This week I’ve been trying to get some more new artwork done. Things are going slowly but surely. As much as I’d live to just jam on new pieces of work all day and all night, I still have to be careful. My wrist is still not what it used to be and I’ve had a few moments of discomfort recently. Certainly not to the extreme rage-educing levels of pain I was in a year ago, but troublesome all the same. So, during extended periods of working on some art with my digital tablet, I have to take a break every once and awhile.

Usually I fill up break time by playing video games. After neglecting it for awhile, the game that took up most of my time this week was The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. This is the first home console Zelda game I’ve ever gone out of my way to play. Yesterday I finally finished it. Though as it started to become apparent that I was coming towards the end, I took my sweet time with it and went through several of the side-quests. I was enjoying the game so much that I didn’t want it to end. Now that I am finished, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it truly is a beautiful, inspiring game with a fantastic story. I especially enjoyed how the concept of the wind was used as a practical gameplay device and as a storytelling tool woven into the tale both literally and meteorically.

I understand that you could probably take any given game in the Zelda franchise and talk about how great it is for hours on end, but I think it’s important to say this specifically in regard to The Winder Waker because the visual style is so different and controversial. Some people may have been upset when the game was first unveiled with its cartoonish style, but at the end of the day they really knocked it out of the park with this one.

I loved the story of this game so much that I could honestly see it as being a movie or a TV show or something like that. There was a Zelda cartoon years ago, but I found it obnoxious. Of course, Pokemon, Kirby, and F-Zero are big Nintendo franchises that have recently been animated, and Nintendo has a sweet deal going with 4Kids to bring those shows and any future Nintendo-based anime series to the international scene. One must wonder, though… Why no Zelda yet? Recently Nintendo has expressed interest in going into animated films. Could this mean that a Zelda movie is on the horizon? I would love to see that. I don’t care if it used either traditional animation or CG or both. A movie like that could be the huge event that finally puts animation over as a valid medium of expression in the eyes of the general public.

Until that highly hypothetical event happens, we’ve got another Zelda game coming up later this year for the GameCube. Not much is known about it yet except that the style is different than Wind Waker, but from graphics alone I can say that it looks freakin’ amazing. See the new trailer here. I waited a year after Wind Waker came out before I picked it up, but this one I might have to dive into right away. I’m really looking forward to it.

Sayonara.