The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alas, Poor Villain: Ganondorf's sendoff is surprisingly sad. While he's every bit the selfish, power hungry monster that he was in the past, he's not too dissimilar from King Daphnes in the sense that he's a man out of time nostalgic for a kingdom that no longer exists. But while Daphnes is willing to let Hyrule stay buried so the people of the present can have a future, Ganondorf refuses to let go of the seat of power that he coveted for so long. As selfish as it is it's still tragic, especially with his childhood in the hellish wasteland that is Gerudo Desert taken into consideration.
  • Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Art Style Dissonance: Undoubtedly, the art style is Lighter and Softer. However, it's debatable if every other aspect of the game is this. For one, all of Hyrule was flooded, leaving few survivors and only the tallest mountains as islands. Two, Link's grandmother has a nervous breakdown after he leaves. Three, Link stabs Ganondorf in the head!.
  • Breather Boss: Gohdan, the guardian of the Tower of the Gods. For a mid-game boss he's very easy to begin with, only having one real attack that you get plenty of warning of in advance and is fairly easy to avoid. Plus, he'll even snort out extra arrows and bombs from his nostrils if you run out of them during the fight. Makes sense, seeing as how he's meant to test Link's skills.
  • Catharsis Factor: The Foresaken Fortress is both a No-Gear Level and Stealth-Based Mission (as in, the universally despised type of dungeon that so many otherwise-excellent games need to have) because due to Tetra's horrendous aim, Link loses his weapon in an undignified entrance. It is both a frustrating and tedious dungeon that seems less like an infiltration into enemy territory and more like an exersize in patience, and being caught means starting over. Even worse, the whole thing is pointless storywise, as Link fails to rescue his sister this time around. Catharsis, however, comes later in your second trip there, where Link does have his gear and you can dole out well-earned revenge.
    • Killing the Helmaroc King in particular is especially satisfying. Not only are you finally fighting the monster that kidnapped your sister, but you get to crush its skull with a hammer!
  • Contested Sequel: Given it's very different from the previous 3D Zelda games (The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time in particular).
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: See here. It is probably THE best Zelda soundtrack ever.
  • Disappointing Last Level: The quest for the Triforce shards. Specially if you are already bored of sailing.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: The tragic qualities Ganondorf displays here have led to a number of fans giving him way more sympathy than he really deserves. While he may have, at some point, had altruistic reasons for taking over Hyrule, they were most certainly long-gone by the time he made his move in Ocarina of Time, where he betrayed and likely murdered the king of Hyrule (who explicitly trusted him) and treated the Gerudo that he claimed to fight for like trash, and turned Hyrule into a monster-infested hellscape completely unlike the beautiful kingdom he coveted. While old age and a long imprisonment have led to him being more introspective, not once does he ever truly show remorse for his actions, and despite his willingness to show mercy to Link and Tetra, once the chips are down he's more than happy to brutalize and murder them purely out of spite.
  • Freud Was Right: The stick Makar uses to play his leaf cello conveniently has two berries dangling from it, and not at the end.
  • Game Breaker:
    • Grandma's soup. Once you get near the halfway point of the game, all it takes is for you to complete a very easy sidequest and boom: you've got the most powerful healing item in the game. It restores all of your hearts, all of your magic, and doubles your attack power to boot! The game tries to balance this by making the effect wear off if you get hit, but it's oh so easy to play around it. You can use Magic Armor to make yourself completely invincible until it wears off, you can use the Boomerang to stun enemies so they won't fight back, or you can simply fall back on skillful, careful swordplay. And just in case that didn't sound broken enough, you get two uses of soup per bottle, and should you run out? Refills are free.
    • Light Arrows. You get them around the end of the game, sure. But with these babies, absolutely nothing will pose a threat to you since they kill all non-boss enemies in one hit. And yes, you can take them to the Savage Labyrinth.
  • Hate Dumb: The lead-up to this game's release brought out the very worst in the fandom. Infamously, one letter published in the Player's Pulse section of Nintendo Power had a list of reasons as to why the game would be terrible, chief among them that it was "a baby easy kiddy game". Most of all because of the new Link's character design. This was of course published a year before the game's release. This attitude was parodied in the fan-comic "Hyrularity" in an issue where Link has to fight the annoying "Boys of Phan."
  • It Was His Sled: Tetra is Princess Zelda.
    • Hyrule was destroyed by a Great Flood prior to the events of the game.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Ganondorf again. Through careful scheming and planning, he manages to get all the pieces of the Triforce right where he wants them and only loses mere seconds before he can make a wish on it. And even then, he only loses due to a genuinely unforeseeable move on King Daphnes' part.
  • Memetic Badass: Link is considered this by the fandom. Adorable as he may be, he still fights Kaiju-sized creatures with Hot-Blooded zeal that would make a shonen protagonist green with envy.
  • Memetic Mutation: For obvious reasons, there's a lot of Videos on YouTube, featuring this game and The Lonely Island's 2009 song "I'm On a Boat".
  • Moe: Aryll, Link, and Tetra, Medli, Makar... most characters qualify due to how adorable the artstyle is.
  • Most Annoying Sound: The Miniblins' constant "DEH HEH" noises, same with the Wizzrobe's teleport alarm.
    • Link's scream when he jumps into a secret cave. Get ready to hear it a lot when you take on the Savage Labyrinth.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: The melodic choir that sings whenever Link uses the titular Wind Waker.
  • Ruined FOREVER: Back during the game's pre-release "hype" cycle, just about everyone wrote it off as being "Garbage for gay babies!1!!!" thanks to the cutesy art style. The fact that the wide expanse of Hyrule Field and its surrounding areas was replaced with a vast, near-featureless ocean didn't help at all. While these opinions persisted for a while, they've long since died down thanks to this game being Vindicated By History several times over.
  • The Scrappy: Thanks to being a creepy weirdo who charges you out the ass to decode the Triforce map pieces in what's unanimously considered to be the game's slowest, most boring section, Tingle's scrappy status was set in stone with this game.
  • Tainted by the Preview: Following a 3D demo featuring a realistic Link, cue an announcement of... a cel-shaded Zelda! The Fan Dumb entry above shows how bad the reaction was.
  • That One Boss: Puppet Ganon is a grueling fight from the get-go, since it's a three-phase boss that gets progressively harder with each form it takes. But the third phase is where it gets nasty, because you're basically pitted against an off-brand Moldorm, complete with speedy and erratic movements that are hard to predict, and a weak spot that's annoying to hit. Because you have to use the Light Arrows to hurt it, the time it takes to set up a shot can leave you wide open for this thing to suddenly run over you, and there's no safe ground to fire from. While there is a handy little exploit to make the fight easier (he'll make a beeline for all-purpose bait and leave his weak spot wide open), there's absolutely no way you'll find out by yourself unless you start throwing literally everything you have at him for whatever reason.
    • While not too bad overall, Puppet Ganon's second phase, the spider, can also be pretty tough if you don't think to look for its reflection in the watery floor so you'll know where to run when it does its body slam attack. It's not an immediately obvious solution, and without it the stupid thing's movements feel genuinely unpredictable.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The biggest fan complaint about the game is that it was too much of a departure from Ocarina of Time. Hilariously, the attempt at an Author's Saving Throw with Twilight Princess led to the complete opposite complaint.
  • Vindicated by History: Upon release, this game was instantly lost to the tides of Ocarina of Time nostalgia and complaints about the cel-shaded graphical style being N64 level. In recent years, popularity polls frequently place it among the top five favorite games in the franchise, and the art style has been hailed as a refreshing experience from other "brown" games like its successor Twilight Princess.
  • Wasted Song: Maritime Battle and Jabuns Theme. The first one is only heard during battles while sailing, and the second one is played once during a cutscene largely consisting of text, where the player might mash the A-button, as most of the text is in an ancient language and thus unreadable. Now, why is Maritime Battle in here? Simple, because of how combat on your boat works (quite frankly, not that good, as your only means of attack are bombs and arrows), the average player might just ignore the enemies, missing out on a pretty good tone which gets better after time.
  • The Woobie: Link's sweet old Grandma. Poor lady breaks down sobbing after her granddaughter is kidnapped, and when you come back to Outset Island, she's literally sick with worry over Link and Aryll. Just the music that plays in these scenes could qualify as a Tear Jerker. You cure her with a fairy, after which she realizes how brave Link is for going out to save his sister, and decides she's going to be strong just like her grandchildren.
    • The Elixir Soup she starts making (for free!) after you cure her, which is the most powerful healing item in the game with added Quad Damage effects, doesn't hurt either.
    • Link, really, if you think about it long enough.
      • On the flip side, he's the only Link in the series that comes out of the game with an intact family, a near and dear Princess Zelda, and a whole ship load of new pirate buddies to boot. Little wonder he's one of the most cheerful and expressive heroes yet.
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