IGN: “Making The Wind Waker Better”

In the wake of the announcement of The Wind Waker HD, we’ve all gotten a bit anxious about ways to improve one of the most beloved titles in the series, am I wrong? Well, IGN’s gotten a bit anxious too, as they’ve run their own article about ways they’d think The Wind Waker would be improved. While a lot of their ideas are good on paper, upon further analysis some are lacking and even contradictory. Nevertheless, I appreciate their effort to acknowledge some of the lesser parts of an otherwise stellar game. Here are their points and my analysis of them.

– Smoother Sailing

An easy change to fix [the sailing] would be streamlining how the actual

Wind Waker works. It’s the game’s titular item, a magical baton with the power to change the wind’s direction – but its use is tied to an odd, cumbersome rhythm mini-game that you end up playing hundreds of times, over and over again. Eliminating the need to play that same baton-swinging sequence again and again could help the sailing sequences flow more smoothly, preserving more of that thrill of sailing over the long haul.

This is actually a really good idea. Taking the idea of having all of the notes of each song ready at the tap of a button in Ocarina of Time 3D, you should be able to hit a song’s icon to play it without going through the Wind Waker minigame. This would eliminate the problem for those who find it cumbersome, but still have it available for anyone who still wants to play the songs themselves.

– Fixing the Triforce Fetchquest

[The Triforce Quest] could be easily addressed – just shorten this sequence. There’s no reason the Triforce has to be fragmented into eight different sections. Why not just three? Or the ocean-sailing aspect of this hunt could be eliminated altogether, as the Triforce could instead be obtained by questing through a dungeon. That would be much, much more fun.

What’s is the point of smoothing the sailing if the part of the game that makes the most use of it is removed? I’m all for removing the need to find a few of the pieces, but putting them all into a dungeon would be much more boring. In a dungeon you’d be sent on a straight line to find all of them in succession, whereas on the high seas you’d need to explore and find the pieces yourself. I think an easy way of making the Triforce Quest a bit more bearable is to simply remove the need to have Tingle decipher all of the charts; just find the charts and follow them to their destination. After smoothing the sailing and removing the need to collect thousands of rupees to decipher the charts, you’ve removed the two main reasons as to why so many people hate this part of the game.

– Restoring the Eliminated Dungeons

[The] most notable [place of a removed dungeon] is the game’s dialogue sequence with the great fish Jabun, Wind Waker’s version of Lord Jabu-Jabu from Ocarina of Time. In OoT, Link ventured inside the belly of the whale as that game’s third dungeon. In Wind Waker, all signs point to the same thing happening again – but then it doesn’t. Link, Jabun and the King of Red Lions just have themselves a merry conversation, and Jabun simply gives Link the magical Nayru’s Pearl. No dungeon. Put those missing dungeons back in, Mr. Aonuma.

Disregarding the fact that it’s incredibly obvious that the removed dungeon took place on Greatfish Isle and not inside of Jabun, I’m all for including more dungeons. In fact, why not go one step further and include the rest of the cut content? The Wind Waker‘s abundance of cut content is incredibly obvious, and including it would make it feel like a more complete experience.

– Fully Integrating the GamePad

[The GamePad] should be fully integrated into every aspect of the adventure. Link’s weapons and items menu should be displayed on the touchscreen, allowing quick screen-tapping swaps to whichever piece of equipment the current situation requires, without the need to bring up a pause screen each time.

And the Pad’s built-in motion control could be matched to the game’s photography mechanics. The Picto Box probably isn’t remembered by a lot of Wind Waker players, but those who did get into its sidequest extended their time enjoying the game by several hours – snapping photos of each and every character in the game to be redeemed for 3D statues of each subject. Holding up the Pad and physically moving it around to properly frame pictures in the Wii U version would add some fun extra physicality to the Picto Box experience.

Absolutely. The GamePad opens a new window to streamlining the Wind Waker experience. Whereas before you had to constantly pause the game to bring out important items such as the sail and the game’s titular item, now with the GamePad you can simply tap that item, instantly map it to a button, and thus shave off ten seconds of menu navigation. Important items could also be mapped to a permanent button on the GamePad itself, similar to how Ocarina of Time 3D mapped the ocarina to the touchscreen.

And why waste gyroscope controls on just the Picto Box? Allow us to aim every projectile weapon with them. The gyro controls went a long way in making Ocarina of Time 3D a more enjoyable experience, so there’s no reason to not integrate them into all aiming. Just include the option to turn it off for people who’d rather aim with a control stick instead.

-Reinventing Tingle Tuner Co-Op

For Wind Waker HD, the GamePad could easily recreate the [Game Boy Advance co-op]. You could pass it off to a pal to use while you kept Link under control with a Wii U Pro Controller, or Tingle Tuning could become just another part of the single-player experience by using the touchscreen to drop those bombs yourself. Either way fans would win, as the often-annoying Tingle would recapture some much-needed usefulness.

There’s a reason I put this after GamePad integration instead of before it like it was in the original article. What’s the point of integrating the GamePad into the experience if you have to toss it off to use co-op? Or need to own a Wii U Pro Controller in order to continue playing the game when you could play it fine before with the controller the system came with? Why not just allow players to use their 3DS instead? It would offer the same functionality that the Wii U GamePad would while still allowing the player to enjoy the bliss of using the GamePad, and would also make a good parallel to the Tingle Tuner’s original Game Boy Advance aesthetic.

Well, that was something. I feel this article only touched upon the surface of all of the little improvements that could be made to make The Wind Waker HD a much superior version of the GameCube classic. So, because of this, we’ll be running our own article of improvements we’d like to make to The Wind Waker tomorrow. Tune in, folks.