I've started playing Gamecube games recently, not because I have a hankering for them but because my four year old son likes watching me play video games. I don't have a hell of a lot of appropriate video games to play in front of a four year old. I'm super tired of playing Portal 2 and Little Big Planet 1/2 for him so I'm delving into family friendly territory for a little variety and to check off some supposedly noteworthy games I haven't ever played before. I played nothing on the GameCube when it came out.
Wind Waker is a well known Gamecube game... and a WiiU game now. It’ll probably be released on several future Nintendo consoles as well assuming Nintendo is stupid/lucky enough to continue making home consoles. Seems like over half of Zelda games are infinitely regurgitated re releases. Just look at Twilight Princess. It’s been released on three consecutive consoles now. On top of that, the backwards compatibility of the Wii and WiiU makes you able to play the previous gen’s version of the game making each re release more superfluous than the last. I don’t care what miniscule changes they made, if you wet your pants in excitement and bought that shit again for $40, you’re an idiot but I digress. I just played the Gamecube version of Wind Waker.
Wind Waker takes place long after the events of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time which stands as one of my favorite games of all time. Zelda games are actually one of the very few things that Nintendo can pull out of the closet that still gets me at least vaguely interested even though they’ve kind of been on the decline for a while. On my bookshelf I actually have a copy of Hyrule Historia. That being said, I think I already made it clear at some point in a past rant that I hate Toon Link. I know he’s supposed to be ten but he looks like he’s five and the expressions on his face are often so stupid.
I didn’t like Majora’s Mask as much as most people that played it but I do think that the art style was spectacular, particularly Clock Town. I want ALL Zelda games to look like that. I want NO Zelda games to look like Wind Waker. The style is cartoonish and too whimsical which is not what attracted me to Zelda games. Even the early top down titles were significantly more grounded than that. The toon style actually works for the top down 2D ones like Four Swords Adventure because it’s a lot less detailed. The early 3D games which I liked so much were clearly dark and serious with some nice light hearted and whimsical stuff on the peripheries to balance it out. (No, I’m not talking about that cancerous piece of shit, Tingle.) The art style of Wind Waker brings the peripheries on center stage which completely changes the mood of the game. Imagine being a Silent Hill fan and you’re eagerly awaiting the next installment, (haha,) of the series. It comes out and its graphics are CEL shaded and all enemies are just bad people that live in the town. That would kind of ruin the appeal, wouldn’t it? Not only that but now half of the Silent Hill titles will henceforth be modeled after this new shitty archetype. Fifty percent of the titles that come out for your favorite franchise you are now predestined to hate.
The whole world you knew in OoT now exists flooded after a great cataclysm. It's made up of a tiny collection of islands, (the tops of mountains,) which means you have to sail around on your talking dragon boat to get anywhere. If it wasn’t for weather and the day/night cycle, the ocean would qualify as a sensory deprivation device. It’s so fucking boring. The stylized visuals make the sea just an endless solid plane of flat vector graphics and aside from the occasional obnoxious enemy or barrel slalom course, there’s nothing to see and nothing to do. It’s just you waiting to be somewhere like a more colorful version of EVE Online. The world map is divided up into a grid with one insignificant island occupying each square. There is only one real town to go to in the entire game. There are so many pointless/cookie cutter islands. There are three tiny triangle islands solely for the three pearls to sit on, like half a dozen great fairy islands that just have a fairy fountain and don’t forget those six stupid reefs which are all just a box with 1-6 columns standing inside of them and nothing to fucking do except dig up rupees or get a triforce piece. The game story is frontloaded with the interesting and important islands. Then after that you become disappointed when you realize that the whole world doesn’t look like that and it’s just a facade.
You can build up all kinds of loot which enemies drop. You can either sell the loot items or use them in a couple of sidequests or to make various potions. I never used anything in the loot bag. I would have used the feathers in the sidequest but I never got enough of them because A: they are rare and B: they come from flying things that when killed have a propensity to drop their shit into a pit/into the water where I can’t get it. To me the bag was a completely superfluous game mechanic. It added nothing. Does anyone seriously give a shit about potions? Why in the hell do health potions even exist in Zelda games where you can get free fairies in a bottle which auto res and heal you upon death? Hell, why even have stores in Wind Waker? If you need supplies, just cut the grass and you can literally find anything but bait. If you upgrade your storage bags, they’re huge. You will NEVER run out of anything. On a side note I find it odd that the bomb salesman charged an impossible amount for bombs because he was the only one who could make them and then when the formula was stolen from him, bombs just started to spontaneously appear when you cut the grass anywhere.
The worst part of the game is collecting the eight pieces of the triforce of courage. First you have to get the main map which tells you where all of the maps to the pieces are located. Then you have to go hunt down each one of those maps across the world. Each one of those maps also has to be taken to Tingle where you pay an obscene amount of rupees to have each one deciphered. Then you have to read each one of those maps to go hunt down each triforce piece, essentially doing the exact same thing over again but getting Triforce pieces instead of maps. Holy shit, this is so much fun and it doesn’t feel at all like padding or busywork. If you’ve never played the game, you might be thinking this is just a typical Zelda premise where you go on an adventure across the world and through several dungeons to collect some important items to open something so you can defeat Ganon or whatever. That is not the case. I assure you that this is about as stripped down as it gets. It’s like having to go back to the grocery store a dozen times because you forgot something a dozen times. There are no proper dungeons or really even puzzles here. You pretty much go and fetch things from a location as you would any common sunken treasure in the water. It’s tedious. It’s boring. It feels like something invented to drag out the game longer to compensate for a lack of content. In general they took the tiny bit of substance they had, ripped it up into confetti and sprinkled it across a big ocean to obfuscate the fact that there really isn’t much there.
On to the plot… The first order of business after trying to rescue your sister who was kidnapped by a giant bird, is to collect these three pearls from the typical beginner’s dungeons. These aren’t too bad. I liked the little woodland sprites in the forest but the Deku Tree looks like total shit. There are three pearls but only two dungeons. The last one you just go get from a big fish which felt like a pretty big cop out. The big fish was previously guarding it at another island but the island got destroyed. It’s like “Sorry, I just moved and haven’t set up the dungeon yet. Um… If you want I could eat the pearl and you could go inside me to get it back. You don’t want to do that? Okay.” The pearls, when placed on three islands, open the way to the Tower of the Gods which I guess you could count as the missing third dungeon but the bottom line is that the game is lacking in dungeons.
There are a couple of mini dungeons where you just pop in for a few minutes to grab a tool/weapon and then leave. I’m not even kidding. You are timed and must complete the dungeon in under about 4 minutes. The Ice dungeon in Oot which I always thought of as a mini dungeon is easily more of a thing than both of the WW mini dungeons put together. This doesn’t feel like a finished game.
The three other dungeons, particularly earth and wind, are extremely tedious thanks to being centered around the Command Melody. In these dungeons, you either get a statue friend or a real friend like Medli or Makar who you possess and control by playing the song with the baton or “Wind Waker” as it’s called. Practically every two minutes you get out the fucking baton, play the song, switch and do whatever puzzle is needed, switch back. Do it again in two minutes. It gets old REAL fast. Hell, I hated just getting out the baton to change the direction of the wind after a while. I’d rather coast along at a snail’s pace than play the song again. There are only like five songs in all but two of them you play so damn much you just get sick of the Wind Waker. This is not even mentioning the fact that I shouldn’t have to physically possess sentient allies in order to get them to do shit. Needing to assume control of their bodies implies that they are completely incompetent. If I want some chips from the grocery store, I ask my wife to pick up some chips at the grocery store. I DON’T play a magical fucking tune to astral project into her brain and do it myself. And while I’m aware that your allies solving puzzles themselves is not as fun as doing it yourself, you should just be able to switch characters with a single button and control them as if they WERE doing it themselves because you told them you needed help. It’s just one more instance of Nintendo contrivedly catering to a gimmick at the expense of logic and fun.
Speaking of, Nintendo also have this problem with putting meta Nintendo references/gimmicks in its games. Wind Waker is pretty bad on this. Not sure if it's as bad as Paper Mario:TTYD but it's bad. According to my Hyrule Historia, they scrapped an idea for "Gamecube Island." That's good I guess but "Dee Ess Island" still made it into the next game. This image is funny because if you replace the word "lack" with the word "fetish" and phrase "the coolest" with the word "dead" you have a Faustian prophecy made public before the Wii even came out.
The best part of the game was the underwater Hyrule Castle frozen in time. I was however still really disappointed that it looked nothing like the one from OoT. I don’t understand this. It had awesome stained glass windows correctly featuring all of the seven sages. Why does the castle look completely different in both design and surrounding geography? What is the point of claiming it’s the same castle when it looks nothing like it?
Actually the best part of the game was in the Wind Temple once when I picked up Makar to carry him. My son said to Makar, “Don't worry little pickle. We won't forget you.” He also made up words to the beginning of the sailing music which consists of repeating “The more the excitement.” over and over.
The best characters in the game were Makar, Medli, Aryl and that guy who does the cannon minigames who puts on a weird show every time where he plays every role by sticking his head through a different themed board with a hole in it. God, he was funny.
Unfortunately half of the NPCs in the game are incredibly hideous and/or have a very punchable face. I would have liked Tetra more if she didn’t have a stupid vertical pompadour. It’s hard to say if the art style is making this worse but it surely isn’t making it better. Why can’t it have a better style like Professor Layton. Those games had a lot of freaks in them but they were endearing for the most part... Except Belle, eew. I like the art style and even the personality of Link from the LoZ Animated Series better than Wind Waker’s Link. Hell, I even like the art style of the Zelda CDi games better than Wind Waker’s. If you’re going to make everything into a big fucking joke then at least make it look like someone’s terrifying LSD journey. I would actually like to see a GOOD game animated in those hyper expressive, floaty fluid movements. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost like living graffiti art.
The people in Wind Waker look even shittier than One Piece characters and I despise them.
I hate this shitty little pig-tailed Eskimo fuckface. I try to talk to him at his shop and he pushes me away and tells me to go to the other side of the shop. What the fuck is his problem?
I hate this disco fruit.
I REALLY hate this stupid kid who follows you around with a foot long snot string dangling out his nose. I never talked to him once and avoided him like he was made of stinky antimatter.
These street kids? Fuck ‘em.
Their pig teacher? What the hell is wrong with her eyes?
Tingle? That’s par for the fucking course.
Did this guy pay someone to do this to his hair or was he inspired to do it himself while huffing paint thinner one night?
I’m not really a fan of this kimono wearing Gannon-sama model. It’s just… weird. I did like how in the last part of the final battle, you have to make a triangle or Triforce with Zelda and Ganon to defeat him. I feel like it drove home the symbolism behind it better than in any other game I’ve played.
The enemy designs are also shitty. There are half a dozen different colored blobs. That’s about a third of the whole ensemble. The iteration of poes sucks. The iteration of redeads sucks… but is arguably the most scary. Bokoblins just look weird. Moblins probably look the worst with their bulbous lip flapping around like a fat jowl hanging off of their massively protruding underbite.
I found the camera in the game. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fucking useless. You’re supposed to do these quests which are kind of like riddles where you take pictures of things that this rabbi guy tells you to do but he’s so vague I have no idea how to start and therefor I stop giving a shit pretty quick. This other guy told me to take a picture of something perfectly round and pale. I took a picture of the full moon. He said that wasn’t it. I said well how about this, it’s a picture I took of your mom’s ass last night. I remember Pokemon Snap but I’m still dubious of the game’s ability to evaluate what the fuck is in one of these fake pictures.
Most of the sidequests I found were shitty and/or lead me to dead ends. What is up with that octopus map? I found one of the giant octopuses, the one with the fairy. I never found another one. I looked for them. I go to where it says they are and they’re not there. I have no idea how to make them appear. Give me a clue here. So many things seem too vague and by my guess are not worth my time so I just ignore them.
The cannon on your ship has the same problem that FLUDD in Mario Sunshine has; you can not engage it while moving. If you want to shoot at something like a mounted canon or an enemy ship, you have to take down your sail and park your stupid ass right there in the line of fire and take your beatings while you try to dish some out. The Gamecube controller has TWO FUCKING CONTROL STICKS. (Okay, one and a half.) One could be used for steering the boat, the other for aiming the cannon. Phantom Hourglass did it and all it used was a damn stylus. Phantom Hourglass did EVERYTHING better except graphics, on foot combat and not featuring the Temple of the Ocean King. That’s fucking embarrassing. Sitting there stationary is lame as shit and makes me feel like an idiot. If you’re battling another ship, you’ll both be shooting with terrible accuracy on a rolling sea while they get to move and you don’t. That brings me to another thing, the cannon desperately needs some kind of cursor to help out with aiming because it’s mostly guesswork. Maybe having to guess makes it more realistic but you know what else would make it more realistic? Being able to take evasive action while you fucking shoot.
Other than if someone actually liked the art style of this game I can’t see the appeal at all. There is just nothing there. Its main content just alternates between vapid and tedious. If you like this game, there is a good chance that you're looking back through rose-tinted glasses at something that made an impression on you when you were younger. This phenomena is never more apparent than when you’re playing in front of a four-year-old. My son’s interests in games at this point in time run as deep as bright colors, silly characters and weird enemies. If that’s all you care about, the game delivers… but so does an episode of Octonauts.
