Despite its slim lineup so far, Nintendo Switch 2’s GameCube library already offers some great titles, but the obvious highlight is The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Link’s seafaring adventure was a daring and imaginative entry at the time of its original release, and while it eventually would be touched up and brought to the Wii U, this marks the first time Nintendo has reissued the game in its original form in over 20 years. What’s most stunning when revisiting the game now, however, is its sense of boundless freedom, which offers a glimpse of the freeform direction the Zelda series would eventually embrace with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
Though now widely regarded as a classic, The Wind Waker was hotly divisive when it arrived back in 2003. Its sunny, cartoonish visuals in particular stirred up quite a bit of controversy for deviating so dramatically from the 2000 Zelda tech demo, but the final game was not the radical departure it initially appeared to be. Beneath its unconventional surface, The Wind Waker remains firmly rooted in series traditions. The framework underpinning the adventure is mostly untouched, following the same formula pioneered by A Link to the Past and later codified by Ocarina of Time. But despite this, the game manages to carve out some notable changes within this template to completely recolor the experience.
The boldest is the shift in setting. The Wind Waker trades the rolling fields and misty forests of Hyrule for the endless blue waves and sun-bleached islands of the Great Sea. Your journey still follows the familiar contours of previous games; you’ll scour the far edges of the world collecting three magical relics, obtaining the Master Sword, and plumbing another handful of dungeons before ultimately confronting the evil Ganon. But the alluring, high-seas backdrop evokes a sense of mystique and adventure that no other Zelda title up to that point could elicit.
It’s out in this vast seascape that we can glean early traces of the open-world direction the series would eventually take. Past Zelda overworlds were similarly expansive and arguably even more varied, but they all felt deliberately curated to an extent. The Hyrule of Ocarina of Time, as awe-inspiring as it was in 1998, was not so much a world as it was a manicured garden, nudging Link along a methodically laid path through interconnected but discrete environments. The game afforded you enough agency to poke around the world for treasure chests and other optional rewards, but it dictated your progress through the main quest by gating access to certain areas of Hyrule until you reached a specific point in the story or acquired a particular item.
The Great Sea has no such barriers hemming players in. Although the first leg of your journey is deliberately paced, with your progression from island to island guided rather strictly by the demands of the plot, the game opens up considerably by the time you retrieve the Master Sword. There is still a firm narrative thread leading you to your climactic confrontation with Ganon, and many of the islands you come across en route to the final battle can’t be thoroughly explored until you’ve returned with the proper tool. But you’re given ample freedom to rove about as you please. Once you’ve fully acclimated to the rhythms of sea travel–plot a course, conduct the wind, raise your sail, and set off–the game turns you loose, allowing you to indulge your curiosity and explore the Great Sea at your leisure.
It’s much more open-ended than other Zelda games at the time, and the designers take full advantage of this looser structure, encouraging you to venture off the proverbial beaten path with a myriad of enticing diversions. Outside of the main story, your journey is largely guided by whispers and rumors you overhear amid your travels–of an invaluable treasure hidden within a frozen island, or a peculiar traveling merchant who was spotted off of a remote islet, or a cursed ship that stalks the seas when the moon is in a particular phase.
Rather than explicitly directing you to these points of interest, The Wind Waker piques your curiosity with vague tidbits and hearsay, much in the way Breath of the Wild would eventually present its side quests–not as a series of missions to check off, but as small mysteries waiting to be investigated. Many of these threads ultimately end up being vital to completing the game, but you never get the sense you’re being ushered along a predetermined course by the developers; you seek them out because you’re intrigued, and you feel a genuine sense of discovery when you follow a breadcrumb trail of rumors to its source.
Thanks to this unbound freedom, every trip across the Great Sea evokes a sense of wonder and adventure, especially in the early going. Save for a small handful of premarked islands, your sea chart is completely empty at the start of your journey, and you must gradually fill it in, square by square, as you travel between destinations. Rather than being busywork, however, the act of mapping out the sea further accentuates the feeling of being an explorer. Setting off into uncharted waters and discovering what unusual sights lay beyond the horizon is one of the most thrilling aspects of the game, and the hints and tidbits you hear from the unsettling fish-men who dwell beneath the waves add further color to the world.
The same holds true for the many islands scattered about the sea. Each square of the map contains some sort of landmass to visit, from small reefs to bustling settlements. Though some of these amount to little more than scenery, many house some kind of treasure or self-contained challenge to overcome, be it a small puzzle to untangle or a gauntlet of enemies to defeat. That you can never quite anticipate what you’ll encounter when you set sail makes each island you happen upon feel like a discovery unto itself, and they’re an obvious inspiration for the floating sky islands of Skyward Sword and especially Tears of the Kingdom, which likewise beckon players with enticing challenges to complete or treasures to discover.
It’s in these broad strokes that Wind Waker’s influence on future titles is most clearly felt, but the game also presages Breath of the Wild in a number of subtler ways. While its exaggerated cartoon aesthetic would only be revisited by a few handheld entries and spin-offs, cel-shading would become a part of the series’ visual identity moving forward, allowing for an even greater degree of expressiveness–particularly in enemy interactions.
Until this point in the series, the monsters you encountered in Zelda all behaved in fairly rudimentary ways, patrolling set paths and pursuing Link single-mindedly. In crafting The Wind Waker, the designers harnessed GameCube’s extra power to make foes not only more intelligent, but more expressive as well. Enemies here behave in surprising and often humorous ways, which in turn makes them feel more alive. The moment of panic that flashes across a Moblin’s face when it drops its weapon in the middle of a fight and quickly scrambles to find another one remains a delight, and Nintendo would further build upon this dynamism with the expressive and resourceful monsters that roam the fields in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
For all of its bold ideas, The Wind Waker does not always match up to its ambitions. As alluring as the Great Sea often is, it can also be sparse and repetitive, the sense of adventure occasionally diminished by too many moments of empty downtime. Nintendo would eventually bring the series back to the familiar, verdant confines of Hyrule, making the Great Sea an outlier among Zelda settings, only revisited in the DS sequel Phantom Hourglass. But its freeform spirit survives in the sprawling, open-ended design of Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule, which channels the same sense of wonder and discovery that made Link’s high-seas adventure such a memorable experience.
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