The Legend of Zelda finally comes to the Wii U. Is it worth its weight in rupees?
Touch screens can be a touchy subject( see what I did there, sorry, won’t happen again) like when the game gives you the option of aiming your grappling hook with the Game Pad screen or by moving the left control stick. I always seem to have trouble with the gyro sensor in these things so I’m much more comfortable with just aiming with the control stick, not a big deal. Another issue I had with the motion was with the camera angles. In this day and age, you would think camera angle issues would be a thing of the past? It was a pain to try and aim the grappling hook and move at the same time because the camera kept moving and my gyro sensor wasn’t picking up all of my motions. My last gripe on sticky controls is with the Wind Waker conductor system. On the plus side, the Game Pad displays the different “motions,” I guess is a good name for them, but the actual control scheme is a little slow, where it might take a few attempts to play the motion the right way because of the sticky controls.
The game has two modes to play, Normal mode and Hero mode. The main difference between Hero and Normal is that in Hero mode, you take double the damage from enemies and receive zero recovery hearts. That mode sounds brutal to me but would be a real challenge to complete and adds to the game and its replay-ability. When I played the demo at E3, it took me a minute to get used to everything but I didn’t have that problem this time around. Everything came back naturally to me after all these years such as how to sneak up on a pig in the beginning of the game. The items that everyone loved to collect in the Game Cube version are back as well like the treasure charts and the joy pendants. Everything felt faster, such as sailing. Nintendo mentioned at E3 that sailing would be faster this time around and they weren’t kidding. You can get from place to place on the water so much faster now!
Nintendo needed a way to incorporate two vital components to the Wii U Wind Waker game, connectivity and Tingle. They killed two birds with one stone with the Tingle Bottles, the entry point for Miiverse connectivity. I think the band The Police said it best with “Message in a Bottle” and that is exactly what the Tingle Bottle is. You can send your messages to Miiverse and then you can get random messages from anyone or you can set it for just your friends messages. Since the Wii U can’t connect to the Game Boy Advance, like the Game Cube could, this is a viable solution.
