Number 8
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Sometimes, the best things in life are the things we didn't want in the first place.
Yeah, I was one of those people in utter disbelief at the Wind Waker reveal. It didn't make any sense to me at the time, in the wake of the infamous SpaceWorld video. But I waited, and I was calm about it, and I played the game, and you know what? It was magic. Magic.
Wind Waker is in many ways the most flawed Zelda game ever created, but the qualities that recommend it are so enormous and effecting that the flaws don't matter. I had fun sailing, listening to the music. The combat was great fun. The animation style, the visual design, the character expressions, everything cam together to make this enormous and enormously engaging world that challenged all of my assumptions about the series.
Do you know how big a thing it is to not want something, and then have it change the way you look at the medium?
Me and the wife still play this game together, alternating play every time we get past a dungeon. The game is timeless - for so many reasons, it will never get old.
