Few games are as commonly
associated with greatness as the Legend of Zelda series. With the
possible exceptions of Zelda II: Link's Adventure for the original
NES, and Majora's Mask for the N64, every Zelda game produced was
easily one of the top five (if not the best) games produced for its
respective system. Needless to say, when the latest Legend of Zelda
was announced for Nintendo's GameCube, Nintendo fans around the
world were drooling with anticipation, waiting to see what the Big N
would do with their beloved franchise.
Then the screenshots of
what would later be titled The Wind Waker surfaced. The new game
would be done graphically in a style known as cel shading, which
results in a much more cartoony, less realistic look. The jeers
resonated, with many gamers concerned that Nintendo had finally
given in to its famous "kiddy" image, and that a Zelda game would
not be a Zelda game if it looked like it should be running on
television at 3 PM (most likely between Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!).
Despite the kiddy first
impression, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is easily a game
fully worthy of players of any age and degree of hardcore. While
there certainly were a number of areas where I felt that The Wind
Waker was more work than fun, the overall experience turned out to
be worth the occasional bouts of tedium.
The most intriguing
aspect of The Wind Waker is that the main character is not, in the
strictest sense, Link. He does wear the green suit and look the
part, but he is not, the game reveals in the introduction, the Hero
of Time who was the main character of the N64’s Ocarina of Time. In
fact, the game does not take place in the land of Hyrule, but rather
many generations later, in a realm referred to as The Great Sea. Our
hero is actually just a normal thirteen year old boy who wears the
outfit of the Hero of Time for his coming-of-age ceremony and finds
himself forced to become a hero when his sister is kidnapped. His
rescue attempt begins this new Link’s epic adventure, which will
have him come face to face with his ancestry in order to save the
present land from a very familiar ancient evil.
To say any more would
really be to spoil the story, but suffice it to say that the story
is masterfully crafted. The designers manage to build upon the
standard Legend of Zelda storyline while simultaneously taking the
franchise in a completely new and refreshing direction. This is
truly one of those games, much like Blizzard’s Starcraft, where the
next development in the story is the carrot on the end of the stick
of occasionally difficult gameplay.
The gameplay itself is
very similar, at least initially, to that of
Ocarina of Time. It
seems that, at least in this respect, the designers felt they got
things right the first time around, so there was no need to change
things. The net effect of this is that the player will likely feel
like he or she is playing through Ocarina with better graphics until
the end of the second dungeon or so, but it quickly becomes apparent
that the gameplay is much deeper than that.
One thing that truly
struck me in this regard is the usage of cooperation in later
dungeons. In a move reminiscent of
Sony’s Ico, there are several
dungeons where you enter with a supporting character who has an
ability that you need to utilize in order to progress. One
particular room in a later dungeon which revolves around using your
mirror shield and your partner to reflect beams of light around a
massive room is brilliant both in its complexity and its execution.
Areas like this really make one marvel at Shigeru Miyamoto’s
continued excellence in game design.
Unfortunately, for every
moment of brilliance in The Wind Waker, there seems to be a moment
of disappointment equal in its scale. As far as the gameplay is
concerned, that particular disappointment is in travel about the
world. The Great Sea truly lives up to its name, as the entire game
world is represented in a world map (or ocean chart, if you prefer)
which is divided into squares, seven across and seven down. Assuming
that the wind is blowing in the right direction (more on this in a
second), it takes about a full minute to cross one of those squares.
While that doesn’t sound like much initially, you’ll find yourself
sailing a lot. Since you are only occasionally besieged by sea
creatures, more often than not you will find yourself just putting
the controller down and checking up on the progress every so often.
Granted, there is the ability to warp later in the game, but even
that only lets you warp to specific points on the map, and
inevitably wherever you need to go at any given moment is a good
distance away from any of those points. While this does go a great
way to creating the impression of a giant world before you, it also
makes exploration, the foundation upon which all Zelda games are
based, extremely tedious.
The other area which is a
double edged sword for The Wind Waker is in the use of the artifact
for which the game is named. The Wind Waker is essentially a cross
between a conductor’s baton and a magic wand, and so serves the same
purpose as does the ocarina from The Ocarina of Time. Different
songs conducted with the Wind Waker produce different effects, from
changing wind direction (essential for sea travel) to warping about
the map to controlling your partner in the aforementioned dungeons.
Again, it’s good as far as the story involves it, and it does save
the inventory from growing too large, but its usage is quite
tedious. When invoking the Wind Waker, a red dot moves from the left
of the screen to the right, and the player must press the C-Stick in
the appropriate direction exactly when the dot is in the center in
order to play the right note. Now, this is not particularly hard,
just extremely tedious; especially in the partner dungeons where
you’ll find yourself playing the “Command Melody” over and over
again, and one wonders if there couldn’t have been an easier way to
achieve the desired result. When I found myself sailing against the
wind because I didn’t feel like taking out the Wind Waker for the
fifth time to adjust the wind direction again, I knew that there was
something wrong there.
Control, on the whole, is
simple enough to pick up, if a bit loose. If you’ve played Ocarina
of Time, with the exception of L-Targeting replacing Z-Targeting,
the control scheme is basically the same: A is your
context-sensitive action button, B attacks with the sword, and X, Y,
and Z are the three item buttons. Once again, there is no jump
button, which does not, it should be noted, preclude the designers
from including jumping puzzles. As a result, getting a little too
close to the edge of a surface causes him to launch himself off like
a green-clad Greg Louganis, often accidentally. This makes
time-sensitive sequences doubly frustrating, because rushing often
causes sloppiness with running angles, and just the slightest
miscalculation sends Link all the way to the bottom again. It sounds
like a minor complaint, sure, but there are enough sequences where
it’s maddeningly frustrating that it really took away from my
enjoyment of the game.
Camera control is equally
frustrating, in much the same way that
Super Mario Sunshine’s often
was. It is literally impossible to get the camera angle that you
want at times, with the camera often being either too low to the
ground or zoomed in too close to be any help. Add to that the fact
that you actually need to use the telescope item in order to get a
first-person view of any sort (which means, for lazy people like
myself, you just deal without any first-person view at all), and you
have some bad camera concerns here. Considering that the game’s
puzzles all revolve around observation of your surroundings, one
would think that the camera would at least be better than that of
Super Mario Sunshine.
With all these complaints
up to this point, it would be extremely logical to expect that I
would also be slamming the cel shaded graphics. (For example,
“Zelda? More like Cel-da!”) Quite the contrary, however; I think
that the graphical style is extremely well executed, and fits this
game perfectly. Despite the fact that this game looks like a
cartoon, that does not detract from the “mature” gameplay experience
at all. (I would like to point out that The Simpsons is also a
cartoon, and regularly enjoyed by humor-loving people of all ages.
Of course, as Homer would say, facts are meaningless; you can use
facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.) The first time
that I killed an enemy and saw him go up in a puff of stylized
purple smoke, I knew exactly why the designers chose to go with this
graphical style. After a few hours of playing, you really don’t even
notice that you’re playing a cartoon (aside from the sailing
sequences, of course, where you don’t have anything to do aside from
admiring the scenery anyway), and everything just fits. Smooth frame
rates and refreshing character designs add to the experience as
well. While there were a few times I wondered what certain things
would look like if they were rendered more like the N64 style, I
really didn’t miss it, and it really sets this game apart from the
rest of the pack.
Sound, much like
everything else about this game, is a mix of extremely impressive
and extremely disappointing. First the good: The music in this game
is absolutely incredible. Apparently, Nintendo has produced a
soundtrack for the game in Japan, and I would definitely buy it if
it were released here. Some of the scores, from simple things like
the warping music to the opening scene which melds the traditional
Zelda overworld music with more contemporary themes, are just
beautiful, and a joy to listen to. There are few games which have
music which is more than simply “just there,” and The Wind Waker
goes above and beyond in that regard.
However, what the game
has in music, it lacks in voice acting. Literally. Specifically,
there is no voice acting aside from the occasional exclamation here
and there. All spoken text is displayed in text boxes, a la Ocarina
of Time. This was acceptable on the N64, as that system’s cartridges
simply did not have the space for the amount of voice acting that
Ocarina would have required, but there is simply no excuse for this
game to not have what is generally accepted to be a basic
requirement of epic adventure games nowadays. I was really looking
forward to spoken dialogue for the first time in a Zelda game, and
in this respect I was extremely disappointed, almost to the point
where I didn’t want to play through the game as a result. It’s not a
deal breaker by any stretch of the imagination, as you do get used
to having to read all the spoken text, but it’s really an
anachronism in this day and age to have to do so, and it really
makes The Wind Waker seem less technically advanced than it is.
Overall, I have something
of a love/hate relationship with The Wind Waker. For every moment of
gaming genius that I experienced, there were at least five similar
instances where I was either ready to throw my controller across the
room or wondering why I spent $50 on a game I clearly was not
enjoying. All told, while I was extremely impressed with The Wind
Waker, I didn’t have a whole lot of fun playing it. In fact, more
often than not, it felt like work more than play. Thus, despite the
fact that I really did like the game as a whole, I have a lot to
complain about, as evidenced above.
This begs the question:
Does a game have to be fun in order to be a great game? In this
case, I don’t think it does. While The Wind Waker is often not a
whole lot of fun, it is every bit a masterpiece. In fact, I think
that The Wind Waker is essentially a work of gaming art, meant to be
appreciated but not necessarily enjoyed. While the game demands much
of its player, and the process is often more painful than fun, the
reward that is the game as a whole is worth the hours that the
player puts into it. While it certainly is not for everyone,
particularly those thin of patience or with short attention spans,
and it certainly does have its share of problems, The Legend of
Zelda: The Wind Waker is very much the must-play game that the hype
built it up to be.
