Reviewed by CL on 12/28/2004
I've always been a huge fan of the Legend of Zelda series. Some of my fondest memories are of playing a Link to the Past with my brothers until the wee hours of the morning and playing Ocarina of Time on Gamecube. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is also another one of my favorite games, but many players are put off by the different graphics and the large time investment that is required before the game starts to give back.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is an experience that has reminded me to have faith in a game. At first, I wasn't really into this game. In fact, I even considered quitting the game because it I just wasn't excited about playing it. I almost felt obliged to play it simply to get my money's worth. However, after playing for about 10 hours, my view on the game has done a complete 180. Now, this is the only game that I play when I have the time.
This game plays like Ocarina of Time on some major performance enhancing drugs. Although it took me a while to realize, the game is much much bigger, has a lot more to do, takes a lot more time, and has much better gameplay and controls.
The reason why this game requires some faith is because there is it requires a longer attention span. When I first played it, I had just finished Ocarina of Time. In that game, something cool (like getting a heart piece or setting off on a new sidequest) happened probably every half hour. This worked well for me because I've been told by several people that I have A.D.D. Now when I picked up the Wind Waker, these events only happened probably every hour. This made the game seem slow and drawn out. In addition to this, I was overwhelmed in the beginning by the sheer amount of things to see and collect, but I wasn't able to do any of them because I didn't have the proper equipment. Initially, these were some of the turn offs of the game. But now that I've spent some time and acquired some of the necessary equipment, the game is really opening up and I see that these things that were initially negatives are becoming huge positives.
I can't tell you how cool I think the graphics in this game are. The game is entirely cell shaded and no matter what those Wind Waker critics say, it looks good. In fact, its probably the 2nd best cell shaded game that I've seen (only beaten by Sly Cooper and the Thevious Racoonus for PS2). The first time that you see Hyrule Castle is absolutely breathtaking. You could practically take a picture of the screen, have it framed, and hang it above the fireplace.
