The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Review

The cel-shaded look was a scandal in 2002 and is now the only Zelda of its era that has not aged a day, because the art never depended on polygon budgets or texture resolution. Link's eyes track whatever matters on screen, wind and smoke are drawn rather than simulated, and every enemy telegraphs through expression before it telegraphs through animation. The Great Sea is the gamble that half works.

Sailing under a shifting wind with the baton in your hand is genuinely serene for fifteen hours, and then the map's emptiness starts charging rent, and the Triforce shard hunt near the end is an unfinished game's seam showing in public. What surrounds that stretch is superb. The parry is the crispest in the series, Dragon Roost and the Tower of the Gods are excellent dungeons, and the final confrontation in a flooded, frozen Hyrule earns a quiet grandeur nothing else in the franchise has matched.