Gaming The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

[slice]

Well I liked the Wind Waker, although I do think it was a bit easy too. I just rented it and I finished it. (with a little help at the end from some websites) I've never been able to finish many games either. In fact that was only my second game I've ever finished.

I'd say to get it though. I'd buy it, but I can't afford it.

[Desbreko]

[color=indigo]Yeah, one of my main gripes with TWW is its difficulty. I came out of almost every fight in the game with full life--even room fulls of Darknuts, Wizrobes, and Moblins. Enemies just give you way too many hearts when you kill them compared to the amount of damage they do. I think it would've been a lot better if enemies did about twice the damage (with the exception of the Darknuts' jumping attack) and you never got three hearts out of those orb thingies.

Pretty much the only fights where I didn't just totally wipe the floor was the last form of [spoiler]Puppet Ganon[/spoiler] and the end boss. The last form of [spoiler]Puppet Ganon[/spoiler] was just so dang hard to hit with the arrows, so I'd be sitting there aiming and it'd just come up and smack me since it moves so fast that you can't really dodge effectively. For the end boss, it really wasn't that hard, it just took me a bit to get the pattern and timing down. Once I did that it was pretty easy.

I really hope they step up the difficulty for the sequal to TWW. If they don't I'm going to be really disappointed. I'm still waiting for a 3D Zelda game with a difficulty level on par with A Link to the Past and the Game Boy games. Ocarina of Time Master Quest was an improvement, but it still wasn't on the same level. Though at least the puzzle difficulty has remained strong in the 3D games.[/color]

[Zidane]

When i first played this game i thought meh how crap.. I strongly hate cel shading with a passion but as i got into the game and started playing it, the other pros shone through. I now play it all the time although i still hate cel shading i think TWW is and awesome game. If u liked the others definatley get this one.

[Fyxe]

[size=1][color=darkblue]I, myself, havn't played much of the game. However, I did get to play about ten minutes of it in Big K-mart a few weeks or so ago. What I did experience was very good. When I first saw the previews of the game I didn't think the game would look very good with the cell shading style. But when I actually got to play it, it was rather good. I do believe the game pulled it off well, it didn't really bother me after I got used to it. I may not have seen much, but even so, it was amazing.
Perhaps someday I will actually get to play more. I'm hoping to save up for a GCN and get Wind Waker.
I've heard great things about this game as well, it makes me even more determined to play more. I think they are still pulling along the Zelda series rather well. I wonder what they will do in the future for it.[/color][/size]

[Gavin]

[color=#518CBD][font=trebuchet ms]In my own personal opinion and one shared by several others, [b]The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker[/b] is one of the, if not [i]the[/i] best games ever produced by Nintendo. Now I was once quite sceptical of the Cel-shaded graphics too, wondering why the hell Nintendo would have gone for such as childish type of animation. I still think they are childlike animations and that is exactly what made me fall in love with this game. I mean what better way to capture the magic of a story than by using such colourful and bright animations and characters [I mean come on look at the King of Red Lions and tell me it doesn't look cool].

My one and only gripe about this game is the fact that it was far, far too easy. I can normally finish a Zelda game once but to the challenge [except A Link to the Past] but this game I finished without ever dying, ever, not even once. Granted I always had a fairy but I never used it, I mean that is some sort of record for me on a Zelda Game. I thought that the dungeons were well laid out, but that didn't excuse the ease of the enemies inside.

I enjoyed a lot of the mini-games there in, the letter sorting was a real pain sometimes, but it was enjoyable none the less, then again any game that has Tingle in it and his well over the top prices may warrant a warning. My brother who also plays the game with me used to gripe about not having his sea chart complete, as a piece of advice I would say that you should just stock up on fish food and spend a while just sailing and completing your map. It may take a while but it is worth it in the end.

I would without a doubt recommend this game to any true video game fan, behind the cute exterior lies a very well thought out, very well made and very, very enjoyable game.[/color][/font]

[NorykoAngelcry]

[SIZE=1][COLOR=darkred]I really enjoyed The Wind Waker for the GAMECUBE. I have to say it ranks up in there in the Zelda series. I don't think that I was really looking forward to the cell-shading to begin with. However, it was a Zelda game, and the big Nintendo guy - Miyamoto - was in charge of it. . that alone told me the game would be good.

In ranks of the recent Zelda games, this would have to come in right behind OoT. I think I enjoyed some of the earlier boat travels. I mean, once I was able to move around a lot faster, it made it that much more rewarding to move through the water.

I give this game 5 out of 5 stars. . it is highly enjoyable, and some of the games kept you coming back for more and more =)[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[GreatBird]

I was just wondering what you guys thought of the last Zelda game. (The Windwaker) Many people have been bashing it. I thought that the game it self was awesome but the graphics arent very good along with the gannon fight that was a waste of time compared to the ocorina of time fight. Other than that it was good but what did you guys think? :cool:

[2010DigitalBoy]

I thought the graphics were great, overrated and overly hated, but great. I think the game itself is very great, but I don't play much of that kind of game, so I haven't gotten all that far.

[Semjaza]

I think the game looked great, personally. Dragon's Roost's opening was freaking amazing. It's a small thing to just have particles flying around, but coupled with the style it just looked really impressive. Animation rocked too, which is always a bonus.

Storywise it's mostly the same old stuff, but I was glad to see a further development of Zelda and, even more surprisingly, Ganondorf. His last words in the game were something I didn't expect and easily added a whole new side to him that I've never considered.

I'm not so big on the gameplay, though. It's still a good game, but really, it's the same stuff we've played before. Nothing all that new was done with the battle system or item usage or dungeon layouts. I guess you could count those tag team style dungeons, but I couldn't stand those. It also didn't help that there weren't many dungeons to begin with. I don't know about anyone else, but when I found myself getting major, important items in one room caves I was pretty annoyed.

Plus it's just way too easy. The fact that a large pig in your home village does more damage to you than any other boss in the game is ridiculous.

[Dragon Speaker]

The pig thing was to be expected. If there's one thing Zelda games can teach us, it's that barnyard animals are [B]dangerous![/B] Okay, maybe only in video games, but still...

But the game was good. It was definately a new style of graphics that I must admit made me grimace at times, but it was still well-used and breath-taking at best. (Example: [spoiler]Sinking down to Hyrule! That part looked pretty darn good, IMHO[/spoiler]) (Did I even have to spoiler-tag that one? I swear everyone's beaten the game...)

The story, well...It was usual. But it did grant an interesting look into Ganondorf's reasons for ruling Hyrule. And what happened to Hyrule... :animecry:

And I'm glad that the gameplay remained basically the same. If the controls and stuff had changed completely...*shudders* And the dungeons had some neat puzzles!

And I really loved the music! I go hang out at Dragon Roost Island just to listen to the music most of the time. :animeswea

[King Ex]

This game was really good. It also has sweet graphics i love cell shaded it and i think it was cool that they gave link emotions. The only problem with this game is that it was to short so The Legend of Zelda OoT is still personally my favorite one.

[Goodbye, Face]

I found that I gave up in frustration more often playing this Zelda than any other. I loved the graphics, the story had its cool moments. Seriously, I was going from GameFAQ to GameFAQ for second opinions on this one. Like, I knew what to do, but it was too hard to do so for some reason. Granted, when I played it, I hadn't played any Zelda games since A Link to the Past. Since then, I've gotten Ocarina of Time (for two bucks!) and liked it a lot more than Wind Waker.

[Desbreko]

[color=#4B0082]I merged this with the original TWW thread, just so people know.

Anyway, my opinion of the game could probably already be found scattered throughout this thread. ... But I still like talking about it, heh.

Personally, I really fell in love with the cel shaded style after playing the game for a bit. I was really sceptical of the graphics when I saw that first Space World trailer, but as I saw more of the game, and then actually played it for myself, I started to like what I was seeing. I think if more people just looked at the graphics for what they are, and not what they aren't (Ocarina of Time, or Twilight Princess now), they wouldn't have near as much of a problem with them.

Now, about the only problem I have with the graphics is the Link character model. I do still think it could've been done a bit better, mainly to make it so more people wouldn't look at it and go "Ew," and dismiss the entire game based on that alone. The rest of the characters I think are fine. Wacky and outrageous sometimes, but fine -- just look at some of the characters in OOT, or MM especially, and try to tell me you don't see the same sorts of characters. Zelda has had weird NPCs since LTTP, and I love it.

On the gameplay side of things, I think TWW is an improvement over OOT and MM. I don't know about others, but combat in TWW was much, much more fun for me than OOT/MM ever was. Yes, the game is extremely easy and I could wade through 100+ baddies and only take a few hits (Shark Island, anyone?), but trashing those hundreds of baddies was [i]fun.[/i] OOT's combat, on the other hand, is so easily broken that it's not even funny. Stalfos Knights? No problem, constant spin attacks will take them down faster and easier than anything else. Iron Knuckle? Jump attack, two backflips, jump attack, two backflips ... repeat until the armor is gone, then move in and mash the B button until it dies because, you know, it can't attack while being hurt. The [i]only[/i] reason OOT and MM are harder is because enemies do more damage and don't drop as many hearts as in TWW -- it certainly isn't due to the enemies themselves being harder to kill.

Dungeon crawling I found about the same as OOT -- though MM is a step below both OOT and TWW in this regard, if you ask me -- provided you disregard the enemies, as combat is a separate issue. I did enjoy the partner dungeons, but not really any more or less than the others, so I don't really have much to say about those. The main thing is just that there are only five in the game, so OOT does have an advantage there.

And I'll leave the sailing thing alone, since it's pretty much just one of those "love it or hate it" things. I personally enjoyed sailing around to explore each and every island, and getting every treasure chart, but that's me. I love wandering around and exploring in games, so it suited my tastes fine. Though if there's one thing I would fault with it, it would be the lack of real weather and enemy hazards out at sea. I mean, you shouldn't be able to start sailing in a direction, set the controller down to go do something else for ten minutes, and come back to be exactly across the map from where you started.

As for the story ... who plays a Zelda game for the story? If you do, go play an RPG instead; you'll walk away much more satisfied, heh. I did like TWW's story, though, and it was nice to see the characters with more personality. I wouldn't say it's any better or worse than previous storylines in the series. And at the very least, it was more original than OOT's storyline, which was almost completely cut-and-paste out of LTTP, except for a few details required due to the game being the first in the timeline.

And thus closes yet another of my mini essays/rants/whatevers about TWW. :animesmil[/color]

[James]

[color=#332E1D][font=franklin gothic medium]It's still very tough for me to really place TWW, in terms of favourite Zelda games.

I would have to say that, bar a few issues, Majora's Mask was probably my favourite of the 3D Zelda games. It wasn't as expansive as OoT, at least in terms of dungeons, but I think it was the better and more refined game. Still, it's a little tough to make the comparison in some ways, because MM was also quite a divergence in many respects. It's hard to view it as a "traditional Zelda".

In the final analysis, I think that The Wind Waker is something that "could have been but wasn't". Yes, it was a great game in its own right. And as a Zelda game, it did make several key improvements (graphics/art style, combat). But it dropped the ball in some ways too. The dungeons were mostly pretty good, but I would be hesitant to say that they were anything better than OoT or MM. And the gameplay surrounding the dungeons was better in the two previous games, in my opinion. Remember what it was like to walk out into the stormy ocean in the darkness, following that glowing seahorse? (At least, I think it was a seahorse). Pure brilliance. That whole atmosphere is burned into my memory - The Wind Waker is memorable, but it doesn't stand out as much as its predecessors to me.

I suppose I would say that the dungeons are "average" for a Zelda game. They're good, but I'd be very hesitant to say that they're better than the last two games.

The biggest issue, I felt, came from the Triforce quest at the end. I've mentioned this on numerous occasions but I really think it's the game's single biggest flaw. Not only was it a [i]painful [/i]aspect of the game (and the first time I've actually experienced something so off-putting in a Zelda title), but it also demonstrated a sloppy design approach from EAD. And that was highly disappointing. Had the two "missing dungeons" been included instead, I'd probably have been a lot happier. It'd have given the game reasonable length, but without compromising gameplay in such a significant manner.

In some respects, this makes me feel hesitant even about Twilight Princess. My hope is that Twilight Princess will absolutely surpass Wind Waker in terms of getting things right in every respect - without adding clumsy busywork to the game. That's my hope, anyway. I found it hard to believe that Aonuma was responsible for both The Wind Waker and Majora's Mask, considering that the latter seemed to be such a more polished game, in some respects.

I suppose that for me, Wind Waker was to Zelda what Mario Sunshine was to the Mario series. It was great in its own right - a darn sight better than most games. But somehow it missed the boat in a few respects, which was ultimately disappointing. But it's not a terribly bad disappointment, afterall, Zelda does bring with it very high expectations for good reason.[/color][/font]

[BlueYoshi]

[color=darkred]TWW is an awesome game, there's no denying that, but yes, in comparison to other existing Zelda titles, there's quite a bit to be desired.

My thoughts on the dungeons in TWW more or less reflect James' opinion; while they were great to play through, they weren't anything special compared to its predecessors' dungeons, meaning that there's still room for improvement. I found this a little disappointing, but the worst case scenario was the fact that we'd still be living in the past by the time the next Zelda title rolled along... as in, all the tweaks and improvements that were needed in OOT that we expected to be in TWW would now have to wait until TTP. Confusing, yes, but I hope you get where I'm coming from. :animeswea

As for the whole Triforce quest debacle, I feel that that was TWW's way of trying to add something new to compensate for the lack of motif in the dungeons' designs. Even though it was executed poorly, it's still appreciated. All that's left for me is to hope that these rather big nook and crannies get the attention they need during TTP's development.[/color]

[The Spectacular Professor]

I just finished replaying.I have come to a conclusion:

Wind Waker stands the test of time. In fact, it aces.

The battle system is still top-notch. While TP does have a few things going for it, The lack of the Parry isn't one of them. Nothing in this game is quite as satisfying as cutting the armor off some brute who's twice as tall as you. Plus, the [spoiler]light arrows[/spoiler] near the end? I can't get enough of watching the strongest monsters in the game being instantaneously teleported into oblivion.

Story is [i]ferry guud[/i]. I'd rather not delve into it right now, but [spoiler]Ganondorf[/spoiler] has some pretty great moments.

Dungeons are interesting, sailing is usually fairly interesting, Bosses require a bit of thinking to figure out. The only problem with bosses is that they're not as [I]fun[/I] as Twilight Princess's, but they do have interesting quirks in their own respect.

About the only major tarnish this game has is that darn Triforce quest. This is where the sailing gets dull. And who's bonehead idea was it to force me to not only talk with Tingle, but give him money? That almost seemed malicious.

Other than that, I can easily go back and enjoy this game just as much as Twilight Princess (I consider the Owl Statues to be TP's Triforce sailing.

Oh, yeah, and any qualms about the graphics should be filed under "who cares?" I think the style fits perfectly with the game. Nobody complains about the more recent games in the series that have followed suit. Besides, the gameplay is where it's at. It's the same as any Zelda game.

[Tatsubei Yagyu]

[FONT="Comic Sans MS"][COLOR="Navy"]Actually, I was thinking of replaying this the other day... XD

But I agree with what you say completely. Nothing in this game really gets old...I heard a lot of complaints with the sailing in general, but I never had a problem with it at all...

Not even the Triforce Gathering bothered me much, the only thing with that was gathering all that money it took to pay that arse Tingle. :animesigh

Also, I have no problem with the way anything in this game looks. I actually prefer it to Twilight Princess. Twilight Princess is still way badass, though. XD

Now I just get it back from my jerk best friend and play it. -__-[/COLOR][/FONT]

[Rachmaninoff]

I can't believe I never commented here since The Wind Waker is one of my favorite Zelda games. Putting aside the stun and slash aspect of the final bosses, I loved pretty much everything about it. Especially the cel-shaded look to the graphics. All the funny expressions by Link and just how colorful the world was really stood out.

I really loved how Link could sneak along the walls and peek around corners, hide in barrels, have parry and counter moves since it just made the game fun. And it's ironic that the one thing many of my friends complained about, the sailing, is one of the things I love best about this game.

Finding all the treasure maps, dredging the bottom of the ocean at the glow rings, beating all the cannons in the reefs to get a treasure chest... I spent hours finding all the stuff you can at sea. Which incidentally makes the issue of having money for Tingle irrelevant. This game gives you more money than you'll ever need. lol

As much as I enjoyed Twilight Princess, I wish they had done another cel-shaded game for the gamecube or now the Wii. I know I would probably fork out the money for a Wii if they made another one. And if not for disliking what I saw of the sailing aspect in Phantom Hourglass... I would have finally broken down and gotten a DS Lite. Anyway, talking about this is making me want to go and play it again.

[The Spectacular Professor]

[quote name='Rachmaninoff']Finding all the treasure maps, dredging the bottom of the ocean at the glow rings, beating all the cannons in the reefs to get a treasure chest... I spent hours finding all the stuff you can at sea. Which incidentally makes the issue of having money for Tingle irrelevant. This game gives you more money than you'll ever need. lol.[/QUOTE]

It's really just the principle of the matter. Only the most extreme of masochists wants to talk to Tingle, and this game makes you fork over money to him.

[SaiyanPrincessX]

[SIZE="1"]We've had this game for years and I started it back in 2003 and had never finished, or got very far at all. I can't remember why though. Anyhoo, I got back into it just recently, and have been hooked.

I'm hoping to get Twilight Princess soon; for GCN, but I don't know if its worth the purchase.[/SIZE]

[The Spectacular Professor]

[quote name='SaiyanPrincessX'][SIZE="1"]I'm hoping to get Twilight Princess soon; for GCN, but I don't know if its worth the purchase.[/SIZE][/QUOTE]

[SIZE="4"][B][I][U]IT IS.[/U][/I][/B][/SIZE]

No, seriously, you won't be disappointed. TP is just about the epitome of awesome on GCN.

[Rachmaninoff]

[quote name='Aceburner;797698]It's really just the principle of the matter. Only the most extreme of masochists wants to talk to Tingle, and this game makes you fork over money to him.[/QUOTE]Well it's not that I want to talk to him, but I can't help but laugh at how he's even more annoying and irritating in this version than he was in the others. XP Him with that silly outfit and all just makes me both cringe and laugh over the idea of someone actually dressing and acting like that. lol[quote name='SaiyanPrincessX'][SIZE="1"']I'm hoping to get Twilight Princess soon; for GCN, but I don't know if its worth the purchase.[/SIZE][/quote]If you don't have a Wii, then you'll never miss the other aspects of the game that it includes because of the controls. So unless you're getting a Wii soon... it is most definitely worth the money to get. It's a fantastic game. That and Link is still left handed like he's suppose to be instead of how they made him right handed in the Wii version.

But I only say that since a few of my friends, though they love the Wii, hate how that was changed so I twit them over the fact that sure I have the different controls but at least Link isn't backwards. :p