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Playing Wind Waker HD

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The wait for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is closing in on the 2 week mark! To pass the time, I decided to play through a few Zelda games I skipped over on my Wii U. My wife and I finished playing through Twilight Princess a few months back and decided that it was time to break out Wind Waker HD.

I never actually played the original Wind Waker. I watched Graev play a lot of it, and it always looked fun, but never did I take the controls. Wind Waker was at a time when I wasn’t really a console gamer. Since then, I’ve become much more comfortable with and even at times prefer the console gaming session over the PC. I digress.

I won’t bore you guys with any long-winded gist of the game. It’s old. You probably played it already. You’re one of the many reincarnations of the hero we know as Link, and you’re sailing around a world torn asunder into islands. Lots of exploration and fun things to find while sailing around on your ship.

I want to simply share a few of my favorite little gems.

What I really love about Wind Waker is how much it maintains a story but allows for freedom to sail the ocean and find things. I’m also loving the little things like having bags within my main bag that allow me to collect monster drops. Picking up enemy weapons is another little detail that’s just fun.

Some of the items are awesome like the grappling hook and the leaf. They add a neat element I haven’t yet experience in a Zelda game.

Wind Waker is a relatively short game if you go for just the story. You can sail island to island and knock out the dungeons rather quickly. Another huge plus for me is that the dungeons aren’t as convoluted as they were in Twilight Princess. None of this having to go back to the same room 5 times and rotate platforms to figure out puzzles so unintuitive you’d have to simply bash your head against the wall for a week to figure it out (if you’re not already following a step-by-step walkthrough).

So if you’re looking for a quick Zelda fix while you wait for Breath of the Wild, give Wind Waker HD a shot. It’s $20 and can last you 24-35 hours. It’s now my favorite — likely to be second favorite after BotW.

  • I still need to go back and beat it. I first started playing it on emulator a few years back, ended up quitting while trying to find the triforce from a combination of “It’s frustrating when the emulator isnt running the game this well” and “This part of the game definitely sucks”.

    …that being said, for a game I didn’t play in my childhood and one that I didn’t finish, I sure have a lot of nostalgia for it. It was a really good game. And I don’t know why, but the dungeons in the game were just designed so well, I remember the puzzles and combat being basically the 100% perfect difficulty for me, like almost uncanny how perfect. It was just hard enough to not be trivial, but I never felt like I needed a guide and never got frustrated on bosses. Compared to a game like Ocarina of Time which I also enjoyed but had multiple dungeons, puzzles, and bosses I got frustrated with.

    • I completely agree with you. The difficulty is perfect for me. Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time would be so frustrating at times. Wind Waker takes that frustration away pretty well, and the HD version has a few nice quality of life improvements with the touch screen.

      • I also heard there was something like…a new faster sail or something like that? Is that right? That would be a HUGE draw for me, the slow sailing speed was definitely an annoyance after a while.