When people ask what my favourite video game of all time is and I tell them, they inevitably wrinkle their nose and say: “What, the one with all the sailing?” To many, that’s all The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is: a 20-year-old GameCube release in which toon Link endlessly sails the vast sea on his trusty talking boat. In 2013, when the game was re-released on Wii U a decade after its debut, Nintendo took the criticisms on board (the talking boat) and added a “swift sail”, allowing players to bypass hours of sluggish seafaring. For shame. The seafaring was the point.
It has now been two decades since the original Wind Waker was released in Europe in May 2003 and it’s time that landlubber critics accepted they were wrong. The game’s expansive ocean was not only soundtracked stunningly, but filled with endless side quests and mini-games, emphasising exploration in a way not seen again in a Zelda game until 2017’s Breath of the Wild. As an 11-year-old girl clicking the little gold disc into place inside her (sister’s) first GameCube, I realised just how engrossing video game worlds can be.
