Welcome to Bandy’s Blogs.
Once a month, I’ll be making blog posts on games that I’ve been playing recently. The games will range from stuff I’m playing for a video, or just things I’ve popped in with my spare time!
July 2024
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD
I recently played through the entirety of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD. This is a game I’ve been wanting to play for a super long time, but I never got around to actually finishing it until this month. And boy, was this such a treat to finally tackle. I’ve been playing through a lot of Zelda titles to eventually rank all the games, and I was really looking forward to this one. For starters, the art style is just incredible. It has aged so remarkably well, and I really like that Nintendo went with this style and went against the grain of what people wanted. It’s one of Nintendo’s prettiest looking games, and it moves so well too. Some criticize the amount of bloom, but I think that’s really over exaggerated. The bloom is not as bad as people say it is. The animations are very expressive, even with the faces simply changing as still images; it still looks really great. The game runs at a mostly smooth 60FPS, but I did notice more frame drops then I expected. Especially out in sea, the game would dip to 10-15FPS when there was a lot of happening at once. The frame dips weren’t that big of a deal though, it wasn’t often enough that hurt the overall experience.
The Wii U’s gamepad is one of the main reasons that there’s not much reason to play this original version from the Gamecube. The touch screen has a map being shown at all times, which is obviously super handy if you’re lost. You can flip through the charts and pull them up on the fly, as well as swap items without having to pause And there’s a lot of quality of life improvements too, the main being the Swift Sail. It not only coasts through the water faster than the normal sail, but it doesn’t need to rely on the wind’s direction. This makes the sailing REALLY fun to do, especially because The Great Sea’s music is just perfect. You really feel like you’re on a grand adventure, it’s magical. The other big improvement is motion control aiming. Trying to nail a shot with your boomerang or Bow 'n Arrow has never been easier, you can make subtle adjustments by just tilting the Gamepad. Although the Miiverse functionality doesn’t work. It is kind of goofy that there’s Tingle Bottles that use Miiverse that are just completely worthless now.
My favorite part of this game by far is the dungeons. While there’s technically only 3 main ones, there’s a lot of miniaturized dungeons as well. These are some of the best paced dungeons in the entire series. The puzzles take a bit of brain power, but also aren’t obnoxious to figure out. The versatility of the items is what makes the dungeons work so well in this game, they’re nothing short of a blast to tackle. And I really like the sailing too, it’s really not as big and empty as people say it is. Although I think our minds have been warped on what “Big” is after playing Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. This is TINY compared to those games, but I digress. I’ll have a lot more to say about this HD remake and the original version when the Ranked video for all the Zelda games comes later in 2024.
