The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

GameCube, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2003) game

Hard to believe how long ago this game came out because it certainly doesn't feel like it. I'd wanted to return to it for over ten years, as back in the mid-to-late 2000s my cousin got her hands on a GameCube and I wanted to be able to help her when she got stuck except that I couldn't remember the details well enough. It turns out that the game being unmemorable wasn't entirely down to my failing brain: revisiting it confirmed my feelings of the time that it wasn't one of the best in the vaunted 'Zelda' canon for several reasons, and while playing it again was a good, solid experience, it wasn't the revelation 'Ocarina of Time' or 'Links's Awakening' brought to me. It marked a trend in Nintendo that, as far as I'm aware, has continued to this day, although with the Switch and 'Breath of The Wild,' the latest 'Zelda,' it seems they may have made a return to the glory days again. But 'Waker' was practically rushed out in comparison to the usual long wait for an instalment on a console, parts of it excised to be placed in the follow-up, 'Twilight Princess,' as I seem to recall, a couple of dungeons, to get that game off to a quicker release. So it didn't have that epic feel Nintendo often went for, of pouring everything into their works of art and only letting it out when it was good and ready.

Perception is important, and I perceive that they were reacting to, or being proactive about, the state of the console industry. They recognised that they couldn't just release updates of existing games with better graphics, it had to be unique (until the years after, when they were literally re-releasing existing games, 'Waker' one of them!), and so they shocked everyone by eschewing the realistic textures and approach of the N64 games, and went for a vibrantly expressive animation style that was unique at the time, even if cel-shading, as the technique was called, became an over-used visual gimmick for far too many games. By blowing up hero Link's head and making his eyes huge and emotive, they were trying to add a stronger connection between the player and the character they controlled, not purely for a closer bond, but also to be part of the gameplay. They weren't entirely successful in that, and it should have been played up significantly as a way to progress - I didn't understand the significance of the graphics until I was stuck, and upon scouring the manual for clues, realised Link actually provides hints himself by looking in the direction of things which are key to progressing, which is perhaps the most revolutionary addition to the series.

The game would have been fine if that was the only attempt to take it further away from what came before and towards a new experience, because in all essential ways it was the same 'Zelda,' and the major change, the game's far more trumpeted selling point, was its vast ocean travel, something which let the experience down substantially. As bracing as it was setting out into the high seas and knowing you could sail to the tiny specks on the horizon, it soon became a chore, and if the game had been the size of the map as a great landmass it would have been a huge space to explore. But sailing in a straight line from island A to island B was a far cry from the thrill of riding horseback over rolling hills and down dales, through woods, leaping streams, the ground falling away beneath your steed's hooves as you hoofed it around a mountain or circled a lake. No amount of sea monster attacks or changes in weather, the cycle of night and day, or the height of the swell could stop it from being a chore, and in fact attacks were just more inconvenience when they should have been a fun or challenging diversion. Searching out treasure was more of a diversion, a necessary deviation from the straight line sailing as you spot a twinkling sign on the surface of the water, or work out where the treasure maps are pointing you to, but mostly they were rupee rewards, the sense of completion more important than the actual contents.

The great oceans that had swamped and submerged what remained of Hyrule were largely barren, and while the same could be said of the wide open spaces and vast fields and passes of 'Twilight Princess,' even though that game wasn't better on the whole, horse-riding still trumps sailing. Further into the game when you have the power to jump to certain locations dotted around the map, it doesn't entirely solve the problem, but makes it less of an issue. It was supposed to give you a newfound feeling of freedom, but even using the Wind Waker baton itself wasn't the fun experience the ocarina gave as Link's previous musical instrument of choice. The ocarina was well suited to the Controller because of its similarity, both sitting comfortably in the player's hands, while the baton was a poor relation, the player just keeping time to a metronome - it struck me that it might have been an ideal Wii gimmick since with that you were waving a wand about. Again, having to stop everything and fiddle about with the baton every time you wanted to change the direction of the wind, complete with the music and unskippable animated sequence, meant that it was a chore rather than an empowerment.

On top of the interminable sailing and lack of solid landmarks to explore, one of the great facets of the series missing here, I felt that even in some of the detail it wasn't quite up to scratch: compared to Nintendo's usual high standards I found control to sometimes be relatively unintuitive. For example, you have to stand in exactly the right place to climb up onto a platform, and when jumping off a rocky outcrop to leap across to another you sometimes find yourself sliding down the near side instead of making that definite jump because it's not sheer enough, an irritant because it's vital if you're intending to leap into the air to glide using the Deku Leaf, and needing maximum height! Similarly, climbing up ladders at sea, or, most tiresome of all, climbing back into your boat, you have to be so precise instead of the game instinctively knowing what you're trying to do and compensating for your movement or position to a slight degree - very annoying when you're trying to get in the boat and instead find yourself talking to him instead! Another annoyance is that most dialogue or scripts can't be skipped or sped up, like opening the treasure chests, something you do countless times throughout the game and don't need to keep reading the message, or when you talk to the fish and he offers you the shooting game: the default is to agree so if you're hurriedly flicking through the responses you've seen too many times, you can accidentally find yourself agreeing to play when you just want to get away!

This is a sign of impatience, I know, but I'm sure in the past Nintendo were more aware of such minor details, they seemed attuned to every aspect of a player's experience, and in 'Ocarina' and other 'Zelda' games I'm sure you could press a button to make all the text appear at once instead of being forced to wait for it to play out at its own speed. It's only a small thing, but it suggests an attitude much larger that seems to be within the game, which is that of time-wasting. They knew they had a relatively short game for the series and they did so much to try and draw it out, something such a creative company didn't need to do before. You just look at the 'Mario' or 'Zelda' series' and see how big, inventive and well crafted they were and then you see how cynical it is to artificially prolong the length of a game by making you sail halfway across the world and then back again. It's the first 'Zelda' that doesn't feel fully polished to perfection (by Nintendo, the 'Oracle' games were another story), and knowing that a couple of dungeons were lifted to get the game finished quicker I can't escape the sense of artificial extension going on, less easy to disguise when sailing isn't much fun - there's never any threat from the weather, even in storms you don't get huge waves crashing about you, tidal waves, or anything to fight against beyond those annoying sea creatures, which could have injected tension and vital urgency to this area were it handled better.

Even worse, sometimes the game feels like it's laughing at you, such as when the merchant promises good things if you buy a certain amount in order to get a Silver Membership, then it's just a 'thank you,' or if you do it all again to get the Gold Membership, and the reward is a one-time refill of all your items, further proof the game is stringing itself out, something that epics like 'Ocarina' or 'Majora's Mask' didn't need to do (or at least not anywhere near as much). This is compounded by the usual troubles in the series: getting stuck. This is just a natural hazard of the games, not a criticism, as I wouldn't want things to be too easy and I always worked it out eventually, no matter how much trial and error it took. I got stuck for ages not knowing how to activate the Triforce Shard charts - there's a door for each of them with a symbol on the ground beneath and I tried playing the wind song, but it didn't seem to work so I must have been in the wrong position because after I got the Song of Passing (which changes day to night, and the reverse), that had filled up the last space for songs on the inventory screen - before, I'd been sailing around trying to find another song as I was convinced that's what I needed, going to half the islands in the game to reread the fish's clues, hoping to find something, until at Windfall he mentioned the dancing man and I happened to learn the Song of Passing off him and realised that wasn't the solution!

That's part of playing a game previously and thinking you know the solution based on fragmentary memories, or from looking at what you have or don't have in your inventory. It was the same with how to get aboard the Ghost Ship and I tried so many things to get on it when I didn't have what I needed to do so and only found out by accident when searching every island methodically. I went in with the mindset of trying to burn through the game at top speed because I didn't want to get bogged down and play it for months, but in the event, in those times when I did get stuck, the only way to work it out was a methodical search of every island until I found what was needed to progress, so I failed in my attempt to rush through at speed in the same way I'd approached 'Banjo-Kazooie,' 'Banjo-Tooie' and 'Donkey Kong 64' in recent years. I mention them for another reason, too: this was the closest to a platformer the 'Zelda' games had come. They were always action adventure games based around environmental exploration and solving puzzles in three dimensions, but because of the nature of this story being set on islands, it meant vertical movement was more common than horizontal, which means an adjustment towards the platforming genre.

Not that it's a bad thing, as I wish there were more good platformers out there, especially on the 'Cube, but it also meant this game suffered in comparison as you don't have the same physical control as in that genre, the control buttons being assigned to weapons and items rather than moves - it's amazing when you look back on how revolutionary the context sensitive movement pioneered in 'Ocarina' really was, allowing you to leap off sides, or hang, with the option to pull yourself back up or drop down, depending on what you wanted to do, but this time it just wasn't quite as well implemented. Something else that reminded me of 'Banjo-Kazooie' in particular were the warp cauldrons taken right out of that game: in dungeons you could find one or more of these large pots or cauldrons to jump into that would warp you to the next you'd found, so travel through the level was quicker if you were going back and forth, in and out of the dungeon, or coming back to it. The cartoon visuals and large, animal-like enemies also connected my mind with the former game, or even 'Super Mario 64' by the occasional sound effect, like the Indian sitar type of sound you hear when the Command Melody was broken, straight out of Mario's world.

The truth is I love 'Banjo-Kazooie,' it's one of my favourite games of all time, and possibly the game I've completed more than any other. I have to wonder if the warp cauldrons were a mere coincidence or whether they were a deliberate attempt to mine something from a Rare game since this was shortly after Rare and Nintendo cut their ties together. It would seem an unlikely stab, but it's possible. If other games may have influenced 'Waker,' it also played with its own series' history, and though the other inhabitants of Hyrule are not much in evidence (beyond the occasional Goron merchant, or the Deku Tree for example), visiting the Temple of Time and heading down into that room with the stained glass images of important characters from 'Ocarina' was a magical moment. Moments like that recaptured the essence of what makes the 'Zelda' series special, and while the timeline, history and canon seems to have been largely tossed around with abandon in what I hear since, and the games were only ever loosely connected in the first place, when you get that connection with the past it's truly special. I did feel the story was simplistic beyond the central premise of Hyrule sinking under ages of time and water, with Gannondorf showing up and Princess Zelda a pirate captain, and we never really get much resolution with any of this as if it wasn't fully thought through, or again, was rushed to completion.

The battle with Ganon at the end is the perfect example of why the game doesn't stay in the memory where 'Ocarina' and the others do - a fight with a marionette controlled by the evil villain, then a sword fight on top of a tower… I'm not saying anything could have competed with the ground-breaking (literally!), finale of 'Ocarina,' even 'Majora' was an easy final battle and a disappointment in comparison, but the story itself didn't seem that strong, something they bolstered in the next instalment. I didn't love 'Twilight' any more than this game, but for different reasons, and I certainly would like to play that through again now that I've been primed by 'Waker,' and perhaps even seek out 'Skyward Sword,' though I've been briefed that it's one of the worst 'Zelda' games ever made, apparently. I don't regret revisiting what is a well made adventure. It feels very much of its ilk, many of the puzzles are familiar, but how could you continue a game series without it becoming over-familiar? They tried to stretch it and make it new and different, and they had a tough pedigree to compete with from its own history, and Nintendo's policy at that time was to get out more and shorter games to appeal to the growing number of casual gamers that have since made the industry more lucrative than the film and music businesses together, so perhaps they were right in the direction they chose?

Just for the record, I played the game on the second file, having completed the game originally, back in the day. This means that you get to play as Link in his blue top and orange trousers, which isn't a big draw, I must admit, although the difficulty was supposedly a little tougher, though I never noticed. I'd always thought I'd come back and do that some day, and now I have, another in a long line of revisits and completions of old games that I've succeeded at in the last decade of writing reviews. It's good to go back, even though in my mind, this isn't an old game, this is just back around the corner, only a few years ago, it seems that short a time. Then you realise just how long ago it really was! A reminder how short life is, and how many games there are still to play and revisit.

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