The Wind Waker on Gamecube

I'm writing about this because today is the day that this game was released on the Wii U which was a system that no one bought and the game's transition added very little to the experience despite the fact that the Wii U was a vastly superior machine to the original Game Cube release. I suppose it is worth mentioning that the Game Cube wasn't really owned by many people either. I simply got involved with it because it was the only way to get a hold of the Nintendo exclusives like Metroid, Mario, and of course Zelda titles.

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For me, this game initially was a massive disappointment because of the new graphical style that they went with. Like many long-term Zelda fans, I was really hoping for that they would either keep the graphical style that they had in the N64 games or perhaps make them even more realistic. When the game was demoed at E3 there were a lot of groans in the audience, and there were plenty at my own house when I was playing it as well. It was received so poorly in fact that after the initial demonstration, Nintendo refused to release any information or video until the game was complete.

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This style of graphics is called cell-shading by the way, or at least I think it is. The decision to go down this route rather than pursue increasingly realistic graphics was a decision made by chief designer Eiji Aonuma and Shigeru Miyamoto, who are the main brains behind all of what is done with Zelda and the men are absolute visionaries, so in time I decided to just give him the benefit of the doubt. The idea behind going back to a cartoonish style of graphics was based around attempting to maintain an audience of all ages. Therefore, the team decided to abandon any sort of theme that could be considered "adult." From a financial point of view I suppose it makes sense, as much as it broke my heart at the time.

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As far as battle was concerned the gameplay was pretty solid and the mechanics of previous games such as Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask were maintained in the Gamecube using a 3D style of graphics complete with an ability to lock on to an individual opponent. It was simplistic enough that anyone could play it, but there was definitely a strategy to it all and the game, as you would expect, got increasingly difficult to the point where many people never finished the game.

This was also the most "open world" that any Zelda game had been up to this point and once you had control of your boat, you could wander just about anywhere including to places that your current power-level dictated that you definitely were going to get your ass handed to you by enemies.

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Going back to the graphics and the rather poor reception that it received from fans: This was such a divisive thing that it created rifts inside the fan base and the game suffered rather poor sales as a consequence. Selling over 4 million copies would be a tremendous success for any other franchise, but the people over at Zelda were hoping to achieve something along the lines of double that, as that is about the number of copies that Ocarina had sold. Of course these poor sales have a lot to do with the fact that the Gamecube was in a distant 3rd place behind PS2 and Xbox as far as console sales were concerned. However, the disapproval of the hardcore fans was heard by the top brass and in the next installment of Twilight Princess they reverted back to a more realistic art style much to the fans' delight.

It is ironic that after time The Wind Waker is considered to be one of the greatest video games of all time whereas Twilight Princess is kind of relegated to obscurity. It seems as though the designers were right after all.

For me, I still have a chip on my shoulder about the graphics decisions and I am unwilling to let that go. Some people make their rankings of the best to worst Zelda games and many of them put this title at the top and I simply can't agree with that. Given that the Gamecube was supposed to be the cutting-edge Nintendo Machine at the time for myself and many other fans like me, it seemed like the franchise was actually taking a step backwards at the time. It was the first Zelda game I ever owned that I didn't finish but I will admit there were other factors at play at the time such as me being in college at the time of its release.

So what did you think of Wind Waker? Did you love it? Did you hate it?