E3 2013: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD Trailer

An HD rerelease of one of the best looking Zelda games is coming out on the Wii U. While not technically a new game, if you missed out on The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker then this is the best time to experience it. In all of it's widescreen HD glory. Widescreen support, refined textures for the HD upscale and all the anti-aliasing. But graphical improvements are obvious for HD rereleases. This is a little more than just a simple HD port though as there have been some gameplay improvements added. Iwata only talked about one during the Nintendo Direct stream and that is the Tingle Tuner. On the Gamecube, the Tingle Tuner works with the Gameboy Advance to send messages to friends or have them support you by using Tingle to drop items in game. In the Wii U version, the item has been replaced with the Tingle Bottle which lets you send messages to the Miiverse by having Link put the message in the Tingle Bottle and have him throw it to the sea to let it wash up on shores of other players. You can also share screenshots that you can take to help other players in case they need help or a guide.

Another new feature that was shown, but not mentioned, was the ability to boost the wind speed of your boat. I never really had a problem with the old boat speed as I found exploring the whole sea chart quite fun but this is definitely a good feature that I know some people have wanted since the original Gamecube release.

I'm glad they kept the celshaded look much like how it originally was. When screenshots of Wind Waker HD first came out, they opted for a more modern shader which I thought took out a charm of Wind Waker's unique art style. But who knows, maybe it's a shader option you can toggle in the menus.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD comes out in October of this year. Get it.