zelda or my GameCube kick, I decided to start playing this game right after I finished with Pikmin 2. Wind Waker is a game I played a bunch when I was little, but it's been SO long since I last played it I genuinely can't remember. At any rate, it was definitely when I payed less attention to game design, so it was high time that I gave it a replay to see just how well it held up. It took me around 25 or 30 hours (rough guess, as the game doesn't count playtime) to finish the Japanese version of the game on original hardware.

Wind Waker starts out in a world flooded with oceans with only a few islands poking above. You, our hero Link, live on one of these islands with your little sister and grandmother. You peacefully live until one day a giant bird carrying girl comes to the island. Long story short, you end up saving her, a pirate captain, and your sister gets kidnapped instead. You join up with the pirates to save her, eventually finding yourself on a larger and much more treacherous journey to save all of this ocean called Hyrule.

Wind Waker's writing is well remembered for a reason. Characters and their expressions are super well animated in a great art style, allowing Link to have more character than ever despite still basically being non-verbal. The characters and islands you visit and help out all follow a larger theme of succession and looking towards the future. It's a very hopeful and remarkably topical game in how it so often shows an older generation, despondent in how they've allowed the world to decay, giving the world to the younger generation with the wish they might still be able to make something despite the failings of the past.

That said, Wind Waker's story and design really do show the pock marks of its troubled design. It's known that Wind Waker had to have two whole dungeons scrapped in order to fit the release schedule of a holiday release, and it's my opinion that this is likely the cause of the game's wild pacing problems. You have a really tightly choreographed first half, an SUPER strong ending sequence, but a really meandering and poorly signposted second half that does a lot to sour that. It isn't experience ruining, but it definitely left me with a lot of ideas of what could've been had they gone for a March release date instead of a holiday one.

The gameplay design of Wind Waker is similarly hit or miss. The dungeon design is really as solid as ever, with the games dungeons and mini-dungeons providing that 3d action and puzzle solving the series is so good at just as good as it ever has. The swordplay has been spiced up a bit from the tried and true Z-targeting of the N64 era. Now in addition to that, you also have special counterattacks you can do by pressing the A button when you hear a sound cue. The way your sword strikes make musical emphasis when you land blows add a ton of cool atmosphere and flavor to the game that really make even normal combat stand out in a way I really appreciated.

The "miss" part of that hit or miss is generally in the form of the overworld and the bits in between dungeons. Infamously, a lot of your time in Wind Waker is spent sailing on that ocean whose wind you're waking with your magic baton (this game's ocarina playing, which is incidentally the Japanese title of the game "The Baton of Wind"). The sailing itself isn't that bad, but it IS that bad when combined with what you're actually finding on these islands you're going to. What you're finding is, generally, things you can't interact with because you don't have the dungeon item for it yet. It means that your time is best left totally ignoring exploring until the big Triforce shard hunt at the end. I don't mind the Triforce chart hunt, but even that has its own bad reflections on the design of the game.

Coming off of Majora's Mask, a game brimming with interesting and character-important side quests, Wind Waker has virtually none, and really not much meaningful side content at all other than treasure charts. Treasure charts are things you'll need to get lots of rupees (which you'll need A LOT of at end game to get your Triforce treasure charts deciphered), and it's just following to X-marks-the-spot somewhere in the ocean. It's not awful, sure, but it's painfully dull. A lot of this really just comes down to the whole ocean as a concept feeling very poorly executed. I don't really think this would've been solved has the game gotten its originally intended development cycle, but adding the ability to speed up the sailing in the Wii U port is definitely a huge upgrade to the overall flow of the game.

Presentation-wise, it's a heckin' Zelda game, so of course it's great. Music is absolutely fantastic, the graphics and character designs are (as already mentioned) very good as well. The cartoony design everything has makes it so memorable compared to just about any Zelda game before and after, as nothing quite looks like Wind Waker (other than the 2D Zeldas its art style inspired, of course). Nintendo always swings for the fences with the presentation of their main line Zelda games, and Wind Waker is no exception.

Verdict: Recommended. This game has too many negative and grating aspects for me to give it a highly recommended verdict in good conscience, but it has WAY too much good stuff for me to give it anything lower than this. It's a mixed bag, but the good manages to outweigh the bad to the point that it still manages to be great. Its quirks will likely turn off some people, but there's a great adventure and story waiting to be found here if you can manage to get over the ocean to get there X3

We were close to figuring out 3D Zelda with this one, but the pieces didn't quite come together.

Somewhere between the aimless sandboxes of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and Majora's Mask's rigid linearity is a Zelda game that justifies having an overworld between dungeons. This does already exist in the 2D games, but we never got closer to this execution in 3D than we did with Wind Waker.

Wind Waker came out swinging with a huge world. Unlike BotW and TotK though, it filled this world with meaningful content instead of disposable garbage. The 7x7 grid this world is laid out on hosts an island on each grid. These islands all serve a purpose. Some are home to dungeons, some to new equipment, some to upgrades, some to macguffins, and some to charts to help you find stuff.

Although you can visit the majority of these islands after completing the first dungeon, you'll find yourself without the charts needed to find the sunken treasures near them, without the equipment to meaningfully explore them, and, oftentimes, without the equipment needed to even get on these islands. In this way of having access to most of the map but needing equipment to get the most out of each location, Wind Waker, more than any other 3D Zelda, is a dead ringer for translating the gameplay of the 1986 original into 3D. The set-dressing is different now, exploring an ocean by boat instead of a landmass by foot, but they've got the most genetic material in common as 2D/3D cousins. How tedious this world is to explore is a different question though. With the wind at your back, it takes about a minute to get between islands, which is not an insignificant amount of time. Sure, there are light rings where you can tediously haul up some rupees and the odd sea-battle, but they do nothing to alleviate from the slog of travel. Or, maybe they do. This is going to depend on you and how you're feeling. Personally, I was always fine with getting the minute/s to think about where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. Warping helps, but you'll have to change the direction of the wind at some point. Watching encore performances drain seconds is grueling, but we can't all be Okami where you change the wind's direction by drawing a swoosh with an analog stick.

Exploration is the meat of the game, which can be confusing to anyone who came from Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask looking for a focus on dungeons. This isn't it, and the game will force you to engage with this exploration with the end-game Triforce fetch-quest. If you've been diligently exploring, following your charts to treasure (or sometimes more charts), checking out all the islands, getting all the upgrades; the Triforce quest will be an engaging side-project to all of your other side-quests. You'll have a 5,000 rupee wallet that's nearly always full, and all the pieces of the game will slide into place. If that's not you, this quest will bring your entire file to a screeching halt. It's some of the most severe punishment I've seen for playing a game 'wrong'. Sending a player, who may not have even gotten a wallet upgrade and ignored the sea charts the entire game and ignored rupees, to collect 3,000 rupees for a tedious fetch-quest is fair justification to stop playing. I didn't personally suffer this fate, but my heart goes out to those who have.

So, how's the rest of the game then? Combat is further dumbed down from Majora's Mask (Ocarina of Time, surprisingly, has the most in-depth combat of the 3D games as far as enemy-behavior/interaction go) due to the way enemies have been worked and the new options available to you. You have a context-sensitive counter-attack that can severely trivialize most encounters. It's a one-button solution to disarming and disrobing enemies, and does high damage besides. There have also been some throwaway stealth-mechanics included. 3D Zelda isn't meant to get the heart racing of people who like action-games, the combat is just here. The most clever innovation over previous 3D titles is making Link heavy with the iron boots so that the hookshot pulls items to him. They also added a leaf that can trivialize platforming by giving you a glide. If you played Ocarina or Majora, nothing here's going to surprise you.

I spent a lot of this review going over WW's open-world and its handling of it. I think it works, and I don't dock games for being cryptic. If it weren't for the aggregate tedium of WW's unskippable slowness spread across encore-performances, constantly changing the direction of the wind, terrible treasure-hauling speeds, waiting for the water to lower/rise in the 3rd dungeon, cutscenes explaining the progress you've made, unskippable cutscenes in general, NPCs droning on about nothing, grinding for spoils for various sidequests, etc, etc, etc, I'd give this a 3/5. Deducting half a star for the time-wasting.

2.5/5

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is a masterpiece by modern standards. There are barely any flaws in this game, and not an ounce of fat. This is what video games should strive to be.

Let me start with the graphics. The cel shaded world is so colorful and vibrant. The gorgeous colors still hold up, and put modern AAA games to shame. Look at the Great Sea. How is it so good looking? I can feel the sea breeze against my face, the waves crashing into the boat. The water changes color, and we see higher waves deeper in and shallower textures towards the coast, which is genius.

All the character models are so cartoony and I love it. They let the characters show emotions more expressively and the overall design is just so damn charming. I love it. A really simple example early on - when Link is leaving Outset Island, the little facial expressions on his face and the Granny's face convey so much emotion.
On the same line, the themes in this game are fantastic.Link is just a child trying to bring his family together. He is not some pre-destined hero who is going to save the world, he just an older brother trying to save his sister. Residents of Outset island feel like a part of your extended family. Everyone is concerned about you and your sister, and try to support you. And its not just the people on Outset - the pirates, people on Windfall - you develop a connection with everyone in this game. Hell, even Ganondorf, but I won't spoil anything.


We cannot talk about Zelda without talking about the music. And oh my god - they killed it with this one. The Great Sea is such a fantastic track. You get that sense of adventure and grandeur as you sail the seas. For a game where you will be sailing a lot, this song is a blessing. Then we have Dragon Roost Island - we've got something upbeat and fun - really suits the vibe of the island. This game has one of the best Mini-boss themes, especially with the sword sounds mixed in with the music. And how can I forget about Grandma's theme - this almost brings you to tears, especially since the Grandma has been super caring and worried about you and Aryll through the entire game. Also, this game has the best rendition of the Fairy Fountain theme in my opinion.


Another integral part of any game is the gameplay, and this game does not disappoint. We've got the classics - the bomb, boomerang, and the hookshot, along with new tools like the grappling hook and deku leaf which make the dungeons and puzzles super varied and fun. The movement in this game feels snappy and smooth here. And combat is really great - its super simple but very satisfying to pull off.

Then we have the Dungeons. These dungeons are simpler from the older games, but I kinda preferred these, and had more fun with them. I love the atmosphere and theme of how a whole dungeon is an island. These dungeons have a larger sense of scale and size to them, but its not really possible for you to get lost in them, compared to older dungeons. And the checkpoint system in the dungeons is really really nice.

Speaking of dungeons, the dungeon bosses are a treat. You basically have to use all the stuff you learned in the dungeon to figure how to take down the boss, which is pretty standard, but the boss rooms and design are what make the fights even more fun.

This is definitely my favorite Zelda, and I really hope that we get a HD Switch port!

No doubt one of my favorites. It has a gorgeous and timeless artstyle, a great feel of adventure, and the music is fantastic. The story is my favorite in the franchise with the best Ganondorf and a superb ending. It has great feeling swordplay, even more so than some modern Zelda games. It's definitely not perfect. It has very few dungeons and not all of them are great, and I won't excuse the triforce quest, it's not a well executed idea to say the least. Still I adore everything else about this game so much that it's easy for me to look past its flaws. This is a beautiful, emotional and epic game I really love.

Growing up, I always had an admiration for Zelda but was also intimidated by them. I would get stuck or lost quickly in the games and give up, even if I was having fun. The Forest Temple in Twilight Princess, Snowhead from Majora’s Mask, etc. The only Zelda game I managed to finish back then was Ocarina 3D, and that was only because my eyes were glued to a walkthrough the entire time. I still had fun but didn’t feel as immersed as I could have since I wasn’t figuring anything out myself.

A Zelda game that had always caught my eye in particular was Wind Waker. Whether it was due to my affinity with the GameCube at the time or its luscious visuals and music; I knew it was a game I needed to play. Around 2019 I finally bought a copy and had plenty of fun, but personal troubles distracted me from progressing past the second dungeon.

My partner who's a huge Zelda fan came to visit me for their birthday last year. They suggested we play Wind Waker with the tingle tuner, which I was absofruitly down with. We managed to progress further than I ever had in a Zelda game (besides Ocarina), and I still couldn’t put it down after they returned home.

Almost about all aspects of Wind Waker appealed to me perfectly. I already mentioned how wonderful I found the art style and music, but the story also left me captivated. I won’t be going into much detail, but the arc Link goes through resonated with me more than anything else. That’s not to mention all the other characters I loved. Komali, Medli, & Tetra in particular were my favourites. Hell, even side characters such as Salvatore and Beedle were so charming that I couldn’t help but adore them.

When I say Wind Waker is some of the most fun I’ve ever had with a video game, I am not sugarcoating that. Admittedly, while playing, I could easily see why plenty of aspects of the game could be a turnoff for others. Did that deter me, though? Not at all.

Truth be told, sailing across the ocean might have been my favourite part. It felt like exploring uncharted land. I was always interested in which island I would find next. Hunting for treasure was also way more satisfying than I remember it being. With how much I was loving the experience, I went out of my way to fully complete the game. (minus the Nintendo gallery because I didn’t have time for it) Even while I was repeating the same stupid minigame, I was having the time of my life.

Of course, I did have to look up a walkthrough for secrets and side quests, but as far as the main story went, I was usually able to figure out the solution on my own. The dungeons are some of the easiest of 3D Zelda, but they're still hecka creative with their puzzles and items. And considering I tended to get lost in Zelda games before I played WW, (when I first played Ocarina, I literally got stuck in the Deku Tree) I greatly appreciated the lower difficulty.

The moment I finished Wind Waker, I knew it was one of my favourite games ever. After years of trying Zelda titles and putting them down, I had finally managed to feel fully immersed in at least one of them. If Wind Waker was able to open my eyes up to how phenomenal the Zelda franchise truly was, then I was excited to see what made other games in the series special.

Now, I can easily say Zelda is one of my favourite franchises ever. For the most part, it's failed to disappoint. While other games are certainly more challenging and complex than this one, Wind Waker is still incredibly valuable to me. I can see its glaring issues, but it has so much heart and soul and is still one of the most fun and magical experiences I've had with a video game. So, thank you, Wind Waker. Because of you, my brain is permanently rotted with your franchise!

I don't really feel like writing a lengthy review like I did last time for Twilight Princess, but this is a brilliant experience. A Zelda world that I actually felt like exploring every nook and cranny of is an excellent indicator of me really, REALLY enjoying something. The world is such a blast to discover. Dungeons are quick and succinct with really solid theming and bosses that mostly hit the mark. The story is a very bold step in a totally new direction for Zelda while still maintaining the classic Zelda magic and whimsy. The things that people hate this game for (slow sailing, triforce quest) are honestly really not that bad? If you experience this game earnestly and honestly try to explore discover the goodies this world has to offer throughout the entirety of the game (instead of just doing a collectathon in the end of everything), it ends up being really not that excruciating - at best, it's a fun (if tedious) romp around the world to see what you can discover with Link's full kit, and at worst it's an annoyance before the end of the game. The only thing I can knock this game for is some of the more cryptic aspects of exploration and the fact that you have to have so many rupees for endgame, but I can't complain about much else when this world is so inviting and open to freely explore.

Respect is the word I would use to describe this game best. Respect for the past of Zelda, yet respect for the need to move past Ocarina of Time's influence and try something new, respect for the intelligence and memory of the player, and respect for creativity in art style and world design. However, there is a bit of a lack of respect for the player's time. Still, this is a brilliantly fun Zelda experience that has aged so, so gracefully, especially in the visual department. If I played Wind Waker HD I think this might have been a 10 for the quality of life improvements.