The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker boasts a unique art style – a wondrous cel-shaded look that simulates a cartoon – and a great story – with the best antagonist in the series to date –, but it is sadly bogged down by some uninspired dungeon design and an overly repetitive structure that focus too much on combat.

The story begins the day Link is about to receive the green robes that symbolize his passage into adulthood. The festivities on his island, however, are interrupted when a group of pirates arrives in pursuit of a gigantic bird. After helping the pirates rescue their leader, Tetra, Link watches his sister being kidnapped by the same bird and realizes he now needs to travel with Tetra to free her.

The game’s narrative is its main strength. The affection that Link feels for his sister, for example, is the first element to be established when the character wakes up, which makes the kidnapping more dramatically effective. In the same way, the hero’s goal, which starts being personal in nature, quickly evolves into the epic undertones expected of the series. Containing some twists and turns that, although expected, still work very well by reinforcing the narrative role of certain characters, the story in The Wind Waker is more agile and busier than that of Ocarina of Time.

Link’s character arc is a well-developed coming-of-age story. The game begins by interrupting the preparations for his transition into adulthood, and his journey serves to complete the process: if at first, characters see the boy’s courage as foolishness because of his age and appearance, near the end, they already respect him and understand that he is able to fulfill his destiny. The story’s strength, however, comes from trying to humanize, even if just briefly, its most iconic villain: Ganondorf here isn’t destroying the world for the sake of it, but has a proper motivation. The story also makes great use of the mythology built up so far, bringing the Triforce to center stage, which has the potential to thrill longtime fans.

The game’s art style, based on the cel-shading technique – which renders 3D images in a way that gives them a 2D animation look – effectively conveys the characters’ emotions, especially Link’s, with his big, expressive eyes. It’s the main responsible for giving a light and comical tone to the events. The exaggerated expressions Link makes when he is about to be “thrown” into a certain fortress, for example, are funny precisely because they are able to capture the absurdity of the scene. And when a fairy reveals to Link he’s her type, the expression on the boy’s face becomes an amusing mixture of embarrassment and a confident look of “Yeah, I’m used to it,” which sells the scene’s humor.

The Wind Waker also innovates when it comes to its setting: the horse-riding fields of Hyrule and Termina go away in favor of a great open ocean. Using a baton, Link can command the wind and use his mysterious sailing boat – who speaks – to explore the countless islands and lost ships that populate the place. The game makes great use of this theme, placing pirates as central characters in the narrative and a ghost ship haunting certain waters, introducing battles at sea with cannons, and even guiding exploration through treasure maps that mark with an X the place where treasures are hidden.

However, if the story and art style in The Wind Waker certainly work, the same cannot be said about most of its dungeons. The first two suffer from being too simple and linear, for example. In Dragon Roost Cavern, there is only one path to follow until the very end. Whenever Link returns to a room that he has been before, he’s usually still walking in a straight line, which means that we rarely need to worry about the layout of the dungeons: after winning a challenge, a shortcut always opens to take us by the hands back to the rooms where we need to go.

Shortcuts are useful in complex spaces that invite exploration, making it both rewarding and practical. But in The Wind Waker, they are used to prevent the player from leaving the pre-established path. Instead of being a reward for exploration, shortcuts produce linearity: they make the way to an earlier room the only logical way to proceed. One of the last challenges of this first dungeon, then, is silly in its simplicity: when we finally get to a dead-end, what we need to figure out is that we simply need to turn around to get to the boss’s room. Meanwhile, back at the Deku Tree in Ocarina of Time, we had to understand both the layout of the place and the mechanics introduced so far to figure out how to clear the way to the place’s underground area.

The third temple, called Tower of the Gods, is the best one precisely because it abandons linearity on its first floor. We are free to explore the place, since the map, the compass, and the key can all be acquired in any order. Its puzzles are also well-designed, introducing two different mechanics and then combining them in one final challenge: at one point, it is necessary to position blocks to be used as platforms whenever the water level rises; at another, we must use wooden sticks to light torches; and finally, we’re tasked to use the blocks to pass with the flaming sticks over the water.

The last two dungeons, in turn, present some problems in how companions are implemented. Link’s partner in the Earth Temple at least has a purpose when solving puzzles – they redirect rays of light – and moving around the place – they provide a way to reach distant platforms without spending magic. Link’s companion in the Wind Temple, on the other hand, is completely useless: they only create trees in predetermined places so that they can be targeted by the Hookshot, and they even spend most of the time trapped in a cage. The key problem of these companions, however, is that they don’t compensate for the fact that Link needs to spend a great deal of time playing a song to control them from a distance, which pauses the action constantly – it’s like the iron boots in the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time, but worse.

The Earth Temple, in particular, also suffers from being thematically displaced. It is artistically bland, with no striking features in its design justifying its name: it would have made even more sense if the temple was called Shadow or Light Temple instead, since its specific mechanic involves both elements. In addition, there is no need for the Wind Temple to be solved after the Earth one. The game could have opened its structure and let us choose which of the two to explore first, but instead forces us to tackle the Earth Temple first for no good reason. One final detail about dungeons is that they usually have one or two optional rooms containing treasure maps. This is a setback in comparison to the several fairies available in Majora’s Mask, but it’s still better than nothing, serving to break, even if briefly, the exacerbated linearity of the dungeon design.

However, the main problem afflicting The Wind Waker is the absurd focus on its combat system. While previous games offered a number of secondary activities, such as solving puzzles, protecting caravans, preventing alien abductions, betting in races, and target practicing, The Wind Waker continually puts “defeat all enemies” as the goal for the player without any special context. Whenever Link finds a boat, he must defeat all the enemies inside. Whenever he climbs into a lookout post, he must defeat all enemies up there. Whenever he finds an island shaped like the face of a die, he must destroy all the cannons around the place. Almost every time he enters a cave, he must destroy all the enemies there. Sometimes the cave looks like a sanctuary, sometimes it looks like a cave, but that doesn’t make the objective different from killing all the enemies in there. The climax of this design is a cave with more than thirty levels in which the challenge in each of them is… to kill all the enemies. As an extra task in the midst of many different ones, this cave would have worked, but coming after many other battles it’s just tiresome.

Since The Wind Waker is not an action game, but one about adventure, its combat system is not nearly as complex enough to sustain so much repetition. Yes, in comparison to its predecessors, it’s a vast improvement, containing a kind of counterattack by pressing the A button at the right time, and giving us the option of using weapons dropped by enemies. These additions, however, don’t change the fact that it remains extremely simple with just one attack button, with some variations depending on the direction of the analog stick and whether the enemy is locked on or not. Enemies, in turn, may have a striking design but rarely need some strategy to be beaten: Darknuts need to take an initial counterattack, while Moblins are easier to hit from behind and that’s it. This coupled with the fact that the difficulty of the game is not high – although it can be increased in the Wii U version – makes The Wind Waker’s hundreds of battles a chore. After all, the first five Darknuts we face will provide the same challenge as the next twenty. Just as the first five Bokoblins will be identical to the subsequent fifty.

Even the missions surrounding the secondary characters are tied to combat. Each monster, when defeated, can drop a specific item: Moblins drop collars, while Bokoblins, pendants. By delivering a certain amount of these items to certain characters, Link gets rewards. There’s a teacher, for example, who loves pendants and her students decide to hire Link to present her with twenty of them. Unlike Majora’s Mask, few minor characters in the game have any semblance of a narrative arc or even personality. The teacher, for example, likes pendants, and that’s it. A frustrated boy sitting on a ladder just needs a random photo to be happy for the rest of the game. While Majora’s Mask had a love story that encompassed many missions and had a strong tragic nature, the one present here is resolved quickly and without major complications.

The Wind Waker also doesn’t show a lot of care with language, making all the characters speak with the same voice: a feat, considering that some of them are pirates. In the game, the dialogue always gets straight to the point, being much more concerned with transmitting information to the player than reflecting the personality of the speaker. While the fairy Tat’l in Majora’s Mask differs from the Na’vi in Ocarina of Time because of the harshness of her comments, Link’s accompanying ship in The Wind Waker cannot differentiate itself even from its fellow companions in the game. Some characters, as is customary in the franchise, are in fact eccentric, as evidenced by the naval battle minigame attendant, who simulates a children’s story with pictures, reproducing the sounds of the confrontations, but the few traits they have are due to their outlandish design and not to a particular voice or interesting character arc.

The game even fails to make most of its rewards relevant. Some maps purchased near the end, for example, tell you where to get treasure maps that lead to pieces of heart, as well as the location of hidden caves and lookouts. However, they don’t point out which treasure maps have already been obtained or which caves have already been explored by us, rendering them useless. One, for example, says there are five treasure maps leading to pieces of heart on Windfall Island. But if we have not marked somewhere how many we have already picked up at each location over the course of the twenty-five-hour adventure, this information will be of no use at all.

Finally, the Wii U version of The Wind Waker deserves some additional comments. It expands the limit of photos that can be taken from three to twelve, making its secondary mission less unbearable, and decreases the waiting time to pull treasures from the seabed and the number of maps that need to be deciphered by a certain character at the end of the game. On the other hand, the new lighting system used, with its overuse of bloom, although effective in open places, makes Link look like a plastic doll in various situations – breaking the cell-shaded look – such as when opening chests. It is also worth mentioning that this HD version contains a sail that doubles the speed of Link’s boat, making exploration faster.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker may have innovated with its unusual art style and told an exciting story, but because of its uninspired dungeons, repetitive combat, and bland quest design, it never manages to reach the same highs as its predecessors.

January 17, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on February 17, 2017.