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The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
With Wind Waker done, I'm now officially halfway through my Zelda franchise playthrough, which is great. The first game came out in 1986 and this has me caught up as far as 2002. (There is a timeline order for Zelda games that I could have gone with, but I went with release order for a few reasons. First and foremost, I fell ass backwards into this by jumping in at 1991 with A Link to the Past because Switch Online had it, then I was like "oh, Switch Online also has the NES games," and it just snowballed from there. Second, the timeline is fake and half-assed so it's not like there's a lot of Deliberate Story Growth I could pick up on if I went through the games in timeline order (although much love to the podcast I listen to that does exactly that). FINALLY, I personally think it's more interesting to track the evolution of the series itself - playing in release order means I can see the first time the series introduces an element, and I can see what gets dropped after one game and what gets brought back and becomes a regular fixture in the Zelda formula. I like that! This was the first game with Rito and Koroks and Beedle and enemies that drop non-generic items and a bunch of other stuff! NERD SHIT!
Anyway this game ruled let's go. Full spoilers, it's a Zelda game, I went to some dungeons and collected some relics and then fought Ganon, who cares about spoilers. Like if you were going to play it next week don't read this but you're not going to play it next week.
Wind Waker peaks too early, I think - while I didn't have the same problems with the last third of the game that a LOT of people do, I also didn't feel the same sense of momentum and in terms of story, all the moments that really hit for me came in the middle. GOD, I'M SUCH A STUPID ZELDA BITCH!!!!!!
The whole Hyrule Castle sequence was fucking STUNNING, from the descent to the frozen hall to the statue of Link and the portrait of Zelda (AND HER WHOLE SQUAD LMAO) to the STAINED GLASS WINDOWS OF ALL THE OCARINA OF TIME SAGES???? THE MASTER SWORD SEQUENCE WITH THE KNIGHT STATUES???? Holy shit!!!!!! A BITCH LOVES IT!!!!!!!!!!!!
(The game as a whole just looks GREAT, I know everyone is already like "turns out nerds were wrong to be mad that it looked cartoony" like nerds aren't always wrong to be mad no matter what, but this is the first game in the playthrough where I've been like HOLY SHIT at the visuals.)
1. I played the Wii U version, which looks almost exactly the same as the GameCube original since it's a remaster and not a remake. I'm glad I got the benefit of most of the minor changes that were made (SAILING SPEED, apparently on GameCube sailing just...HAD to be slow because otherwise the game couldn't load your surroundings quickly enough? A NIGHTMARE), but there were one or two things I think I would have preferred on GameCube. (Mainly it's the stuff around Tingle's brother Knuckle? Seems like they stripped all the actual content out of that one and left the bones of it for anyone who remembered where to find them from the original.)
2. Apparently the tail end of this game is NOTORIOUSLY tedious - you need to track down eight shards of the Triforce of Courage. On GameCube, you did this by finding eight treasure maps (all in different locations), which then each led you to a separate Triforce shard, so...sixteen things to find in all, and in between you had to pay exorbitant amounts to Tingle to get the treasure maps decoded. So people who mostly stuck to the main quest suddenly had to do a bunch of tedious exploration and Rupee farming to progress in the game. For Wii U, they improved this by replacing five of the treasure maps with the shards themselves, so you only had to hunt down eleven things and you only had to pay Tingle for three maps. I think a lot of people still find that fairly tedious, though.
NOT YOUR GIRL DUDSKI! Some of us went rogue as soon as the boomer lion boat stopped bossing us around so much, and we spent HOURS gleefully exploring the ocean and finding every island and getting our navigation chart completely filled in, and we had a notebook where we wrote down all the places that the fishmen we encountered said we could find Triforce shards. And then later in the game we went rogue for hours AGAIN and hit up most of the islands AGAIN because this time we had unlocked bombs and stuff and A BITCH LOVES TO EXPLORE THE SEAS, so by the time we got to the point where the game was like "now you have to stop and find all this shit," we already had most of the work done. None of this was relevant to my enjoyment of the game, I'm just smug enough about how my way of playing Zelda is better than other people's that I felt it was worth two paragraphs.
3. I think I wish there had been more dungeons, since Dragon Roost is so straightforward. I LOVED the Tower of the Gods, both as a dungeon (the statue stuff was so good!) and just aesthetically - it all felt like the early hints BOTW Sheikah vibes, which I loved:
The Earth and Wind dungeons were good but also the sidekick mechanic was occasionally maddening, whether it was the nine million times I positioned Medli, switched control back to Link, tried to reflect her light, and ended up calling her instead because I didn't realize I was standing within that radius. FUCKING INFURIATING! And then with the little Korok dude it was just a pain in the ass trying to get him from Point A to Point B in the wind chamber. ALSO WEIRD AS HELL HOW MY SIDEKICK FOR THE EARTH TEMPLE IS A BIRD AND MY SIDEKICK FOR THE WIND TEMPLE IS BASICALLY A SENTIENT ACORN??? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
FURTHERMORE Medli (a Rito) is the Earth Sage because her ancestor (a Zora) was????? They explained a LITTLE about the Rito evolving wings but THEY USED TO BE FISH PEOPLE???? THE ANSWER TO "A BIRD MAY LOVE A FISH, BUT WHERE WOULD THEY LIVE?" IS HYRULE??????
3B. Complicating matters: KOBOLI, ONE OF THE RITO POSTMEN, IS CLEARLY DESCENDED FROM THE OCARINA OF TIME POSTMAN?
Wait. Oh man now I'm on parallel universes. Okay IN-GAME they are like "haha funny story Koboli is descended from a postman in an age gone by WINK WINK" but the Postman wasn't in Ocarina of Time, he was in Majora's Mask? THE GUY IN OCARINA OF TIME WHO LOOKS LIKE KOBOLI WAS JUST A JOGGER? Did the jogger BECOME a mailman? Was he already a mailman and he was just off duty in OoT? Did the mailmain from Majora's Mask pull a Will Parry and cross from Termina into Hyrule and like, get himself a fish girlfriend, and they had half-fish babies that AGAINST ALL LAWS OF BIOLOGY were themselves able to have children, and eventually their fish descendants evolved into bird people? I'm spiraling. (I googled this and it's all nerds on forums being NO FUN WHATSOEVER and being like "the line about Koboli being descended from another postman isn't intended to be firm canon because Rito are descended from Zora, not Hylians, and anyway the Postman lived in Termina not Hyrule" like FUCK OFF, GARY! WE'RE FIGURING OUT INTERSPECIES MULTIVERSE SHIT HERE! TAKE IT SERIOUSLY!
4. This game is FUNNY. Link is kind of a mess and people tell him so? Tetra keeps being like "you're a reckless idiot and you'd be dead several times over if I weren't thinking two steps ahead FOR YOU" and the lion boat is just...so sick of Link's shit, ALL THE TIME. THE LONGSUFFERING RITO GIRLFRIEND WHO MAILS ME A REWARD BC SHE KNOWS HER BOYFRIEND CHEATED ME? Zelda games always have some humor in them but IDK this just had so many little touches or like cutscenes with things set up for comedic effect (like Link moving to decisively strike Ganon and the very delieberate beat of suspense before cutting to another shot to show that Link has landed on his ass having done no damage whatsoever, INCREDIBLE), and IDK how much of this was deliberate but LINK'S FACE???? LINK'S HILARIOUS LITTLE FACE?????? Some stuff I was definitely misreading his facial expressions bc he would look pissed off ALL THE TIME for NO REASON but I don't care bc it was hilarious.
WIND WAKER LINK IS A BITCH AND I LOVE HIM.
5. JUSTICE FOR TETRA????? Okay this is the one big spoiler but Tetra is SO FUCKING COOL and has so much of her own shit going on and rather than like, get into WHY she wants her extremely devoted pirate crew to believe she's only in it for the treasure when in fact she's clearly trying to, at the very least, save the people on Outset Island, if not stop Ganon ENTIRELY, the game is just like "oh she's the new Zelda" and sticks her in the dress and then STICKS HER IN A BASEMENT? The physical transformation was SO fucking stupid (and makes no sense anyway???) and then the AUDACITY to make such a fucking cool Zelda character and then STICK HER IN A LITERAL BASEMENT FOR SAFEKEEPING...she's a pirate let her do pirate shit!!!!!
She does get to be heavily involved in the final battle which is GREAT but SHE SHOULD HAVE STAYED TETRA AND SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE MORE TETRA SHIT! Like instead of being like oh IDK reassembling the Triforce of Wisdom sticks her in Zelda cosplay (TEMPORARILY????) they could have told me about HOW ZELDA'S DESCENDANTS BECAME A MATRIARCHAL PIRATE DYNASTY??????????? If she DIDN'T know she was Zelda what did she know, because the Hero of Time legends clearly meant a lot to her! I WANT TO KNOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.
6. It's always extremely funny in Zelda games how the world is ending and for HOURS you can just be like wandering around exploring and sightseeing and running mundane errands for townspeople, but it is EXTRA funny in Wind Waker. I detoured after the second dungeon to sail the entire ocean and get maps of all 49 islands and draw a grid in my little notebook with notes on what I needed to come back to when I had what items, and then I got back to Windfall Island and Maggie's dad is like VIBRATING WITH DISTRESS about how she's kidnapped and I haven't saved her yet, and I go to Outset Island and my grandma is CALLING OUT FOR ME AND MY KIDNAPPED SISTER IN HER SLEEP and the neighbors are all like "I'm sure you're going as fast as you can but this is literally killing her" and every time I accidentally let the lion boat talk it's like WHAT are you DOING????? And it's just. I would be getting all the same dialogue from characters even if I were moving through the main quest as quickly as possible, but it's VERY funny to have it happen after I've spent six hours just vibing.
SORRY TO THE PRESUMABLY MASSACRED RESIDENTS OF WINDFISH ISLE!!!!! I got held up feeding berries to a fishman so he would talk to me about forks!!!!!
7. Okay without getting too into the plot of the game, the King of Hyrule shows up at one point and is like "yeah everything is an ocean bc when I was king Ganon was taking over and I couldn't stop him." Which whatever, that's fair, YOU TRIED I GUESS, NOW A TWEEN HAS TO FIGHT YOUR BATTLES, BUT WHATEVER, NO JUDGMENT - anyway he was like "gods can you fix this" and the gods were like "uhhhh we can flood the place and kill 95% of the population, how does that sound" and he was like "IDK better than the alternative I guess." And then at the end of the game, just as the final fight with Ganon is about to happen, the king gets a hand on the Triforce which means he can ask for LITERALLY ANYTHING. ANYTHING! The Triforce doesn't have genie rules! And instead of being like "I wish Ganon would die by shitting out all his internal organs and have his soul ripped apart by demons so thoroughly that he can never return again and also could the flooding recede so we could have continents again" he's just like "please give Link hope and also flood this place some more" so LINK AND ZELDA, WHO ARE CHILDREN, still have to fight Ganon????? WHILE THE KING CONVENIENTLY DISAPPEARS? ONLY TO REAPPEAR IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE FIGHT AND BE LIKE "SORRY I DESTROYED THE WORLD. DON'T MAKE MY MISTAKES - I AM AN OLD MAN FIXATED ON MY PAST AND FULL OF REGRET. YOU SHOULD LOOK TO THE FUTURE. BUT ABOUT THAT: THE PLANET IS VERY MUCH STILL DESTROYED AND YOU PROB DON'T HAVE A FUTURE. MY B." WHAT KIND OF BOOMER NONSENSE!!!!!!!!!!!
I AIN'T LISTENING TO SHIT, YOU OLD BITCH!!!!!!!!
8. Another EXTREMELY funny thing about this game is that in Link's culture, they have been handed down the story of The Hero of Time (aka Link from Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask) and they have a tradition where when boys come of age (I think at 12???) they receive a green Hero of Time outfit to wear on their birthday. Shit goes down immediately after Link gets his green birthday outfit, so CONVENIENTLY he is in the classic Link outfit for the entire game, which looks normal to the player but CANONICALLY HE IS WEARING HIS GOOFY OoT LINK COSPLAY FOR THE ENTIRE GAME?????
9. Love the mix of screaming and random nerd detail here but I was disappointed the Ghost Ship didn't have more going for it. I came across it SO MANY TIMES before I was able to board it and it built up this huge mystique in my mind and I deliberately structured things so it would be my LAST Triforce shard before I went to fight Ganon, AND THEN IT WAS JUST A SLIGHTLY CREEPIER VERSION OF A ROOM I'D ALREADY BEEN IN AT LEAST TEN TIMES? I just had to kill like four things and that was it. I wanted a mini dungeon BOOOOOOOOO. Don't repeatedly tease me with a GHOST SHIP that CHANGES LOCATIONS and CAN'T BE BOARDED if you're not going to make the experience of eventually boarding it a memorable one!!!
10. Related to the many-points-before-this thing about how I feel smug that My Way Of Playing Zelda Is Better, there are a LOT of dudes on the internet who like to flex about how much they love the Savage Labyrinth and what a great challenge it is? IT'S NOT HARD. There's like ONE CHAMBER that kicked my ass and everything else was totally fine. It was honestly tedious as shit. It's long, it's not difficult. (I would not BLAME anyone who had trouble with it but flexing about how much you enjoyed the challenge of it like you think it gives you Tough Gamer Points is objectively very sad.)
10. The second trip to Forsaken Fortress is maybe my favorite story segment in any of the Zelda games so far (JK IT'S THE FIRST TRIP TO HYRULE CASTLE but still, second!), it was just SO fucking pleasing to have all the friends I'd made so far (minus the Deku Tree I guess but he is a literal tree so it's fair that he couldn't make the trip) come to my aid and get me out of the jam I ended up in because Tetra is RIGHT when she calls Link a bonehead who always rushes in without a plan. PIRATES! DRAGONS! MAILMEN! A PRINCE! Everyone helped!!!! I loved it!!!! It's a shame they didn't involve any of them more after that, even if it had just been in the sense of "oh Prince Komali is offscreen doing A Thing That Will Help." It was nice how everyone showed up and saved Link and Tetra from drowning at the end and Everyone Was Ocean Pals but I just would have loved some sense during the final journey to Ganon that Link had allies even if they weren't physically present. The sages kind of count but they didn't hit in the same way. FRIENDS!!!!!!!!!
11. FULLY obsessed with how much all the historical Hero of Time artwork in this game resembles Link's painting form from A Link Between Worlds. OBSESSED!!!!!!!!
12. Random complaint but after hearing so much great stuff about the music in this game I uhhhhh wish there had been more of it? It was fine but there are these HUGE periods of silence which frankly made no sense to me. GIVE ME TUNES FOR NIGHT SAILING!!!!!!!!!
13. Another random complaint that I would insert further up the list if it didn't mean I'd have to update all the subsequent numbers: WHY ISN'T THE TOWER OF THE GODS IN THE MIDDLE?????
The Tower of the Gods is an island that doesn't appear until midway through the game and it's extremely important to the main plot of the game - it's surrounded by three Triangle Islands and you have to take action at each of them to make it appear. So why...the fuck...is it ONE SQUARE OFF FROM CENTER? What kind of sick joke is that? WHO ARE THEY DOING THAT VERSUS?
12. I could have finished this game in like 15-20 hours but I ended up spending 50+ on it because A BITCH LOVES TO EXPLORE!!!! It didn't have anything on like, Breath of the Wild, because the map was easily 95% water so it was less about discovering out-of-the-way secrets and more about finding a few dozen very specifically defined points of interest, but I just had such a good time finding it all! Also I love that the lesson they learned from Majora's Mask was "at least one town should be extremely full of Town Shit that you can do" I LOVE A DENSE LITTLE ZELDA TOWN!!!!!!
In conclusion: A++ would play again. Actually I kind of already did play like...a LOT of it again. Four of the six non-Ganon bosses. It's fine. It was very normal. There is a thing called the Nintendo gallery where if you take photos of the different living creatures in the game a man makes you sculptures of them, and I started it VERY late because I simply could not figure out how to get in despite the game providing many hints, and by the time I started it there were some people and monsters from the earlier parts of the game that I COULDN'T get anymore, and when I beat it I was like "I only need four more pictures, I'm so close..." and I had some incorrect ideas about how early in the game I could make those four pictures happen, and then I realized I was wrong and had to fight SEVERAL more bosses than I was expecting, but it was fine. It took like six hours. AND I GOT MY PRIZE THAT MAYBE DOESN'T SEEM LIKE IT WAS WORTH IT BUT IT WAS:
Anyway this game ruled let's go. Full spoilers, it's a Zelda game, I went to some dungeons and collected some relics and then fought Ganon, who cares about spoilers. Like if you were going to play it next week don't read this but you're not going to play it next week.
Wind Waker peaks too early, I think - while I didn't have the same problems with the last third of the game that a LOT of people do, I also didn't feel the same sense of momentum and in terms of story, all the moments that really hit for me came in the middle. GOD, I'M SUCH A STUPID ZELDA BITCH!!!!!!
The whole Hyrule Castle sequence was fucking STUNNING, from the descent to the frozen hall to the statue of Link and the portrait of Zelda (AND HER WHOLE SQUAD LMAO) to the STAINED GLASS WINDOWS OF ALL THE OCARINA OF TIME SAGES???? THE MASTER SWORD SEQUENCE WITH THE KNIGHT STATUES???? Holy shit!!!!!! A BITCH LOVES IT!!!!!!!!!!!!
(The game as a whole just looks GREAT, I know everyone is already like "turns out nerds were wrong to be mad that it looked cartoony" like nerds aren't always wrong to be mad no matter what, but this is the first game in the playthrough where I've been like HOLY SHIT at the visuals.)
1. I played the Wii U version, which looks almost exactly the same as the GameCube original since it's a remaster and not a remake. I'm glad I got the benefit of most of the minor changes that were made (SAILING SPEED, apparently on GameCube sailing just...HAD to be slow because otherwise the game couldn't load your surroundings quickly enough? A NIGHTMARE), but there were one or two things I think I would have preferred on GameCube. (Mainly it's the stuff around Tingle's brother Knuckle? Seems like they stripped all the actual content out of that one and left the bones of it for anyone who remembered where to find them from the original.)
2. Apparently the tail end of this game is NOTORIOUSLY tedious - you need to track down eight shards of the Triforce of Courage. On GameCube, you did this by finding eight treasure maps (all in different locations), which then each led you to a separate Triforce shard, so...sixteen things to find in all, and in between you had to pay exorbitant amounts to Tingle to get the treasure maps decoded. So people who mostly stuck to the main quest suddenly had to do a bunch of tedious exploration and Rupee farming to progress in the game. For Wii U, they improved this by replacing five of the treasure maps with the shards themselves, so you only had to hunt down eleven things and you only had to pay Tingle for three maps. I think a lot of people still find that fairly tedious, though.
NOT YOUR GIRL DUDSKI! Some of us went rogue as soon as the boomer lion boat stopped bossing us around so much, and we spent HOURS gleefully exploring the ocean and finding every island and getting our navigation chart completely filled in, and we had a notebook where we wrote down all the places that the fishmen we encountered said we could find Triforce shards. And then later in the game we went rogue for hours AGAIN and hit up most of the islands AGAIN because this time we had unlocked bombs and stuff and A BITCH LOVES TO EXPLORE THE SEAS, so by the time we got to the point where the game was like "now you have to stop and find all this shit," we already had most of the work done. None of this was relevant to my enjoyment of the game, I'm just smug enough about how my way of playing Zelda is better than other people's that I felt it was worth two paragraphs.
3. I think I wish there had been more dungeons, since Dragon Roost is so straightforward. I LOVED the Tower of the Gods, both as a dungeon (the statue stuff was so good!) and just aesthetically - it all felt like the early hints BOTW Sheikah vibes, which I loved:
The Earth and Wind dungeons were good but also the sidekick mechanic was occasionally maddening, whether it was the nine million times I positioned Medli, switched control back to Link, tried to reflect her light, and ended up calling her instead because I didn't realize I was standing within that radius. FUCKING INFURIATING! And then with the little Korok dude it was just a pain in the ass trying to get him from Point A to Point B in the wind chamber. ALSO WEIRD AS HELL HOW MY SIDEKICK FOR THE EARTH TEMPLE IS A BIRD AND MY SIDEKICK FOR THE WIND TEMPLE IS BASICALLY A SENTIENT ACORN??? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
FURTHERMORE Medli (a Rito) is the Earth Sage because her ancestor (a Zora) was????? They explained a LITTLE about the Rito evolving wings but THEY USED TO BE FISH PEOPLE???? THE ANSWER TO "A BIRD MAY LOVE A FISH, BUT WHERE WOULD THEY LIVE?" IS HYRULE??????
3B. Complicating matters: KOBOLI, ONE OF THE RITO POSTMEN, IS CLEARLY DESCENDED FROM THE OCARINA OF TIME POSTMAN?
Wait. Oh man now I'm on parallel universes. Okay IN-GAME they are like "haha funny story Koboli is descended from a postman in an age gone by WINK WINK" but the Postman wasn't in Ocarina of Time, he was in Majora's Mask? THE GUY IN OCARINA OF TIME WHO LOOKS LIKE KOBOLI WAS JUST A JOGGER? Did the jogger BECOME a mailman? Was he already a mailman and he was just off duty in OoT? Did the mailmain from Majora's Mask pull a Will Parry and cross from Termina into Hyrule and like, get himself a fish girlfriend, and they had half-fish babies that AGAINST ALL LAWS OF BIOLOGY were themselves able to have children, and eventually their fish descendants evolved into bird people? I'm spiraling. (I googled this and it's all nerds on forums being NO FUN WHATSOEVER and being like "the line about Koboli being descended from another postman isn't intended to be firm canon because Rito are descended from Zora, not Hylians, and anyway the Postman lived in Termina not Hyrule" like FUCK OFF, GARY! WE'RE FIGURING OUT INTERSPECIES MULTIVERSE SHIT HERE! TAKE IT SERIOUSLY!
4. This game is FUNNY. Link is kind of a mess and people tell him so? Tetra keeps being like "you're a reckless idiot and you'd be dead several times over if I weren't thinking two steps ahead FOR YOU" and the lion boat is just...so sick of Link's shit, ALL THE TIME. THE LONGSUFFERING RITO GIRLFRIEND WHO MAILS ME A REWARD BC SHE KNOWS HER BOYFRIEND CHEATED ME? Zelda games always have some humor in them but IDK this just had so many little touches or like cutscenes with things set up for comedic effect (like Link moving to decisively strike Ganon and the very delieberate beat of suspense before cutting to another shot to show that Link has landed on his ass having done no damage whatsoever, INCREDIBLE), and IDK how much of this was deliberate but LINK'S FACE???? LINK'S HILARIOUS LITTLE FACE?????? Some stuff I was definitely misreading his facial expressions bc he would look pissed off ALL THE TIME for NO REASON but I don't care bc it was hilarious.
WIND WAKER LINK IS A BITCH AND I LOVE HIM.
5. JUSTICE FOR TETRA????? Okay this is the one big spoiler but Tetra is SO FUCKING COOL and has so much of her own shit going on and rather than like, get into WHY she wants her extremely devoted pirate crew to believe she's only in it for the treasure when in fact she's clearly trying to, at the very least, save the people on Outset Island, if not stop Ganon ENTIRELY, the game is just like "oh she's the new Zelda" and sticks her in the dress and then STICKS HER IN A BASEMENT? The physical transformation was SO fucking stupid (and makes no sense anyway???) and then the AUDACITY to make such a fucking cool Zelda character and then STICK HER IN A LITERAL BASEMENT FOR SAFEKEEPING...she's a pirate let her do pirate shit!!!!!
She does get to be heavily involved in the final battle which is GREAT but SHE SHOULD HAVE STAYED TETRA AND SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE MORE TETRA SHIT! Like instead of being like oh IDK reassembling the Triforce of Wisdom sticks her in Zelda cosplay (TEMPORARILY????) they could have told me about HOW ZELDA'S DESCENDANTS BECAME A MATRIARCHAL PIRATE DYNASTY??????????? If she DIDN'T know she was Zelda what did she know, because the Hero of Time legends clearly meant a lot to her! I WANT TO KNOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.
6. It's always extremely funny in Zelda games how the world is ending and for HOURS you can just be like wandering around exploring and sightseeing and running mundane errands for townspeople, but it is EXTRA funny in Wind Waker. I detoured after the second dungeon to sail the entire ocean and get maps of all 49 islands and draw a grid in my little notebook with notes on what I needed to come back to when I had what items, and then I got back to Windfall Island and Maggie's dad is like VIBRATING WITH DISTRESS about how she's kidnapped and I haven't saved her yet, and I go to Outset Island and my grandma is CALLING OUT FOR ME AND MY KIDNAPPED SISTER IN HER SLEEP and the neighbors are all like "I'm sure you're going as fast as you can but this is literally killing her" and every time I accidentally let the lion boat talk it's like WHAT are you DOING????? And it's just. I would be getting all the same dialogue from characters even if I were moving through the main quest as quickly as possible, but it's VERY funny to have it happen after I've spent six hours just vibing.
SORRY TO THE PRESUMABLY MASSACRED RESIDENTS OF WINDFISH ISLE!!!!! I got held up feeding berries to a fishman so he would talk to me about forks!!!!!
7. Okay without getting too into the plot of the game, the King of Hyrule shows up at one point and is like "yeah everything is an ocean bc when I was king Ganon was taking over and I couldn't stop him." Which whatever, that's fair, YOU TRIED I GUESS, NOW A TWEEN HAS TO FIGHT YOUR BATTLES, BUT WHATEVER, NO JUDGMENT - anyway he was like "gods can you fix this" and the gods were like "uhhhh we can flood the place and kill 95% of the population, how does that sound" and he was like "IDK better than the alternative I guess." And then at the end of the game, just as the final fight with Ganon is about to happen, the king gets a hand on the Triforce which means he can ask for LITERALLY ANYTHING. ANYTHING! The Triforce doesn't have genie rules! And instead of being like "I wish Ganon would die by shitting out all his internal organs and have his soul ripped apart by demons so thoroughly that he can never return again and also could the flooding recede so we could have continents again" he's just like "please give Link hope and also flood this place some more" so LINK AND ZELDA, WHO ARE CHILDREN, still have to fight Ganon????? WHILE THE KING CONVENIENTLY DISAPPEARS? ONLY TO REAPPEAR IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE FIGHT AND BE LIKE "SORRY I DESTROYED THE WORLD. DON'T MAKE MY MISTAKES - I AM AN OLD MAN FIXATED ON MY PAST AND FULL OF REGRET. YOU SHOULD LOOK TO THE FUTURE. BUT ABOUT THAT: THE PLANET IS VERY MUCH STILL DESTROYED AND YOU PROB DON'T HAVE A FUTURE. MY B." WHAT KIND OF BOOMER NONSENSE!!!!!!!!!!!
I AIN'T LISTENING TO SHIT, YOU OLD BITCH!!!!!!!!
8. Another EXTREMELY funny thing about this game is that in Link's culture, they have been handed down the story of The Hero of Time (aka Link from Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask) and they have a tradition where when boys come of age (I think at 12???) they receive a green Hero of Time outfit to wear on their birthday. Shit goes down immediately after Link gets his green birthday outfit, so CONVENIENTLY he is in the classic Link outfit for the entire game, which looks normal to the player but CANONICALLY HE IS WEARING HIS GOOFY OoT LINK COSPLAY FOR THE ENTIRE GAME?????
9. Love the mix of screaming and random nerd detail here but I was disappointed the Ghost Ship didn't have more going for it. I came across it SO MANY TIMES before I was able to board it and it built up this huge mystique in my mind and I deliberately structured things so it would be my LAST Triforce shard before I went to fight Ganon, AND THEN IT WAS JUST A SLIGHTLY CREEPIER VERSION OF A ROOM I'D ALREADY BEEN IN AT LEAST TEN TIMES? I just had to kill like four things and that was it. I wanted a mini dungeon BOOOOOOOOO. Don't repeatedly tease me with a GHOST SHIP that CHANGES LOCATIONS and CAN'T BE BOARDED if you're not going to make the experience of eventually boarding it a memorable one!!!
10. Related to the many-points-before-this thing about how I feel smug that My Way Of Playing Zelda Is Better, there are a LOT of dudes on the internet who like to flex about how much they love the Savage Labyrinth and what a great challenge it is? IT'S NOT HARD. There's like ONE CHAMBER that kicked my ass and everything else was totally fine. It was honestly tedious as shit. It's long, it's not difficult. (I would not BLAME anyone who had trouble with it but flexing about how much you enjoyed the challenge of it like you think it gives you Tough Gamer Points is objectively very sad.)
10. The second trip to Forsaken Fortress is maybe my favorite story segment in any of the Zelda games so far (JK IT'S THE FIRST TRIP TO HYRULE CASTLE but still, second!), it was just SO fucking pleasing to have all the friends I'd made so far (minus the Deku Tree I guess but he is a literal tree so it's fair that he couldn't make the trip) come to my aid and get me out of the jam I ended up in because Tetra is RIGHT when she calls Link a bonehead who always rushes in without a plan. PIRATES! DRAGONS! MAILMEN! A PRINCE! Everyone helped!!!! I loved it!!!! It's a shame they didn't involve any of them more after that, even if it had just been in the sense of "oh Prince Komali is offscreen doing A Thing That Will Help." It was nice how everyone showed up and saved Link and Tetra from drowning at the end and Everyone Was Ocean Pals but I just would have loved some sense during the final journey to Ganon that Link had allies even if they weren't physically present. The sages kind of count but they didn't hit in the same way. FRIENDS!!!!!!!!!
11. FULLY obsessed with how much all the historical Hero of Time artwork in this game resembles Link's painting form from A Link Between Worlds. OBSESSED!!!!!!!!
12. Random complaint but after hearing so much great stuff about the music in this game I uhhhhh wish there had been more of it? It was fine but there are these HUGE periods of silence which frankly made no sense to me. GIVE ME TUNES FOR NIGHT SAILING!!!!!!!!!
13. Another random complaint that I would insert further up the list if it didn't mean I'd have to update all the subsequent numbers: WHY ISN'T THE TOWER OF THE GODS IN THE MIDDLE?????
The Tower of the Gods is an island that doesn't appear until midway through the game and it's extremely important to the main plot of the game - it's surrounded by three Triangle Islands and you have to take action at each of them to make it appear. So why...the fuck...is it ONE SQUARE OFF FROM CENTER? What kind of sick joke is that? WHO ARE THEY DOING THAT VERSUS?
12. I could have finished this game in like 15-20 hours but I ended up spending 50+ on it because A BITCH LOVES TO EXPLORE!!!! It didn't have anything on like, Breath of the Wild, because the map was easily 95% water so it was less about discovering out-of-the-way secrets and more about finding a few dozen very specifically defined points of interest, but I just had such a good time finding it all! Also I love that the lesson they learned from Majora's Mask was "at least one town should be extremely full of Town Shit that you can do" I LOVE A DENSE LITTLE ZELDA TOWN!!!!!!
In conclusion: A++ would play again. Actually I kind of already did play like...a LOT of it again. Four of the six non-Ganon bosses. It's fine. It was very normal. There is a thing called the Nintendo gallery where if you take photos of the different living creatures in the game a man makes you sculptures of them, and I started it VERY late because I simply could not figure out how to get in despite the game providing many hints, and by the time I started it there were some people and monsters from the earlier parts of the game that I COULDN'T get anymore, and when I beat it I was like "I only need four more pictures, I'm so close..." and I had some incorrect ideas about how early in the game I could make those four pictures happen, and then I realized I was wrong and had to fight SEVERAL more bosses than I was expecting, but it was fine. It took like six hours. AND I GOT MY PRIZE THAT MAYBE DOESN'T SEEM LIKE IT WAS WORTH IT BUT IT WAS: