Monkey Island and Zelda: Wind Waker
Anyone ever noticed that Zelda: Wind Waker (And Phantom Hourglass) has a lot of parallels with the Monkey Island series? 
Off the top of my head;
-The entire world seems to be made up of an endless ocean with various gimmicky islands, and it is populated by pirates who are never seen doing anything particularly dangerous.
-The main character (Link/Guybrush) is a clumsy blonde guy who seems to be the only one aware of how bizarre and silly everyone around him is, and picks up extremely good swordfighting skills in a very short amount of time.
-The main character has a talking boat at one point (King of Red Lions/The Dainty Lady) who turns out to be more important than they initially appear.
-The main character's female companion (Tetra/Elaine) is loved and respected by everyone, and tends to have a bit of a temper. She is also very capable of looking after herself, yet also gets kidnapped later on.
-Anachronisms everywhere; Wind Waker has cameras, Monkey Island has...well, mostly everything.
-The crewmates either disrespect the hero (Most of Tetra's pirates, Linebeck/Guybrush's crews in Secret and Curse) or idolize him (Niko/Winslow)
-The hero is repeatedly fired out of a cannon, much to his discomfort.
-The villain keeps coming back and just won't die ever, and usually when he returns it's in a new form. (Ganon/LeChuck)
-Erm...there is a character named Tetra?
-And one from Ocarina of Time instead of Wind Waker: The hero is hit on by a fishlike merperson (Ruto the Zora/Anemone the Vaycalian) and does not enjoy it at all.
I'd have to say the similarities became more obvious when Tales came out, being a 3D game with a gorgeous cartooney art style.
Off the top of my head;-The entire world seems to be made up of an endless ocean with various gimmicky islands, and it is populated by pirates who are never seen doing anything particularly dangerous.
-The main character (Link/Guybrush) is a clumsy blonde guy who seems to be the only one aware of how bizarre and silly everyone around him is, and picks up extremely good swordfighting skills in a very short amount of time.
-The main character has a talking boat at one point (King of Red Lions/The Dainty Lady) who turns out to be more important than they initially appear.
-The main character's female companion (Tetra/Elaine) is loved and respected by everyone, and tends to have a bit of a temper. She is also very capable of looking after herself, yet also gets kidnapped later on.
-Anachronisms everywhere; Wind Waker has cameras, Monkey Island has...well, mostly everything.
-The crewmates either disrespect the hero (Most of Tetra's pirates, Linebeck/Guybrush's crews in Secret and Curse) or idolize him (Niko/Winslow)
-The hero is repeatedly fired out of a cannon, much to his discomfort.
-The villain keeps coming back and just won't die ever, and usually when he returns it's in a new form. (Ganon/LeChuck)
-Erm...there is a character named Tetra?
-And one from Ocarina of Time instead of Wind Waker: The hero is hit on by a fishlike merperson (Ruto the Zora/Anemone the Vaycalian) and does not enjoy it at all.
I'd have to say the similarities became more obvious when Tales came out, being a 3D game with a gorgeous cartooney art style.
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The Wind Waker is a great game too. It has a really great feel for exploration and adventure.
Too bad it's a tad on the short side...
Mmm.... wait wut? No it's not. If by 'short' you mean it only has 7 dungeons, one of which you go through twice... wait, no that's still sufficiently long.
Kinda makes me want to play WW again now. Or finish Twilight Princess on my second runthrough on the Wii (my first runthrough was on the Gamecube). Zelda is great. Too bad it's been going downhill lately. Never got very far in PH (due to boredom) and I'm not going anywhere near Spirit Tracks. Hopefully the new Wii title in the works wil be better than the aforementioned DS titles.
But I guess I'll add my two bits,
Windwaker was the first Zelda game I ever beat, and Tales of Monkey Island: Chapter one: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal was the first MI game I've ever beat.
And both have swords.
And Mer-people.
you know your Twilight Princess on the Gamecube is really rare, hold onto it
Twilight Princess Wii is missing from this pictures because I hadn't acquired it yet. Also I used to have Minish Cap but I lost it
My copy of Minish Cap was "lost" (possibly stolen) and same with my copy of Oracle of something (can't remember which of the two).
Any reason you want to avoid Spirit Tracks? I've really been enjoying it.
Fair enough I guess. I did like Phantom Hourglass too so it's possible you'd hate Spirit Tracks. Although I like Spirit Tracks better.
Also, I'm sure lots of people would have thought the same of boats when Windwaker came out. But it worked. And trains in Spirit Tracks work in my opinion.
I guess if you really didn't like Hourglass you won't like it though, since it's in the same spirit.
Get it? Spirit?
Boats seems a little more fitting for a fantasy setting than trains. I didn't mind boats in WW. I did mind having to sail around on endless seas, though. Not enough land in that game.
Really? I don't see why...
Okay, maybe I see why, in the way that these weren't steamboats. But still, Final Fantasy has steampunk-like magic and it works for their boats and flying stuff, so why not trains?
I guess horse carriages would have felt better to you? That would of course remove the whole "you have to stay on the tracks" thing.
I don't know, I felt it really worked, it actually made me wonder why the previous Zelda games didn't have trains yet
And Phantom Hourglass had steam boats.
Anyway, there's a certain level of acceptance I'm willing to give to little things. As Zelda got more cartoony (Wind Waker/Phantom Hourglass/Four Swords) out of this world stuff is expected for for comic purposes because it's so outrageous. But it was only a small amount. Trains in a Zelda game is just over-the-top ridiculous. And also, I never liked Phantom Hourglass either so the fact that it has steam boats means little to me. It's just as ridiculous, though.
I like the more realistic Zeldas. Twilight Princess and the new Wii title coming out...sometime? I just think the cartoony ones are trying too hard. I hope the new Wii title won't be as stupid (I don't expect it will seeing as it's more serious than the cartoon ones).
Not even to complete your collection?
I also never got into Majora's Mask, either. Still meaning to beat it, though.
EDIT: Wait a minute, what am I talking about? You can already do backflips which is good enough for a jump.
Picto Box?
I liked jumping in Link's Awakening.
This being said, I'm fine with the way it's automatic in the other games.
Well you know what? I'm sick and tired of Nintendo screwing around with Zelda. They should focus on what made Zelda great in the first place. Fun and simple. ALTTP was the franchise's peak, then it just went downhill.
1. Cutscenes, these just broke the flow of the game. What's worse is that they are too long and you have to keep pressing buttons to get through them.
2. No more shooting sword. This is more of a problem of going to 3D. I'd like to see it come back one day.
3. Goofy voices. It's very annoying to hear high pitched "tee hee hees!" from every single female character and *grunts* from every male character. If there's not going to be any voices, then have no voices at all.
4. Link must yell with every sword swing. Completely unnecessary! It's now a requirement for some reason. They even added it to the GBA version of ALTTP. If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it.
5. Turning into an animal for a majority of the game. This is a new one. People want to play as Link with a sword and shield, not the wolf man! I hope this doesn't become a trend.
6. Tingle. He's no Murray.
7. Drama. It's just awkward in a Zelda game. I want to fight monsters and find treasures, not look for medicine for someones dying aunt.
Ok, I'm done.
i loved wind wakers look which today still is amazing, but im getting seriously tired of its overuse. Then again Twilight Princesses look seemed a bit uninspired to me. it might have been the somewhat monotone muted colors.
links awakening was my first one and it was simply amazing. OoT was great, but i don't have the same adoration for it as other people. I prefer both wind waker and a link to the past, i think.
i love bioware, to me they are second to nintendo (which to me is at the top), but their thing is epic storydriven RPGs, which Zelda shouldn't be. No way should rockstar take reins of Zelda. I respect them, but i don't like their games much (i liked GTA1 and 2 though :P)
And the colours were definitely not muted and monotone in TP. They were quite vibrant. The lighting was a lot more stylised but I think it was done well.
But i was pretty sure that twilight princess suffered from the "realistic" "next-gen" graphics that most games early in the generation suffered from (meaning you'd never see more than a few colors on the screen at the same time, all to the yellowish brownish side, and everything was shiny and "bloomy"). I'll have to play the game again. now at least i have component cables.
Anyhow, I have never gotten to play WW fully, I would still love to, but obviously it is not something you would just buy the console for. I tried to use Dolphin, the gamecube emulator, to see if I could just get a glimpse of it, but that failed horribly. It managed to reach about 2 whopping frames per second, so that's a no-no.
Completely agreeing with MusicallyInspired here: Zelda has the same balancing going as say the original Monkey Island games, they are not simply 'let's combine items till we drop', 'let's collect tonnes of random junk', 'let's have long-winding cutscenes'-concepts, yet they do lean on them internally to create something of much more epic proportions. When reading about the third-party developer suggestion, Blizzard sprung to mind. Even though they are of course nowhere near single-player-only games, they also seem to be able to strike this perfect balance in both lore and game mechanics, it's mindblowing.
Ha, Tim! I love that! Now I want it to be an actual game.
Once I got to
Twilight Princess was a lot bigger. But it lacked the originality that The Wind Waker and Majora's Mask had. It felt more like, people keep complaining they want more Ocarina of Time, let's almost remake Ocarina of Time.
It was a fun experience while it lasted, but there's a reason for it being the only Zelda game which name I never seem to remember.
I didn't touch the DS games though, they just didn't seem Zelda-y enough for me.
To me, my favorite Zelda game is Majora's Mask. It was so strange and dark, it was like a nightmarish world of Hyrule. The whole 3 day theme was brilliant, it didn't only feed the constant threat that the world was going to end, but it also gave the characters much more dept. They would do things on their own in these three days, not just stand in one spot for their whole lives.
Too bad a lot of people hated the three day concept. Nintendo's never gonna try that again.
It seems now days that if a game tries to do something different, it's declared "Not [insert game]-y enough". If it tries to stay the same, it's called "more of what I already have". If it's too hard, then few get the satisfaction of beating the game on their own without a walk-through (if they beat it at all). If it's too easy, then it's declared "kiddy". Too dark? "Depressing, I want to have fun with a game". Cartoony/ humorous? You guessed it, "not dark enough".
Oh well, that's life.