Dear Nintendo,
Oof ahahahahAHAHAHAAA
Where do I even start?
I have no idea where to begin with you
I mean, I knew I knew it would be bad, but I did not expect it to be THIS bad.
This THIS is so so much worse than I imagined.
I knew I KNEW that giving a ten-year-old a wand that controls the weather would be potentially terrible
But I didn't know that it would be
the most disastrous video game item that I've ever covered in my entire life
My GOD This thing is freakin terrifying!!!
*BUDUM BUM BUM*
Okay...
Deep breaths we can do this. Just put it out of your mind Austin we can get through this just one step at a time...
*Clearing throat*
Hi, it's me Austin
And I'm here once again to talk about the weather in one of the Zelda games because apparently
something is utterly wrong with me, but I mean cut me some slack.
What else am I gonna talk about when doing a video on wind waker the science of fish? who are also expert
Cartographers and the ethical implications of being a seaside town that is heavily dependent on fishing, killing, and eating a fully sentient species?!?
God! this game is horrifying. Seriously, I think they should have won an award for being the most low-key horror game for the Gamecube.
I don't know why people were complaining on MySpace back in 2002 about the game not being the dark
Grown-up Zelda title that they wanted. This game is terrifying.
Anywhere, you look starting almost immediately out the gate with that freaking kid that chases you around with snot dangling out of his nose!
Get away from me!!! I don't want your boogers on me!!!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
[PLEASE STAND BY]
That's just scary to me because I'm the parent of a toddler and I have a very intimate relationship with the tactile
Experience of human nasal mucus and stuff like this just hits me way too close to home.
But you're not here to listen to me wax philosophical about the tensile strength of snot.
You're here to listen to me rip a beloved zelda franchise apart with the awe-inspiring
powers of science! so let's get to it.
How exactly does the Wind Waker work and more specifically, how utterly...
DISASTROUS is it?
[Music]
Okay a summary for those of you who don't know or a refresher for those of you who forgot because this game originally came out
Dear Lord sixteen years ago! Meaning people born on the day of its release can legally drive in the United States now.
Just great first people born when Final Fantasy 7 came out turned 18 now this and I feel freakin old!
Y'all probably know by now
There's three different parallel zelda timelines that follow three different courses of events following ocarina of time.
One where the player couldn't be bothered to beat the game,
So Ganon won and Link was gutted like a fish and two where Link
Defeated Ganondorf during ocarina of time and link was returned to being a child and one where he continued to live as an adult.
Wind Waker takes place in the third branch of this timeline what's known as the adult era! In fact, in this branch
It's the game that takes place immediately after the events of Ocarina... More or Less.
Ganon comes back and there's no hero to stop him
so the king of Hyrule floods the entire country turning it into a sea. then buff-ilion's of years later or just a hundred or
*processing*
whatever some time after this Ganon starts doing bad stuff in the newly created sea so our
Reincarnated link a ten-year-old boy is gifted with the Wind Waker as a tool to aid in his journey to stab
Ganon to death again!
The Wind Waker is capable of doing a crap ton of stuff.
Some of which is honestly pretty boring like communicating with the sages
but then it can do even more serious things like change the direction of the wind, creat cyclones and
Strangely changed day time into night time.
Now the last one seems like it would be perhaps the most disastrous of all three since it would affect ecosystems
all across the entire world not just
Locally. Not to mention the possibility of flinging all occupants of the planet into the air and slamming them back down due to angular
Momentum, but it turns out that the cinematic for this particular
Ability actually begins and ends with a fade to black meaning that we have no idea how long this process even takes from either Link's
Perspective or the perspective of everyone else in the world. For all we know he's just standing there
Slack-jawed like a jackass staring into the middle distance like he's in a Bethesda
RPG while people go about their Affairs trying not to bump into him for hours.
Or maybe the thing is filled with the same opiates that are in big
boss's giant vape cigar and link is just getting
SUUUPER stoned while a high pitched woman vocalizes behind him, So it seems like time is passing faster.
[More music that goes a little something like this] WHOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
*clearing throat*
Anyway, this isn't that important because it's by far the least damaging thing
this glorified weapon of mass destruction is capable of. The biggest problem by far is the ability it has
to change
Wind directions, but in order to understand why that's so dangerous
We're gonna have to talk a little bit about how wind works.
I talked a bit about this in my breath of a wild video but wind exists essentially because of heat.
Specifically differences in the amount of heat energy across the entire planet.
This is due to a variety of factors. But the biggest creator of wind is actually the Sun.
At any given moment, the Sun is only heating about
50% of the planet. This difference in heat from only one side of the earth getting Sun creates differences in pressure since hot air
Rises and expands while cold air sinks and condenses. When gases in the same container...
(In this case the container is the earth) are different temperatures and under different pressures
They want to mix together until they're both the same pressure and same temperature in
thermodynamics this is what's known as
Equilibrium and since cold air is denser and under higher pressure
This means that in almost all
Circumstances cold regions of air move into hotter regions of air. The existence of gravity and the rotation of the earth
Complicate this somewhat but it is a pretty good rule of thumb for those of y'all who are taking
Meteorology 101 and we'll talk about how this affects things later on but for now keep this in mind. air moves
from high pressure to low pressure.
So before we can draw any conclusions about the climate of Hyrule
We first have to figure out how fast the wind is even moving because if we can't figure that out
We're dead in the water.
That was not intentional...
Now those of you who have watched my show know by now that in order to measure stuff in video games we need to do
pixel measurements and in order to do pixel measurements
we need a ruler and already you can see that we're gonna run into some problems in that...
A each iteration of link is a
reincarnation of a past link and there's quite possibly a large variety of different heights they have
And B, the Proportions of windwaker are just freakin goofy, man!
I mean, I love this art style
But I can pretty much make no presumptions about anything being standard because this game is super super cartoony
But then I remembered that there's one thing that appears in every Zelda title one object. That's
immutable one thing that's impervious to change because it's not a
Reincarnation of anything but rather it's the same thing every single time
the Master Sword
This is a relic used by links going all the way back to Skyward Sword and off the top of my head
There's not just one but two games we could use to get this length breadth of the wild and
Ocarina of Time and as much as I'd love to jump into breath of the wild
Considering that winwaker is closer to ocarina of time both in the Zelda timeline
But also in our real-world
Release dates and therefore presents less margin for error based on the changing tastes of 3d modeling artists over time
That's the one I'm gonna use to get the length of the Master Sword and in order to do that
*Breath in*
We're gonna have to take a deep breath and (May need to pause for this... You've been warned)
use the pool in the lakeside laboratory plus the iron boost
Which allows us to sink to the bottom and use the meter marks to determine links height
Which is approximately one point six one nine meters or just shy of five foot four inches
which we can use together with the Pythagorean theorem in order to reduce inaccuracies in our math to do pixel stretching in Photoshop to determine
The length of the Master Sword which is just shy of a meter at 99 centimeters or three and a quarter feet! Knowing the length
of the Master Sword we can now hop back to wind waker where we need to determine ten-year-old links height because measuring with the Master Sword
Would be really really inefficient which gives us a link who's only 103 centimeters tall (Congrats on being in the 110th percentile for ten-year-olds
you'll grow up eventually little buddy)using this we can determine his run speed four point three five meters per second or just short
of 10 miles an hour
Which will allow us to measure a length of land and time how long it takes for the wind to travel that distance
Which finally gives us a base wind speed of Wind Waker, which is 30 meters per second
Which is 59 knots or 68 miles per hour
We're still not done yet. Because in order to know everything we need to know about the pressure gradients
We're gonna have to know the size of map which we can get by measuring the speed of the king of red lions
Which is 13 knots 15 miles an hour or 24 km/h
Measuring how long it takes to traverse one distance of one side of one square of one grid of the map which gives us a length
of four hundred thirty four meters multiply that by seven to account for one side of the whole map and then square that number which
Gives us a total area of nine point two seven square kilometers Wow
*panting* ;-;
All right
No biggie
just blew through a week's worth of math in just under a minute and
Heck since you're here if you were impressed by that epic display of math and breathlessness
Why not subscribe to the game theorist channel for more?
Ehh?
EHHHH?
[QUE EPIC MUSIC]
Hold on to your butts because this still isn't enough information to get us where we need to go because in order to know
Exactly how dangerous this thing is. We have to know one more thing. The latitude of hyrule.
[Fancy Music]
Latitude for those of you don't knew... knew? good job Austin...
Latitude for those of you who don't know (Good job!) is the degrees norse...
My god can't even [BLEEP] say normal words now...
Latitude for those you who don't know is the degrees north (Good Job again!)
or south of the Equator
Something is the further north or south the more rotation there is in wind systems
the more extreme seasons are and the colder and darker your winters get. You may think it's impossible to determine where
The latitude of Hyrule is but you would be wrong because the
Constellation Ursa Minor or the Little Dipper is in Wind Waker
And we can use the Little Dipper or more specifically the star Polaris
To figure out our latitude which we can use to figure out our pressure gradients and how they relate...
to wind speed. Polaris also known as the North Star is a star system approximately
433 light-years away from Earth and it aligns almost exactly with the North Pole which is why it's been a consistent navigation
Star for well ages. It's only visible from the northern hemisphere
So we know that Hyrule is in the northern hemisphere already. Now in order to figure out our latitude
We simply have to measure how many degrees above the horizon
Polaris is which is difficult without an actual astrolabe
but you're pretty damn close using a combination of the in-game compass and the telescope which gets us a latitude of
25 point 29 degrees which places Hyrule just on the barrier between the tropics and the
Subtropics. Anyway, we finally have all the information we need to build our geostrophic wind chart of Hyrule.
that's those cool maps with the lines in them that show the pressure gradients of different regions. In the subtropics at
Latitude 25 in order to maintain wind speeds of 60 knots the air pressure has to drop by one
millibar every 21
Nautical miles. Millibar is one one thousandth of a bar the standard
Atmospheric pressure at sea level in most areas. That's actually not that much of a change all things considered
That's more or less the amount of pressure a quarter exerts on the ground due to gravity.
That's how much the pressure changes over 21 nautical miles in order to maintain a 60 knot
Wind not too bad, right?
WRONG
Interestingly while air in the form of fronts move from high pressure to low pressure wind actually moves perpendicular
To the movement of pressure fronts. This is due to the Coriolis effect
The way fluid dynamics are affected by being on a rotating body. Winds therefore in the northern hemisphere
rotates clockwise
Around the high pressure systems meaning if the wind is blowing from west to east
There's low pressure in the north and high pressure in the south
This is really important because once you understand how window works
You know that the wind waker is the most dangerous
relic in the entire world.
Air like all non photon matter has mass
That's where the air pressure itself comes from. The weight of the air being pulled down on top of you by
Gravity. if it didn't have mass there'd be no air pressure
also
You already know this because I told you and you're a smartypants that air moves due to pressure differences specifically it moves
perpendicular to direction the pressure fronts move clockwise around high pressure
And parallel to the pressure gradient
Which means in order for wind
Direction to change air pressure has to move and in Wind Waker the wind speed changes
direction in...
THREE SECONDS!!!
I timed it three
Second which means if you're changing the wind speed from northeast to southwest a giant pocket of air weighing
136 billion kilograms will be ripping across I roll at a terrifying
1435 meters per second!
As it rushes in switch places with the low-pressure front
This is over four times the speed of sound so instead of a gentle breeze
It'd be like crashing into a brick wall in a jet fighter (really?)
seriously (Okay ._.)
The force of air hitting link alone is equal to the power output of a freaking train engine at full speed this shockwave
Wouldn't gently move it'd pulverize everything in its path
But Austin, I hear you saying the high-pressure system doesn't need to travel across Hyrule
It can just move around it, Sparing the inhabitants death
WROOOOOONGAAAAH
Ignoring the fact that this shows a tragic disregard for anybody unfortunate enough to live around
Hyrule and not in it and that taking this longer path to change wind directions would result in the pressure systems moving at Mach 6
Instead of Mach 4 and essentially reduced the surrounding countries into steaming craters. Hyrule itself is still totally
Screwed due to one thing
Eddie's... Eddie's aren't affected fluid dynamics caused by prefers flows like oh
I don't know sudden wind changes over a hundred and twenty knots at once. This sudden change of wind direction and speed would almost
instantly spawn thousands thousands of F1 to F2
tornadoes across the surface of Hyrule tearing everyone apart at the seams because
somebody couldn't be bothered to wait for the wind to change direction on its own!
This thing this stupid thing is so
freakin dangerous and not to mention that the pressure system required to maintain those wind speeds at peak would qualify as a
category 1 hurricane
on the saffir-simpson scale
Hyrule should not be this tranquil. One wave with this stupid wand should reduce the entire
Country to a storm ravaged Ground Zero similar to the Red Spot on Jupiter, but no
Let's just hand it over to a ten-year-old. No big deal. Hey, hey Link!
You want to save the frickin day break that stupid thing over your knee and go make yourself a sandwich
sincerely, Austin.
[Thank you for watching!]