Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 130: The Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker

Episode Date: December 18, 2017

In a generation where games strove to be gritty, photorealistic, and more "mature," The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker dared to be boldly cartoony, and suffered greatly at the hands of console warriors. Yet, close to 15 years later—and with the help of an HD remake—Link's seafaring GameCube adventure is remembered quite fondly. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Kat Bailey, and Matthew Jay as the crew explores just how this GameCube game went from reviled to treasured. Special thanks to backer Jenny Nielsen for funding the production of this episode!

This week on Retronauts, we demand a mature and realistic Zelda. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I am your host for this one, Bob Mackey, and today's topic is The Wind Waker, the Legend of Zelda game from 2003. Let's go around the room and see who else is here today. Hey, it's me, Jeremy Parrish. And who else is here? Hi, I'm Kat Bailey, editor-in-chief of U.S. Gamer. And we have a newcomer onto the show.

Here comes a new challenger. Who is setting right to the right of me? Way. I'm Matt Jay. Is that Beatle? No, that's the King of Red Lions. Oh, right. Every time we talk to him makes the horrifying way. Matthew, explain yourself. Who are you? Who let you in here? And why are you here?

I am. Also, I asked him here. So let's get that out of way. Thank you. I am another invader from the Lasertime Network. Thank you for giving us a second place to talk about things that people haven't thought about in a long time. Is there some sort of coup that I should know about happening, Bob? No. No, Jeremy. If I hand you something to drink, just trust me, though. I'm the one who picked up the drink. Oh, no. I'm okay. It's a reverse coup. It's what I wasn't expecting. A counter coup. A suicide coup. Suicide coup. Wow, this is so complicated. Ford or coup. This episode is not about coups. It's about the Wind Waker.

A great Legend of Zelda game that I feel was it was maligned for a bit. And then I think, I guess, is the Zelda cycle like the Sonic cycle or is it different? I think it's like the reverse of the Sonic cycle. No, the Sonic cycle, if you allow me to explain, is a game is announced, everybody's very

excited. The initial footage is shown. It looks pretty good. But then an annoying twist is introduced, most notably the werehog. And then everybody is disappointed, and then the review scores are bad. Well, I mean, Link was a werewolf at some point, right? He, I mean, he kind of was. But that worked much better.

The Zelda cycle is Zelda game comes out. Everybody gives it tens. Everybody talks about how amazing it is. But then people start picking apart its shortcomings until the next Zelda comes out. Everybody goes, the previous Zelda was crap. This Zelda is amazing. Look how much better it is. I was ahead of the game on hating Skyward Sword, though.

And I'm waiting for people to say that was a good game because I will be there to argue with them all over again. I think Brother of the Wild kind of shattered the cycle because it's so different. That's true. So I think Skyward's Swords' opportunities for rehabilitation will never come. No, it's doomed to be the Zelda 2 of the series. Wait a minute. It's still in that coma. Did people say Skyward Sword was good?

Yes. I didn't meet a lot of those very good reviews. Yes. I gave it a four out of five and practically got death threats. Oh, my gosh. I liked the eight hours I played of it, but then I guess it gets bad after that. There's a lot more hours of that. I think that's one of the – so whenever I wrote an article,

for oneup.com, I would always get one fired Bob Mackey comment. And I think that got me the most comments ever for a one-up article that I wrote, writing about what's wrong with Skyward Sword, like two weeks after it released. What about the hair-pulling article? The hair-polling article? Yeah, like this week and this evening. Yeah, I did one of those,

and it was a pre-Gamergate. I'd be dead now if Camergate was around when I wrote that article. But let's get back to the topic. This is about the Legend of Zelda, the Winwaker. And before I tackle, or we tackle the game as a whole, I do want to talk about just the drama surrounding this game's announcement

and the release and everything like that. This game had a lot to overcome. And a lot of fans felt slighted in some way because... So, Space World was a basically Nintendo-specific convention that Nintendo held for themselves between 1989 and 2001. And this is where footage of new games would come out, you know, when the Internet could show you videos and stuff like that.

And as part of a sizzle reel for the GameCube at Space World 2000 in the summer of 2000, we got maybe a 10. 10-second clip, I think it's even less than 10 seconds, of Link Fighting Gannon. And that kind of planted the seed in people's brains where, oh, this is going to be the next Zelda. This is going to be what the next Zelda game will look like. Do you guys remember seeing this footage at the time, this tiny little smidge in a footage? You probably watched an IGN.com video that was the size of like postage stamp.

I was going to say fly larvae. No, it was actually one of the postage stamps they used in the game for the mail system. Yeah, it's very meta-textual. And you had to download it, too. Yes, dot MP1 probably at this point. I mean, I was in the video games press, an amateur sense at that point, writing, well, helping out with the GIA, gaming intelligence agencies. So, of course, I was tuned into it.

And also the message board reactions that followed in the wake of both showing the game. Do you remember what was said after the 2000 showing of this like Zelda prototype footage? because I think what happened next year overshadowed everything. Yeah, I mean, it was just kind of like, oh, it's, you know, the next logical step in the progression of Zelda. It is very ocarina of time-ish, but it looks nicer. Yeah. And that's what Zelda is going to be. And that's what Twilight Princess eventually was.

Because people didn't pay any attention at all to Majora's mask. No, no. They were like, this isn't showing signs that the Zelda team doesn't want to just do the same thing over and over again. But it was basically just like a graphic demo or a tech demo. There was no title underneath the footage. It was very, very similar to the pre-Ocarina of time demo footage that basically showed off N64's metallic reflections and things like that. Link doing combat against a, I want to say... A skeleton.

Yeah, I want to say it was a stolfo's. Yeah. There was also some, like, metallic, you know, like it can do metal shading kind of thing on it. And Link looked a lot more like Zelda 2, Link. Yeah, less polygons, yeah. Wasn't there also a scene of Sammis running down a tunnel with four? fire exploding behind her, and everybody was also pretty excited about that, because Samus had not appeared on the Nintendo 64.

She appeared in Smash Brothers, thank you very much. That's right. As a toy, though. But I think you're right, Kat. That was not. We did not know it was an FPS at that point. I don't think we just saw footage of Samus running, but yes. I don't know if Nintendo knew it was an FPS.

Rutter didn't tell them yet. Surprise, guys. We made a different game out of your thing, and it's just as good. One more thing I want to add is the reaction to the space world. old Zelda demo in the impact that it has reminds me of the Final Fantasy 7 tech demo on the PS3. Oh. Where people saw that and we were like, we want that. And people would not shut up about it until years later they finally did it.

The Final Fantasy 7 tech demo on the PS3? Yeah, the PS4 white engine demo. They show them getting off the train for the beginning. I totally forgot about that. Usually every graphics tech demo is an old man's face retaining around. Well, this was a young woman with flowers. Okay. I'm pretty sure they spent as much on that one white engine tech demo.

as they did on the entirety of the original Final Fantasy 7. It was one of those big budget. Look what we could do if time and money were infinite. They swiftly abandoned the White Engine, correct? It's gone now. It's dead. The White Engine became the luminous engine, crystal tools. It sort of evolved, and I think it's still in use for Final Fantasy 14.

It's blast processing. It's their version of it. So the bigger deal, so gamers had this seed plan in their head. Like, there's going to be a newer Ocarine of Time-style Zelda game. I know this for sure because I saw eight seconds of it. And in 2001, Nintendo unveiled at Space World 2001, the cartoony Wind Waker that we know and love. Actually, it's a little more amped up in this footage. It's linked sort of tricking enemies, doing wild takes, enemies freaking out, very, very close to what the final release would be.

And gamers were mad. I know what you're thinking. Gamers never get mad. More like Zelda. Yes, C-E-L-D-A. And I have to say, I do feel like this is all being fueled by people. people who grew up with Zelda entering their late teens, early 20s, perhaps mid-20s, and being very insecure about playing games.

I feel like we were not okay with adults playing video games in 2001 yet. I mean, I think now it's kind of understood that everyone plays games, even if it's just like bejeweled on your phone or some match three game. But I think at this point, people becoming adults were looking for reasons to justify their habit or their hobby. It could be both, actually. Yeah, I think it's kind of cyclical. And, like, you know, there's, console generations are like five years.

And I think that does sort of reflect in the people who grow up playing systems and people who grew up and were a certain age, you know, playing NES or Super NES or N64 kind of come of age with these new console generations. And the console generation before, Sony had really embraced the kids who were kind of entering their pesky teenage years and gave them a place where they could feel mature. And I think, you know, everyone felt like it's Nintendo's turn. Nintendo needs to join the team. And the N64 seemed to be going that direction. I mean, right before Windwaker was announced and actually shown off, you had games like Conquer and perfect dark, which were very violent and or vulgar. So I think there was a, you know, and you also had eternal darkness. And you had, you know, kind of this growing sentiment of increased maturity for Nintendo games, Nintendo software.

And so I think everyone said, well, obviously the next logical step in the progression is Nintendo's going to go along with them and they're going to embrace me as I get older. And I want my equivalent of Rob Blyfeld Comics here in the year 2000. Games are finally mature. They have poop monsters. Who sing? Who sing? Nintendo said, no, we're good. We're going to do something a little different.

It's funny how things change because in 2017, all of my friends are kind of pushing 40, but they could not be more excited to play Mario Odyssey. They cannot be more excited to play goofy cartoon anime games. But things are much different in 2001. I want to ask everybody at this table, where were you? What was your reaction? I don't want to be all me and intellectual about this, but I was fine with it. I watched. I loved anime at this time, and I still do.

And I had no weird hang-ups about playing a cartoony game. And it's cool if you were against it. I'm just curious about everyone here. What was your take on this? We kind of had not seen anything like this before. Let's start with Matthew. He's the newcomer here. We'll pick on him for.

first. This game could not have been any more my jam. I thought so. Everything about it. I mean, I was, so when it came out, I was, I believe, 12. I didn't get my GameCube until about a year later. Maybe it was a year or two later. It was like 2003.

And I finally played it. And it was just, it came with my GameCube because GameSub was doing this promotion where if you bought a GameCube, you could pick a game from two different tiers. So you get like a great game and an okay game. So I got Winwaker and Blood Rain. Wait, which one was which? Okay, never mind. Speaking mature games.

And it just entirely sucked me. And I mean, I love, I'm the biggest animation nerd in the world. Like, I love cartoons. I think Bob's going to fight you over that claim. We've debated. Have you tussled? We need to have a formal debate for charity, but we'll talk about that later. We've bonded over it.

We've been the opposite. I won't make him debate me. But I think Matthew, as a younger person, you probably did not have the hang-ups about, I demand to be taken seriously with my elf game. You know, I think maybe a 12-year-old would not be as, I don't know, put off by this sort of, you know, style. I don't know. Have you met 12-year-old boys? Yeah, I was going to say, that depends on the 12-year-old boy. That's true.

I believe my Zelda experience at the time was Oracle of Ages, maybe a bit of a link to the past on Game Boy Advance, although that might have been later. And also, was later because that brought in the cell-shaded Zelda style for the four swords. Okay, so that was later. but also I had played like several hours of ocarina but I never like got obsessed with it and got too into it. I think I only borrowed it at the time. So Matthew, we know he was on board. Kat, what did you think when you first saw this either footage or screenshots or however you absorb this announcement? I was a skeptic actually.

I mean, I certainly was not beneath playing cartoony games. I mean, I was fully into Pokemon at that point, for example. But it was less that somebody said, hey, have you seen? seen the new Zelda and showed me a blurry still screenshot of Link, and with no context whatsoever, the character model looked really weird to me. Yeah, that's a good point, Kat, actually, that I assume a lot of people saw screenshots and not the video, given how really the Internet was. I mean, his head was way too big, his eyes were gigantic, he looked really kind of weird

and sharp and angular, and I was like, what the heck is this thing? It was so ugly to me. And I was like, oh, my God, Zelda, I don't know what the heck is going on with Zelda, but I don't think I want this thing. And it wasn't until I actually saw it in motion that I went, oh, okay, that looks pretty good, I guess. Okay. How old were you at the time? I was in high school, so I was about 18. Okay.

I was 19. Jeremy, how about you? Well, I was past my dangerous teenage years. He put his switch late away. He put a switch late away. 25. And so I saw the Wind Waker. and was like, yes, this is it.

This is what I want. I'd never, like the N64 and Ocourine of Time just never quite clicked with me. And there was something about the system. I mean, I loved, you know, Mario 64, Mario card. There were some games, Paper Mario. And what I increasingly found during that generation is that while I did enjoy, you know,

some games that had the more serious vibe like Metal Gear or the Final Fantasy games or whatever, I was increasingly appreciating games that had unique visual flair that stepped aside from, you know, like everything is gray and brown and has purple light sourcing, which was very much the aesthetic of the late 90s. You were eight years ahead of your time, Jeremy. I guess. Everything was going photorealistic in an era where the hardware could not handle photorealism in any way.

So everything was just blurry and muddy. By that point, I loved Klonoa. I loved Mega Man Legends. Both of those games on PlayStation didn't click with me at first, but then I played both of them and was like, and I went back to them about a year later and said, oh, no, wait. this is good. I remember at the time connecting. I loved Paper Mario.

I didn't really play that much of Jet Set Radio, Jet Grind Radio, but I loved the style of it. I loved Mr. Driller. I discovered that it was really great even though it looks really stupid and babyish. And so I was like, you know what? Bright colors are great. And I don't know if you remember the site, UK Resistance, that British gaming site? How about the Blue Sky?

Yeah, the Blue Sky Gaming? Like, they hadn't quite come to that kernel of philosophy yet, but they were getting there and they were increasingly pushing. Like, games should look more like Outrun and, be happy and have Calypso music. And I was increasingly thinking, you know what, they're right. More Ferraris, I say. More Ferraris.

So I was all on board with the Wind Waker because I really appreciated that Nintendo was taking one of its biggest franchises and going visually in a direction that no one expected in a way that seemed true to the spirit of the game. Like I remember it seeing, you know, the old promotional art of the original Legend of Zelda where Link was this little squatty guy looking out over a beautiful, colorful sunset. And I was like, you know what, Zelda finally looks like that. That's like the Zelda I've always had in my mind. He's back to being a little short, fat baby elf.

Yeah, I mean, he was designed to be a little anime elf, and it finally happened so many years later. So I want to really quickly depend the quote-unquote mature people or the people who wanted the grim dark. I didn't say there was anything wrong with that. No. I said I enjoyed some of those games. Oh, sure. I mean, yeah, these are the expectations of the time. Sorry, Kat, please.

I just wanted to highlight that at that time, this stuff was very new and fresh. And we were coming off a good 20 years of games being, you know, cute for most part, lots of mascot platformers and everything and things had started to turn during the PlayStation era. But, I mean, the fact that games could be, you know, kind of telling these quote-unquote mature stories or looking, quote-unquote, photorealistic was really cool at the time. Unfortunately, people went too far with that. And we're like, no, everything else that is kind of cartoony, that's total garbage. we only want this stuff.

But at the time, I can understand why people were so enthralled by this stuff. So the great thing about this is everyone's reactions to this announcement video are frozen in time, at least on some websites, some websites that they're still around, like IGN. Dawn of the Internet. Yes. And so I took a peek into their archived official Zelda bitch thread just to, I wanted to fish out three random comments because they're all the same. And I swear to God, if you do a word search while you're reading this,

I swear the words mature, dark, and realistic show up at least 30 times in every page. The term mature Zelda was really in the psych case. And I want to tell these people, even back then I wanted to tell them, did you not play Majora's masks? Majoris Mask, rather. One of the side quests is reuniting a couple so they can embrace as the world ends. How much darker do you want to get with your Zelda games? But I guess they didn't consider that dark enough because you're playing as a kid. Did it have blood?

I don't think so Did it have really dark and hardcore character designs by Todd McFarlane? It was kind of spooky. Bob, were there titties? There were no titties. That moon was scary as hell. I think I'm in the Bomchoo bowling girls in it. She's hot, but...

Were you playing as a little kid? Yes. Yes, you were. I think that's what it's all about. So what I did was I just pulled out three little tiny posts at random and I want to read them here so we can react to them and make fun of people who were probably teenagers at the time and can't defend themselves here. So let's start with this one.

One of the reasons I was interested in the GameCube was because of the Zelda shown in Space World 2000, and now they butchered a classic. The N64 version looks better. The GameCube version looks like something out of my Game Boy Color. What happened to the new mature look that Nintendo was trying to get? A little hyperbole there. It's not a Gameboy color game. So they showed some footage and that was the classic that they butcher, like some prototype

footage? Eight seconds of bad footage. That classic eight second clip. Yes, we're throwing this 14-year-old under the bus. Another one. I can't begin to express my disappointment that they decided to do this to the Zelda franchise. One of Nintendo's most respected and mature series has been reduced to a slapstick Saturday morning cartoon. Zelda has been grown up over the years, and with each new installment, I grow more excited to play it.

But this looks like a step backwards. This style I would have loved to play in Pokemon, Kirby, or even Mario, but Zelda, it just doesn't make any sense to me. So you can see, I guess this person sees Zelda as always being a mature. expression of like this kind of game concept. Are we incorporating any discussion of GameCube rage in general to this? I mean, it's all, it's a purple square with a handle. It's all a rich tapestry of hatred. Paraseltman had one.

Yes. Famously, Paris Hilton was photographed one. The one thing I have in common with her. Also, my last name is very similar to her first name. Last comment. God, what's wrong with you people? This game is looking like crap. Is everyone who likes it seven years old?

I mean, I can understand a few people. people who like the old style, maybe liking the cartoon look, but this is all caps. But has anybody noticed yet that it's supposed to be comedic, too? Link is not a comedic fellow. I mean, the whole point of Zald is to have a dark feel to it. The feel that it always keeps you on edge thinking of what will happen next. So this is just, I mean, this thread has thousands of posts. Just jump in, dive in, everybody.

Rewind there for a second. He's pointing and accusing finger at people who like the game. So that does imply that there were people standing up to defend the game. It wasn't all. I look through the threat and they're a tiny, tiny minority. And at most, they'll say give it a chance, but people are very skeptical about this in general. A few not angry men being shouted down. Yes.

I assume that there are no women on this board in 2001. And if they are, they're hiding their identities. I mean, this guy has a real great idea of what Link's personality was at the time. Does anyone else feel like it was that defined? I mean, I felt that Link was just an blank slate for you. Yeah. And he had such great dialogue like, hip. It's true.

And in this game, he goes, Oi! But yes, Link is not a comedic fellow. I reiterate that statement because it's ridiculous. Well, excuse me, Princess. Exactly. I mean, it was already a Saturday morning cartoon. Well, Friday afternoon cartoon.

Sheer Miyamoto is Nintendo's creative fellow. They need a comedic fellow. It's true. They need Takashi Tezica. Yeah, I was going to say, that's Tezica. Or the mother guy. Uh, you should have a toy toy. That's not so much comedy as like bittersweet nostalgia.

It's kind of more like Kurt Vonnegut, like, sad comedy. was told comedy. Let's get into the development of the game. So as with a lot of the Nintendo stuff that we cover on the show, there is a great Iwada asks from 2013 when the HD version came out. So I recommend you guys go out and read that. I'm pulling a few things from that. Not everything, of course.

It's a really good conversation, as are all the Awada asks. So this might piss off. those space world fans, but Wind Waker did start as a prototype that simply sort of advanced the look of O'Carina of Time. So I assume at one point maybe that prototype footage was going to be the new Zelda, but Al Numa thought that it looked too normal. A.G. Al Numa, who directed Majora's Mask, basically did all the directing work on Aquina of Time and directed Winwaker. He was like, this is too normal. It's not, it's not Nintendo enough. We can't just, you know, bump up graphics a little and make a new Zelda out of that.

Yeah, Nintendo does that a lot. They start to kind of iterate on old ideas and then say, okay, well, that's a good start, but let's do something totally different. Like, you know, Mario Kart started out as an F-0 multiplayer demo. Right. And that clearly became something very different. Were these 128 Marios, what if they vacuumed and fired water out? Yeah, what if they were tiny little carrot people? Yeah.

I want to go back and play the, was that ever a playable demo of the 100 Marios? No, it was just a video. It was another space world thing. They were all so cute. The design of the Wind Waker Link comes from Yoshiki Haruhana, who is a graphical designer at Nintendo. Basically, they were just kicking around ideas, and he showed Aunuma a sketch of basically what would become Toon Link, and that dictated the rest of development. I do want to pull in Matthew on this because this is all very tied into existing anime, and it's all tied into people who were working at Nintendo at the time. So it's often cited that the look of the Winwaker is based on a 1963 anime movie from Toe.

It was brought over here localized under the title The Little Prince and the Eight Head of Dragon. I'll have a link to the footage of this on the Retronauts blog, but if you look at it, you'll be like, this is Wind Waker as hell. This and Tezica. Tezica. It's very tezica. Oh, for sure, for sure. I mean, people were complaining about this looking to anime in 2001. This looks nothing like anime in 2001.

This looks like a 60s or 70s anime. A lot of anime now looks like it for sure. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Blobby, tiny, big-eyed. It's like that kind of not as detailed thing is very popular these days. Yeah, I mean, anime in the late 90s or 2000s, everything was very angular, very busy, very colorful, not so colorful, I don't think. Ava was like pretty, you know, just a couple years earlier.

Lots of very elaborate, spiky hair, but yes, Windmaker looks nothing like 2001 anime. Yeah, wasn't Nintendo developing some sort of game based on Jungle Emperor Leo with Tezica's son around the late 90s? maybe I'm hallucinating but I've worked on a lot of projects like taking up from Tezica so that wouldn't surprise me. Yeah I'm I feel like there was that thread going on that could have been some indirect inspiration

I will do more research after this episode. If you don't mind me making a really quick observation I think it's emblematic of a kind of a clash of cultures that we were seeing in say 2001 where I mean Western fans were kind of going in the more grim dark direction I think but in Japan

if you ever look at a lot of media, animation and cartoons have always been just a huge part of everything they have from just random flyers, the way that they illustrate things, PSA's, the work. So I think that it was very natural for them to go back to this, to go to this look, especially once they had these graphics at their disposal. Yeah, for sure. And of course, in America, people, while anime was certainly exploding in 2001, people were still going, big time, big time. Those cartoons, I just don't understand. Zelda's not anime. Where's the Ninja Scroll guy?

Where's the tentacles? Make it like a good American cartoon like Voltron or Speed Racer. Samurai Pizza Cats, maybe. So I do want to point out that there's a reason why the Windmaker looks so much like this movie. And obviously they drew from it from inspiration. But someone who worked on the movie, worked at Nintendo at the time, Yoichi Kotabe. If you don't know his name, he basically did all of the 2D arts for Nintendo for their instruction books. He drew the covers for games like Mario 3 and other Nintendo covers.

Like anything from that era, you can definitely tell what he drew because his drawings have a very distinct look to them. And Nintendo had problems turning those designs into 3D for a while. But Yoichi Kotabe is the dude who mentored Yoshiki Harohana. So basically, he was mentored by someone who worked on the movie and they sort of, I guess, collaborated or colluded to kind of take this look from what then was. a 30-year-old movie to kind of drop it into the Wind Waker. And I don't know if Nintendo has ever admitted to this or commented on it, but I've only seen other people speculate on it, for sure. And one other thing I wanted to point out, and maybe you guys can tell me if this is a crackpot theory, the Winwaker was also being developed when the anime manga One Piece was just started taking off in a huge way. It's been running for 20 years now, and it's sort of just like the kind of default anime for Japan right now.

And this anime is all about pirates And sailing, what's that? I thought that was Jojo. Jojo just became an anime for like the second time a few years ago. Sorry, this is end of the week. There was an anime back around the time that Wind Wager came out because they based, you know, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure by Capcom, the fighting game on that. So I think that was based on the anime and not the manga.

Anyway, whatever. But I do want to say, maybe Matthew can chime in on this because I know you've seen one piece. I mean the whole, it's fantasy. pirates with like magical powers. I think that makes perfect sense. Yeah, I don't think Nintendo was thinking, we want to capture that One Piece magic, but it was just like everywhere in Japan, it was like the biggest anime, and it still is, and these were in the early years of One Piece.

I'm sure the guy's sleeping under their desks making this game, we're reading One Piece before bed. Or just like having it lull them to sleep. So that's my crackpot theory for that. And so we're talking about how games are going for photorealism in a time when that was sort of impossible. And in the Awada asks, Aluma was talking about how basically this cartoony look allowed them to communicate puzzle information in a better way for the player. If you have a lot of details, especially with the texture quality of the time, a lot of things get lost in just in the geometry and the textures, especially in a game designed to be played at 480I. We are in the 4K world. This is a 480I game.

Yes, back then, textures were quite muddy and a lot of detail would often get lost. I mean, God, back on the PlayStation, Snake didn't even have expressions on his face. No, no, it was a big deal. Like a light chalk drawing of a face on him. Metal Gear Solid 2 looked amazing on the PlayStation 2, but it was really at the top end. Games like Splinter selling stuff. I mean, it was a good-looking game, but it wasn't exactly. Zelda looks so much better.

Winwaker, if you might permit me to say this, people, one thing that always frustrated me at the time and still frustrates me now is that everybody always said the GameCube was really underpowered, and people would even say that the GameCube was more underpowered than the PlayStation 2. Whereas the GameCube had some of the best-looking games of that generation. Metroid Prime and Winwaker are two huge examples. Winwaker blew me away at the time. I really think they knew how to use the system to its full capabilities by cutting corners in other places. I was just playing the Winwaker. I noticed there's not a lot of textures in the game. And when textures appear, they're very simple. They're not very complicated. So I feel like they saved a lot of power there.

And it's a great example of cell shading. Yeah, yeah. Everything, I think that cell shading is one part, but having really appealing character designs. And this was all new for Zelda at the time, like characters like Link and Tetra and everything. And who was a shop owner? I can never remember.

Beetle. Beetle. Things like that. Thank you. They were very faithful to the look and feel of Zelda, but they had in kind of a personality of all their own. And that's a crucial part of doing good cell shading, I think. Yeah, oddly enough, sorry, Matthew, go ahead.

Oh, sorry. You were playing the HD version, right? I was just recently for this podcast. The H1 kind of messes that up. You're right. You know what? That kind of annoyed me more than it probably should have when they first announced the HD version. If you go back to the GameCube version, everything is very flat, flat shaded.

In the HD remake, they look more like clay figures. They have a lot more like, I don't know, there's a lot more detail to them. Dependium. Yeah. When in the Windwaker, the original version, things are just like, there's no shading or anything like that. It's just flat shadows and flat textures. But you're right, Matthew.

Like, I think that HD remake does betray the original intent. I still like it. It's still the most playable version of the game, but I wish there was an option to turn off all, like, the bloom and the shaders and everything like that to have a more basic game. Although, this game looks fantastic on the dolphin emulator. If you ever want to boot it up in the dolphin emulator, it's just, it's gorgeous. You can play the original graphical style in, like, 4K if you want to.

It's a gorgeous game. Cell shading is the easy. way to future-proof your game. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, Jetset Radio, Dragon Quest 8, like all these games from forever ago look amazing. It's just, like, 2D animation. Like, if you put in that Snow White Blu-Rae

that just came out a couple years ago, like, you could tell someone, this was made today, you know? We didn't know that at the time, though. We didn't know that a lot of games from that period wouldn't end up holding up because we couldn't conceive of how much better displays we're going to get, for one thing. I mean, I played a bit of Twilight Princess HD. Not a good-looking game anymore.

I thought it looked great on GameCube. I think Twilight Princess, this HD looks pretty good in parts. I'm going to part. But no, Wien Waker. That's kind of a qualified statement. I will agree to disagree. So back to the development. So I assume that Takashi Tezika and Shigura Miyamoto were screwing with A.G.

Al-Numa. But in this interview, he brings up that they wanted a reason for Link's eyes to move around. Because in the game, when Link's eyes move around, it's the game trying to tell you like, oh, there's a switch over there. There's something you need to see over there. It's just their way of, like, kind of moving you towards an objective or an item you to interact with. Miyamoto and Tezica said, you need to justify his eyes being so big, so maybe he can

shoot beams out of them or something like that. And I was like, they had to be screwing with him. I wanted to be in the room with them during this conversation to know what the kind of conversation, like the kind of mood of the conversation, because it feels like they were screwing with him at this point. Link's eyes, like them giving you the ability to control Link's eyes at certain parts of the game is one of my favorite features in a video game ever. Like when you're sidling along a wall, if you're like just jiggle the C-Stick a

little bit or the left stick like he'll look around and it's just his eyes move before any other part of him so you can actually just like make him look around and it gives him so much personality and it's just so much fun to mess with i think he does have the biggest eyes of any character in the game too and the fact that he always looks vaguely panicked or he's so expressive with his mouth whereas most characters have a very stoic kind of their jaws gritted and they're not really doing anything but link he looks alive he really does yep the idea of facial expressions uh communicating video game gameplay wasn't new, and other people tried it. Like Tomb Raider, and the original Tomb Raider, when an enemy appears and Laura draws her guns, her expression goes from neutral to like scowling, angry face.

But you can't really appreciate it because she's facing away from the camera. True. And to make this work, they really had to come up with design conventions to force you to look at Link, to have, you know, the third-person perspective concept kind of reversed. So there's a reason for a link to be looking out at the player. That's true, yeah. I mean, this one has the first actual good camera in a Zelda game and a 3D Zelda game in that you can just move it freely. You don't have to, like, hit the C button.

I totally forget how it worked on the N64. Were the cameras, the C button? How do you control the camera and link? You could use a C stick. I'm talking about an Ocary of Time and Majora's mask. I thought C buttons were items and you hit Z trigger to move the camera behind. I think you just could center it behind him with the X trigger. I think that's all you could do.

So this is the first one with a free camera like that, so you could definitely see Link's face in a lot of this if you wanted to, and you didn't necessarily always have to be behind him either. And if you're sailing and you press that button, it'll make, it'll like, I mean, it did this, I think an Ocarina, too, where it brings down the, like, widescreen black bars. Yeah, it looks so cool because you can, like, sort of direct it like in Grand Theft Auto, like, make it look like a, when I would be bored sailing, I would just, like, put in a cool camera angle and just appreciate it. It was sort of a, yeah, the cinematic option. Yeah. So this is a, obviously, a game that had to cut corn. to get out on time, and they admitted as much that there are two unfinished dungeons that were planned for this game.

And when asked if they could put them in, you know, a re-release, Aluma said we used all of those ideas in other games. So, I mean, it's totally clear where these dungeons should be, especially in the beginning where it's like, oh, get the three pearls before you get the master sword. The first two pearls are in dungeons. The third one is just like thrown at you. So you meet like a Jaboo Jaboo Whale guy. And I wanted to assume there's probably like a Jaboo Jaboo style like and go inside of a

creature dungeon in this game that was obviously cut for time. And when I got to that, I was like, oh, what a rip off. But this game, I think out of all the 3Ds, all the games, has the least amount of dungeons. And they make you revisit one twice. Interestingly enough, the Earth Dungeon and the Wind Dungeon apparently were based on content that was cut from O'Cardine of Time. Oh, really?

The cycle continued. Interesting. I did not know that. And even those dungeons you do to get the pearls are pretty much like use this item. Right. They're not very deeper. You can tell that they were also supposed to be bigger. Yeah.

I mean, I love how this game looks and I love how it plays, but the dungeons are pretty simple. They're not as big or complex as they want them to be. A lot of backtracking. A lot of backtracking, too. Control this guy. Okay, now go to the next guy. Okay, control this guy to jump on that thing. And a lot of things are based around a hub, at least, in the early dungeons.

There's like a center hub, and they're all very vertical and they're things shooting out from the hub. So I guess they had like a common theme in mind when designing these. Someone pointed that to me on Twitter, and I know it's like, yeah, these dungeons are very vertical. Maybe that's because with this free camera, you can look around a lot more than you could before. Chopping that big flower down so it falls. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I feel like the tingle tuner was kind of wasted in this game. Like the idea that you could have a second player kind of join in with Game Boy Advance

and help you find secrets in the dungeons. Oh, yeah. The dungeons aren't really complex and difficult enough to merit. No, I played with the tingle tuner, though. It's a pretty neat idea, but it just doesn't quite pan out. We all played with a tingle tuner in this group? Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I had the SP connection cable because I was playing Pokemon Coliseum, so I was like,

Why not? I think I got it for this. I'm pretty sure I bought it just to do the tinkle because I wanted to do everything I possibly could in this game. It let you bomb enemies and it gave you a little map to hold in your hand. I mean, now the Wii U version you have that map in your hand at all times. Could you troll link with bombs? You could, yes.

You could drop bombs on link too. That's what I did. Find secrets as well. It cracks this game wide open as well. This game suddenly becomes Babytown Follies where like when two people are controlling a thing, you can do whatever you want. If you watch speed runs, they do the Tingle Tuneer a lot to break. the game. Although you can easily break this game. There's a lot of great speed runs involving

Winwaker. Go look at any of the awesome games done quick or summer games done quick speed runs and watch this game just get split in half. Where do you find the exploits in this game? It's basically a lot of very granular knowledge about how the tech works. But all of the secrets I've seen about how to break the game is making it so the game basically just launches link backwards several thousand miles to whatever island you want to send them to. Similar to Breath of the Wild. It's a lot of just like getting Link to fly over things. Yeah, it's like it's basically telling the GameCube, give Link this much momentum in this direction

and then increasing and increasing it and then letting go and having them fly across the map and hoping you don't end up in the ocean and drown. So yeah, these are all very, very interesting speed runs. Basically, everyone was anxious about this game. They didn't know what to think. They were upset about the graphics. They wanted their mature Zelda. Finally at E3 2002, a demo came out and people said, okay, guys, it's fine now.

This game is fine. It was the fight against the first boss where you used as a grappling hook. And everybody went, oh, that was pretty cool. And I was not part of the games industry now. But in December of 2002, my horrible GameStop manager gave me a free ticket to an event in Cleveland where they let you play that first dungeon. Whoa, man, Cleveland Games Expo. Yes. It was just at a bar, and they had a bunch of kiosk set up.

That makes total sense. Yes. Listen, old people, calm down. You'll like this game. my girlfriend at the time there, she did not appreciate it as much as I did. She's dead now, no. Dead to me.

Dead to me. Dead to me. Oh, that's so much better. Speaking of that grappling hook, like, when is that going to come back? It was so much fun to, like, to swing it around, to have it to be able to, like, move up and down to, like, control how far you can swing, to use it to steal items from enemies was so much fun. I mean, the first thing they really, they really explicitly teach you how to do is swing, and

there's a lot of swinging and vertical movement in this game. It has a really, it makes you really feel connected to lean. in the way that you can use your momentum to swing around things, even more so than the hook shot, I think. And I swear to God, they must have fine-tune it in a way that I can't tell in the game in the Wii U version because I remember that first test of swinging in the Pirates ship just to be very, very annoying.

And I passed it in one try on the Wii version. I just want to say that swinging in video games is fun. As a recording, yesterday I was playing five hours of SNES classic games, and I was playing Castlevania 4. Doing the same thing. I was playing it today. And I was swinging cross those cats, and I'm like, this feels great. I love this.

You never see that again. Samus's weird impossible swinging around in Super Metroid. She like does circles, yeah. There's no real gravity involved. SteamWorld Dig 2. I was playing that yesterday, and it has not swinging, but it has grappling, and you can use it if you're fast to, like, zip around and kind of break out of boundaries that you're not supposed to go to.

Swinging is a really fun mechanic. So the last thing I want to talk about of the pre-release and development of this game, and I want to know if you guys took advantage of this. So Nintendo was obviously worried. The developers were worried. In fact, Aounuma and his staff talked about how worried they were, but they decided to keep continuing down this path. And one of the reasons why they had hope was apparently their wives said, this looks like a game that we want to play. And apparently, Aounma's wife was not a gamer.

Another staff member's wife said the same thing, and she was not a gamer either. So they thought, okay, this could be a Zelda for more than just the typical Zelda audience. So they had that going for them. But in order to sort of smooth things over and get people an incentive to want to play this. game. Anyone in America, this could have been a GameStop-only deal. If you pre-ordered the Winwaker, you got a GameCube disc with Ocourine of Time on it and MasterQuest, which was sort of the remnants of the canceled disc drive Ura Zelda. Jeremy's nodding us had a lot. Jeremy, can you speak about this at all? In what sense? The Master Quest. I mean, Ocary of Time, duh, we know

what that is, but what is this Master Quest? Did you play that version of it? I played a little bit of it and didn't really find it that enjoyable. Like, it mostly just kind of, like, turns everything reversed. It, like, flips everything mirror image, doesn't it? It does some wacky stuff. It changes, like, weird. Yeah, there's, like, cows embedded in Japu-Japu's inner lining of his stomach. That's the best change, I think.

There's, like, some really weird stuff. But it's pretty much Ocarina of Time, just like the weird remix mode, the equivalent of a second quest, basically. Sort of, like, an arrange mode. Yeah, it was supposed to be a 64-D-D add-on that you would plug in the disc and the cartridge at the same time to the disk system for the N64. But, of course, that never came to the U.S., and they didn't continue developing or a Zelda for N64.

Right, right. That was a big cancellation there. Yeah, so this kind of took what they had and just said, here you go. And it's, it feels it. It feels kind of half-hearted. But it's neat. It's a fun, you know, archaeological relic.

And it is part of the Zelda Canon. It's a nice thing to get for free. And I, it's hard to find. Mine? Are these things rare? I have mine. Those Master Quest discs are pretty cheap, yeah. It was a big collector's item for a while. I sold mine for quite a bit. But it also, I believe it also had the original Zelda on it? Did not. That came out on the GameCube bundle a couple years ago.

Yeah. Okay. Yep. Were you going to say something, Kat? I was going to say, I just want to put a little context into this. By the time that this happened and they put out this pre-order disc, the GameCube in a lot of people's minds was very much in trouble. And a lot of people were going, oh, what's wrong with the GameCube? look at, yeah, Metroid Prime came out at the, in 2002, but a lot of people were saying, oh, the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox were running circles around it. Smash Brothers was not the sensation that it is today. So this was the first time I remember there being a real burst of good press for the GameCube,

was when they announced this pre-order bonus with Occurrentive Time and the Master Quest. And everyone was like, oh, well, God, yeah, I have to get Win Wake her now. This is a huge deal. I totally agree with you, Kat. That's context I think that was missing prior in this conversation that, the GameCube was not doing well. And I think the reason why a lot of these games feel or are in finish like Mario Sunshine and Winwaker is Nintendo was like we need to get this thing out in 2002 or early 2003. Which is really too bad because, my opinion, it really, really damaged Winwaker.

I think so, too. I want this game to be more complete. But at the time, the PS2 had Grand Theft Auto 3. The Xbox had Halo. Final Fantasy 10 was out by this time. Kingdom Hearts was out by this time. The GameCube had Smash for the... Zeno Blame.

Metal Gear Solid 2 was out. by this time. Saga. Saga? Was that a system seller? It was, you know, for the people who were into the anime style, it was pretty big. I can't believe I played all of those games. So people were going, Will Winwaker save the GameCube? It's looking a little dicey. But, so I did not get the pre-order disc, sadly, because I did not own a GameCube at the time because I was a poor college student. However, I believe it was 2004 for my birthday. I did have a GameCube and a friend of mine gave me a pre-ordered. disc for my birthday, and I beat it that summer. That was the first time I ever beat Ocarina Time was on my GameCube with the pre-ordered disc. It's not a bad version.

I think it bumps up the resolution at times a bit. Yeah, it definitely looks a little better. It's the one I have the most experience with in Ocarina. I guess it's the disc you mentioned, the one that came out later. I didn't realize there were two versions of it. There were. Yeah, when I repurchased a GameCube, I sold my original one and then I bought it again for something.

I forgot what, but I got the Zelda bundle disc. The one time GameCube ever got any traction was when they slashed. the price and included that bonus disc. That's why I bought it, yeah. Which is when I bought my GameCube. I wanted to play Major's Mask again. That version freezes up, though, with a jerk. That must have been the one. Maybe I got it later than I even realize. I think this was probably 2003.

It was 2003 because I went and saw Kill Bill at the same time. What a great pairing. When you're a GameCube under your arm. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. But, and the

I'm going to be the oh, oh, so. And the I'm

So before we move on to the game discussion, let's talk about the staff of the game. A lot of these are familiar names. Some of these people, they've not done a lot outside of Zelda, so there's not much to talk about. But, of course, director, I.G. Al Numa, he has been in Zelda jail for like 20 years now. He's not allowed to do anything but Zelda. And every time I see him, his hair is grayer and he looks more tired. He's making the best of it, though. He really is.

But, I mean, Jeremy, he did not direct Breath of the Wild, correct? He is now where Miyamoto used to be. He's flipping the tea table these days. I remember interviewing him in conjunction with Windwaker HD. It was like a Skype interview. And I basically just said, like, so how's it going? It was kind of like the opening gambit, and he was like, oh, I'm so tired. I miss my family.

I was like, oh, my God, he's saying this with, like, PR people there. What the hell? Tell them to give me water. I'm so thirsty. I was like, man, this guy needs a break. I mean, I'd really love to see Aounuma do something outside of Zelda because I love his first game, Marvelous, and other Treasure Island for the Super Famicom. That's great.

I just wonder what else he could have done outside of Zelda, but I guess this is the role that was... What you're saying, it's the George Lucas curse. He got involved with something so big and so successful that, in the end, that, that became his life's true. He never made a Howard the Duck game, though, or Howard the Duck equivalent of the game. So, weirdly enough, I love the script for this game. I love the story for this game, but the people who wrote it are not story people. I mean, still in this era of game development, you can fill 9,000 different roles because game development was like that back then.

So one of the writers is Mito Hero Takano. He wrote Star Fox 64, which is great. I love that game, how goofy it is. also he directed 1080 snowboarding so sure I wonder if that impacted the sailing

at all I mean snowboarding and sailing aren't that similar but I feel like there might be a similar sort of momentum and the way that use the environments

Did he have any involvement with Wave Race Blue Storm? I didn't see that I mean these guys are all over the place in terms of what they did and what they worked on and what their roles were so the other script writer

I didn't have his name I forgot to put his name here but his other credits are assistant director on Luigi's Mansion and sequence director on Animal Crossing Wild were like, I assume these guys would have more writing credits

for Nintendo at this time just because I just like the story in this game so much, but you know, maybe this is their first great story in a video game that they wrote. Who knows? And of course, the music Koji Kondo, and this game has the most Zelda music of a Zelda game at this, up

to this point. And Condo was used to writing smaller soundtrack, so a few folks helped them with this one. This is a very robust soundtrack, and I think more than any other Zelda game, Music is very much used to characterize people and events and things like that. I feel like music does play a stronger role in Wind Waker as opposed to the games that came before and since, even though this game does not have a musical instrument in the title.

A baton is not an instrument. I swear to you guys, it's not. Does anyone, I want to have more conversation about the music? Do you guys agree with me on that? I'm just curious because when I play this game, it's just like there's Grandma's theme, there's Errol's theme, there's the windfall island theme. I think all of these things really... I mean, the sailing theme is one of Zelda's greatest overall theme. I mean, the whole set, it just goes and goes.

It's like a whole suite, and you really feel like, as tedious as the sailing in this game can get, it never feels tedious because you always have that music behind you, except when the storms come, and then you're like, oh, God, I'm going to die. It reminds me of the Final Fantasy 7 overwall, except it loops better. Matthew. The main theme is just incredible. And I think it does such a perfect job of, like, when you press that power button and you just hear that little, like, strum, and that very chill. Like, it just lets you know, like, this is a chill game.

Kind of a sea shanty. Yeah, like, hey, open your windows, just, like, lean back and play this cool summery, awesome chill game. Yeah, it reminds me of a few other games did a really good job of setting their mood with the title screen music. O'Carine of Time was one of them. Is it a sea shanty or kind of more like a Celtic tune? That's why it's very. A little of both. But it reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy 9, which, you know, you expect bombast when you boot up Final Fantasy 9 after Final Fantasy 8.

But it's like this quiet sort of Irish flute melody. And you're like, wait, this isn't, what? Where's the bombast? Yeah, I mean, the first thing you hear when you turn it on before the flute or whatever starts is like this is this rustle of like it sounds. It sounds like wind chimes, but more like seashells. I don't know what the instrument that is, but just a very soft sound. And I've never played this game. Is it a rain stick?

You know what? It might be. But I've never played this game with a good stereo system before. And I'm blown away by how good this music is in this game and how good the instrumentation is, which I don't. really associate with GameCube games. They did not re-record this music for the Wii U-HD version. It's all the same instrumentation as wasn't the GameCube version. My best experience with the music in this game was on an airplane coming back from Japan

because I reviewed the game, which came out, the HD version came out at the same time as Tokyo Game Show. So I took my Wii U with me, and there wasn't an electrical plug in the plane on the way there. But then I played in a hotel without a TV, and I was like, that's cool. I've got the game pad. And then on the way back Were you playing on the plane? There was an electrical power in my seat and there was no one next to me

so I was like, and so I played Wii U on the airplane on the way back from Tokyo. You might be literally the only person to ever do that. No, I've seen Patrick Kleppick and some other people do that in more recent years,

but I feel like I was the first. I feel like I broke new ground and it was really stupid and I'm glad the switch is just like take it and go. You secretly invented the switch. I did. I was telling them, look guys. Because this is what we want.

One quick observation I want to make about the music is, aside from setting the tone of the game, it really carries throughout. And it's so bright and shirry, even when you're fighting the bosses, which I think really stands out, especially in light of the fact that it's actually kind of a post-apocalyptic scenario. It really is. It really is. I have to say this is not name-dropping, but it's more praise for Kochi Kondo. I went to, I think, the first Hyrule Symphony that they had in L.A. in 2011, and Koji Kondo was there. He did not go to all of them, but he went to the opening of, you know, the entire symphony project. And he played a song on the piano.

Out of all the songs he played, he played Grandma's theme from the Wind Waker, which I was like, wow, that is a great choice of what I did not expect at all. And boy, that audience was terrible. It only got better. This was in America? It was in America. It's like, hey, you don't have to cheer every time you recognize a song. I recognize them too, guys. I feel like the orchestras who play on those tours are like, these stupid children, stop.

This is not how you listen to Cook. When I saw it again in San Francisco, though, and the crowd was well-behaved. But that first showing, oh, my God. But, yes, enough of my gripes. We're going to take a break now, and we'll be back to talk about the game itself after that. Hi, this is Ben Dominic, the host of the Federalist Radio Hour. We're a daily show coming to you five days a week from Washington, D.C., where we interview our nation's top journalists, politicians, authors, chefs, economists, entertainers, and more.

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That echoes a legend. A legend held dearly by the royal family that tells of a boy who became a man. He embarked on a great journey to the deepest, darkest corners of the earth. Battling the forces of evil. Testing the limits of his world. of his world, all to fulfill his destiny, which is, above all else, to save me.

To save me. Product not yet rated. million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of chocolate. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. So we're back, everybody. And before we move to gameplay and things like that. I do want to talk about the story of Winwaker because I want

to know what you guys think about this. I think this is the first Zelda to have a real focus on narrative instead of just kind of a collection of ideas that are vaguely related. There is a strong through line. There is characterization of the villain. I just feel like there's a lot more personality too along with that. What does everybody think about that idea? One of my favorite observations, the things that I noticed about the game as I was playing at the first time, is once you get the photo mode and you can go around taking pictures of everything, thing, you know, the game kind of documents what you take pictures of, and you can take pictures of enemies, and you can take pictures of characters. There's like six generic enemies in the

game. You're fighting the same six monsters over and over again. But in PCs, there's like 120. It's a ridiculous number. There are a ton of them, yeah. They really, really put the effort in this game into creating a vibrant world for a link to live in. And I don't mean visually vibrant. I mean, like, every character has their own dialogue and their own sort of personality and their own relationship with the other characters in towns. And you have to track them down. You do have to track them down, but you don't really have to do a lot with most characters' personalities. They're just kind of there as like wallpaper, but it's very detailed wallpaper. And you can really invest yourself in this world. And I think, you know, the fact that they put so much effort into

creating a hundred however many NPCs that none of whom look alike unless they're related and they're supposed to look like brother and sister or something. That really shows where their hearts were with this game and what they thought was important. Yeah, everyone has a very strong personality. By that, I mean, they're all weirdos.

Everyone is a different kind of weirdo, but I love it. And they all have different faces. It's just, yes, Jeremy, you're totally right about that. They put a lot of time into building a population for LinkedIn interact with instead of just like random NPCs who tell you, like, go to the mountain or go to the West or whatever. Right. It's a nice contrast to the Dragon Quest games where you have, like, the same 10 NPCs all throughout

the world. Oh, God. And you have, like, the same dude with the mask and the chest straps. And he'll, like, show up in all kinds of different roles. And I get that that's kind of the thing that Dragon Quest does. But it can be really disconcerting to have, like, a major character who is just one of these NPCs or are supposed to be, like, it's a... like, well, you know, before I met this guy and he was a jerk, but now it's the same

Sprite, but he's like a sickly person who desperately needs my help. That is way annoying in Drag Quest 7. I hate that aspect of the game. It's all Dragon Quest. Yes, but Seven is so long. That's true, yeah. Just like, which identical king do I need to talk to now to go back to? So I'm going to push my glasses up a little bit.

She's doing it, folks. This was the first Zelda really kind of delve into canon a little bit and have connections to pass games for better or worse. As I had Zelda 2, you mean, oh, oh, glasses, oh, white, all the way up. I mean, there are Zeldas that are connected in time. I believe Zelda 2 is a sequel to Zelda 1. Obviously, Majores Mask follows up Ocarina of Time. This one does establish a canon, you're right, Kat, in that it is an apocalyptic version of the Ocaryne of Time world.

That's correct, right? Yes, and I was definitely a Zelda fan at the time, and I was very curious about the world of Hyrule and how all of the games connected together. And obviously, the whole stupid many-timeline theory was still ahead of us. But I really enjoyed the big twist, of course, spoiler alert. If you were listening to this podcast, there are spoilers. Yes, it is a post-apocalyptic high rule that was flooded because when Gannon returned, people were waiting for the hero of time to return as well.

And he did not. And so the gods had to flood the world. and I really enjoyed that concept. I enjoyed that element of it. I enjoyed the fact that the master's sword was being handed down. I loved that you were seeing areas that were very much from Akrona time. Yeah, yeah. And the references back to past games.

But also, I always liked imagining at the time, I thought, okay, at the end of the game, Tetra and Link sail off into the sunset to find new lands. And my assumption was that they were going to found a new Hyrule, which was going to be the high rules in the NES games because I was like, oh, the NES games are like way down the line from Winwaker. So therefore, they're starting the new kingdom of high rule, which explains why the map layout is different from Ockernard of Time.

I see. I love the reveal of the game. People are laughing what's happening. Because I was being very nerdy there. That's why. I don't think the official timeline aligns with your hots at all. This was Katz thought, circa 2003. Yes.

It's weird than that. It's not weird. It's actually interesting in that we were starting to think more about the Zelda timeline in the early 2000s. Like what's going on here? What's been happening for the past 15 years? Well, it was getting more and more complicated. Right. At the time, I mean, when Akrona and Time came out, we're like, okay, well, this is just, this goes back even further back than Link to the past.

So it goes Akron and Time, linked to the past. And then the original Zelda's in Zelda 2, and Link's Awakening is in Link to the past as well. And then WienWaker comes along and suddenly things change a little bit and you're going, okay, so how does this fit into there? And then more Zelda games, it kept getting more and more complicated. I think Nintendo basically created an out for themselves in a way to explain every Legend of Zelda game that they distance themselves from, which I find odd because this solved every continuity, every timeline problem. In the intro to the game, it's kind of established that a link is just a role someone fills.

It's not just one guy you've been following this entire time. It's like James Bond. Exactly, exactly. But people demanded more than that, which I have a problem with. I love this solution where it's like, don't think too hard about it. High rule is a place. And, you know, it keeps getting destroyed and rebuilt. And every once in a while, guy named Link will show up and he'll save the day.

But, like, people just really love the world. Yeah. And when people really love the world, they naturally want to establish lore, even if really the story concepts around it are pretty flimsy, see also Star Wars. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things that go and explain that I have a lot of questions about, like, Gannon Dorf, how does he keep coming back? Is he functionally immortal? Like, there are a lot of big questions they never really answer. Well, in this one, he dies.

In this timeline, Link kills Gannon and puts him an end to him for good. That is strike one. That is strike one. But talking about Gannon. Gannendorf. This is the first time that they've actually cared about giving this guy any sort of motivation outside of pure evil. I mean... We see him brood. What's that?

We see him brood. We see him like alone in his study, like thinking about his own evil. He is a great character in this game, actually, more appealing than Link in some cases because Link is a blank slate. But, yeah, Gannendorf is just kind of a wounded guy. He wants to get revenge against the goddesses for flooding the earth. The earth was flooded to stop him, so it's really his fault. but he thought that was kind of unfair and that makes the fight at the game

kind of the most meaningful fight in a Legend of Zelda game to compare to Twilight Princess where Gannon appears like with two minutes of the game left what a bummer that is but this is earned this fight is completely earned and Zelda helps you and it's such a great moment in the game

The way he defeats Gannon is like one of the greatest gaming moment ever. First of all Gannon does not appear in the last two minutes of Twilight Princess he appears in like in the middle of the game you go to the dungeon where he was in prison by the gods, et cetera. Oh, really? I thought he appears at the end.

It's like, it was me this time all along. It was not that. And then you fight him. Gannon definitely appears by the middle of the game. And you learn a lot about what was going on with that side of the timeline strike two. I just remember that it was like this Zant guy. And then at the end of the last boss fight, it's like, nope, it was Gannon. It was Gannon the whole time.

I mean, Gannon is definitely pulling the strings. Yeah. To get back to Gannon, a lot of that is because Winwaker is kind of a deconstruction of what you would know as the typical Zelda game. in the sense of the whole premise of the game was that technically in a Zelda game, Gannon appears, the hero appears, but the whole premise of the game is that the hero did not appear. Link is not the hero that was faded. He's actually just kind of a kid who ends up taking on the mantle and taking the Master's Sword

and eventually fighting Gannon. I guess that is true. It's like what if a normal person was taking on this role, not just the destined hero? And meanwhile, Gannon is going, I've made a lot of mistakes. I seem to be trapped in a cycle, it seems. but I can't break out of it. I have to keep going, which is kind of a nod to,

Gannon keeps coming back. Yeah, they give a lore version for why he wears the tunic. They say that the tunic is just given to, like, the oldest boy in the town, and every town has one. But if you, New Game Plus, that the tunic's invisible,

and you're in his lobster pajamas the whole time, and it's the best. I love the lobster pajamas. That's the cutest little design for Link. So more story stuff. They introduce some new races. The Rito, the bird people, who would disappear

until Breath of the Wild. So they were gone forever. I don't know why they didn't reuse them. I love their design. I think they're really cool. They're supposed to be a descendant of the Zora or something. Something like that. There's some relationship.

Which makes no dang sense. Yes. They really should have set this more than 100 years after O'Reany of Time because if this only happened 100 years later, people would remember things. There would be like a memory of this apocalypse, but no one seems to acknowledge it in any way. Also, you'd think that, you know, in a world flooded by water, that the Zora would be like, oh, hell, yeah. This is this owns.

This is good for us. It's not like, let's turn into birds. Sorry, Matthew, go ahead. It's, I mean, it can be way easier to forget that stuff, maybe, because if a lot of the old people die, there's no more books, there's no documentaries or film or anything. Maybe it's easier to just wipe out all the knowledge of the world in a place like that. I mean, Nazis are back and it's only been 70 years. That is true, yes.

Have you seen the movie threads? No, I've not. What was that? It's a nuclear apocalypse film set in England, but the whole point is that the apocalypse destroys the threads that are holding society together. and within like a generation literacy is going away, which is I'm just saying that Zelda is a very bright and happy and cheery version of threads.

I've never heard that, but I buy it. I like that theory. We also have the Kokiri, which are sort of the little Princess Mononokey Kodama guys, right? The little, like, they have leaf faces. Am I thinking of the right things in this game, Kokiri? They're the little leaf guys. No, they're the Korox. Oh, Korokiri are the elves from Akron of Time.

They're the things that Link comes from. Right, right. The Kokiri kind of become the Korokai. That's right. Okay, no wonder I was confused. Like, Kokiri were the elf people, and then they turned into, like, little acorn people. They, like, grew up around the decu tree and became little tree dudes. You just assume, you just have to go, okay, this world is magical. There is definitely magic in here.

There are gods. Yeah, whatever. They became Korox and the Zoroos became Rito. And Kokiri gave you their poop in Breath of the Wild as a reward. Though, pushing glasses up, the Rito and the Zora are both in Breath of the Wild, so they're clearly separate species. Splits. It's like Goofy and Pluto. It's like monkeys, why they're still monkeys.

I'll buy it. You bring up another influence we didn't mention earlier, which is, of course, Hayao Miyazaki. Yes, that's got to be a major influence. A future boy Conan maybe or... Yeah, I mean, I think just his work in general. Oh, that's totally true. Modernoke came out a couple years before Winwaker, but Winwaker was in development at the time. A lot of anime influence.

But most importantly, Gorons exist, but they're going extinct and I say good. Aw. They never did nothing for no, but I don't like Gorons. What? Why not they roll around real fast? They're the funniest race in the entire. Rocks. That's so hilarious.

They get a big sword that breaks. They eat rocks and they're sleepy. They're so jolly. Well, I have hated my heart for gorons, I guess. Because you had to find that armor to not burn up on their volcano? Yeah, that's probably it. Something annoyed me about them. So this game, as different as it looks visually and as different as it plays in terms of, you know, the open world, it does adhere very much to the Zelda kind of formula.

established from Link to the past. You get X number of things in dungeons and you get the master sword and then you go to like three or four more dungeons and then you fight Gannon. It's the exact same sort of formula without a lot of variance there and you're getting a lot of these same items

and I feel like that is definitely a criticism of this game that as wild as it went in terms of style, it was still extremely conservative in terms of the structure of the game. But it wasn't until Twilight Princess that people started to go, well, are they doing the same structure again? Especially with how close that game was to Ocarina

in terms of like the sequence of things you went in. Did you guys... I feel like there's much more padding in this one. I mean, that's a try force quest at the end? For sure. For sure. I mean, all the padding was the dunch... They had to make up for dungeons they cut out, of course.

So there was a lot of padding. Because you couldn't have a 15-hour Zelda game. No, no. I would kill for a 15-hour Zelda game. See, I had the guide which came with a giant map of the world, which I had hanging up my wall right behind my TV. So the Trifor Shards were annoying for me, but it was like not as annoying

because I would just look up at the map and just find it there. And those have only gotten more doable over time. We should explain what Trifor Shards are. So there is a super involved kind of fetch quest in the game and that you have to rebuild the Triforce

before you can open up the last dungeon, I believe. Is that how it works? So are we going to talk about this because it ruined the game? It is a huge damper and you can see from the very beginning they thought this was a problem.

So the Japanese version is much more involved. There are a Triforce chart you have to get them decoded by Tingle. Okay, first you have to find the charts. Then you get them decoded by Tingle. By paying him money. Which costs money.

So you have to farm money just to pay Tingle. And he charges like hundreds of rupees. It's like 400 rupees per map. Yeah, it's absurd. So you have to go and do everything. And it's so boring. And then you have to go out and dig up the Trifor Shard. And one of the shards involves like, oh, you get a map to here, then you go here, then you go here, then you go here.

It's not just, oh, find the chart in the ocean, or the shard in the ocean, rather. With every release of this game, they've made this less involved. So there are eight charts in the GameCube Japanese version. One of them is super involved. They made that a tiny bit simpler for the American release. And in the Wii U release, there are only five Trifor's charts, and they're just as simple as turn in the chart. They show you where it is in the world, and then you dig it up, and that's it.

They made it as easy as possible, but I still think it is a huge bummer that is obvious padding in this game. Well, it's not only that, it kills all the momentum in the game. It really does. You have everything. You return to the fortress where, so the first dungeon you ever go into is the stealth section in the game. Right. The fortress.

And you return with your sword and everything. You're ready to kick some butt. And there's an amazing set piece where you're fighting the bird, right? That's a great set piece. Kidnapped your sister. With a big hammer. You're running up the tower as it's collapsing and everything. And then you fight the bird and you beat it.

And you're like, yeah, that was amazing. I love that set piece so much. And then right after that, it's like, okay, now go get the Triforce pieces sent and you loose now. And everything just, all the momentum of the game evaporates. And when you finally get everything, it's like, okay, game's over now. Yeah, they liked that idea so much that they brought it back later that year for Metroid Prime's Artifact. Oh, God, that's a bad part of that game. I had totally removed that from my memory.

Thanks, Jeremy. That is the reason why that game is not as good as you remember. That part did not age well. It's great up until that point. Yes, it really is. Let's talk about that opening. So I was playing this for, you know, research. I was playing it again.

I finished it twice on the GameCube, and I played the HD version for the first time over the week. And I noticed I put it four hours into it. I was like, wow, I finished two dungeons. This Zelda game moves so fast. Compare that to the next Zelda game. In four hours, I don't think you make it into the overworld yet. I think I gave up before that point playing the HD version. There was a mandate in Twilight Princess to get as many dungeons as possible in there

and make it longer and more involved. And, of course, when it came out, everybody said, perfect, amazing, look how many dungeons in there. Heck, they even squeezed in one more extra dungeon just for kicks with the, I think it was the Temple of Time. I love the dungeons, but it takes so long to get to those dungeons. It does. It really does.

The beginning is very slow, let's be honest. But this is a very speedy opening. And they make an odd choice, though. The first dungeon you go to, so your sister gets kidnapped because Gannon is kidnapping all the pointy-eared girls in the world and hopes for finding Zelda. And you go... That really is. Hey, that's not cool, Gannon.

But you go to the Forbidden Fortress, and unlike any others all the game, this first dungeon you go to, you have no weapon. It is a stealth dungeon, and frankly, it sucks. I didn't like it on the GameCube. I don't know what they did on the Wii U, but I feel like it's much harder to get caught on the Wii U. But on the GameCube, I felt like I was getting caught all the time. And there was no real indication as to the enemy's cone of vision or what constituted you being safe or not. I don't think I got captured this time, and I don't think I'm any better at this, but I do feel like they made some behind-the-scenes improvements to that first dungeon to make it more tolerable.

A great example of how stealth sections and video games are often a blight. Yes, and starting a game with a stealth dungeon. Especially that time. This is the time of like, let's throw in a stealth thing just to annoy you for two hours. But this was an observation that somebody made, and I do not have a, I do not take credit for this, but they were supposing that the reason Nintendo put a stealth dungeon into start was because they were a imagining Winwaker. They intended Winwaker to be easier, a good introduction for the series, especially for perhaps kids who would be attracted by the cartoon art style.

So take away Link's weapon? No, more like you are getting acquainted with all of the mechanics of the game, but there are no real consequences. You're not going to die. If you get captured, you just get sent right back to prison and then you can try again. For experienced gamers, it's tedious. And let's be honest, it's not a great design choice. No, that is too confusing, too, for a first dungeon. It is pretty confusing.

You had turned around a lot, a lot of it looks the same. Plus, I'm sure they were like, well, this is something different. We've never done a stealth section before. And stealth was actually still relatively a fresh concept at that time. It was very in vogue. I mean, this is post Metal Gear Solid 1. Splinter Cell. Being developed alongside Metal Gear Solid 2.

Yeah, everyone was on the stealth train and not doing it very well, frankly. It was cool to get, I mean, it's really annoying to get thrown into jail more than once. But the first time we do it, you're like, oh, well, they took me into a whole different part of the map. And now there's like this part that I wouldn't have seen if I had just been. really good at this? It is fun the first time, not the third or fourth time. I did well at this time. I don't know if they fixed anything in the Wii version or improved anything.

So, yeah, I get what they were going for with that. You return to that dungeon with a weapon and feel really empowered after, you know, hiding from everything the first time, but I don't think it's worth that first go-around to feel more empowered later. It's like that scene in Monty Python the Holy Grail. Which one where the guy with the sword

just goes through that whole party. That's right. Shell sections are a blight. Yeah, they really are. Jeremy. I was just going to say, I feel like they did stuff a lot better in Akrona of time where it's like one screen and that's all you have to do. And they give you an overhead view too. They give you basically Metal Gear Solid 1 kind of camera angle, even though that game was released before Metal Gear Solid 1.

No, it was just after. Yeah, but they couldn't have copied it. No, no. Definitely not. Let's talk about the combat. though, because Twilight Princess would build off of this. It's very similar to what we saw Madura's Mask on Occurion of Time.

You Z-target one enemy, and the rest sort of surround you and wait their turn. There's one thing in this game that kind of ruins the combat, or makes it too easy. Of course, you don't have to use it, but there's a moment where the enemy will do a certain move and the basically A button will light up on the screen.

You hit that button, it does Link's most powerful attack, and it hits every time. It's sort of like the easy button. Yeah, it's like a parry, but not quite as hard as it is in something like Dark Souls. It's just like you have a huge window to hit that button. And it is really, really easy to just kind of steamroll through the game. Don't you have to use it to beat the, to knock the armor off the deco?

Yeah, it's necessary for a lot of enemies, like Dark Nuts. And in fact, you can use it to, you know, disable an enemy or take away their weapons sometimes, I believe. But yeah, that goes into how this game is generally just too easy in general. I don't know if I'm the only one who thinks that, but this is a very easy game. You can get through it without dying really easily. Yeah, and I think enemy attacks like barely take off a quarter of a heart, depending on what you're getting hit by. I just remember never dying in this game. And that's why I love Breath of the Wild because I died the first, like, five minutes setting out to that world.

Yeah, it's like, God, I love that they let me die in this game. One of the cool things, so Kat brought up something I've been thinking a lot about. And Matthew, I think, brought it up as well. Breath of the Wild borrows a lot from the Wind Waker. I mean, I brought this up on Twitter and someone said, land in the Breath of the Wild is basically like water in the Wind Waker. I totally agree with that. And one of the other things you can do in the Wind Waker that comes up a lot in Breath of the Wild is using enemies' weapons against them. Any weapon that's dropped by an enemy, you can use against them, and they're all disposable, which is a huge thing in Breath of the Wild.

You're constantly going through weapons that belong to other monsters. What was the, what are the moblins, they're not moblins, but the bocoblins? Yeah, whatever, the Boko ones. Their skulls are basically like the platforms that you'll find randomly in the ocean. Oh, yeah. They'll be shooting cannons at you and everything. It's the same as in Breath of the Wild. Like the little camps that you take out in Breath of the Wilde.

Yeah. The difference is that Breath of the Wild's world feels so much more alive. It really is. Yeah. There's stuff to find you're not just in sort of a blue void with coins popping up sometimes. That's one of my biggest problems, to be honest, with Winwaker was when I was playing at the time, this was a period in my life where I was very much a completionist. And I did as much as possible. I explored every corner of that map.

and it became pretty apparent to me that there was not a ton to find like most of the islands were pretty disappointing they would have one treasure and the treasure would be a rupee or something and a lot of the challenges were sort of copy-paced through the things where it's like there's three platforms here

now there's four, now there's five there's so much space for really great side quests and the fact that they rushed this out made it so I mean frankly it's pretty empty and the island they're like two pretty good islands I suppose the world just despite being vast and interesting and nice to sail across,

I was one of those people who just really did enjoy sailing. Oh, me too. I really like sailing. I didn't get the complaints about it. I'm probably the odd man out on that one along with Kat. I did not feel like there was anything to go to for the most part. Yeah. I had no incentive to find treasure.

It's like my goal is to map every square on this by talking to the fish guy, but that's it. In fact, I sort of ruined it for myself when I first play through, in that the second I got the boats, I went to every square and got every map. And only then did I realize, like, oh, I can't do anything on any of these islands because I have such limited gear. And then I had, and then when I had to go back to them later, it was so boring. Like, I recommend if you play this game, don't go to every island the second you can because you will ruin this experience for yourself. So this is probably where you're starting to get that maybe, I don't want to harsh the nostalgia vibe here,

but I think Winwaker is an incredibly flawed work. And while I really like a lot of what it does, I love the art. I love the music. I like Gannon with Pathos. I I like the twist and everything. I feel like so much of the in-between, the dungeons are too simple. The gameplay is way too easy. There's not enough to find in the world. There's way too much padding and busy work. And it's tough to ignore, frankly.

That's right. I mean, the HD version is a huge improvement, but there's only so much they could do. Of course, there's a lot of tiny, tiny granular changes that are too numerous to list here. one of the more important ones is you can get the swift sail and make sailing faster. And when you want to change the wind direction, it doesn't replay the song after you conduct it. There's all these little tiny things that save you a lot of time. But there are broader things that could not be addressed with a remake. And I feel like I would love to see a real sequel to the Wind Waker or like a remake that kind of addresses the problems we've talked about, the empty ocean, the lack of dungeons, the padding and things like that.

But unfortunately, the only stylistic sequels to the Windmaker were DS games, and they sort of divorced themselves. And they were even worse. Oh, there was so much worse. They're right. I don't like Spirit Tracks. I'm sorry. Phantom Hourglass was not a good game.

I'm a weirdo who likes Phantom Hourglass. I disagree. I like it. You're mistaken. I strongly dislike Phantom Hourglass. But in terms of- That doesn't make it a bad game. It just means you dislike it.

No, it does make it away. The judge. Yes, the judge of all this. Don't get me started. In terms of Winwaker, though, I think the thing that's kind of disappointing is, is the first couple dungeons that you play through are kind of the introductory dungeons and the back end dungeons

were much more elaborate and interesting. One of my absolute favorites actually is the one with the Mears Shield where you're solving various puzzles there and it's really spooky and it has a really great vibe to it and I like that the Rito can let you fly and everything.

I was annoying to command her with the... Yeah, having to play the song every time. So there are two dungeons that you have a second character helping you. And to control them, you have to play a song. And that sucks having to do it every time you want to switch back to the character. It's also kind of creepy that like, so I'm not, so Link is mind controlling this person instead of them just doing their own thing with this like George Harrison sting plays when they, when you take over their brain? Is he taking the over them?

It's what's what I always felt like to me. Why else put the Wind Waker out? It's like, let me enter your brain to solve this puzzle. Sitar song plays for a second and then it goes like and you go into like the mind of the little Korok guy. Oh, you're right. Yeah. I guess okay, Link is controlling their brains. It's weird. See, for me, what was emblematic

of Wind Waker's problems at the end was in the final dungeon, you do a boss rush and you're re-fighting the same bosses and I mean, and as Jeremy was pointing out, their enemies actually aren't that interesting. They are repeated quite a bit. That's not actually what I was saying.

You're saying that there are like a tiny number of enemies. I was saying the towns and people were much more interesting Not that the enemies weren't interesting. They were like 12 of them, though. Yeah. And I mean, not to harp on that point too much, but like all these, so Winwick, I don't think I've said it explicitly, but this is my favorite video game. And I understand all of these flaws and things, but that's not what I go to this game

or really most games for is all the other stuff we said about, like the townspeople. I play this game like animal crossing. Like I play this game because I want to like photograph that guy putting the love letter into the mailbox. And then when I do a dungeon, I'm like, okay, dungeon's done so I can get this item. but now I can go to this cool other island that I haven't been to yet. Like, I hang out on that main hub island where the guy dances at the grave and you play all the mini-games. Like, that's the game to me.

Not as much, you know, all the other stuff. There's not enough of that is the problem. For you. For me, it's fine. It's a game where you just kind of chill out and soak in the ambiance. I love chill game. Like, my favorite genre of game is like colorful, relaxing, Catamari Golf Story, like, games that are just like, I'm just going to relax and play this cool game. Yeah.

If you have no, if you have no agenda, sailing. can be relaxing, sailing can be surprising. The way sailing works in this game is that there are like a number of squares on this map basically and everyone has one attraction in it. Some of them are, you know, dungeons or more design things. Other ones are kind of copy-paste challenges. It gets back to the original Legend of Zelda in that rigour where each screen has an entrance, but never more than one.

That's right. Yeah, I was between jobs when this game came out, so I had nothing but time. Oh, me too. I was actually coming off of a huge breakup. So it's like, I'll sink my life into this. I was a child. Yeah, I was okay. Just like, well, I don't have work yet.

So I guess I'll just go sail around for a few hours. Yeah, this is rock the game. It really is. Does that Michael McDonald on the soundtrack? I think that's his name. Zelda, take me away. I completely understand where you're coming from when you talk about enjoying the ambiance. Like I said, I love sailing in this game.

And it really is such a colorful and lively world. but I think Breath of the Wild does it so much better in so many different respects. I mean, there is, they do address the potential boringness of sailing, not as well as Breath of the Wild does, in that there will be enemies, there will be barrels that pop up with rupees on them. You can do like a little mini, like kind of slalom through them or whatever, however that works. Like, they did think about that, but it's not enough, or they didn't have time to give you enough things to do on the way to your destination. There was one thing that I absolutely adore it, though. What's that? Photo mode.

Photo mode. Yes. What do you mean by that? Just taking pictures? That's what we were talking about. So, ma'am, a girlfriend and I were playing Wind Waker. We play all the Zelda's together. Like, that is the one game that she really plays.

And she is a completionist. Her only goal in Breath of the Wild right now is to find every Khorak, which does she know about the poop? So in Winwaker, her goal was to get every single figure. And I am not a complete, I am not the kind of person who's like, I have to get everything, but just not only taking a picture, but getting it turned into a really cool figure. Yeah, they give you a little museum full of statues of all the characters. You're saying that made me a little sick because I know how long it takes to make one figure in that game. Oh, my God. And there were so many times where I'd be like taking the picture, especially of like a boss, because you have to replay the game with the color thing in order to get certain bosses, especially the first one.

You'll finish them before you get the camera. Yes. So I did that. I went back to the beginning of the game. I'm playing through the first. I'm getting the picture of the boss. I'm like, please God, please God, please God. Because if he says, nope, sorry.

So they made this a ton easier in the Wii U version. In the GameCube version, you take a picture, you hope it's a good picture. You show it to the guy and you have to wait three days to pass until he'll make the figure for you. You have to do that for every character and enemy in the game. And you can't take selfies. I forgot about that. I got like, I made two figurines and said,

I think I did that too And I was like I'm not on board for this But the Wii version I'm fuzzy on the details Please forgive me But I believe like the second you take a picture It'll be like here's your figure Or it's it's way less complicated

It tells you if it works or not Yeah The HD remake was invented after the advent of 3D printing So that's true That's true Yeah That weird Link has a big Epson 3D printer

On the King of Red lines Which was even worse Was that the camera Could only hold three pictures That too That too Man I know there was so many problems with that subquest or whatever you want to call it.

And then they brought that back for street passing in the early day. I'm not saying that it was a perfect sidequest. I had tons of flaws like the rest of the way. Right, right, right. No, I'm saying that is impressive devotion bordering on insanity that someone would actually do that. But I really liked it. I loved those statues. Did you get them all?

I did not get them all. But also when you walked into the room and it was almost like walking to a room full of amoeboes, right? Where did the statues go into the pictobox guy's house or something? Yeah, there was a gallery. Right, right. So you were looking at this giant collection of really cool little Zelda statues. It was also a little similar to what you would have, Smash Brothers Mailie. I loved getting the trophies and just admiring them because they were always really lively.

This was, of course, well before Amoevos, and you would get a little bit of lore behind them. And I think Winwaker did this as well. And so it was a way to learn about the world and also get to see these really neat models up close and personal. Yeah, Matthew said, you know, he plays this like Animal Crossing well. there you go. You know, listening to you talk about this and the process involved in the limitation of only three pictures per camera, I feel like in a lot of sort of traditional old school Japanese development studios, there is this philosophy of like work is

its own reward and, you know, going through the steps and undergoing the process is a big part of the experience. So you had things like in Dragon Quest, you always have to go through the saving ritual where they like talk to you and you can check your experience and they tell you like do you want to stop playing now and you know Dragon Quest 9 you could street pass three people at a time and then you had to go clear out the street passes and then go back and set it up again Animal Crossing it's like you play for 15 20 minutes a day you find your bells that are buried you get some fruits you dig up the fossils you have blathers check them maybe go to the island

and you're done for the day come back tomorrow I just feel like this is part of that same philosophy. And I don't know that it's necessarily a good philosophy, but I understand that it exists and that it is very much kind of, I feel, I don't want to make too many generalizations, but I feel like it's kind of culturally ingrained. There are a lot of, there's processes, there's ritual. And you see a lot more of that in Japanese society than you do an American society where everyone's just like, you know, I'm just going to wear my shorts to church, whatever. My crocs, my shorts. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So, So, yeah, like, you know, this is like video game tea ceremony.

I don't know. I think you got something there, Jeremy, because I am thinking of certain side quests or certain bonus quests in things like Metal Gear, like, taking the pictures of all the ghosts and Metal Gear Solid 2, getting all the dog tags. That's just as involved as getting all these pictures. You love Monster Hunter. Look how methodical that game is. That would never, that game would never have come from an American studio.

That game is all about eating your vegetables, I think. It's really just like about processes and going through the steps and hard labor. and maybe you fail and have to do it again. Yeah. And, you know, go out and grind for stuff. I guess the closest you come to it is like, you know, World of Warcraft or MMOs. And even then, like that that game has been streamlined to the fact that it's like sliding down a greased shoot of playing. Yeah, it's all about just giving you rewards over and over and over again.

You're mentioning Japanese design. I want to bring up the Wii remake again because one of the things I associate with Japanese design of this era is the inability to move and shoot at the same time. And that actually happens a lot in Metal Gear Solid 3, a game I'm doing an episode on for this session where I'm in first person mode and I want to move and shoot, but it won't let me. Well, then it would be a first person shooter. That's true. That's not that game. What are you thinking? I would throw up everywhere if that happened.

But in the Wind Waker, the HD remake, all over the prime minister. You can move, yes, exactly, all broccoli. You can move and shoot in first person at the same time. It feels so good. Like, you can kind of play this as a first person shooter in a way that I really love. But I have to recommend the Wii. Have you guys all played the Wii remake? It's so good.

It's so good. It streamlines so much stuff. One of the best parts of it is that the Wind Waker baton is always mapped to one of the directional buttons. You never have to swap it out. And all of the menu rearranging you do is just on the touchpad, which I think is one of the things I miss about the Wii U. As strange as that sounds. I love having the functionality on the game pad. Not enough games have done that well.

You like the DS functionality. Exactly. Exactly. I like the DS functionality. That will not happen on the switch. Also, an important, a little bit of streamlining was in Winwaker, you would use your baton, you'd do the thing, and then it would do the animation. Yes. And that was very slow, unfortunately, especially in the levels where you were doing the command, where you were commanding the people.

So they took that out. Like, they did the animation the first time, and then from that point on, you just did it, and then it was good. Yeah, it's like, we don't need to replay this song. You literally just did it. But it was a really cool animation. We want to show it to you. We work so hard on this. We're going to be able to be.

I'm going to be. Thank you. So, yeah, I mean, we're kind of running out of time here, and I think I've said all I wanted to say, I don't know, there's just so much I like about this game. For as far as it's flaws go, there are plenty of flaws, but I like being in this world a lot. I love the characters. It's just a lot of, like, liveliness, a very, it has a very kind of meazard. We're talking about the anime influences.

I just feel like the liveliness of the townsfolk and the sort of eccentricities they have are really interesting. I really love the extremely bored guy running the battleship mini game. Splash. Boom. Splash. Caboom. Yes.

And he basically holds up little pictures up to his face to play all the roles, including the cheering children if you shoot all the squids in the water. I love the annoying aristocrat guy who gets mad when you break all of his pots. I like the guy who hits you up for money because his daughter's been kidnapped. he has the ugliest daughter in the game, I think. There's like so many nice touches in this game. Yes, and tingles in jail where he should be. Talking about deconstruction, I love that there's an area where if you break pots,

you not only don't get money, but you have to pay it fine. That's right, yes. And I love the auction house. Windfall Island is so great. I wish it was bigger. As with all of these early 2000s games, when I go back to them, I remember them being a lot bigger than they were. I was like, oh, this is very, like, these towns are very small. These areas are very small.

Open world games have really kind of changed the perspective we have on games. But you even experience that within the games. Like Breath of the Wild, you start up and you're like, the plateau is so big, you can go anywhere. And then you finally get off the plateau and you're like, oh. Oh, my God. That's another thing that really bothered me about Skyward Sword is going from Winwaker to this to Skyward Sword where I'm like, oh, my God, I can fly anywhere. And then there's a loading screen every time you hit an island. Like, that was just really annoying to follow up.

The open world in quotes was just a total, like, myth. It was just a total, like, fabrication. It was never existed. It was a hub. Yeah, and there were maybe a few things you can go to that were optional, but they really wanted it to be more guided. I will do my Skyward episode. I will make you all suffer one day.

That'll be how many years? Like four years or not? We've got like four years. The wounds will not heal. I guess I have time to play it still. Anyway, anything else to throw out, Jeremy, don't do that with your life. Anything else you want to throw out before we close off here? I just, there's just so much to talk about.

We only have 90 minutes, and I feel like, again, deeply flawed game, but I think this game has overcome its initial rocky reception to become a sort of flawed gem, I think. What does everyone else think before we close out here? Apparently, we're now on the downward slope against Wind Waker, listening to Kat talking about how trash it is. It was rehabilitated, now it's going back in the crapper. No, I mean, I was all on board with it when it first came out. I loved it when it came out, you know, when it was first revealed.

And then I loved it when I played it, despite its flaws, like I was in a better place to kind of smooth over those and accept them. And yeah, time hasn't really changed how I feel about the game. Maybe if I went back and played it all the way through again, I would find that it's kind of like half-life where it's better

in memory than in the actual experience. But I don't know, like the combat feels so good and the sailing is so relaxing and the characters are so likable and vivacious that I feel like I would still have a great time playing it. I just don't

necessarily have that much time to devote to a game that I've played through before. Matthew, this is your favorite game. Final words on this for Retronauts. I mean, I don't know how much more I could say than it's my favorite game, despite all its flaws. I guess I'll just share one quick thing, is that one time I was playing this for like the third or fourth time in high school with my girlfriend at the time, and her dog ran by and knocked the GameCube over and lost five hours of gameplay. So we just turned it back on again and in about two hours. I got back to where we were, and the dog did it again, and I still hadn't saved.

Oh, my God. So I went back to the same place and just played it again because I love that game. You can't stop me from playing it. That dog had it in for Winwick, though. Maybe it was Cat. Oh. I said, I don't want to be like the total downer of the group.

It's too late, Kat. You're ruined the smallest. I actually strongly disagree with Jeremy. I'm not offended, Cat. I don't think that it's garbage. I think that what's there is extremely well-crafted. I don't think I said that you said it's garbage. Welcome to Straw Man Corner, everybody.

I believe that garbage was a word that was just used. But I do, however, find the unequited. Quivocal praise that is heaped upon it, a little annoying, because I do think that is extremely flawed. And I think that has to be... My praise is equivocal, cat, just so you know. I go on the Internet and people treat... I have seen plenty of people say, Wind Waker is the best Zelda ever made, bar none. And I'm like, I strongly disagree with that sentiment.

Sorry. There are a lot of things that I really enjoy about it. I think the final battle is awesome. When you're fighting Gannon in that, please God, I'm sorry for use this word, cinematic setting with the waterfalls and everything. And I really love games where it's just a duel, where it's not, they're not putting in BS quick time events. They're not doing stupid set piecey things where you're jumping from platform to platform and hitting the weak point. No, it's a straight one-on-one duel, and that is what you do with Gannon, and then it ends with you stabbing him through the freaking forehead, and that is awesome. That is awesome. I love it, just hitting him getting stabbed in the head.

I always run a figure of that, that stone, Gannon with a master's sword in his head. Oh, that's great. Yeah, yeah, it turns to stone after. That should have been where you get the Master Sword from in a game. You should have to take it out again in its head. And then it comes to life and chases you. It's so wonderfully full of personality and I like so much of it. But there's so like, as you're playing through it, you realize how shallow the actual game is,

how little there is actually to find, how small the islands actually are, how actually kind of repetitive a lot of the processes are. And at the end of the day, like the, I think a lot of people are willing to overlook the Triforce finding the maps thing. but for me that was a huge part of the game for me and it really sucked that the first half was so great and then the second half was not. It was just filler and it was a huge letdown for me at that time and it's for better or worse colored my opinions of it ever since. I think the ambition of this game was fully realized by Breath of the Wild

and if you dislike that game you're wrong. I have not heard anyone say they disliked that game. I just feel like it is all of the best ideas from the Wind Waker, sort of made in a way that is not made with more time, made with more care, and executed much better because they had like 13 years of learning to do. So that's my final word on this. Thank you all for joining us for this episode of Retronauts. Thank you, Kat and Matthew, for joining us today.

Matthew, great job on your first ever Retronaut's appearance. We'll have you back soon. I've been a fan of the show for almost a decade now. Oh, that's a pretty big deal. What didn't you like about the first few episodes? I'm a little wounded. Of Retronauts? Yeah.

What did I say that? Who are you talking about? Oh, because I said almost only that kid. I just hadn't discovered it. Even bumpy early years, they were actually coming up. You've been around for 11 years, Matthew. Now you're not invited. I'm just kidding.

So, yes, thank you for joining us. I've been your host, Bob Mackey. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And I will offer you this proposition. Do you want to hear this podcast without ads? Do you want to hear this podcast at a higher bit rate? Do you want it a week early? If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, go to patreon.

dot com slash retronauts for three dollars a month you can get all of those bonuses attached to your retronauts feed and you can just live the the full retronauts lifestyle getting every episode a week ahead of time at a higher bit rate and with no ads that is the ideal version of listening to retronauts and all of your money helps fund this entire podcast so we really appreciate it if you give and we try to offer good incentives for the people who want to give us money and i have another podcast that is talking simpsons every Wednesday. We have a new episode of Talking Simpsons. We're going through the entire series

and chronological order right now. We're probably at the end of season 6 into season 7 maybe. But yes, look for Talking Simpsons on your podcast device or go to talkingsimpsons. Or go to Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons for even more stuff. Too much to list here, honestly. Jeremy, how about you?

You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and of course at Retronauts.com because that's where I spend pretty much all my time working, writing, creating podcasts, videos, etc. Speaking of videos, there is a companion video series to retronauts that I create weekly called Video Chronicles. Sure, why not? Looking at the chronology of Game Boy, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nias, et cetera, et cetera. You can support that on Patreon.

Patreon.com slash GameSpite. That's like me, and it's pretty cool. So check it out. Also, there are some books that go along with this. You can check out at fangamer.net. It's awesome. Hooray. Hi, I'm on Twitter at the underscore cap bot.

and you should check out my website, which is usgamer.net. And we have two podcasts. One is the US Gamer podcast. I'm not on that one, but it's pretty sweet. We talk about all of the different things that are happening in gaming. And also, Ax the Bug on, which I am on, every Friday. That's our RPG podcast that I host with Nadia Oxford in front of the show. So please check that out as well.

Matthew. I do stuff on the Lasertime Network, Lasertime Podcast.com. You can find a bunch of podcasts. We do, like, the main Lasertime show. It's where Talking Simpsons lives, a bunch of other shows like that. Viggy Game of Podcast. our show of video games. I also have a YouTube channel,

YouTube.com slash cartoons 101, where I make videos about like the history of animation through interesting stories about people who have worked in the industry throughout time. And I also have a Twitter at Disney 80s 90s, Disney 80s, where I just tweet differently interesting, fun,

and weird things from the Disney company from the 80s and the 90s. Before we go, though, I do want to mention this is a listener request, right, Jeremy? That is correct. And I forgot to look up whose name it was. Well, I will request it. But thank you, listener, for requesting this.

Yes, and I will put... Sorry to make you sad, listener. No, no, listen. Thank you so much for giving us money. I will put your name in right now in a personal thank you. Thank you very much, to Jenny Nielsen. So thanks again, Person, and we'll see you all next Monday for a brand new retronauts. Later.

You know, I'm going to be able to be. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate.

Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, gosh. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with a lot. limited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy

to save. The Mueller report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today

at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very very foundation of who they are and what they do the robbery suspect in a man police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder i'm ed donahue