CGA-2026-01 🕹️⛵🛡️ REMOVE CARTRIDGE ⏏️ The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Welcome back, Heroes of Wind! (For the sake of full disclosure I myself am not yet a Hero of Wind, but should be within an hour or so...)
Hopefully everyone enjoyed their second consecutive month on the high seas as much as I did - I'd say at this point, we can basically consider ourselves a pirate club!
I had initially planned to actually plan something to write about in this post, but due to taking on way too many things this month I unfortunately haven't really had a chance to do any research beyond my own (almost) completion of the game. Hopefully any Wind Waker veterans in here will be able to help us out with any important insight that I am certainly overlooking!
For me, the most notable thing about The Wind Waker is how strongly it influenced the most recent two Zelda games. I'd say it seems to be the game that contributed the most to the modern Zelda formula. The freedom it offers you in being able to simply choose a direction and start exploring is a feature that is more or less missing from most 3D Zelda games. Also, the sheer scale of the world is really only comparable to BOTW and Tears. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Koroks - I had no idea that was a Wind Waker thing!
While I had heard about it in passing, actually seeing the underwater kingdom in this game was a strangely nostalgic experience. The way they tied in the old angular Link statue was very cool; I imagine it is safe to assume that an extremely long time passed between Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker to allow for such evolutionary toon-ification.
I wish I had had more time to finish exploring more thoroughly and compile a list of secrets. I just finished exploring the map today, and know there are still plenty of things that I have yet to see. So instead of rushing through the last dungeon, I decided to post this for now, then come back to share more thoughts in the comments later.
Next month, join us as u/Kawa guides us on a trip to the lagoon... the Racing Lagoon!
| Month | Game | Host |
|---|---|---|
| February 2026 | Racing Lagoon | u/Kawa |
| March 2026 | Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls) |
u/J-Chiptunator |
Until next time, you filthy bilge rats!
CGA Announcement: We have officially ejected the cartridge for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. No worries if you're not done -- there is still plenty of time left in the month to play!
This topic is for people to share their parting thoughts and experiences. Spoilers are NOT required to be hidden for this topic, so if you're reading this before you've finished, be careful about reading any comments here.
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Thank you! I accidentally absconded from my duties
I'd be curious to hear what you guys see as the biggest strengths of The Wind Waker and/or other Zelda games. Is it the story? The world? Skill challenges? Intellectual challenges? Aesthetics? Collectathons? The humour? Are they games that you play to test yourself, or something that you play to relax? If you love The Wind Waker or Zelda games in general, what is it that you love the most?
I'm asking since I've always found it difficult to stick with Zelda games, and it wasn't different this month, either. I didn't complete The Wind Waker. I don't think I even got a third of the way through.
This is not to say that I didn't like the game. I have very fond memories of it. But in the end, whenever I thought about continuing the game, I found something else to do that I wanted to do more. I just didn't seem to be able to find the "hook" that would capture my interest. It's been the same with every Zelda game that I have tried over the years. I think I have played about half of them, yet never completed a single one. As charming as they are, the games in the series don't seem to either challenge me or allow me to be creative, and I don't find their stories all that interesting. I just seem to be moving from one place to another and stuff happens, with relatively little meaningful player agency.
Or that, anyway, is my feeling about the games. And so, I have started to accept that me and Zelda games just aren't compatible. Which is fine. But at the same time, I would love to be able to love Zelda games. There is clearly much to love about them and they are exceptionally well made. Just for some reason, they don't hook me.
I would therefore really love to hear what it is that hooked you in The Wind Waker. And was it different than with other Zelda games? Help me see the game through your eyes.
Will repurpose some thoughts since I think it's sort of an answer here.
I've played The Legend of Zelda, Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Oracle of Seasons, Wind Waker, Four Swords Adventures, Minish Cap, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, Skyward Sword, Link Between Worlds, Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom in some regard. Majora's Mask was very formative to me as my first console game, despite the fact I never got past Woodfall Temple. (I still haven't beat it!) The level of quality for these games has never been low, as a product. As an experience, there's a clear level of intention around most of their gameplay that serves the feeling of high adventure.
I only beat a few of em, though. And I find quite a few of them, personally, very boring and repetitive! I had little drive to complete them. Wind Waker ain't one of those, though. I LOVE Wind Waker.
There are a lot of faults dancing around the core Zelda tenets with stuff they tried in Wind Waker; the Tingle quest really could've used some tuning (pun intended!) (and it got tuning in HD!), the first dungeon being a stealth experience is a little wonky and negatively affects the pacing, and the experience is very compressed for a Zelda game. Rather than presenting the game and sort of nudging you to make your own decision about exploring it's nooks and crannies, the ocean kind of funnels you directly to those places during the latter half; from that, there seems to be less to discover yourself by the end. But iunno, man, I just don't care about any of the problems. I think this swashbuckles more than anything else I've ever played, faults be damned.
As mentioned in the thread, people saw this game with confusion at the start, and some celebrated when the Twilight Princess trailer signaled a return to a kind of conservative outlook on what Zelda "should" be, even before that game came out. You can boil Zelda games down to how they execute their gameplay motifs; dungeons, fights, Link's arsenal, the Hyrulean mythos, handling the Master Sword as the central macguffin, what the fuck an Octorok looks like, etc. But from a gameplay standpoint, Wind Waker feels kind of ironically on the conservative side of Zelda, very iterative - they don't really shake up the grand skeleton of the things that conventionally define the series. If anything, it goes backwards in raw number of dungeons.
Instead, I feel like they polished the formula into the finest sheen they could manage by distilling Zelda stuff. The lore feels like it's at its most well-developed up until this point. Link's weapons aren't too crazy, but the Deku Leaf especially allows you to get more free-form in navigation. Regular enemies are more interesting to fight than those in the earlier games. The dungeons work around very neat concepts, even if the side character gimmicks are a bit clunky via Command. And oh my god, the bosses. Chef's kiss. All of em. God I fucking love the bosses in this game.
I bounced off Twilight Princess, I bounced off Skyward Sword. I think I expected them to turn into something that captured a new, fresh way to tell the story. Personally I think the team was mired in Ocarina cues, and Ocarina was already technically mired in Link to the Past cues. Wind Waker tried to capture a different spirit without losing the general narrative, and I think that's what felt so fresh to little me at the time.
And man do I fucking love the aesthetics. The visual style never drops the weight of the story any more than 8-, 16-, or 64-bit graphics ever did, even while it's so super-deformed. It gets your guard down, but it delivers stuff like the Helmaroc King fight that's so grand and personal through that "cartoony" demeanor. The music drives all this with one of the most gorgeous, stylistically-diverse soundtracks the Nintendo sound team could manage. Even the writing feels very lively; every little thing on Windfall feels oddly quaint and loaded with some individual conflict, unaware of the conflict literally below the waters. The characters are more dimensional; many of the good guys are abrasive, and even the grand evil is extremely relaxed and charming. That all results in a very refreshing, cathartic climax, which is tinged with some bitterness but acts as a serious tale of movement. Nintendo didn't seem to get that message for a bit.
But! If you don't latch onto the aesthetics as much, or you don't think they prop up the gameplay narrative enough, or you just plain dislike Zelda in any reconstituted form? No, I think it's extremely valid to find it's "just" another Zelda game. Anyone who doesn't feel those so viscerally, though, I believe should give it a fair shake.
Big caveat for me, I played Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Wind Waker when they came out and then skipped all the proceeding Zelda games, as I didn't have a Wii, until Breath of the Wild. I never got all that far into those games when they first came out but have now played all of them all the way through multiple times.
I love all Zelda games, but Wind Waker brings a real sense of joy. I fucking love it, and contentiously might call it my favorite Zelda game. Like you say, it's got to be the most Swashbuckling game I've ever played. It was also the first open world game I ever played. I love how many little rabbit holes you can find yourself in. All of the funk characters. And apart from others, I freaking love the cartoony graphics.
Personally, all of the above kinda? At this point nostalgia is definitely a huge component. Link's Awakening was one of the first games I got with the original GameBoy, and Ocarina was a staple of middle/high school.
The story usually isn't anything special, but it's a classic framework. There's usually a lot of neat characters along the way, and a variety of settings. Even if they tend to be fire / ice / woods / etc. Some of the worlds are more interesting than others. Ocarina is a pretty straight fantasy kingdom, where WindWaker is WaterWorld. But they all at least have some character. The aesthetics tend to lean into a pretty unique blend of cozy and melancholic somehow. Though that's definitely strongest in Majora's Mask.
The puzzle aspect is really nice. There's an overworld with lots of mini-puzzles. Each dungeon is a larger inter-connected puzzle with each room being a smaller puzzle in the whole. The change in themes and tools lends to a large amount of variety in those puzzles. One of the less successful aspects of Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom for me is that the dungeons are pretty samey. There is variety, but not to the extent of the more linear games. They mostly compensate for that with a lot of the overworld locations, but still. The youtube series Boss Keys is a good review of how dungeons can be little puzzle boxes. Though like he says in the relevant video, WindWaker isn't super strong on the larger puzzle front. WW is a large influence the Switch games, maybe more than most other Zelda games.
I'm past the point of walking down a checklist to make sure I got every collectible/upgrade, but I do like that most random caves you poke your head in will give you something for your trouble. Metroidvanias tend to be my bread and butter gaming wise, and Zelda games are definitely in that vein.
For Windwaker specifically, mostly it's a vibe thing. I'm a huge sucker for travel mechanisms I find fun or relaxing. I went through Journey dozens of times. The art style is very expressive with Link's face and all the animation work on display. I was in the crowd that was upset we weren't getting a more 'dark/realistic' Zelda at the time but what we got is gorgeous in it's own right and lets them use 'cartoon' physics and logic in interesting ways. The combat especially has a lot more going on than previous Zelda games.
My forays into the Wind were brief, both then and now, but I thought I'd nudge everybody's memory of how contentious the graphical style was when it was originally unveiled.
Years after Ocarina of Time set the benchmark for how Zelda would look and feel in 3D, and at the height of mature gaming (we'll call the GTA3 era that for now), the cell shaded art in this game was roundly criticized when it came out in 2002.
In 2002, Nu-metal was in full force, the USA was in full homeland security/Iraq mode, so in the west at least, it seemed like Wind Waker was an odd choice.
Personally, I was still soaking up what I could for the Dreamcast, so I missed this. What do others remember about the initial release?
Anecdotally: the Spaceworld 2000 demo set expectations for a darker followup to Ocarina of Time and it seemed like a reasonable path after Majora's Mask had a more sinister tone as a side story. So when "Celda" showed up with a wildly different style and a goofy-looking Link in bright colors a lot of people were disappointed with the shift compared to what everyone previously thought was coming. Personally I didn't mind it and by the time the intro shifted to playing the classic melody I was already in love.
People wanting a more serious-looking Zelda got their wish a few years later with Twilight Princess, though in the decades since both there's been a lot of talk about how The Wind Waker's appearance aged better.
I didn't join in playing this time around, but a few memories from when it first came out:
One thing I loved to do in the game as a kid was sail around, it felt fun to explore the massive sea compared to the limited hub fields of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. It was mostly empty for technical reasons but even just piloting the boat through the waves with nothing on the horizon was a joy.
The final battle was an amazingly cinematic fight and I loved this version of Ganondorf, from his design to his characterization and motivation. "I coveted that wind, I suppose." sticks with me to this day.
There were a number of standout soundtrack pieces for Wind Waker, like Dragon Roost Island which is now a classic. The Hyrule Castle theme from A Link to the Past was one of my favorites from the franchise prior to this so hearing the new piano arrangement (starting at 10:15 in the final battle video) after it was absent from the previous two games made me freak out the first time I heard it and I sat there for a few minutes before moving on in the dialogue.
I didn't play through Wind Waker this month as I did so just a year or two back. It's a great game, though, and one that offers a level of openness unlike any other.
True, OoT and Majora's Mask offer you a great field to explore, and on N64 hardware they certainly feel expansive. Wind Waker however let's you go anywhere. I loved that sense of freedom and discovery. The waters felt just open enough to allow you to get lost, but with enough points of interest along the way to keep you engaged. You'd often stumble across little islands with treasure, challenges, or secrets to uncover.
I do remember getting a little lost in some of the dungeons. The environments were larger, and I felt the puzzles weren't quite as telegraphed as in previous games. Though I don't mind a little friction in a video game, and I don't think I ever needed to specifically look anything up. Though I did admittedly get stuck on the final boss for a while. The weak point of Puppet Ganon is its tail, but I was distracted by the arrow pointing at its head. Cheeky game.
I wouldn't say any of the dungeons specifically stood out to me or were that memorable, with the exception of Dragon Roost Island. Despite being an early dungeon, I loved the visuals, the sense of scale, the story beats, the epic boss fight, the grappling hook, and that brilliant theme song. Great dungeon overall.
There's a lot of optional content in Wind Waker, but I think most of it is discoverable without guides. The game offers direction with its charts and hints, or even the Tingle Tuner if you've got the hardware for it.
I originally played Wind Waker for the GameCube, but had only borrowed the game and so hadn't completed it. My more recent playthrough was the HD version, which did add a few niceties. I didn't mind the slight change in art style, and most of the changes were quality-of-life things to smooth out the rougher parts of the game. Though I'm not sure if I liked the more powerful sail. It was convenient, but I liked the sea being a little bit of a threat. Maybe it could've been broken down into multiple upgrades throughout the game, or moved to a later point.
One thing I really enjoy about the Zelda series is how experimental each game is. They create a new identity for each game, making major changes to gameplay, tone, and even genre (talking 'bout you, Zelda II).
Wind Waker is no exception. A game about piracy and sailing is completely unique in the franchise. And of course, the unique toon cel shading stands out as well. The game still looks gorgeous today, regardless of if you're playing the original or HD remake. Everything from the visual effects, HUD, and even the sound effects help support that unique aesthetic.
It stings me a little bit to think of anything from the GameCube era as being "retro", but I guess I need to accept that truth now. So yes, Wind Waker is a solid retro game. It may have been a little controversial on release, but it has long-since shaken that off and earned its reputation as a fan favourite.
I think for me it came down to the treatment of Ganondorf and Zelda. The villain finally felt like he was a character with some real motive (whether or not it was bs). Tetra finally gave Zelda something other than being a voiceless kidnapped Zelda. You could argue Sheik gave Zelda some character, but she was mostly just speaking in riddles in Ocarina of Time. I think this was the turning point where both story and characters were beginning to matter to the series.
The final thing to add is that this art style was how the creator originally imagined the first Legend of Zelda to look like, and this was the first time the technology could achieve it. It’s the Zelda game that hasn’t really aged visually.