Above the waves – The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

**The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker** (Nintendo, GameCube, 2002/2003)

In 1978, a storm destroyed most of the pier in my hometown. It had been the second longest pier in Britain, but the town’s popularity had fallen too far from its Victorian seaside heyday for it to be worth repairing it. By the time I was around, the only remains were one stub attached to the land, and the very end of the pier still standing on its own at sea.

They built a sports pavilion on the land end. As well as being home to the national roller hockey champions, it hosted a lot of children’s sports activities, which meant I was there often. From the sea end you could look out the window and see the other surviving section of the pier, looking remarkably close but totally out of reach. A forlorn relic, the sight was lasting evidence of what wasn’t there any more, washed away into the ocean.

I went to secondary school in a bigger city, and we once went on a geography field trip to my hometown, to study erosion. Reminders of impermanence were never far away. The sea is a good place to think of the past. It’s a theme that The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker picks up, and uses in service of one of the deepest and most optimistic experiences the series has ever offered.

I wouldn’t say I loved the sea, but only because it was too much of a fact of life for that. You don’t usually love the air you breathe. And years and years before I ever got on board a plane, all of our holidays abroad would mean a trip on a ferry, hours spent watching lashing waves and taking in the meaning of distance as only the vast fluid ocean can convey it. I loved stories about the sea (and islands, and buried treasure) from an early age. Five on a Treasure Island and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader were early favourite books. The first computer game whose narrative I fell in love with was The Secret of Monkey Island, a pirate story with its own magical sea journey. The possibilities of the ocean continued to enthrall.

So in 2003, when I had lost touch with video games and was focused on the world of indie music, it made sense that it was another seabound story, brought over from another island nation, that pulled me back in. I played The Wind Waker on my university roommate’s GameCube, I loved it, and without that wonderful experience I probably wouldn’t have played enough games past 2000 to be interested in writing this whole project now.

The ocean is the central character in The Wind Waker. By the time you’ve completed the first dungeon it gives you a boat, a sail, and a baton to conduct an airy chorus into magically changing the wind direction, letting you go anywhere on sea. Being able to move around the whole world from right after the first dungeon, doing a little task in each area to add it to your map, was a level of freedom which the series didn’t pick up again until spectacularly running with it in Breath of the Wild in 2017.

Sailing in The Wind Waker gives a taste of the peace and possibility that can arrive when there is nothing around but oceans as far as the eye can see. Some complained that the sailing was too slow, but to me it has always been the heart of the game, the thing that provides a sense of distance between places and allows the game to tell a story of precarity, disconnection and adaptation. Like the decaying relic of the pier I used to look out on, The Wind Waker has a story to tell about what went before.

Being moved out to sea isn’t even the most famous change that The Wind Waker made, though. That was its art style, a glorious cel-shaded rush of colour which at the time made for a super alternative to ever increasing levels of detail and only looks better in hindsight. The bright colours are just the most immediately noticeable part of a consistent bold and expressive style. Its characters’ outsized faces and guileless expressions are a gift to physical comedy, like the scene where Link is about to be fired from a catapult and each number in the countdown gets a rapid cut to a new expression of apprehension.

The style allows a wink from pirate captain Tetra can be an outsized moment of exposition to match any of the mystical laser beams elsewhere. The approach flows right through to things like the way written text uses giant and tiny font sizes, and the dramatic musical cues with each slash of Link’s sword during combat. The game’s systems are united in ensuring maximum expressiveness.

The extent of the aesthetic change (and ultimately the backlash to it) reflects one of the ways in which The Wind Waker’s form and content line up, which is in considering how to handle legacy. It wasn’t the first console Zelda game since Ocarina of Time, but Majora’s Mask was both so obviously based on the Ocarina of Time engine and so entirely a weird alternative of its own that it dodged the question. The Wind Waker had no such option and would be seen as the first real follow-up.

Ocarina of Time ushered Zelda’s complex interlocking action adventure systems into 3D. It also confirmed The Legend of Zelda in a routine of telling stories, or rather different versions of one story, which were nominally in the same world with different iterations of the same characters. The series’s own history was now inseparable from the legend of its title. The Wind Waker makes that idea resonate deeper and harder. Partly that’s because it leans further on a specific past.

Since Ocarina of Time was going to loom inescapably large anyway, Nintendo attempted to embrace that. A GameCube port of Ocarina of Time, complete with added new quest, was used as an incentive for buyers of The Wind Waker. In the UK, the two came inseparably in one box. And, counting on players’ familiarity, the story of The Wind Waker makes clear that the hero in the legends its characters speak of is specifically the Hero of Time.

It also follows a lot of the format of Ocarina of Time, though the oversized reaction to its stylistic changes has overshadowed the extent to which it changes other things too. It has some smart new items like the hang-gliding/wind-blowing Deku Leaf, and if the dungeons already occasionally get overfamiliar, there’s an answer to that too. It’s well-documented that The Wind Waker has an unusually small number of dungeons because some planned ones fell behind in development and were scrapped. But changes made for pragmatic reasons don’t have to be bad ones. The quest for buried shards of the Triforce that bulks up the game’s closing stages instead, an exercise in unpicking stories and rumours in search of numerous maps to guide you to a treasure, was one of my favourite parts when I first played it. It fits right in with the pleasures of sailing its ocean, and personally brought me right back to my memories of treasure hunting tales past. It’s a charming experience to gain a better understanding of a world through unravelling its clues.

The story’s biggest confrontation of the legacy of Ocarina of Time comes earlier, in its closest equivalent to the big moment of that game when young Link moved into the future and found that the world he had grown up in was now ruined, newly dark and horrifying. That wasn’t the first game to make something of mid-game cataclysm. Final Fantasy VI’s upending of the World of Balance into the World of Ruin comes immediately to mind. It’s even more common for games to start off with dystopia already in place. In The Wind Waker, you deal with some evil which Ganon has brought to the Great Sea, but for the most part doing so is preventative; Ganon provides little beyond a threat and a bit of typical (attempted) princess-kidnapping to drive the plot. Instead, The Wind Waker’s art style and setting come together to put a different emphasis on cataclysm.

The game turns on a sequence which comes after the first round of dungeons and objectives are completed, when the challenge of the gods has been met, and potentially the whole world has been mapped. Link and his talking boat head into a glowing magic circle and are taken below the sea to a castle in another place. Link remains colourful, childlike, wide-eyed. But the kingdom he has arrived in is entirely monochrome, a lifeless moment frozen in time. The game’s colourful palette sets up the contrast of its removal, and it’s a moving experience to be within the frozen kingdom’s haunting wrongness. Link confirms the meaning of the place by restoring the signature triforce symbol, takes the sword he came for, and colour and movement slowly seeps back in. It lights up stained glass windows depicting characters from Ocarina of Time, canonisation in full effect.

A short while later, the game fills in the details if they aren’t already apparent. The place was Hyrule Castle, lost below the waves after the gods responded to a last-ditch call to save the kingdom by sealing it below a flood. The ancestors of Wind Waker’s characters were refugees who fled to the mountaintops. This section does contain The Wind Waker’s most disappointing moment, in the fate of pirate captain Tetra. After previously lighting up every moment she appeared like an even more confident and sarcastic Elaine Marley, she gets fitted into the only space in the legend available for a woman and instantly vanishes out of the action. She may not be held captive by Ganon, but she gets held captive by the plot all the same. Leaving aside that needless weakness, though, I love the wider implications of the revelation of the nature of the world.

The world of The Wind Waker is a magically colourful one, with largely contented people all around, doing their best. Postbirds flap their way between islands, merchants practice their most breathily grateful thank yous, people have all their small joys and resentments and dreams. The saturated, hyper-expressive presentation goes out of its way to present the vibrancy of it all. And this idyll, it turns out, is in Hyrule’s equivalent of the World of Ruin. After the deluge, this is what grew up in the world that was left. It’s a beautiful affirmation of the force of life, not just carrying on in the face of hardship and change but prospering.

It’s an affirmation that The Wind Waker follows through on completely, too. It dangles the possibility of Hyrule’s return, before discarding it to settle on a final message of living for the future. Even when the evidence of older, more celebrated times is around and below us, better to keep them in mind but create a bright future in our own, new and better ways. There is no holding back the waves.

Nintendo would go on to find their own blue oceans ahead, though they would be slower to take the message of looking to the future to heart as far as The Legend of Zelda on consoles was concerned. The Wind Waker stands out still as one of the most optimistic, as well as beautifully presented, experiences in games. It resonated the first time I played it, and it sure as hell resonates in decaying, backwards-looking Britain now.