Playing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the first time makes you realize just how much Nintendo has been overcompensating since the original negative response to it. It’s also no wonder why Nintendo sort of gave everyone the middle finger (okay, not really, more like a thumb’s down because they’re Nintendo) when they criticized the idea of the Nintendo DS and pretty much everything there was to criticize about the Nintendo Wii. While Nintendo certainly follows a select set of trends, they’ve also had a habit of just doing things their own way. Sometimes these things are unconventional, other times they are rigidly set in stone to their detriment.

The Wind Waker turned out to be an example of Nintendo doing something rather unconventional, not only with the Zelda series, but with a big open-world game as a whole. It should be noted that around this time open-world games weren’t even a thing like they are now. Grand Theft Auto III, the title that could be argued to have jump started the whole craze, had just released in 2001. In the following year Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind released on PC and Xbox and The Wind Waker hit shelves in Japan for GameCube. Each of these games released close together and featured vast, expansive worlds, but Grand Theft Auto and Morrowind ultimately had a longer lasting influence.

I find it to be a bit tragic, but I can also understand why the wavy expanse of The Wind Waker’s ocean hasn’t exactly caught on more than ten years later. Even with some of the improvements added to the game to make traveling “easier”, it has more than its fair share of problems. Mechanically speaking, that is.

I’ve recently written about atmosphere over on GamersWithJobs, particularly on how designing for atmosphere and tone can often be counter-intuitive to user-friendly design. The oceanic world of The Wind Waker embodies this sentiment.

My general problems are that it takes a long time to get anywhere, and that the world has so few defining features that it is troublesome to remember where anything is in relation to another. To put it another way, I always knew I had friends that lived two towns over from me, but unless I could hop on and off of the bypass outside my apartment I had no clue where they were in relation to the rest of the world. They may as well have been some island floating about in the nothingness of space, suspended by little more than the on and off ramp connecting it to my taped-together perception of the world. It wasn’t until I had to find that very same ramp the hard way due to my friggin’ town being flooded that I got a more complete idea of how their house connects to the rest of my perceived world.

The Wind Waker never gets that sort of connection, especially when your play sessions tend to be a week to a month apart as mine are. Each island is separated far enough that you can only see vague shapes in the distance, with very few having a unique enough outline to identify immediately. “Ah, yes, that’s Dragon Roost Island” you’ll think to yourself, recognizing the volcano shooting into the sky. Yet once the game asks that you remember where a fire or ice covered island is, well, that’s when things get a bit more tricky.

Yet I don’t necessarily hate all of these features about the game, either. Wind Waker is perhaps one of the most relaxing games I’ve played, perhaps second only to Prince of Persia 2008. That the ocean is so empty gives you this feeling of freedom, that there are no borders. There’s just the open sky and the waves before you. As the sail ripples in the wind, the water cascades along the sides of the boat, and the seagulls soar overhead, you find yourself imagining the wind in your hair and salty scent of the ocean’s spray.

The Wind Waker is a post-apocalyptic view of the world, but unlike most games that cover the land in desert, or even Waterworld where pirates and criminals reign as malevolently as they might in Mad Max, the flooded Hyrule seems a tranquil, peaceful realm interrupted only by the appearance of Ganondorf. Communities become much closer knit as each small island is separated by great expanses of sea and surf, where word of other distant land masses are often discussed as rumor and hearsay.

It’s a very different Hyrule than any Zelda game before it, and even Skyward Sword has failed to replicate it by swapping the big blue ocean for the majestic cerulean sky. Each island in Wind Waker manages to serve as a quick distraction, a place to spend some time exploring before moving on to the next. The player will be led to ships containing challenges and treasures, or hidden caverns housing beasts, trinkets and fae.

All the while, Link is left without a single companion constantly chattering about where to go next. I spent roughly three hours, perhaps more, simply sailing the ocean, filling out Link’s map, discovering treasures big and small before I managed to get on with my primary objective. Not once was I told that maybe I should try for this destination or that, or to visit this person or that monster. In fact, it was only by chance that I came upon the first step to moving on with the story, encountering the foe that would allow me to unlock the Ballad of Gales.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is a game about exploration and discovery, perhaps the only entry in the series to be so faithful to the first in that regard. In typical Nintendo fashion, they managed to change it around by slipping the player into a brand new environment, surrounded by water rather than blocked and herded by it.

As a result, the approach to The Wind Waker becomes different, unique. I don’t explore it in the same manner I explored A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, or Twilight Princess.

Yet, unfortunately, there are times I want to just move on with the story, and in this case I needed to check a FAQ in order to figure out where to go. I had unlocked over half of the game’s map and was still clueless. It turned out that I needed to then use the Ballad of Gales to warp to a location that I don’t ever recall visiting, and could only be visited upon teleporting there. It is very much the opposite of modern Zelda games, where the solution required time and effort to find and could easily have been missed, or in my case forgotten after weeks of not picking up the game pad.

I cannot help but wonder if, perhaps, this is part of the reason Zelda has become so hand-holding. The response to The Wind Waker was mostly negative, and it is possible that Nintendo was so frightened off by the response that they leapt back into their comfort zone.

As of now, I feel like I really would love The Wind Waker more if it were a smaller world where everything was more tightly knit together. Yet I’m not sure I’d actually want it that way.