I know a 1/5 seems harsh, but the new visuals where the bloom is so excessive it looks like you're staring at the screen through a smudged window and the conflicting lighting engines that turn models into clay when you approach a light source on top of the chugging frame-rate make this an unacceptable port to me in the moment-to-moment gameplay. It just looks and runs worse than the original too often.

Which is a shame because the addition of the Swift Sail, gyro-aim, d-pad item-mapping, shortened conduction time, and all the other QoL improvements are for sure nice.

I'll be sticking to the GCN version. It can be modded to have most of this QoL stuff anyway.

Reviewed on May 05, 2023


1 Comment


11 months ago

Maybe you'd be better off modding the HD version.
The most popular mod for Wind Waker HD is a mod that reduces the bloom and makes the color palette similar to the GameCube version !