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rynlingWind Waker Ganondorf is not right, but he is not wrong. His struggle to reverse an ancient tragedy in a world that no longer cares about what has been lost is heartbreaking.
Most of Wind Waker consists of missions sending the player off to discover how beautiful and magical the world was before it was flooded. The dungeons are gorgeous and richly interactive, while the Great Sea is empty and sterile.
The reception of Wind Waker was extremely mixed, with people loving the land-based exploration and hating the sailing. In other words, players wanted more of what Ganondorf was attempting to restore and shared his frustrations regarding the state of the Hyrule. When I talk to people about Wind Waker on Twitter, I typically get comments along the lines of "I always tear up when it’s revealed that Tetra is actually Zelda" or "Medli’s awakening as a sage gets me every time." What people seem to find touching are glimpses into a past that is all the more poignant precisely because it has been forgotten.
The reason Ganondorf is a villain is not because he’s a bad person or because his cause is unjust, but rather because he’s unable to cope with how the world has changed and what it has become. That being said, the gameplay elements of Wind Waker seem to encourage the player to understand where he’s coming from and why his loss is so tragic. Because Ganondorf represents everything we find so enjoyable about the Legend of Zelda games, it’s difficult not to empathize with him. If the player didn’t identify with him on some level, the narrative catharsis at the end of Wind Waker would not be nearly as powerful and meaningful.
At a meta level, however, Ganondorf was successful. So many players were so vocally pissed off about Wind Waker that the next game in the Zelda series, Twilight Princess, is basically the Ocarina of Time clone of Hyrule that Ganondorf was trying to achieve. I think it's only now, more than ten years later, that the gaming community has started to appreciate just what Wind Waker was doing by attempting to stage an intervention in the classic Zelda system of linear exploration.
I started thinking about this because of a comparison someone made on Tumblr between Wind Waker and Dragon Age Inquisition. She wrote that Thedas, like the Great Sea, is "a current world that is different, drowned, destroyed, a world that doesn’t even know how destroyed it is."
Most of Wind Waker consists of missions sending the player off to discover how beautiful and magical the world was before it was flooded. The dungeons are gorgeous and richly interactive, while the Great Sea is empty and sterile.
The reception of Wind Waker was extremely mixed, with people loving the land-based exploration and hating the sailing. In other words, players wanted more of what Ganondorf was attempting to restore and shared his frustrations regarding the state of the Hyrule. When I talk to people about Wind Waker on Twitter, I typically get comments along the lines of "I always tear up when it’s revealed that Tetra is actually Zelda" or "Medli’s awakening as a sage gets me every time." What people seem to find touching are glimpses into a past that is all the more poignant precisely because it has been forgotten.
The reason Ganondorf is a villain is not because he’s a bad person or because his cause is unjust, but rather because he’s unable to cope with how the world has changed and what it has become. That being said, the gameplay elements of Wind Waker seem to encourage the player to understand where he’s coming from and why his loss is so tragic. Because Ganondorf represents everything we find so enjoyable about the Legend of Zelda games, it’s difficult not to empathize with him. If the player didn’t identify with him on some level, the narrative catharsis at the end of Wind Waker would not be nearly as powerful and meaningful.
At a meta level, however, Ganondorf was successful. So many players were so vocally pissed off about Wind Waker that the next game in the Zelda series, Twilight Princess, is basically the Ocarina of Time clone of Hyrule that Ganondorf was trying to achieve. I think it's only now, more than ten years later, that the gaming community has started to appreciate just what Wind Waker was doing by attempting to stage an intervention in the classic Zelda system of linear exploration.
I started thinking about this because of a comparison someone made on Tumblr between Wind Waker and Dragon Age Inquisition. She wrote that Thedas, like the Great Sea, is "a current world that is different, drowned, destroyed, a world that doesn’t even know how destroyed it is."
