While at one point I considered myself a dedicated gamer, a lack of time has pulled me from the medium. For the past five years I average the completion of one game a year. As a dedication to the remnants of my hobby, each game completion will earn its own review.

Wake up to the Wind

SPOILER ALERT – This article includes references to the ending sequences of the game.

Wake up to an adventure that seems unsure of who is actually in control. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker suffers because the user’s interaction with the game is never consistent. There is a frequent conflict between the free-roaming nature of prior Zelda titles, and the controlling, child-proof, scripted adventure presented by the game’s designers.

Long before Grand Theft Auto established open world gaming as a headline grabber, Shigeru Miyamoto, The Legend of Zelda’s creator, released the original The Legend of Zelda as an open world sandbox game, where players could travel the entire landscape, enter any dungeon, and play through its adventures in almost any order the gamer wanted. As the franchise evolved, The Legend of Zelda series rewarded the gamer for creativity. Dungeons increasingly relied on mind-bending puzzles for completion. Players walking off the beaten path were rewarded with additional heart containers that increased the damage they could take in combat. Even computer controlled characters started to beg for Link to travel on his free will to other lands to help deliver goods to other characters.

Sailing in The Wind Waker

Unfortunately, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker forces the gamer into a controlled experience. While older games rewarded exploring players with lush geography, mysterious woods, canyons, reflective lakes, and even bridge underpasses, The Wind Waker rewards gamers with… more water. Travelling The Wind Waker’s landscape is like looking out the window while flying over the Atlantic Ocean. While British Airways planes may not face an occasional shark attack, the experience is largely the same. Gamers who want to travel and explore are kept company with nothing but animated waves and the occasional rain shower. The talking boat that Link pilots is constantly reminding him of his next scripted task, and many of the hidden islands only become useful when a certain item is equipped by Link, or to put it more appropriately, when the game’s designers want you to take advantage of the hidden islands. It’s their story, not yours.

It says something that in the game’s final sequence, Link doesn’t even have a chance to stop the franchise’s lead villain, Gannon, from collecting a magical, game-ending Triforce. Instead, the child-aged Link is slammed to the ground by the taller, older Gannon, and left to lie on concrete while Gannon unites the three magical triforces to complete his plot to punish the world. As the arch enemy chants a spell, an older, white-bearded King of Hyrule appears out of nowhere, grabs the Triforce, and saves the day. He may have a half hour of camera time in human form in the entire thirty-hour game (throughout most of the game he existed as Link’s sail boat), but this old man plays the deus ex machina and ends up being the one who saves the world. After the game permits Link to finally fight Gannon, the old man wishes nothing more than “hope” for the future for the Link and Zelda’s own lives.

Epic Cinematography During Sword Fights

Despite its limitations, The Wind Waker does excel at presenting the trademark aspects of the Zelda experience. The risky artistic design of the game presents cartoonist images that mirror the older, more famous Zelda game, A Link to the Past. The cell-shaded art style represents what the 2-D A Link to the Past would look like if one could pull the camera down to the ground for a 3-D view. Throughout the game are subtle inclusions of previous franchise songs, characters, and gameplay homages. Traditional weapons such as the boomerang, crossbow, and sword are brought to new life with additional control options. New weapons, such as a wind-propelling leaf, spark creativity in the gamer towards exploring new ways to explore the adventure.

For aging gamers lured by other next-generation experiences, The Wind Waker does everything right to make one believe that Link, the game’s hero, is the true Gaming Hero. While playing the game, it becomes evident that few videogame heroes have the history, grace, or creativity of Link’s adventures. Through cleverly leveraging prior titles through the game’s storyline, and adding emotional impact through cell-shaded art, Link’s Wind Waker adventure plays out as a unique and imitation free tale.

Gliding Through the Wind with a Giant Leaf

Yet for all of the franchise celebration, in the game’s concluding moments, Link is knocked to the ground by Gannon, while a computer controlled old man saves the day. In that ending, after the last button is pressed, the harshest reality of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker sets in. The gamer could not control the end of the title. Link may have fought Gannon, but he didn’t save the Triforce.

Perhaps the Wind Waker is a dream you can rarely control.