Aside from the art style that was mired in unfair controversy, the highlight of Wind Waker as a Zelda game is the sense of exploration. Unfortunately the actual act of exploring can be frustrating and tedious. As much as I love taking in the art and the music on the high seas, sailing gets old very quickly, and exploration goes unrewarded for almost all of the game. Early on in the game, islands mostly fall into two categories: Islands that are significant later in the story but not now, and side islands that can't be plundered without items from later in the game. Once the player reaches a point in the game where they can be reasonably confident that exploring will not be a waste of time, they end up doing a world tour and uncovering the whole map at once, zone by zone, rather than slowly over the course of the game, which I think is a shame. The last few minutes of the game are incredible and the opening is quite strong as well... it's the middle that's the problem. Dungeons are adequate fail to impress and it certainly feels as though one or more were cut from the game. The mandatory late-game world-spanning scavenger hunt is always a risky trope, and it's implementation here is pretty infamously poor. One would think that finding a piece of the Triforce wouldn't be as unceremonious as just scraping it off the ocean floor. The HD version wisely moves the pieces instead to the locations that once held the charts which led to them. This also cuts out the excruciating fees that Tingle demands in his role as middleman and the game is better for it.

The Disney part of Kingdom Hearts is not "filler", you absolute lunatics. Even if it feels like Square Enix themselves are treating it that way now, the Disney stuff is core to the whole series' appeal, and none of the future games do it quite as rightly as Kingdom Hearts 1. It is a big, goofy action platformer that beautifully captures what it means to be young, and to be honest I'm getting sick of people trashing the combat for being a step behind KH2. I tried letting Warcraft 3 be my 2002 Game of the Year. I really, truly did. Every time I looked at that list, it made me sad, and I will commit this logical dishonesty no further. If for no other reason than the pure artistic audacity of its very existence, Kingdom Hearts is the best thing that happened to video games in 2002.

Star Fox Adventures is worse than you remember. The combat is braindead, and yet it's everywhere. The controls for shooting with the staff are awful. Dealing with Tricky and switching between staff powers is a pain in the ass. Some of the puzzles are horrible, and there are large stretches of unnecessary, uncompelling backtracking. Complaining that there aren't enough "Star Fox" parts is dumb, because there's plenty to bitch about on Adventure's own demerits, with or without the Star Fox cast being shoehorned into it.