The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is deceptively dark game.
Yes, it’s cute and colourful and expressive, and yes, that makes it a very child-friendly
game.
Far more child-friendly than the previous game in the series, Majora’s Mask, at any
rate.
That colourful façade is only skin deep, though.
The world of Wind Waker is cruel.
Everyone is out to get you, the gods either don’t care about you or are actively trying
to ruin your day, and there is no hero – just an unlucky kid who happened to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time.
Welcome back to A Link to the Plot, our ongoing series where we examine the key game mechanic
in each Zelda game and explore how it perfectly reflects the game’s narrative and central
themes.
With Wind Waker, the central mechanic is, wind.
Wind that is always inevitably blowing the wrong way, wind that constantly annoys you
and halts your progress.
Ultimately, Wind Waker is a game about how sometimes, life is awful.
First things first: why wind?
Going into the Gamecube era, having wrapped up Majora’s Mask in an impressively quick
development period, the Zelda team wanted to push the new Gamecube hardware to its limits.
Said Shigeru Miyamoto: “Actually, for a long time we've wanted
to be able to use wind in games.
We've had windy stages in the Super Mario games before, but really it wasn't until we
were able to use the technology of the Nintendo GameCube and some of the visual styles possible
with it that we were able to really show wind blowing in a videogame.
So, that was one of the things we decided to challenge ourselves with, which made it
a driving force behind The Wind Waker.”
So, having decided on wind, the team next came up with a setting that gave the wind
relevance.
A sailboat was logical.
Said Miyamoto: “First of all we have to come up with a
specific stage of a game for Link's adventure and we came up with the idea of the ocean
and how Link would move.
We decided to use a ship and make use of a sailing boat so players could have control
over the wind and that is how we came up with the idea of wind control.”
It was at this point that the Zelda team decided to drown everyone in Hyrule.
Before we explore that cheery topic, a word from this video’s sponsor.
There is a Wind Waker minigame which never made it outside of Japan.
Navi Trackers, aka Tetra’s Trackers, features four Wind Waker Links competing at tasks set
by pirate captain Tetra.
It was never localised to English, and can only be played on the Japanese version of
Four Swords Adventure, known as Four Swords Plus.
Buying a copy of Four Swords Plus is nice and simple thanks to our sponsor, Buyee.
They allow you to purchase products from major Japanese websites including Rakuten, Mercari,
Yahoo Japan, and Amazon Japan.
They then get your purchase shipped to their warehouse, where it’s prepared for international
postage.
If you did want to try out Navi Trackers, Buyee is offering Video Game Story Time viewers
a 2000 yen discount code if you use the link in the description – that’s equal to approximately
20 US dollars.
Although, don’t forget that a Japanese GameCube game will also need a Japanese GameCube, so
oh darn, you’ll just have to buy the beautiful Japan-only pumpkin orange GameCube as well.
Anyway, back to the flood.
Zelda games are no strangers to apocalypses.
Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask both show their respective game worlds suffering the
effects of terrible evils.
A Link to the Past has its Dark World.
Most recently, Breath of the Wild depicts a world where the bad guys won and civilisation
has been all but destroyed.
It’s very similar to Wind Waker in many respects.
What makes Wind Waker stand out, though, is that the terrible world-ending apocalypse
event that creates the Great Sea, and drowns Hyrule, is not the work of some terrible evil.
The flood is caused by the gods themselves.
Throughout Wind Waker, the gods are synonymous with the weather, and they are often cruel
and malicious.
Take, for example, Cyclos, the giant froggy wind god, who grows angry after mortals disrespect
his shrine.
So, he goes on a rampage, forming cyclones that grab ships on the sea and toss them across
the map.
When the game talks about wind, it’s rarely positive.
In the opening cutscene, Ganondorf’s return is described as an “ill wind” that blows
across Hyrule.
Ganondorf himself embodies the wind, but is also antagonistic towards it.
At one point, he says: “My country lay within a vast desert.
When the sun rose into the sky, a burning wind punished my lands, searing the world.
And when the moon climbed into the dark of night, a frigid gale pierced our homes.
No matter when it came, the wind carried the same thing...
Death.
But the winds that blew across the green fields of Hyrule brought something other than suffering
and ruin.
I coveted that wind, I suppose.”
Ganondorf also refers to the few surviving colonies on the mountaintops as “drifting
on this sea like fallen leaves on a forgotten pool”.
They have no control over their lives; they are tossed and turned seemingly at random
by the whims of the gods.
This is the genius of Wind Waker, and its much maligned wind system.
Yes, it’s annoying when you have to pause to change the direction of the wind while
on the Great Sea or when solving puzzles.
This, though, is the point.
The wind is not your friend.
The wind represents the will of uncaring gods who are often unfair.
Link’s journey across the Great Sea is reminiscent of many seafaring Greek legends.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Poseidon, the god of the sea, holds a grudge against Odysseus so
strong that he does everything in his power to make Odysseus’ journey across the oceans
as difficult as possible.
Link, though, is different.
He’s the titular Wind Waker.
Unlike everyone else upon the Great Sea, even Ganondorf himself, Link can force the winds
to obey him, and can change his fate.
While playing the Wind Waker, it’s interesting to note just how often the game points out
that the progatonist is nobody special.
He’s not a hero, he has no big destiny; essentially, he’s a pretender.
Said Eiji Aonuma: “And talking about the Link character in
the Wind Waker, the game is a kind of unprecedented challenge for us in the Zelda series.
The Link character is an ordinary boy not destined to fight at all but was involved
in an incident and forced to be involved in a role in the long history of Hyrule.”
That lack of destiny is apparent in every trial or challenge the game throws at the
player.
Everything is harder for Wind Waker Link than it is for Ocarina of Time Link.
In Ocarina of Time, the Master Sword is simply waiting for Link to pull it from its pedestal
once he’s found three spiritual stones.
In Wind Waker, Link needs three stones again, but he also needs to fight his way through
an enormous tower to prove himself worthy of the Master Sword.
Then, even the Master Sword’s power is not simply granted to him – he has to battle
through two more dungeons to recharge the sword’s batteries.
Time and again, Wind Waker Link is compared to Ocarina of Time Link, and every time, people
around Wind Waker Link dismiss him as unimportant.
He’s a nobody.
He just got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This actually extends to Link’s character design, as for the first time in the series,
the goal was not to create a blank slate avatar for the player to project onto.
Said Aonuma: “Until then in Zelda games, we had kept
some things back so that the players would play as if they were Link himself.
But in The Wind Waker, even though you control Link, you also view him objectively and played
as if you were interacting with the world through Link.
The manner of emotional investment is a little different than in previous Zelda games, and
as you spend time with it, it gradually grows on you.”
So while Wind Waker Link is still very heroic, he doesn’t occupy the same role as most
Links across the Zelda series.
He’s not an audience surrogate, and he doesn’t have the benefit of divine help in his quest.
He has to earn everything himself, in a world that does not care about him at all.
In order to do so, he has to seek out the game’s true power source: money.
Rupees are in all Zelda games, but they’re never as necessary as in Wind Waker.
They can be used to buy arrows or bombs or new equipment to progress, but no other Zelda
game makes the player constantly hustle for cash the way that Wind Waker does.
You need money to buy a sail before your adventure can begin.
You need money to pay the postman to get a key letter to progress in the story.
You need very deep pockets to pay Tingle enough to decipher eight Triforce charts to finish
the game.
Wind Waker is a phenomenally cynical game.
While it may look cute and cuddly, the hidden message within Wind Waker is that you are
a nobody.
Insignificant.
The universe does not care about you.
Yes, you can fight against the wind.
If you really push and struggle, you can force the world to take notice of you.
At the end of the day, though, the only way to actually win… is to be rich.
That is why The Wind Waker is the darkest game in the Zelda series.