Having completed the game, I must now take the time and share my impressions and experience while playing this game. In many ways The Wind Waker is a unique experience, however in other ways it's not the best experience one would hope a Zelda game would offer. I must say that it is hard for me to classify this one in the same light as Ocarina of Time.
Visually, The Wind Waker is a very well designed game. The cel-shading truly makes it seem as though you are playing a cartoon. Just because I personally would not have used these type of graphics for a Zelda game, doesn't preclude the fact that the technical quality and appearance of the graphics are unacceptable or inferior. In fact, this game is probably the best effort so far in the use of cel-shading by any developer. The environments and characters are filled with vibrant color. The animation of explosions and water, or smoke, etc. is very fluid and dynamic. I guess the only complaint I have would be the result of using this type of animation style and appearance. What I'm specifically referring to is the characters' animation, often times they exude a very childish or simple drawing style when a more traditional Anime style would probably have given the game more merit with older gamers. When you look at Link with those wide eyes and stubby shapeless legs and arms, you just don't feel like he's a "Legendary Knight" rather just a kid with a toy sword playing with piggy monsters. For crying out loud, he's ten years old! These graphics also go hand and hand with some of the simplicities of the plot and the seemingly rather comedically stupid characters. If this were a cartoon and not a game I would expect it to appear on the Disney Channel rather than HBO or Sci-Fi.
What you hear musically varies depending on where you are in the game, most of the time you spend on the water, and you hear what appears to be a modified version of the Hyrule Overworld Theme to have that "travelling on water" feel to it. Some locations have very good catchy music with instruments never used with a Zelda game, but unfortunately due to the short duration of the piece it often repeats. The worst music appears in the dungeons, temples, etc. you almost want to turn the sound completely off due to the annoying mindnumbing repetative nature of it. Most of the music while in various dungeons consists of minimal sounds, a handful of notes or a bum-bUm-bum, dum, dum dum, bum-Bum-bum, etc. and it goes on endlessly until you are throughly pissed and just want the noise to stop. Sorry but this game has probably the worst dungeon music of any Zelda game to date. Why oh why couldn't they ressurrect the themes from the early games like Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventures of Link. A bright spot is the use of the Hyrule Castle theme from A Link to the Past, I was glad to see they properly correllated the music from the A Link to the Past with the association of Hyrule Castle, good job there. The music near the ending was also rather well done but a lot more could have been done to spice things up musically in this game.
The sound effects are actually the best yet to appear in a zelda game and there are more different sounding clangs and clinks of metal, some are still the same. One thing you have to wonder is that with the rather below average amount of dialogue in this compared to RPG's I've played on the PS2, why there are no verbally spoken words. GameCube and the capacity of the disc media is fully capable of allowing for spoken dialogue so why just leave it out? Many games now have crossed over into the use of spoken language and Zelda should have done the same, however it didn't so I have to compare it to games similar to it currently available and deduct points for the sound category due to its inferiority in this regard.
Probably the most defined and perfected feature of Zelda games has in fact been their Gameplay and Level Design. This is specifically where Shigeru Miyamoto excels, his ability to craft various puzzles and giving you various tools to solve that puzzle are uncanny. Link has numerious sword movements, many of which have direct similarities to what we've already seen with Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, however Link in The Wind Waker has the new Parry Attack ability which I thought was a very cool idea. It must be pointed out to veterans of Ocarina of Time that the various dungeon/temple areas are significantly easier that what was encountered in Ocarina of Time and maybe Majora's Mask. There is nothing anywhere close to being as hard as The Water Temple was in Ocarina of Time in this game. There is a good chance you'll finish this game in under 10 hours due to it's low difficulty, however even if you finish it in 10 hours if you want to find every treasure chest, heart piece, or perform the several side quests then you will be playing at least double that long. The actual official quest part of the game seems kind of short, and at times a little boring with the endless "go fetch" hunts for various charts you need to find treasure boxes. Finding chunks of the Triforce of Courage in treasure boxes just sitting anywhere was very dumb though and almost seems indicative of a lazy programming and development team. Those pieces of the Triforce could have been hidden inside of 8 dungeons just like the original Legend of Zelda game for the NES, but they opted to make you play around with charts and annoying warping or sailing to each location, then you just simply drop a grappling hook in the water and pull it up. I mean, come on, logically speaking, the Triforce is the most powerful item in the entire world of Hyrule and someone is just going to leave parts of it in a rusty box under the water for anyone to find? Yeah Right! There were 4 Major Dungeons in this game all of which were rather easy. Many of the enemies are also rather weak. Link has some good items like the Boomerang, The Grappling Hook, and Bow, but he is missing some of the standby's of previous Zelda's. I liked the idea behind the "Spoil's Bag" that extra items could be obtained from enemies ala an RPG, and they could even be stolen from enemies using the Grappling Hook, that was very cool, however you'll find that collecting these items aside from Joy Pendants is not vital to finish the game.
When playing this game, and encountering the different events of the game, a lot of things came into question regarding the plot. I've heard some people compare this game to A Link to the Past, and in many ways I can't imagine how that is even remotely possible. A Link to the Past has some very difficult dungeons, in fact in total it has 10 and that doesn't include Ganon's Tower, The Wind Waker only has 4 officially, and the Forsaken Fortress. The storyline of A Link to the Past also had a lot more going for it, than The Wind Waker and the major characters like Sahasralah, Link's Uncle, Agahnim, Ganon, etc seemed considerably more believable, realistic, or sinister and driven by identifiable motivations or emotions. The Wind Waker employs the use of comedy too much and it detracts significantly from the epic feel of the Zelda Legacy. Many characters are intentially made stupid, foolish, or rediculous. Now don't get me wrong, I love a good laugh, and games like Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, or Lunar: Eternal Blue are wonderful comedic (and animated as well) RPG's, but in The Wind Waker there are two strongly clashing ideas in this game, and the comedy is not impliemented correctly or just plain not funny at all. It makes it all seem like nonsense. I was very optimistic on the outset of playing this game because of the introduction, however as I got to playing the game it turned out to be nothing as epic and exciting as the introduction implied it would be about. In many ways, much of The Wind Waker is a plot designed for a child's mind to grasp, with glimmers of some depth sprinkled here and there, but just when you think it might get good it gets bad again, and then at the end, nothing makes sense and you are left without any sense of conclusion or completion other than knowing that Ganondorf is turned to stone and the King of Hyrule regrets his decision to flood the world and is telling Link and Zelda that Hyrule is gone forever. That's it!? Lame. The actual ending sequence though is better and more reasonable than what happened with all the dancing people at the end of Ocarina of Time but still quite a bit off the mark. It is ludicrious to call this game epic, but definitely a children's fairytale.
I have a lot of trepidations about recommending this game to everyone, this is nothing like Ocarina of Time, and many older gamers might not like this one as it were. I have many mixed feelings about The Wind Waker. It is easy to play, and probably easy to finish due to its short plot and few dungeons, etc, but I don't see this as being the kind game the majority of the gamers who are now above 18 will enjoy as much as others that are available or currently under development for other consoles aside from the GameCube. From what it seems, not enough consulting and collaboration was done on this game on Nintendo's part. It may have been a Miyamoto only project, with him holding a frim grip on the reigns, but one thing has started to show through with Miyamoto, and that is, that he is and always will be the king of puzzles, level design, gameplay, and control, and a pioneer in trying out new ideas, however he is significantly deficient in the understanding of what completes the whole image of an EPIC experience with complete deep characters, and a setting that exudes the emotion of an immersive experience. As well, I'm not sure if pressure from Nintendo caused this Zelda game to continue to backpedal the target audience of the game even younger, a consistent routine Zelda has been taking since Majora's Mask. Maybe The Wind Waker suffers from TOO MUCH innovation, and it devates so much so from the image of the series major console based games, that it isolates itself. I'll tell you what, you be the judge, play it and see if you like it. Understand for just general slash-em-up fun and puzzle solving this game will entertain you but if you expect to have an RPG-like experience you won't. I just hope Nintendo quickly discovers that the most games are now being sold to adult gamers before it's too late. I'm still a fan of Zelda games because of how great so many of them were, I just hope that "vision" that I have in my mind of an epic Zelda will someday come to fruition.
