The Necessity of The Wind Waker Remake

With more details, a new trailer, and a playable demo for The Wind Waker HD, we now have a much more fleshed out idea of what this game will finally look like. Of course, it looks just as good as the original game, and the added touches should make it worth replaying.

However, in my experience, most vocal Zelda fans online clamor for a remake of Majora’s Mask or A Link to the Past; I rarely heard people asking for a remake of The Wind Waker. We already know why we have it–it’s the result of Nintendo experimenting with different art styles, and they saw it as an opportunity to appease some Zelda fans–but was it really necessary?

Sort of.

In a sense, you could argue that any remake is unnecessary. Especially with Nintendo products, a game, when released, is finalized in a sense, a work of art on its own. I’ve heard that the original Ocarina of Time had “dated” graphics and could have used an update, but I don’t buy this argument any more than the argument that the special editions of Star Wars were necessary because the original 1977 film is “dated.” Ocarina of Time was a product of its era, but its visual style conveyed its unique atmosphere beautifully. Nothing about the Nintendo 64 version was lacking.

So it is with The Wind Waker, though more gamers might be receptive to the idea that its graphics haven’t aged at all. While some games boasted cel-shading at that point, The Wind Waker was a leap and doesn’t seem like a product of its era at all; it bucked trends and defied expectations, at least in terms of presentation, which HD versions of games are designed to address.

However, even if a remake of The Wind Waker isn’t much more necessary than a remake of any other Zelda game would be, it also isn’t any less necessary. Miyamoto has already discussed one of the reasons: HD could breathe new life into the game. Furthermore, HDTVs are now standard. The original game wasn’t optimized for HDTVs; complete or not, playing the game on an HDTV now doesn’t quite resemble the original experience on an SDTV for obvious reasons. Given the original game’s distinctive visual style, there may not be a better candidate to show off the WiiU’s visuals. One of the things that has surprised me the most about the title is how much it has ended up looking like the original, in spite of a number of new effects. This is a good thing, since the original game’s iconic style was one of the chief reasons so many gamers found it appealing. It’s a happy medium that allows us to catch a glimpse of what a current-gen Zelda game can look like.

While I’ve never personally had a problem with the Great Sea or Triforce Quest, I don’t think streamlining them would be a bad idea. A great number of players found the amount of time it took to travel between locations to be immensely damaging to the experience of playing The Wind Waker, and the Triforce Quest has become notorious not only for its tedium, but also for its pacing. Unless you have been hunting down maps between dungeons, it delays the end of the game, creating a frustrating barrier between the player and the world by slowing down progression of the story. The development team has addressed these problems, fortunately, with a streamlined Triforce quest and the option of faster sailing.

Furthermore, and most importantly, the game isn’t that widely accessible. It was released for the Gamecube, one of Nintendo’s less successful consoles, and is up to this point the only Zelda game apart from Skyward Sword and Four Swords Adventures not released on multiple platforms (The Minish Cap is playable on the 3DS through the ambassador program, but accessibility is a concern for that game as well). Titles like Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask have been released and are playable on multiple consoles. Accessibility is a serious concern, and what better reason could there be to rerelease a game than allowing new players to experience it?

While a remake is never necessary, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better candidate right now. The Wind Waker, one of the finest Zelda titles, deserves this shot and I look forward to the results.