OMG CELDA LOL

Just finished Wind Waker yesterday. Awesome game. It’s significantly easier and shorter than Ocarina of Time– I beat it in about 30 hours, and that’s with maximum fucking around, and I only died once, during the final battle. Unlike Metal Gear and Yoshi’s Island, where I mention how awesome it is every five minutes and tell everyone they’re the best games ever, Zelda’s kind of a subtle, silent killer. It’s almost underrated in my head. When someone asks me what the greatest game of all time is, I usually say FF7 without thinking. Then I ponder it for a second, and say “Well, maybe Ocarina of Time”. Ocarina had an amazing soundtrack, perfect play control, great graphics for the time, and ended up being one of the only games to truly live up to it’s hype. MGS2 was a good game, scratch that, a great game, but it never gets the respect it deserves because there was no way it could’ve led up to the hype it was getting, plus it was much different than the first one. FF7 didn’t have much hype before its release. Neither did Halo, GTA3 or even the original Mario Bros. Mario 3 had the hype, and it delivered. and that’s why it’s the top-selling videogame of all time. Anyway, Zelda completely absorbed my life when OoT came out. If I didn’t throw out my notebooks from that time, you would find Triforces, shields and Master Swords on almost every page. Once I beat it, I replayed the ending over and over again. The funny thing was that the game wasn’t even perfect. The camera was buggy, and a few areas didn’t have the atmosphere that FF7 had. But other areas did. The Forest Temple in particular, and the whole feeling of returning to Hyrule Castle at the end, climbing up those infinite stairs with the badass organ music, and battling Ganondorf in a bizzaro game of Pong. Then running down those same steps while the castle collapses and fighting Ganon in his true form. What an awesome game.
Majora’s Mask came out shortly after, and I loved that too. I played the shit out of it. But soon, just like how Ganondorf was sealed away for what seemed like eternity, I didn’t play Zelda for a long time. Five years, actually. I played the Oracle of Seasons, but that wasn’t a true Zelda game. When Wind Waker first came out, I, like a lot of fans, doubted the cel-shaded look. After seeing one of the original promo videos for the Cube and seeing a beautifully rendered Link duking it out with G-Money, I wasn’t expecting what looked like a cartoon. I figured I’d play it anyway, and I did rent it eventually with the intention of playing it over a vacation. But, it never found it’s way into my brother’s purple GameCube. Two years later, I finally got my own Cube, and I knew I couldn’t just play Smash Bros on it 24/7, so I got Wind Waker. I popped it in, played it for a bit, and wasn’t fully engaged. It seemed like it would be an issue of Sonic Adventure Syndrome, where I wasn’t totally involved emotionally in a game, but beat it because I somehow felt obligated. And while it had a cool atmosphere of sailing around, with a ginormous sea to traverse, I didn’t get fully involved until about halfway in, where they start connecting the dots with the Links of the Past and the Triforce was first mentioned. Now I was down.
So what do I think now? As I said, totally awesome. I just bought Link to the Past a few weeks ago, and I’m going through that, as well. Wind Waker reminds me of why I like videogames so much; when something comes together so beautifully — the graphics, the music, the gameplay, the atmosphere, the details– that they change the course of my day. With regular games, I go to class or work, and I play videogames when I have the spare time. With games like this, MGS3 and FF7, I play it as much as I can, as often as I can, and everything else becomes secondary. And of course, I might not even touch a Zelda game after I beat Link to the Past, or at least, not until November, when Twilight Princess comes out. And I might forget completely about Zelda. But when I come back to it, it’s going to consume my life all over again.