I hate Wind Waker.

  • A thread explaining my intense dislike for The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. As requested by @Kaynil .

    So, first off, I actually did a podcast about how much I hate Wind Waker. So if you'd rather listen to that, it's an option for you. Here ya go: http://dumbstufftakenseriously.blogspot.com/2015/09/episod…nd-no-mans.html

    But for the benefit of the deaf, and those who'd rather not suffer through my shitty podcast, I will also write out my thoughts on this awful, awful game.

    First, I think it's important to establish that I wanted to like this game. My Zelda series fanboyism was at its peak in the lead up to this game. As far as I was concerned, this franchise could do no wrong. A Zelda game had no flaws, simply by virtue of being a Zelda game. Several times I went out of my way to tell people that Adventures of Link wasn't as bad as everybody said it was, despite the fact that at that point I hadn't even played the game yet. And while a lot of impotent nerd rage was spewed across the Internet over the "cartoony" look of the upcoming Zelda game, I was the game's valiant defender. I wrote multiple essays about how good the game was going to be.

    Being a poor fuck, I wasn't able to get my hands on the game right away. But when I finally did borrow a copy from a friend and play it? The game LITERALLY put me to sleep. I've never been prone to take naps in my life. I was a spry and energetic 16 year old, it was the middle of the day, I'd gotten plenty of sleep the night before, and I was playing a game I'd waited to play for years.

    But the sailing in this game was so boring, that I fell asleep despite all of that.

    Honestly, that's enough for me right there. If a game puts me to sleep, it's a bad game. Or, at the very least, it's not a game well suited for my tastes. (Though given how much I loved the previous Zelda games, I think it's fair to assert the 'bad game' point.)

    However, that's not the end of the story. Because my girlfriend loves Wind Waker. And I love my girlfriend. So earlier this year I sat down and played through all of Wind Waker, from start to finish with her. Playing the game with someone I love didn't help though. Wind Waker still sucks.

    For starters, the sailing. The sailing is horrendous. Not only does it take forever to get anywhere, but the act of changing the wind direction is tedious. It's something that has to be done way too often, and takes way too long to happen.

    Which leads into another problem: cutscenes. Cutscenes, cutscenes, cutscenes. This game interrupts the action constantly, forcing you to sit through endlessly repetitive animations, boring narrative and mechanical exposition, and so many needless story segments. How many times do I need to see Link's amazed face as the wind changes direction under his command? Does he ever get used to it? Because I've been bored of it since the first time it happened.

    I'm going to repeat an anecdote from the podcast, because it's relevant and it pissed me off so much at the time. There's this puzzle. It's pretty simple. You freeze a slime guy, then you put him on a switch, and the switch makes stairs appear. Then you have to run down a hallway as fast as you can, so you can get up the stairs before the stairs disappear again. I figured the puzzle out as soon as I walked into the room. It's not exactly a hard puzzle.

    The first time I tried to complete the puzzle, it showed me a long cutscene of the stairs appearing. I couldn't control Link during the cutscene, so I didn't have enough time to run down the hallway. That meant I had to run all the way back, freeze a new slime, and try again. This time it didn't show that cutscene, so I made it alllllllmost to the end. But a Stalfos appeared, and I had to sit through a "Stalfos appearing" cutscene. During the cutscene, the stairs disappeared.

    If the cutscene hadn't happened, I coulda just ran past the stalfos and straight up the stairs, but nope. I had to fight the stalfos, run back down the hallway, freeze a new slime, put it on the button, and run back to the stairs a third time. This time there were no cutscenes at all, and I made it with time to spare.

    That's not game design. That's garbage. Gameplay in WW is constantly interrupted by those stupid little cutscenes, and they always break up the action. Frequently, this causes enough of a disruption in gameplay that the player fails in a situation where they would otherwise succeed.

    And while we're on the subject of dungeon / puzzle design, it's mediocre at best. A lot of the game's "challenges" are really just lock-and-key barriers. When you walk into a room and there's a high ledge with a target above it, you don't have to do any thinking to figure out what the solution to the puzzle is. If you have the hookshot you can pass, if you don't have the hookshot you can't. It creates the illusion of overcoming barriers, while really you're just uncreatively repeating the same action over and over.

    There's also a weird amont of platforming for a zelda game. Zelda games aren't platformers. They don't include a "jump" button. The moderate amount of platforming sections that were included in the N64 Zelda games worked pretty well I feel, but they really ratcheted it up for Wind Waker, and it doesn't work for me at all. I kept falling and needing to start my whole climb over just because the twitchy, not-optimized-for-platforming controls just don't work for platforming. If they wanted to include a 'jump' button, that'd be a different story! I think a Zelda game that incorporated 3D platformer elements could be super interesting! But that's not what they did.

    Moving on, lets talk about some of the items.

    Telescope: what the fuck is this even for? Did any of you ever use it ONCE outside of a scripted segment? I guess there are a couple bits where someone says "I see something in the distance," and you can stand next to them and Telescope it. Maybe this could have been interesting if that was a more relevant aspect of play. But, as mentioned above, the sailing sucks.

    Iron Boots: Since you never really go underwater in this game, these are literally only useful as a lock-and-key item. In Ocarina of Time, you could use the Iron Boots to explore. Walk around underwater areas, and try to find new solutions to problems. In Wind Waker you only put them on if you jump on a button and it doesn't go down. (Or if it's one of the 3 areas of the game with strong winds).

    Hookshot: My poor neutered hookshot. Coolest item in Zelda games. It used to stick to all sorts of things. In Link to the Past, you could use the hookshot to latch onto pots and pull yourself towards them. Pots! Pots are everywhere! In Ocarina of Time, there were a ton of wooden surfaces that worked. In Wind Waker it's pretty much only the targets and the fat little tree things. If you see one of those, you know the game wants you to use the hookshot.

    You might as well be watching a cutscene.

    The Leaf: This is actually kinda cool. It would be better if the platforming segments didn't suck as much, but if you're using the leaf, the platforming parts can be a whole lot more fun to play. Plus it can knock enemies back, plus it's the weakness for certain enemies! It's actually a pretty creative and fun to use item. Although, I do have one question:

    Why not just use the sail? I mean, you have the sail in your inventory. And the Sail is really only useful when you get in your boat, which means it spends tons of time just sitting uselessly in your inventory. It would make sense if you could also use the sail as a parachute sorta thing.

    Boomerang: This is actually really well put together. Very satisfying to use. A real improvement over Ocarina of Time. Bravo.

    The Grappling Hook: Oooooo the grappling hook. How I hate the grappling hook.

    First off, we can all acknowledge that it's redundant, right? The Hookshot is already a thing. Why did we need a second thing exactly like it? With a little tweaking, the hookshot could have done everything the grappling hook did. There's no reason for both items to exist, and the hookshot is an established part of the zelda cannon. So, right off the bat, the grappling hook never should have made it out of the pitch meeting.

    The grappling hook is also awkward to use. You've gotta shift into first person mode and nudge the controller around eeeeeever so gently until your cursor says you've hovered over an acceptable part of the grappling point. I always ended up bumping past it and needing to move back the other way. Goddesses help you if you need to use the grappling hook in combat, such as you do during that first boss fight. Blerg.

    And then there's that stupid cutscene that plays every time you grapple onto an object. Made all the worse for the fact that you often have to grapple multiple times in a row. So. Many. Cutscenes. This stupid item could have been forgivable if it had been quicker to use.

    Finally, there's the way it's used later in the game, which irks me. You enter a room, there's a locked door. You look around, you try a few different things, but nothing seems to open the door. Finally, you think to look up, and there's a grapple-hook lever in the ceiling. It's been two hours since you needed to use the grappling hook. Nothing in the room indicated you should have looked up. It's just a dumb, time-wastey-"gotcha!" puzzle. There's no cleverness involved.

    If they'd wanted to be clever, they could have put a statue in the center of the room with a grappling lever on its tail. You'd see the statue as soon as you entered the room, and you'd know that there was something special about it. The statue has a lot of details, so you'd spend some time looking at it. You might overlook the fact that the tail is shapped like a grappling lever at first, but if you're clever you'd give it a try, and be rewarded for thinking your way through the puzzle.

    But no. Instead they made the solution painfully obvious, and simulated difficulty by placing the solution out of your line of sight. Whee.

    Lets see...Oh! NPCs! Wind Waker is when Zelda NPCs started to suck. It's a pretty clear line of delineation, actually. Before Wind Waker, NPCs are grounded in the game's reality. After Wind Waker, NPCs are characters in a children's cartoon. The kind of character that's always loud and clumsy, because some white guy in a suit thinks that'll keep children entertained. I can't take modern Zelda NPCs seriously. They all seem as though they might slip on a banana peel or get hit in the head by an anvil in the next scene. Blergle.

    Lightning round because this is getting super long:

    Boss Fights: Bland. Often the only difficulty in the boss fights is the difficulty of getting the controls to do what you want them to do.

    The Opening: Aside from the dozens of cutscenes, the bit with your sister and the bird is alright. Until they send you to the forgotten fortress. Why is there a stealth section in a zelda game? It's awful. Obviously it's awful. Zelda isn't a stealth game series. This was a terrible idea, and they made it the first dungeon. That's stupid.

    Difficulty: The game overall has no decent difficulty curve. 90% of the game could be played while you're sleepwalking. Then you'll walk into a room that requires intense effort and concentration. Like that fuckin' gauntlet you needed to go through to get one of the triforce pieces. What was that? I mean, it was kinda tedious, but it was really fucking hard compared to every other triforce piece! Why?

    No Index of hints: This just felt like a dumb choice to me. Why don't the hints the fish give you get recorded anywhere? Dumb.

    Talking to the fish to get map segments: I like the idea of making map charting a bigger part of the game, but I didn't like the way they did this at all. One, it required you to haul around a bunch of bait, which was annoying. But more importantly, you had to find the place that the fish was in each square, which meant you had to change the wind around a bunch so you could get to the fish. Dumb. Why not just have a bottomless bait bag, and be able to throw the bait anywhere in the square?

    Slow ship movement speed without a sail: Seriously, moving when you don't have a sail is too fucking slow. Like, why have this feature at all if it's going to move at 1/100th of Link's swim speed?

    The ghost ship: I really though this was going to be an interesting quest. I thought I was going to have to figure out what the symbols meant, and I was all excited about that. I actually did figure it out. Then I realized they just showed you exactly where the ship is on your map. Lame. Why give all those hints if you're just going to tell me?

    Zelda/Tetra: This is a big one. Tetra is an interesting character. A strong woman who takes her fate in her own hands, and has a real impact on the game. Then she learns she's Zelda, and pretty much immediately becomes a damsel in distress. Fuck that noise. Dumb, dumb, dumb, stupid.

    That's all that comes to my mind at the moment. I do want to emphasize that I don't think WW did everything wrong. I think the art style is beautiful, and I think the combat can be very fluid and enjoyable. Particularly if you're fighting Darknuts. (The weaknesses in the combat system become more apparent if you fight large numbers of fast enemies. So the Darknut's slow speed allows the positive aspects of combat to really shine.)

    But, overall, I hate Windwaker. I think it's a bad game.

  • Thanks LS. your thread is the excuse I need to stay up till dawn. I've read it alla nd I want to give my take in some of your points. I also want to listen the podcast episode. I will do that, I just don't want you to think I a ignoring this after I requested it. It is pretty innteresting. I also want to see what other people think about it.

  • Wind Waker HD pretty much fixed up all my complaints about the game. Which were the slow sailing, the cutscenes every time you change wind direction and the triforce piece hunt.

    I really didn't mind anything else. It could've been a bit more challenging. Honestly I didn't mind the sailing as much as most people. I found it fun and having a huge ocean to explore was cool. However, maybe a bit more things to explore on each island would've been nice.

    I very much enjoyed the art style and the animated NPCs.

    I wouldn't say I hated it, but it's not as good as people say it is. It's just a good Zelda game.

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  • The triforce hunt didn't bother me, safe for the really really really stupid mechanic where the glowy light showing where you should drop your crane disappears when you get close to it.

    What possible purpose does that serve? Especially when they make it SO DIFFICULT to make small adjustments to your position in the boat, due to aforementioned slowness of moving without a sail.

    I swear, sometimes I think they were TRYING to make a bad game. Why else would they create two mechanics that are so at odds with one another?

  • Okay. It has beena while since I played tWW so I might be a bit off so feel free to correct me. :XD:

    You can have the soundcloud podcast embed directly:
    [MEDIA=soundcloud][media][media][media][media][media][media][media][media][media][media][media][media][media][media][media][media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/media][/MEDIA]
    I loved the beginning. Hahah.

    Hahah. I found annoying changing the wind but never to the point of just crawling. Probably I tried and found the painfully speed without the right sail and tried it once but after that I pretty much stuck changing directions.

    The aiming and having to watch out, as awkward as it felt for you I still think it is about skill, about getting used to the game. SomethinG I like from tWW bosses is that sense of tension you get. You can't just stand still, the branches, the stuff is out to get you. I felt in real danger.Being on the run and trying to figure out how to beat it. Then when you know what to do, that's just half the solution, you need to have a strategy to be able to do it as much as possible without receiving damage.

    pretty interesting podcast. I see a lot of what you typed indeed overlaps with this but I a still glad you wrote it. makes it easier to comment.

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    when I finally did borrow a copy from a friend and play it? The game LITERALLY put me to sleep. I've never been prone to take naps in my life. I was a spry and energetic 16 year old, it was the middle of the day, I'd gotten plenty of sleep the night before, and I was playing a game I'd waited to play for years.

    But the sailing in this game was so boring, that I fell asleep despite all of that.

    Honestly, that's enough for me right there. If a game puts me to sleep, it's a bad game. Or, at the very least, it's not a game well suited for my tastes. (Though given how much I loved the previous Zelda games, I think it's fair to assert the 'bad game' point.)

    It is quite a thing to say the game put you to sleep. For me the first impression I had with the sailing was the limitation. You had a vast blue ocean and you're itchy to explore. As far as you're concerned you passed your first dungeon, you have been through enough to understand the game. Sure boat is relatively new but nothing that hard to pick up with a little practice. So going a few tiles and being reared back because we must visit Dragoon Roost Island was truly frustrating. I felt like the follow without detours approach lasted way longer than in previous games.


    Which leads into another problem: cutscenes. Cutscenes, cutscenes, cutscenes. This game interrupts the action constantly, forcing you to sit through endlessly repetitive animations, boring narrative and mechanical exposition, and so many needless story segments. How many times do I need to see Link's amazed face as the wind changes direction under his command? Does he ever get used to it?

    I didn't mind the sailing in itself, not even the wind change, because once you control the winds is knowing where you go, point there and sail. The annoyance was that instead of point A to C you find in your way another island or secrets and you need to re-adjust. That the cinema is never shortened after the first few times beats me. At least HD remake seems to have shortened it but probably it'd be better if you could just skip altogether and just point where you want to go. They also added a sail cloth to go faster.
    I bolded part was just amusing so I wanted to make it stand out. Agreed.

    There's this puzzle. It's pretty simple. You freeze a slime guy, then you put him on a switch, and the switch makes stairs appear. Then you have to run down a hallway as fast as you can, so you can get up the stairs before the stairs disappear again. I figured the puzzle out as soon as I walked into the room. It's not exactly a hard puzzle.

    The first time I tried to complete the puzzle, it showed me a long cutscene of the stairs appearing. I couldn't control Link during the cutscene, so I didn't have enough time to run down the hallway. That meant I had to run all the way back, freeze a new slime, and try again. This time it didn't show that cutscene, so I made it alllllllmost to the end. But a Stalfos appeared, and I had to sit through a "Stalfos appearing" cutscene. During the cutscene, the stairs disappeared.

    If the cutscene hadn't happened, I coulda just ran past the stalfos and straight up the stairs, but nope. I had to fight the stalfos, run back down the hallway, freeze a new slime, put it on the button, and run back to the stairs a third time. This time there were no cutscenes at all, and I made it with time to spare.

    That's not game design. That's garbage. Gameplay in WW is constantly interrupted by those stupid little cutscenes, and they always break up the action. Frequently, this causes enough of a disruption in gameplay that the player fails in a situation where they would otherwise succeed.

    I am pretty sure I'll think of you next time I reach that area. I don't recall this puzzle in particular but I do recall having to do twice things because of cutscenes pausing me. I agree that they shouldn't make a cinema of every door closing and enemy appearing. The real cutscenes like when the sister is snatched are pretty cool, but I do recall feeling annoying to enter a new room and immediately being told, here is a switch, check this door, check this platform, back to you. Before you even had a chance to move Link the room had already been shown to you, all the exploring is out because all the important elemets are spelled out for you, heck, the animations are there to insinuate what the puzzle solution is.

    And while we're on the subject of dungeon / puzzle design, it's mediocre at best. A lot of the game's "challenges" are really just lock-and-key barriers. When you walk into a room and there's a high ledge with a target above it, you don't have to do any thinking to figure out what the solution to the puzzle is. If you have the hookshot you can pass, if you don't have the hookshot you can't. It creates the illusion of overcoming barriers, while really you're just uncreatively repeating the same action over and over.

    [...]Finally, there's the way [the grappling hook is] used later in the game, which irks me. You enter a room, there's a locked door. You look around, you try a few different things, but nothing seems to open the door. Finally, you think to look up, and there's a grapple-hook lever in the ceiling. It's been two hours since you needed to use the grappling hook. Nothing in the room indicated you should have looked up. It's just a dumb, time-wastey-"gotcha!" puzzle. There's no cleverness involved.

    If they'd wanted to be clever, they could have put a statue in the center of the room with a grappling lever on its tail. You'd see the statue as soon as you entered the room, and you'd know that there was something special about it. The statue has a lot of details, so you'd spend some time looking at it. You might overlook the fact that the tail is shapped like a grappling lever at first, but if you're clever you'd give it a try, and be rewarded for thinking your way through the puzzle.

    But no. Instead they made the solution painfully obvious, and simulated difficulty by placing the solution out of your line of sight. Whee.

    I see your point but I think TLoZ usually display this kind of puzzles. I don't particularly recall if tWW are way more often or if in OoT was more varied than that. Kill the enemies to open the door is a classic recurrence. Need an item to access is another. Feel free to remind me of good TLoZ puzzles. I am sure there are even in OoT (my brain keeps whispering the Spirit temple, but it won't give me a specific example).
    That said taht idea you came up with is pretty cool.

    There's also a weird amont of platforming for a zelda game. Zelda games aren't platformers. They don't include a "jump" button. The moderate amount of platforming sections that were included in the N64 Zelda games worked pretty well I feel, but they really ratcheted it up for Wind Waker, and it doesn't work for me at all. I kept falling and needing to start my whole climb over just because the twitchy, not-optimized-for-platforming controls just don't work for platforming. If they wanted to include a 'jump' button, that'd be a different story! I think a Zelda game that incorporated 3D platformer elements could be super interesting! But that's not what they did.

    I don't really recall that much platforming but it could be that I am just used to it so I didn't think much of it. I remember that in MM jumping to platforms felt odd, specially with Link frigging showing off with his different jumps. Just jump straight! I mean, don't get me wrong, I like the animation itself but sometimes it just didn't fit the mood or the angle.

    As for the Items..
    Telescope: Used it a few times, never really helped me to make things cleared at the distance. I used it to spay on the killer bees I think. It was funw atching the guy on the tree.
    Iron boots: Yeah, I even forgot we use them so point taken.
    Hookshot: I use it so little that I honestly forget tWW has it. I always think that it was substituted by the grappling hook.
    Grappling hook. I actually had fun with this but it was ashame it could only be used in approved areas. I don't remember which one you get first, but it would had made more sense to upgrade that.

    Oh! NPCs! Wind Waker is when Zelda NPCs started to suck. It's a pretty clear line of delineation, actually. Before Wind Waker, NPCs are grounded in the game's reality. After Wind Waker, NPCs are characters in a children's cartoon. The kind of character that's always loud and clumsy, because some white guy in a suit thinks that'll keep children entertained. I can't take modern Zelda NPCs seriously.


    Do you mean by design or dialogue?
    Would you mind comparing two NPCs to better illustrate your point.

    Boss Fights: Bland. Often the only difficulty in the boss fights is the difficulty of getting the controls to do what you want them to do.

    I can't recall most of the fights but I liked them. they were kind of short once you understood what the game was expecting you to do. Although I can't recall them all.

    The Opening: Aside from the dozens of cutscenes, the bit with your sister and the bird is alright. Until they send you to the forgotten fortress. Why is there a stealth section in a zelda game? It's awful. Obviously it's awful. Zelda isn't a stealth game series. This was a terrible idea, and they made it the first dungeon. That's stupid.

    Crap. Probably here I have an unpopular opinion but I thought it was a very interesting approach. You have no weapon and are trying to pass the enemies walking undetected. The problem with it is that the barrel thing gets old awfully quick once you realise it is not difficult to pass the guards just too damn slow.
    another gripe I had with the dungeon was accidentally falling on the lower flows because I didn't grab the rope in between rooms, it was a pain finding the way back to the above floor as it usually involved exiting the rooms and going up by the side yet again.

    Difficulty: The game overall has no decent difficulty curve. 90% of the game could be played while you're sleepwalking. Then you'll walk into a room that requires intense effort and concentration. Like that fuckin' gauntlet you needed to go through to get one of the triforce pieces. What was that? I mean, it was kinda tedious, but it was really fucking hard compared to every other triforce piece! Why?


    Can't recall the gauntlet thing, but I don't recall much of that difficult spike. I do felt the game overall felt easier than the N64 ones.

    No Index of hints: This just felt like a dumb choice to me. Why don't the hints the fish give you get recorded anywhere? Dumb.

    Agreed. I did question this many, many times.

    Talking to the fish to get map segments: I like the idea of making map charting a bigger part of the game, but I didn't like the way they did this at all. One, it required you to haul around a bunch of bait, which was annoying. But more importantly, you had to find the place that the fish was in each square, which meant you had to change the wind around a bunch so you could get to the fish. Dumb. Why not just have a bottomless bait bag, and be able to throw the bait anywhere in the square?

    I am not sure if it was to inflate something simple to make you feel accomplished or what. I would have enjoyed better the way you mentioned, however having to buy bait gave me an excuse to use my rupees and use the pouch. It is just annoying the whole memorise in the distance and then more or less guess where the fish is. Overall it didn't annoy me more than just the passing moment.

    Slow ship movement speed without a sail: Seriously, moving when you don't have a sail is too fucking slow. Like, why have this feature at all if it's going to move at 1/100th of Link's swim speed?

    I found it funny. I think it is mostly for sailing around the island to find the best point to approach it.

    The ghost ship: I really though this was going to be an interesting quest. I thought I was going to have to figure out what the symbols meant, and I was all excited about that. I actually did figure it out. Then I realized they just showed you exactly where the ship is on your map. Lame. Why give all those hints if you're just going to tell me?

    That's cool you deciphered them all. I don't recall how well or bad I fared into it, but from what you say it'd be cool they had made it optional or that somehow you could have shown you had figured it out and only then it marked the ship for you as a reward.

    Honestly I didn't mind the sailing as much as most people. I found it fun and having a huge ocean to explore was cool. However, maybe a bit more things to explore on each island would've been nice.

    Yeah, I really think some island were really empty there.

    The triforce hunt didn't bother me, safe for the really really really stupid mechanic where the glowy light showing where you should drop your crane disappears when you get close to it. What possible purpose does that serve? Especially when they make it SO DIFFICULT to make small adjustments to your position in the boat, due to aforementioned slowness of moving without a sail.

    I felt they would take the mark a little too soon, the problem being that moving slowly in the middle of the ocean with nothing on the sides to corroborates your position gets tricky. Specially during night time. I never really felt that bothered by it but I see your point.

  • I see your point but I think TLoZ usually display this kind of puzzles. I don't particularly recall if tWW are way more often or if in OoT was more varied than that. Kill the enemies to open the door is a classic recurrence. Need an item to access is another. Feel free to remind me of good TLoZ puzzles. I am sure there are even in OoT (my brain keeps whispering the Spirit temple, but it won't give me a specific example).
    That said taht idea you came up with is pretty cool.

    It's true, puzzle design has never really been tLoZ's strong suit. Early Zelda puzzles were almost completely obtuse, such as when you need to burn the bush to enter the final dungeon. I don't remember if the game actually had any hints for this, or if it was merely expected that you'd eventually try burning the bush. (Though the saving grace of that puzzle was the fact that it could potentially be solved wayyyyyyyyy before you actually needed to go to the final level. AND, the tree you had to burn did stand out a bit.)

    LttP is where I think the puzzles peaked. Which isn't to say they were perfect, but they were better. Getting the book of Mudora, for example, is a pretty good puzzle. You just got the dash boots, and if you've walked around the world you know you can use them to knock stuff out of trees. And you know right where the book of Mudora is, it's just on a high shelf. The game gives you all the pieces, you just have to put it all together. The game repeats this puzzle a total of twice, if I recall correctly. The two repetitions are with keys, and they were far enough apart that I had to spend some time thinking before I realized the solution to each one. (Mind you: I spent time THINKING. All of the puzzle pieces were on screen for me to see. Unlike with similar puzzles in windwaker where the solution is obvious, but the challenge comes from the puzzle pieces being hidden off screen, waiting for you to look up at the ceiling.)

    In Ocarina of Time, there were some challenging block-pushing puzzles in the forest temple. And figuring out the weird gravity-shifting hallways was a bit of a puzzler for a bit. I also recall the spirit temple having some good bits, particularly with that huge statue. OoT also had a few places where the only way to reach something was to glide there on a cuckoo, which was never explicitly spelled out for you. That's some good puzzle design.

    The whole "kill all the enemies to make the door open" bit isn't what I'd call a puzzle. It's more of a combat challenge.

    I don't really recall that much platforming but it could be that I am just used to it so I didn't think much of it. I remember that in MM jumping to platforms felt odd, specially with Link frigging showing off with his different jumps. Just jump straight! I mean, don't get me wrong, I like the animation itself but sometimes it just didn't fit the mood or the angle.

    There was, for sure, tons of platforming in WindWaker. Several dungeons had large rooms with spiraling pathways to the top, including moving platforms. Other areas had long rooms where you had to maneuver moving platforms by spinning levers with the leaf item.

    This trend probably did start in Majora's Mask, though I think it was much less prominent in that game. Usually only brief segments in the Deku form.

    Do you mean by design or dialogue?
    Would you mind comparing two NPCs to better illustrate your point

    Both, for sure.

    A game can be cell shaded, with a cartoon style, without resorting to making its characters look this ridiculous. Link himself looks great! Some of the main characters, like Tetra and Link's sister, also look pretty good. But then there's the secondary characters, like the pirate crew, who've got buck teeth, make strange noises, whine like children when they're scolded by Tetra, and so on. Or the kid with the booger dangling down by his feet. Or that weird shopkeeper wearing a parka.

    I feel like all of these characters are trying to make the world seem silly. Like it's all a joke. I can take a cartoonish world seriously, but I can't take Wind Waker's world seriously.

    Compare to Ocarina of time, for example. The NPCs were colorful. We all remember the various Kokiri, the dancing lovers, the guard who believes in ghosts, Malon, and so on. But of all of Ocarina of Time's NPCs, the only ones I'd call 'goofy' are 1. Talon, and 2. The construction workers. And both of these are considered lazy by other characters in the game, and there are consequences to their laziness.


    Crap. Probably here I have an unpopular opinion but I thought it was a very interesting approach. You have no weapon and are trying to pass the enemies walking undetected. The problem with it is that the barrel thing gets old awfully quick once you realise it is not difficult to pass the guards just too damn slow.
    another gripe I had with the dungeon was accidentally falling on the lower flows because I didn't grab the rope in between rooms, it was a pain finding the way back to the above floor as it usually involved exiting the rooms and going up by the side yet again.

    Stealth games are my favorite genre of video games. The Forsaken Fortress is a terrible stealth game.

    If it was good, I would have enjoyed it. But like I say in the podcast, it's a very jarring way to begin a game where the gameplay will focus on swordfighting.

  • The whole "kill all the enemies to make the door open" bit isn't what I'd call a puzzle. It's more of a combat challenge.

    Perhaps it is me reducing the door won't open to a puzzle. I just have been in the past stump by a door that won't bulge until I realise tehr eis still a small fry hanging around. I guess it is more of a Zelda logic than a puzzle.

    Getting the book of Mudora, for example, is a pretty good puzzle. You just got the dash boots, and if you've walked around the world you know you can use them to knock stuff out of trees. And you know right where the book of Mudora is, it's just on a high shelf. The game gives you all the pieces, you just have to put it all together.

    I like that kind of puzzle where you have been given the parts and it is just about how to put them together, once you realise what it is it tends to be something so simple you feel silly for taking this long. In :ALBW: you have to catch a thief but the guy is super fast. As soona s he sees you, he bolts out. The answer was to use the drawing mechanic and jump on him from behind. This might sound too obvious but the brilliance is that because you're so set in catching him while he's in the town, you don't see a big area to plaster yourself into. The situations required you to change your thinking from "how can I be fast enough to catch up with him?" into "Is there a way to sneak upon him close enough so he doesn't get a chance to run?

    Anyway I agree. Those puzzles where the problem is not finding the solution but finding where the switch is. It kind of reminded me of Egoraptor's frustration with the arrow-to-the-eye type of blockage. The games seem to rely too much on them and instead of variating more the execution they just add a false sense of difficulty by hiding it from your range of view

    Speaking of switches I remember I turn a switch on with a Spin Attack. Late ron in the game I found myself in a similar situation where I wasn't able to reach the switch itself or throw something at it. I thought I had it but then the spin attack was pointless. That was pretty cool, they just gave you a false sense of security but the puzzle was actually solved in a different way.

    There was, for sure, tons of platforming in WindWaker. Several dungeons had large rooms with spiraling pathways to the top, including moving platforms. Other areas had long rooms where you had to maneuver moving platforms by spinning levers with the leaf item.

    I keep thinking on the fire-dungeon, specially with the timed platforms you created by pouring cold water on it. In itself that was an ingenuous thing if I recall correctly, locking you with the jars of water and letting you figure it out. But, oh my gosh, those platforms were so annoying. too close or too far and you just wasted the limited amount of water. in tWW it seemed taht as soona s they liked something they wanted to make you use it as much as possible.

    [..]there's the secondary characters, like the pirate crew, who've got buck teeth, make strange noises, whine like children when they're scolded by Tetra, and so on. Or the kid with the booger dangling down by his feet. Or that weird shopkeeper wearing a parka.

    I feel like all of these characters are trying to make the world seem silly. Like it's all a joke. I can take a cartoonish world seriously, but I can't take Wind Waker's world seriously.

    I don't know. I think it was more about them trying to go for more tropes. I recall some serious looking characters like the Rito but I can see what you mean about they going over the line to make them look and act silly. That kid was gross. I can understand the pirate crew was being underplayed in order to ensure Tetra stood out as the capable leader. I feel like :tww: tried a bit too much to be a cartoon. Their choice of narration, the characters silly reactions and specially the cutscenes constantly going for the humour. I can almost hear fanfares, insert que, when Link is sent in the barrel, when Link wakes up and discover the boat is talking, the explosion after placing the pearls... etc, etc.

    Majora's mask had a bit of it with Ingo and his brotehrs, for example, or Igos Du Ikana and the Captain's hat, or the redheads dancing but it was less in your face, I suppose.

    Stealth games are my favorite genre of video games. The Forsaken Fortress is a terrible stealth game.
    If it was good, I would have enjoyed it. But like I say in the podcast, it's a very jarring way to begin a game where the gameplay will focus on swordfighting.

    Well, since Link didn't have a sword I didn't fee it too out of place to try a segment with it, what killed the dungeon was that it was too frigging repetitive. If they couldn't come up with different puzzles they should have made that part of the game way shorter. There could have been other areas where you sneak in by say moving slowly through a net in the ceiling, having different kind of guards for the light towers, have different cells with its own puzzle on how to escape so getting trapped doesn't get old as fast. Instead we get a dull, repetitive dungeon.
    I am not big in stealth game actors, what do you thin could have made this level better? Besides the idea of just scratch it off the game altogether. :lengua:

  • I am not big in stealth game actors, what do you thin could have made this level better? Besides the idea of just scratch it off the game altogether. :lengua:

    I think it would be hard to make it work, really. At this point, there have been a lot of non-stealth games that have tried to have stealth sections. And it's Alllllllways awful. I can't think of a single time where it has worked.

    But I suppose lets say Nintendo offered me a bunch of money to fix that part of the game, and the refused to let me just cut it. Alright, lets see.

    I think I would have added a special enemy to the game for that segment only. Something that had a really obvious range of vision. Like a monster with blue beams of light coming from its eyes, and it could only see things inside those blue beams. (The sight lines would also show up on the game's minimap.)

    I'd also have the camera pull back a bunch to a fixed position, like they did in the stealth segment of Ocarina of Time. (Which, actually, wasn't that bad now that I think about it). If you're going to lose for being seen, then you need to be able to see the whole playing field. You need to know if there's a dude coming up behind you.

    I'd also design the rooms with better thought towards sneaking through them. In WW they were really just normal rooms with guard patrols. They should have had things to hide under / behind / on top of.

  • I've read most of this page of posts, and I only have one thing to say...

    At least I'm not the only one who doesn't like Wind Waker. I'm in love with the idea of Wind Waker, but the actual gameplay always made me question why I would put myself through the slow sailing and numerous, useless cut scenes.

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  • There's a character in Fallout 4 named Nick Valentine. When he's with you and you hack a computer, you get a little popup that says "Nick likes that."

    I want to take a screenshot of that and post it here. "Nick likes that." But I have to go to work in 20 minutes, so I don't have time. So just imagine that I put in the effort.

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  • Read everything, the game's too far out of my memory to comment on everything, but a few things. [long-ish post alert]

    I completely agree with LinkSkywalker about the childish characters, but I'm not sure it makes it a bad game. It's possible that it just wasn't marketed at me. That is, maybe Nintendo were trying to bring in a younger audience. I mean, let's face it, they couldn't make childishly animated characters in OoT's world if they wanted to, the technology wouldn't stretch to it. So, while I prefer the darker games, it's a half-hearted criticism of the game's objective quality.

    I must admit, I didn't like the dungeon design all that much. I think the whole series lost its dungeons after WW. For me, it's not just about puzzle design, it's about feeling and world-building. In OoT, for example, all the dungeons have a place in that world - they feel like they were once places of worship, or mines, or whatever. When I explore them, my imagination goes wild with their history. Less so with MM, and not at all with WW or the games beyond it.

    A huge plus for me was the soundtrack. Maybe the best music in the Zelda series.

    The sailing thing. I feel like a ramble...

    The sailing feature was an amazing, exciting concept poorly executed. The idea of it I remember being so entranced by. I think it could have worked, but would need serious rethinking. It depends on what you want out of a Zelda game. For me, I love the role-playing, fantasy element - I love being lost in a world and living in it. The day-to-day gaming is more important than the story for me, which is why I love MM so much for its breathing world outside the main story. So for me, I would have liked less (or no) control over the wind - instead using navigational skill to play the game. This would add an element of randomness to where you'd end up, making the seafaring aspect more three-dimensional. I'd fill the sea with random slabs of rock/grass with the odd cave or something, and allow you to leave a limited number of warp points around the map (away from NPC sight), and maybe leaving yourself supplies in caves, giving you more of a sandbox feel that would have saved the sailing. So, maybe you'd come to an area you'd not visited in a while, and then "Oh, I forgot I left that here!"
    The sea was just wayy to empty. And being able to control the wind made sailing, well, pointless. I'd also add a few fixed warp points for ease at major story locations, they may have already done that I can't remember. I think you could warp to any tile, which was... meh. I would also like to have more interactivity with the map - map-making and using maps is a huge part of sailing, and is too automated for my liking.

    And finally, finding the Triforce pieces was stupid, stupid, stupid. So I'm like, wow, I'm finding the TRIFORCE pieces! That amazing thing I heard about in OoT but never got to lay hands on! How cool! What? I just have to sail around and pick them off the floor? They're just randomly scattered on the sea floor? And I have a triforce-detecting gadget? Eughh... (and the idea that my little boat can hold a chain long enough to reach the sea bed is a little odd. It would have been a great excuse for some iron-boots sea-bed exploration! Hello Hyrule! But no, they couldn't do that.)

  • ^ Pretty much if they had done what you're talking about in your post, I think I would've liked the game better. Sea-bed exploration via iron boots would've been amazing, and adding random land masses and caves to explore in the ocean would've been fun. I like to feel more connected to the game I'm playing. The empty space and artificial (fake feeling, off putting... hard to find the right word for it) design of a lot of the places I went to made me kind of lose interest and put down the game.

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  • I liked it. I liked seeing the new Deku tree, I liked how it said the Kokiri Kids became the Koroks or whatever they where called. This game is the late late late descendant of the one I love and you see how the world has changed, and see some familiar faces that you had already met.

    This game is the bukkake of all things awesome with.....wait bukkake is not the right wording. Uhm.......I lost my train of thought.

  • I liked it. I liked seeing the new Deku tree, I liked how it said the Kokiri Kids became the Koroks or whatever they where called. This game is the late late late descendant of the one I love and you see how the world has changed, and see some familiar faces that you had already met.

    I mean, there's a lot of great things about the game, particularly the art style. Although the Deku Tree is something I really didn't like, personally. It falls under my complaint about NPCs being made too goofy. The original Deku Tree was dignified and wise, and he looked that way. The new one had a fat guy face with a single upturned buck tooth.