I enjoyed quite a bit of this game, but there's also a lot that I just found super tedious and uninteresting. I really think Zelda games are a lot better when they open up and let the player go and do things in the order they want, and despite throwing the player into an ostensibly vast and open world, Wind Waker constantly goes out of it's way to do the exact opposite of that.

Outside of two dungeons that can be done in any order, pretty much everything in this game's main story is super streamlined. Given the structure of the game's world, this means that at points the game literally just has to have your boat go "lol nope, I'm not going that way" to make sure the player doesn't go off and do something they're not supposed to, which is super egregious in this type of game. And outside of the main quest, there isn't really a whole lot to do. Every quadrant has one island, and outside of the major story islands, pretty much every island has one or two puzzles and a treasure map attached to it, after which it pretty much becomes deadspace on the map. This arguably isn't any different from how a typical Zelda game's sidequest material would function, but with the more open structure of Wind Waker, it just makes the whole world feel so much more empty.

This problem is REALLY exacerbated by the game's main gimmick: sailing. Every one of this items is 2-3 minutes apart with very little interesting to do in between. You might encounter a copy-and-pasted enemy base, or maybe even an sea enemy that's more obnoxious to deal with than it's worth, but for the most part you pretty much just set the wind in the direction you need to go, and wait for the boat to get there. It gets super tedious, especially later on when you've already cleared most of the minor islands, and the fast travel isn't good enough to alleviate this.

There IS a lot of good stuff here though. Of course, the graphics are quite charming, and outside of the extremely over-exaggerated depth of field effect, most of it has aged quite well. The story is also probably the best of any Zelda game I've played so far, and the ending is especially good. But overall, I don't think it's quite as strong of a game as Ocarina of Time (and I'm not someone who's particularly fond of that game in the first place).