THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: THE WIND WAKER (2002)

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what a charming, heartfelt, unique experience this is. what a beyond rushed, artificially extended, transparent experience this is. wind waker is the ultimate yin and yang for me, an opinion born from my two 100% runs played back to back within the past eight months. i have been exposed to absolutely every single piece of brilliance the game has to offer just as much as i've found myself facing cracks of all sorts of varied shapes and sizes--it's often with wind waker that those cracks may as well be gloryholes for their size... at least the stall door it's cut from's so lovingly rendered and lit. the moment the title screen opens, wind waker hits you with a mini presentation of the gorgeous visuals and models awaiting your adventure: good. as soon as you leave your home island, an agonizingly boring "stealth" section slams you in the chest: bad. the pace continues to suffer as the story brings you to peaceful windfall and as peaceful as a predungeon gets with dragon roost island: also bad. the game brightens up once again with its first dungeon, followed quickly by a second island and too its dungeon: good. under duress of deadline, the game tricks you into finding your third destination in tatters, the hero too late: badass. this does not eventually lead to a dungeon but, instead, a quick cutscene inside a rock: bad. our collectathon quest culminates in a tower of challenges and a peek at something much, much larger: good then we fuck ganon's fort up: badass. then we get to ride in the great sea with medli and makar on the boat: adorable but we're riding straight to dungeons, and hitting [a] on either has them slowly chastise you for not picking up the pace: excruciating triforce hunt: sure the peek at something much, much larger was actually just a fancy hallway: no boss rush final dungeon: what easiest final boss in zelda history after: what. but the cracks go deeper--it's the barely there existence of forest haven, how there's very little to do or see beyond moving onto the dungeon and on your way out. it's the existence of stealth at all, complete with wall peaks and barrel hiding, being absolutely worthless and unused. it's this fucking boat who drags out his dialogue as molasses as possible nagging the piss out of your tunic for every single possible little thing. when that old asshole bit it at the end, i didn't bat an eye. were i given the choice to slide ganon's domer right out of his stone noggin, i would've had my next target not more than a couple feet away. perhaps the biggest issue of the wind waker is its flat, generic story full of flat, generic characters existing in a completely unique, captivating world full of unique, well-crafted designs. i mean, EVERYTHING has a great fucking design. and the silhouettes are so goddamn impressive--character and island alike. turn a model pitch black and i could just about identify every single one of them from posture alone. and these islands are filled with mystery and intrigue: a thin island scraping the air with its needle... a land shaped around the ocean's deadliest, an assembly of green topped minecraft blocks... but there's just not fucking much done with them. you pop in, do one of three generic mini-dungeon designs, and you leave with either a piece of heart (if you're lucky) or another worthless helping of rupees in a game where they're handed out like candy, in a game where there isn't anything at all to spend them on. no seriously, what are you meant to do with these besides buy bait, pears, and the occasional blue gatorade? yeah you're gonna dump a load into tingle's pants with all those garbled charts begging to be ungarbled, but every triforce chest is surrounded by rupee showering pots in the first place, so what the fuck does it matter?

you know, it seems like i'm endlessly dumping onto this game with reckless abandon, and that's because i AM dumping onto this game with reckless abandon--i have spent eight long, long months scraping up against every single inch of the wind waker, attempting to view every possible possibility of dialogue npcs could offer, attempting to scrounge up all available rewards this great sea could conjure up for me. and i did it twice. issues are unavoidable in doing so, and staying silent on annoyances and problems is a disservice to anyone who spends that long playing a game. but it's clarifying the wind waker's cracks that makes it extra special because, here we are--me writing, you reading--in a 4.5 starred review.

in other words--this game freaks it, and it freaks it all over the place. and yet, its strengths are so strong, its ambition so contagious, that the wind waker navigates the currents and waves its haphazard development and hypocritically miyamoto induced crunch creates... and finds itself successfully sailing out from the storm and onto calm waters. the secret to the game's success is found in its simple execution of grand ideas, aforementioned sailing its highlight.

i adore sailing. i love the distance and scale between islands, rendering complaints about long "waiting" times too silly for me. the time passed is a part of the experience, the time spent with king charting courses through white and blue. the experience is spotting a watch tower and parking king to stab its occupants--if bombing the shit out of them from below isn't an option taken, of course. the experience is finding you've inadvertently come across a sea chart's x, treasure soon to be yours. the experience is passing by enemy ships and deciding whether to wage war or spare them (and your time). the experience is passing by beedle and deciding whether to wage war or buy bait (and remember: one can very well do both). it's being chased by sharks and deciding whether to take them on or hope to outrun them. it's fighting against the wind to navigate a reef and win against its occupants. it's circling an island's coast in search of cartographers. it's heading dead straight for a circling of seagulls while deciding whether it's time for bombs, boomerang, or the arrows for a change.

the experience is sleepily making your way back to outset island, the moon finally dipping below the horizon and lighting your boat in the first few glimpses of morning.

and on that note, it's actually downright criminal how incredible the main hubs of the wind waker can look in sunset/sunrise conditions. you don't know what that's like, do you? that's because i'm almost certain it's impossible to see such without exploiting the game in some way. but it's incredibly worth it to find windfall bathed in the last of the day's light, to see dragon roost's shore as the sun greets valoo. these sights are intoxicating, and this is just again one of the many ways to praise wind waker's extremely sharp use of lighting, its fantastic models, its brilliantly simple colors.

every screen is an art piece.

dungeons are cool, too. they're all pretty piss easy and about as braindead as any ocarina of time dungeon that isn't the forest or water temple, and that's disappointing, but they each carry such strong aesthetics on their backs as well as offering unique enemy variety and puzzles that it's hard to forget any of them. it's also doubly hard to forget the dungeons given there's only, what, five of them? christ, lol. so i suppose if a dev's going to be rushed and must make the work done count, it's good they opted for tightening what they had versus thinly spreading a meager plate before their players. i don't think anyone would've appreciated a wind waker with twice as many dungeons half as much if they featured... half as much. still, i really wish they were harder. this aspect can't even stem from my eight months of continuous playing--the wind waker was outright one of the first discs i ever pressed into my gamecube, and even the young asshole who played then snored his way through everything that wasn't the wind temple. well, okay, the earth temple scared me, so i was wide awake for that one. it was still easy, though. spooky... but easy.

have i mentioned link's eyes yet? i've been kind of vaguely praising models and all, but our protagonist for this zelda's just the best. see something interesting? so does he. see something spooky? so does he. get scared of your fucking mind? so. does he. link and i were certainly not alone in the earth temple (also literally, since the bird woman was there). also, wait, i put medli in parentheses, but she's a really interesting example of something wind waker sucks and excels at i for sure have mentioned already: great models, terrible writing. medli's cute. damn cute. i crushed on her as a kid, but it was all in the design, and i was reminded of that with every playthrough as i'd be repeatedly exposed to her flat characterization and how pathetic it whimpers: she exists for other men. that's her character. medli exists to serve link, serve valoo, and serve komali. she plays the harp, but only because another woman who served their dragon freeloader told her to. half her dialogue concerns prince komali--her fucking LAST LINE in the GAME is about komali. and i think this wraps back around to a particular point of failure with the wind waker that's reflected in another nintendo classic: chibi robo. both feature lovely music, lovely gameplay, lovely art... and flat, dead, bonedry writing.

guess that's why i always loved the thousand year door a little more than this as a kid. but believe me, i still loved them both.

and i still do love this game! i wouldn't have spent eight months playing it if i felt any less so. i wouldn't have invested so much time and energy into a passion project completely built off the skeleton of what these devs poured their souls into with what little time they had. and god fucking damn do i wish they'd been given more time, but i'm thankful the wind waker released at all, and i'm thankful it became a cornerstone of my childhood. i played the game to such depths and scourings that i would return to the great sea just to create my own stories and narratives--i'd be running from some evil dude who's tracking me island to island, or i'd be running mail deliveries for the rito, or--what i'm trying to express is THIS is the extent to which i adored this zelda's gameplay and sailing, its aesthetics and presentation.

and i still adore all these things, and the faults may be several golfball sizes too large, but let me re-emphasize: the wind waker is the best stall door i've ever pissed next to in my life. and... wait... there's something etched into it that i can just barely make out.

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."

oh, fuck off, miyamoto.