The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

At some point before the GameCube came out there was a promotional video that showed some stuff that the system would be capable of doing. One of the scenes in the video showed a fight between Link and Ganon from the Legend of Zelda series. It looked pretty good for a demo.

Then, when rumblings of a new Zelda game being in development surfaced, lots of folks (me included) just kind of assumed that the super-awesome scene that we saw in the demo movie is going to be what the final game would look at. Turns out that we were all kind of wrong. Kind of very wrong.

The game, it turns out, was going to be cel-shaded, and what that meant was that everything in the game was going to look like a cartoon, and what that meant is that a lot of folks were completely thrown for a loop. In fact, the visual look of the game is really polarizing to fans of the series. I kind of got the impression that a lot of people thought they were ‘lied to’ when they saw that the game that they were getting wasn’t going to be the game they thought they were getting. But, I didn’t really mind too much.

I knew the game was going to be, beyond anything else, a Zelda game, and they hadn’t really let me down up to that point. And the graphics, I gave them a fair chance, and they did a pretty good job. The game looks good, cel-shaded or no.

The game takes place sometime after the events in Ocarina of Time, and somehow the world has become flooded. One day Link’s sister gets kidnapped by a big bird and Link has to go rescue her, and then save the world (natch).

Really, though, what you do is run to the bottom of a dungeon, collect the treasure inside, then try and find the next dungeon to do the same thing, but here’s the thing. The world is flooded completely, and all that’s left is a bunch of islands, which were mountaintops. The world is absolutely huge, and the islands are not. But you have to use your little skiff and sail around until you find the right island.

But that’s not all!

Late in thegame you have to find these shards of the Triforce. The problem is that they are literally hidden everywhere. You do get maps telling you the vicinities you have to search in, so you get to do a ton of sailing and a lot of plumbing the depths of the ocean. Kind of tedious, I’ll grant you that.

But the rest of the game was really good. My metric being that the game felt really short. Other than the sailing there was nothing about this game I didn’t like. Except for maybe the sidequest where you are tasked with taking pictures of enemies in the game to create statues. But, since that was optional, we won’t count that. I’d even go so far as to say that I liked this game better than the Wii offering.

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