I still remember the day I bought Wind Waker. I was 16 and high on the IGN review I just read. I was over my initial reaction to the art style and was filled with nothing but pure fanboy hype. My friend Colin and I walked (very quickly) home from EB Games, booted up the game, turned off the lights, and turned up the sound. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I very slowly became disillusioned. Although I beat the game and enjoyed a fair bit of it, by the end I was attacking it pretty harshly. I called the world disconnected, disjointed, and devoid of personality. I said the music sucked, and that there was little to no mood. I – like the entire planet – criticized the sailing and the mad dash for Triforce pieces at the end of the game.

So now, almost 7 years later, I’ve played through almost the whole game for only the 3rd time. A small number considering how often I’ve played a significant portion of the N64 iterations. I’m definitely glad I gave the game another shot. I have more fond feelings about the cel-shaded wonder now and a lot of my previous complaints no longer hold any water in my books. However, that doesn’t mean I’ve done a complete 180 on the title. There are still major factors that I feel hold Wind Waker back from being a truly spectacular title.

First, let me go through what I no longer agree with my former self about. Wind Waker is absolutely not devoid of personality. A few other faults that I’ll mention later probably made me feel that way, but the art style, music, and characters all play off each other well to create a very distinct personality. The canon game dude, the shopkeeper, the butler, they’re all extremely memorable characters. Some of the best from the entire franchise. It’s apparent in retrospect that I was looking for more of the moody strangeness that Majora’s Mask provided and thus ignored the unique characters that Wind Waker offered. I no longer hate the sailing. In fact, I think it’s relaxing and often epic. I think it should be easier to change the wind direction, but it’s really not too big a deal, and the scale of the ocean truly gives a sense of adventure. The accompanying music adds to that, another aspect I’ve changed my mind about to some extent. I used to think it was all crap because, again, my expectations were elsewhere. But there truly are some standout tracks in the game including one that has made it into my regular piano play sessions. Finally I’ve eased up about the dungeons. I had a much better time trekking through the puzzles and challenges this time around, although I admittedly stopped playing before my least favourite. This playthrough confirmed that Majora’s Mask does, in fact, have the worst dungeons out of the 3D Zeldas.

But it wasn’t all eye-opening opinion-changing stuff. While I had a great time with Wind Waker, I was reminded of the things that still hold me back from relentlessly praising the title. While the main islands are mostly well designed and generally interesting to explore, the other one billions squares of the ocean are largely a massive disappointment. There are an incredible number of cop-out islands with little pay-off. So often I would discover a hidden area only to be rewarded with rupees. Sure, I need them for that stupid Triforce quest, but that section is poorly designed as well, so that doesn’t make it any better. Exploration isn’t nearly as rewarding in Wind Waker for that reason. In Ocarina of time, the world is much smaller, but it’s jam-packed with things to find and almost every discovery has relevance and meaning. Majora’s Mask’s world wasn’t as well designed, but the mask sidequests were everywhere and added that same sense of coherence. While not as bad as Twilight Princess, Wind Waker didn’t share that same sense of accomplishment and unity.

That leads me to another complaint that still holds. While the game is bursting with colourful characters and a consistent personality, Wind Waker wastes this fact too often. The underwater Hyrule is undeniably cool, and there are scattered moments throughout the experience, but the game has trouble having any emotional effect via mood like I’m used to from the series. I know the opinions are mixed on this, but while I’m not detached from the story, I feel like I’m watching an interesting tale rather than being inside the world like with Ocarina and Majora.

Overall, however, I think Wind Waker was an incredibly important title for Nintendo to make. Twilight Princess proved that even a very well designed traditional Zelda title feels stale, and Wind Waker proved that Zelda can work in a brand new universe. It may easily not be my favourite, but I am definitely very glad it exists and that it had the guts to take Zelda somewhere new. That is something that it’s done better than any other title in the series, and I hope it’s outdone really soon.