Yarr! Explorin' the mighty seas is... boring? Aw, shucks.
Yes, it brings back the days as a child, playing as a pirate with all the other boys at school. All the cool kids did it, and we’d all chase the losers down and bully them. Sad, but it was the life of a rebel, a rule breaker, a pirate. One thing Nintendo got everyone hyped up about in Wind Waker (WW) was its massive sea to sail around and explore. And I’ll tell you, it’s huge; it might take 10 minutes to sail from one end to the other (in real time). As a result, one of the big things WW is also a double-edged sword; it can be so darn boring cruising the seas. I mean yeah, massive and dangerous is the life for a wannabe pirate but there’s so many gaps of boredom or frustration that it kills all hope of enjoyment. It’s unfortunate that you spend such a long time out at sea.
It isn’t just the long gaps between destinations; the things you do can quickly become horrifically repetitive. You’ll shoot sharks, dodge tornadoes, shoot sharks, kill octopus-like creatures, shoot sharks, get attacked by canons and last but most certainly not least and easily the most frequent of encounters, shoot sharks.
It’s either fun or frustrating the first couple times; killing the octopus things is rather enjoyable. You float around it in your boat and have to shoot at specific point on it’s massive body to take the beast down. It’s a challenge at first and thus entertaining. However, the next one you slay is much easier; you’ve already slain this creature before. And so it becomes boring; the challenge is gone, and all you’re doing is pressing buttons while staring at the screen. You’re just not there because it very consciously feels redundant.
And then there’s the shark shooting, which is just frustrating. You can’t move about in your tiny ship - which, I might add, has a name and talks to you - so you’re restricted to standing still when you’re picking off the attackers. That makes the battles much more frustrating, if not more difficult. To top it off, sharks generally attack in packs, and at times will swarm you so that even if you shoot one, the other will ram into the boat and knock you out. Sharks are merely the aggravating mosquitoes of the sea; weak, when you think about it, but terribly annoying and difficult to kill. It’s the seemingly simpler things like these that makes traveling the sea the burden that it is.
Without these annoyances, I still couldn’t say that traveling the seas would be entertaining. It’d be no longer frustrating, but ten times more boring. It’s tough to imagine how Nintendo had such a hard time making the seas interesting. Even the treasure searching’s a boring experience. Without the maps that tell you where to find the treasure, aimlessly looking is about the most boring thing you could do next to trying to find a ladybug in a massive field in the winter. And, ironically, it’s either frustrating or boring trying to find the maps that show you where the treasure is, depending on what you have to do to get the particular map. Everything that has to do with the sea simply doesn’t work, and it’s a shame because there was so much potential at hand to make it what Nintendo makes it out to be.
But the sea isn’t really what WW’s all about. Zelda games have always been about traveling from dungeon to dungeon while picking up new weapons, items and whatever along the way, while meeting people and going off on various side-quests. In this regard, WW succeeds. There are five dungeons (or ‘temples’) in WW, and none are particularly boring. Each do what they do best well and make WW what a Zelda game should be. Which leads to my next point.
WW looks like just about the weirdest Zelda game, ever. The other thing WW has going for it is its visuals, which were extremely controversial when announced and shown. You see, WW neglects the realistic looks of its predecessors and goes rather for a cartoon look; cell shading. Cell shading is, if you will, the fad of the early current generation. Thick black lines outline flat character models with limited detail. Cel Damage and Jet Set Radio Future utilized it, and it did have a fancy look. And while the initial awe of the look has long worn off, WW utilizes it extremely well. Link (our sword wielding protagonist) looks extremely smooth in animation. The environments surrounding him have an equally smooth feel, and looks like it was coloured with a paint program on the computer. Just flat colours. Bright and cheerful. Happy looking. A unique feeling.
WW does that well - create feeling. You’ll feel like you’re in danger when you’re surrounded by psycho human-rat things with huge heads. You’ll feel alone and in danger constantly while out at sea in the night. You’ll feel powerful defeating the swarm of enemies that had just been surrounding you. Everything else about WW comes together to form this feeling; the cell shaded graphics, the cheerful poppy music of the towns, the size of the creatures compared to the size of Link, everything. Zelda games have always been successful in this regard, so it comes as no surprise that WW is equally successful.
WW starts off at your home island, Outset. You live in a cozy home near the sea’s shore with your Grandma and sister, Aryll. You’ve fallen asleep on the lookout by the docks; it would appear Link’s had one too many drinks. It’s his birthday today, and Aryll’s there with him to celebrate. She gives him her prized telescope as a gift to Link, but only for a day (what a rip!). She eggs Link on to try out the telescope, and so he does. He quickly spots a massive bird carrying a strange girl in its talons and behind it sees pirates on their massive ship, shooting canon balls at the beast. Several shots later, they hit it, and the girl falls into the forest on the cliff of Outset. Link, feeling like a hero, goes to rescue her.
You’ll earn your sword in the beginning of the game by sparring with an old man who lives with his brainiac brother. This gets you used to WW’s relatively simple controls and immediately makes you a master of the sword. Pumped and ready for action, Link takes his sword and scales the cliff to get into the forest, where he’s greeted by the game’s first deadly enemy.
The enemies in WW range from dumber to dumber, at least in comparison with your own knowledge. But that isn’t so much of a problem as you’ll often find yourself battling many of them at a time. In the beginning, however, you only have to take on one at a time; ease into combat. Swinging the sword is simple with the push of a single button, and a new addition to WW is special timed attacks. Pressing ‘A’ at precisely the right moment (which is indicated by the game) leads to a jump-and-slash attack that severely damages the early enemies, sometimes even killing them. The return of the spinning slash (or ‘Sarack Attack’ as coined by children who name moves off of the sound Link makes when he does them) makes WW’s combat complete-feeling and allows you to never get bored of fighting enemies. Constantly moving about while taking on the evil moblin that’s trying to smash your skull in is entertaining, for sure.
And so you clear the forest of evil and find the girl. She comes through and wakes up, right around the time her pirate crony finally comes up to see if she’s ok. And so without any thanks to you for saving her, she quickly heads out with the henchman, leaving you in the forest. Rude as she is, life is life, and so you exist back into fresh air, where you see your sister Aryll who’s come up to see you. But the bird has returned to reclaim its prey, and accidentally swoops up Aryll instead of the rude girl! Bent on getting his sister back, Link joins the pirates on their adventure and goes to search for her, and so begins your adventure in WW.
That type of action sums up what you’ll basically be doing outside of dungeons, but inside dungeons is a relatively different story. You earn many different weapons throughout the game; the boomerang, the hookshot (which shoots a hook attached to a chain out of a mechanical arm-hold-thingy) and bombs, for a few examples. You will need to utilize each and every one of these in the dungeons, which are mostly puzzle based. Yes, there’s your fair share of combat in them and that’s all nice and fun, but the real charm of the Zelda games is always finding out how to conquer the dungeons that stand in the way of your task. In WW, you get such puzzles, and they range from obvious to mind-bending depending on the temple and the train of thought you’re in. If you like mind games, Zelda succeeds in that regard.
The one problem Zelda dungeons have always had is the predictable bosses. They’re fun to toy with, but it’s almost always immediately obvious what you have to do to kill them. In each dungeon, you find a new weapon. You will always have to use that weapon against the dungeon boss in order to defeat it. Because of that, the task is much easier than it should’ve been. It would’ve helped to have some variety in the bosses too, or several stages of a boss that changes what you have to do to hurt it so that some challenge could at least be thrown into the mix. However, even the bosses with multiple stages carry the same basic goal and it makes each boss a breeze. It’s kind of embarrassing, really, but it was to be expected, as the same has been for every other Zelda game. Which is unfortunate.
However, the one thing you can never take away from a Zelda game is how fun it is. Combat, puzzles and bosses are all fun enough to warrant you taking this twenty hour journey. The massive seas slow you down and the repetition is apparent some of the time, but slashing up enemies is such a treat and figuring out how to clear a room of enemies without using your sword is even more of one. The variety of enemies with different requirements for destruction and the wide range of themes that are applied to the dungeons make for a solid romp that is above the average action adventure. WW is a fun Zelda title, if not with the wrong ideas. Had Nintendo come up with a different gimmick to suit WW we might have one of the better Zelda titles; as it stands, it’s just a competent entry that’s up to Zelda standards that could’ve been much better.