The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (GameCube)

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The Wind Waker makes fantastic use of the GameCube's ability to link up to the Game Boy Advance. In the game, you'll acquire an item called the Tingle tuner, which essentially looks like a Game Boy Advance with an antenna sticking out of it. With it, you can call upon the fairy wannabe Tingle, who appears on the GBA screen along with a map of your surroundings. As you move around, Tingle will occasionally give you hints about dungeon puzzles, and his map of the sea is helpful for finding islands before you've properly charted a quadrant. Tingle can also heal you, restore your magic, drop a bomb anywhere you put his cursor, and give you the ability to fly for short periods of time. All this extra item- and power-up-based help comes at the cost of a handful of rupees, and it's never actually required. The entire Tingle tuner portion of the game seems to have been designed to allow parents to help young children through the game, as his hints and items can be used to make the game even easier than it already is. However, Tingle's bonuses are disabled during boss fights and other important encounters, limiting his effectiveness.

All told, the game can be completed in 15 to 20 hours, though considering all the extra heart pieces, treasure maps, and other little optional endeavors in the game, that number can increase fairly dramatically. The game's quest starts out in a very brisk manner, quickly moving you from dungeon to dungeon without delay. The game's final third, however, requires you to collect a series of items before you can gain entry to the game's final sequence. Collecting these items isn't difficult, but the focus on sailing, rupee collecting, and dredging up items from the bottom of the sea is pretty tedious. While this portion of the game has actually been shortened up a bit since the Japanese release, it still feels like it was put in the game merely to pad it out to an acceptable length. Thankfully, the game gets back on track after this portion is completed, and the game's final confrontation puts a nice new twist on the classic Zelda boss fight.

Much has been said about The Wind Waker's cartoonlike, cel-shaded look, which was initially met with quite a bit of skepticism when it debuted some time ago. That skepticism is completely unfounded, though, as this new entry in the series looks absolutely amazing. What seems like a relatively simple look on the surface is revealed to be quite complex pretty early on, as the game begins to show off some of its facial animation techniques. The game's characters are extremely expressive in their motion and appearance, and this adds emotional weight to the game's text-based story line. There are lots of great little touches to the game's look. The game's focus on wind translates into grass that blows naturally, sails that fill with wind when you've pointed them in the right direction, and swirling gusts of wind that clue you in to the wind's direction and force--something that actually factors into the gameplay on more than one occasion. Artistically, The Wind Waker is nearly unmatched, on the GameCube or on any other platform.

But the game is no technical slouch, either. It runs at a pretty consistent frame rate, allows you to clearly see far-off objects and islands with ease, and makes great use of various lighting effects for things like torches and other underground light sources. About the only noticeable bit of weirdness in the game's visuals is some occasional dithering or color banding when you're out on the open sea at night, but even that is relatively rare and stands out only if you're specifically looking for it. It's also worth noting that the game features progressive scan support for those with higher-end displays.

The Wind Waker's music is a collection of fantastic tunes. Some of it is completely new, some of it qualifies as a remix of older (usually The Ocarina of Time) music, and some of it is music that sounds reminiscent enough of older Zelda music to remind you of specific passages in previous compositions. Regardless of the source, the music all comes together very, very nicely. There isn't any real speech in the game, though most major characters make a series of noises when you speak to them. Link himself has the same style of yelps, shouts, and screams that you've heard in previous Zelda games. While the noises do work fairly well, hearing the same handful of voice clips again and again in combat does tend to wear on you a little bit. The game's sound effects and other audio elements are nicely done, and, depending on your surroundings, they occasionally pick up a little echo. For players with above-average audio configurations, the game makes pretty good use of its Dolby Pro Logic II support.

While some may be a little put off by the late-game item fetching and the game's easy puzzles and boss battles, The Wind Waker is nonetheless a strong achievement in every way, from its stunning graphical presentation to its tight control and interesting story line. It may not have fallen too far from the tree Nintendo planted back in 1998, but the way it refines one of the polygonal generation's most important games makes The Wind Waker every bit as much of a must-own game as The Ocarina of Time was before it.

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