Mega Bits

Title: Zelda: The Wind Waker
System: Nintendo GameCube
Game play rating: 2.5
Plot rating: 2
Replayability rating: 2
Bonus points: 1

Overall Score: 7.5

The Wind Waker is the penultimate installment in the Legend of Zelda, chronologically speaking, occurring several hundred years after the events in Ocarina of Time, which, if you don’t know, predates the original NES game and its prequel, A Link to the Past.  Ocarina of Time is considered not only the masterpiece of the Zelda series, but the starting point of the legend itself.  Overall, I give the game a score of 7.5 stars for its familiar and fun gameplay and its less-than-epic plot line.  This game still hits recommended status, so this is definitely a game to play, but at only 7.5 stars, it’s not a must.

Plot – 2 stars
In Wind Waker, Hyrule has been buried under an ocean.  After Link defeated Ganon at the end of Ocarina of Time, Ganon was sealed by the sages.  When the seal started to weaken, Link was nowhere to be found, so Hyrule was flooded to prevent Ganon’s complete takeover of the land.  The triforce of Wisdom was split in two and half was kept in the kingdom while the other half was passed down in generations.  Ganon still had the triforce of power, and the triforce of courage was broken into (an unsurprising) eight pieces to prevent Ganon from capturing the Triforce and getting his wish granted.

The legend of the Hero of Time (a la Ocarina of Time) was passed down as well, and when boys come of age, they spend a day wearing the garb of the hero.  It just so happens that’s where you come into the story.  You are playing around town in your hot new hero’s clothes when disaster strikes and sends you on a journey to save your sister, become the Hero of Winds, find and restore the legendary Master Sword, and defeat Ganon once and for all by resting the blade for all time in Ganon’s skull.

The reason I scored this one down is only because it didn’t have that epic world-will-end urgency to it that nags at you when you aren’t playing.  In fact, at the end, when everything is happy, I didn’t get the sense that I had saved the world because the final boss battle was just a swordfight with Ganon.  No crazy alter-Ganon that transforms into this gigantic monstrosity that’s about to eat the world, you just…win.  And then it’s over.  For all of its Zelda goodness, this one let me down at the end.

Game Play – 2.5 stars
Most of Wind Waker is played sailing the oceans in search of new islands and sunken treasure, some of which are heart pieces, some of which are triforce pieces, but most of which are rupees.  Fortunately for this game, the big wallet allows for a whopping 5000 rupees, and for the first time in my Zelda history, I didn’t fill it up and wish I had something to spend it on.  That was a plus, but really, after I had 3000 rupees I had bought everything I needed and was off to decapitate Ganon.  I really liked the sunken treasure part, even if it was anticlimactic to get a red rupee after sailing around for 20 minutes and finally getting your boat in the right place.  As far as flavor goes, the ocean idea was fresh and offered up a lot of play with pirates, ghost ships, sea monsters, cyclones, and whirlpools.

Land battle was essentially taken directly from Ocarina with a few enhancements to the B-mash combo.  If you collect enough of an item, you can get additional techniques, but overall this has been a stellar feature since the N64.

Also, I walked away with the prize in this game while only having achieved 12 out of the 20 available heart containers.  And while I used a potion on the final boss, the only time I ever used a bottled fairy was on a lesser boss that I couldn’t L-target correctly, so I died.  This game wasn’t hard enough.

Replayability – 2.5 stars
The one part that I didn’t like about the game was that there was too much to do.  Much like Oracle of Seasons, there is this sidequest to get pictures of rare locations and people.  Not necessary, and too huge of a quest to finish in one play-through.  In fact you get another quest at the end just so you can go and finish all the sidequests you neglected the first go-round.  I didn’t complete this quest.  I tried, but it wasn’t at all obvious without a walkthrough what you needed to take pictures of.

What this game lacks is a reason to play it again.  That being said, if you’re the type that likes to finish every possible aspect of the game, this game is one you can sink a whole week into – without sleep.  And get a walkthrough, because this game is big, and there’s lots to do.  In fact, if you’re into those 16-square shift puzzles, you can spend days before you get that last triforce shard finishing those and laughing when the butler door pays you out of his ass.

As far as picking this one up later, I might do it for fun, which is why I scored it as highly as I did.  The game is easy enough to remember what to do and how to do it, but there’s enough that it doesn’t feel like you’ve just done the same thing over again.

Bonus Points – 1 star
Wind Waker scores mega bonus points for its throwbacks.  Having played as many of the previous games as I have, I can appreciate the way it integrated the sacred instruments from Oracle of Ages into the plot.  There were a lot of throwbacks in the music, but updated so you didn’t necessarily recognize them at first.  And finally, the breathtaking Master Sword room, which may be the greatest tribute to a previous game that I’ve ever seen.  This looks and feels like a Zelda title, even though they moved to the cartoony cel-shading rendering on this and Phantom Hourglass.  I was worried it would be too kid-oriented, but this is a fully grown Zelda game, and it’s worthy of the title!

Growing up with a Nintendo Entertainment System, the original 8-bit NES, some of my most memorable moments were playing the first game in the series that has propelled a franchise that includes 15+ games, a cartoon, several manga, and several live-action YouTube videos.  If it can be said that a game can be loved, then I love The Legend of Zelda.

To date, I have played all but two of these titles all the way through, including the rare Master Quest to Ocarina of Time.  In fact, it is my current gaming goal to complete all of these games.  As you can see on the sidebar there, I’m currently playing Zelda: The Wind Waker.  The remaining title to complete the set is The Minish Cap.  You will certainly be getting the reviews of those two when I’m done.

The great thing about this series is that every title is so familiar, yet so different.  In every case, there have been throwbacks to the previous games, like items, bosses, dungeon layouts, and secrets while keeping the puzzles and dungeons fresh.  One of the greatest tributes I’ve ever seen in any game was in the Wind Waker when I retrieved the Master Sword – the room was lined with stain-glass renditions of the six sages from Ocarina of Time.  Having just finished the Master Quest a few days earlier, it was so fitting and so real that it took my breath away.

This series has everything in it that make a good game, and you can tell from its high marks on any list of the top games of all time.