Storytelling as a craft
Wind Waker just came today.
Jesus. I had no idea how right I was about the whole legend/storybook aspect. That’s precisely what this game is. The introduction sequence lays it all out.
Link has a lobster on his shirt!
In terms of gameplay and general structure, Wind Waker is almost identical to OoT. The controls are much more polished, mroe responsive, and generally nicer-feeling than in OoT. We’ve still got the god-damned fetch quests. (In fact, I think we’ve got more than in OoT.) Dungeons and towns and shops are generally laid out in the same way as before.
So, yeah. Basically imagine a really buttery OoT, with just about all of the interface problems removed, and you’ve got a good starting point.
At least in the first few hours, the game seems oddly linear. The player is given a boat right near the outset, and free roam of the ocean (which now covers almost the entire world) — but if the player decides to head off on his own whims, the boat begins to complain.
Yes, I know I’m not going in the right direction. Thank you. I don’t care if I’m not ready for that island yet; I want to visit it anyway.
There are more natural contraints for the player than simply not allowing him to go where he pleases.
Honestly, I’m starting to get tired of the post-Adventure of Link Zelda gameplay style. I wasn’t fond of most of the changes in Link to The Past, but one of the things which most irritated me was the way that items came to be used.
I’m not going to elaborate right now on exactly what the distinction is, but OoT backpeddled a bit in this regard; its item system — the items available; the manner in which they, the player, the environment, and enemies interacted; the manner, timing, and order with which the items were acquired — reminds me far more of the way things worked in the NES games than in LttP.
Wind Waker feels more like LttP, as far as items go.
Take that as you will.
Actually, given how integral the whole item collection system is to the game structure (as in Metroid), this has a pretty big effect on the general tone of the game.
In Wind Waker, I feel like I’m just collecting random doodads. Some of them are useful; some aren’t. But the only reason the game is giving them to me is to enable me to progress. At the point I’m at now — around five hours into the game — I’m ceasing to be thrilled when I find a new inventory item.
What’s worse is that about half of the items in the game so far seem to serve no purpose other than as keys in fetch quests. Argh. I don’t care! This is an adventure game convention which needs to die. Soon.
Further, even the interesting items — such as the grappling hook — are often hindered a bit by needless irritation. Every single time the grapple wraps around a post, for instance, the game halts to show me a four-second cutscene. I don’t need this more than once ever, thank you.
The good parts so far: the atmosphere and general graphic design are just fantastic, now that I’ve got some context for all of their elements. Link actually has a lot of personality; his facial expressions add a bunch to the game. Almost every object in the environemnt is interactive in some vague way or another. The water and fire and smoke and heat effects are very well-executed.
There’s this one kid on the first island who has a perpetual, enormous drip of snot hanging from his nose. I don’t know if that was really necessary.
I have a feeling I know who Zelda is. I’ve had this feeling since about half an hour into the game.
Where the atmosphere is original, it’s great. Where it’s not, it’s tiring — at least for me. All of the forced OoT-ish trappings quickly began to wear on me — but in the cases where the game takes a full left turn into its own universe, there’s a ton of life to be found. These moments tend to evidence themselves when the player is either left free to explore and bond with the environment, or when the game locks the player into a tightly-scripted plot sequence. Where I begin to lose patience is where the game tries to yank me around and force me to do things for it for no other reason than the fact that it’s a videogame.
I’m not fond of manipulation. I don’t mind wasting time of my own accord, but I don’t like my time to be wasted for me.
To be fair, I’m still only a few hours into the game. The plot hasn’t fully picked up yet, and I’m not yet as free to wander — so perhaps things will become less annoying in the future.
As far as sailing goes — it’s a mildly interesting mechanic, for a few minutes. The problem is that it takes so long to get anywhere. And once you set your coordinates, you don’t… really do anything. If you try, you’ll probably end up stopping the boat. The best thing to do when travelling is just to put the controller down and get a sandwich.
Again — maybe something else happens with this later. Right now, though, I’m perplexed. There are a lot of really good ideas in this system — so why did they combine them in such an obviously tedious manner?
I hope there’s more use for the telescope in the near future. About an hour in, I found a camera of sorts which has exactly the same functionality, except with the added benefit of enabling me to take pictures. I don’t see what I need the telescope for, if I’ve got this other item sitting around. I hope this isn’t just an oversight. We’ll see.
So — to boil it down:
The good — the graphical style; the atmosphere; the expressiveness of the characters (similar to Skies of Arcadia in this respect (among many)); the smooth controls; the non-annoying menu system; some interesting potential with a few of the new items; the self-reflective sense of humor of the dialogue; the Koji Kondo score; the introductory sequence.
The bad — how manipulative and needlessly annoying the actual game tends to be so far; THE FUCKING FETCH QUESTS; the overall structure of the item system so far.
Again — in its best places, this game has a different atmosphere from any previous Zelda game. I hope the game takes more advantage of its advantages than it seems content to thus far. It feels like a real shame to me that with all of these great new ideas, Eiji Aonuma felt compelled to make a Zelda game out of the pieces.
So. We’ll see, we’ll see…