Despite placing more focus on the water than any other Zelda title, The Wind Waker never actually shows an animation of Link swimming. It would make sense for Link to not have a swimming animation, since the water in The Wind Waker is opaque, meaning it would never be visible in normal gameplay. However, by turning down the opacity of the water, we can see that Link has always had a swimming animation.
In the water, Link has what seems to be two animation states: idle in the water and actively swimming. When Link is idle, he treads water to remain afloat while not moving underwater. While moving, Link does a more casual breaststroke that keeps his head above the water. This is viewable somewhat during the game’s ending as Link’s head bobs at the same cadence as his breaststroke. Both of these animations are details that add a level of depth to Link being in the water, and it leaves one wondering why they would remain invisible, especially in a game with such a large amount of swimming.
For this swimming animation to be visible, the transparency of the water would need to increase at least a little. This creates a potential problem though, because increasing the visibility of the water would mean anything beyond Link’s body would also have to be rendered and visible, which includes the underwater side of any island or the bottom of the ocean. It’s possible the developers wanted to circumvent the extra work of modeling the undersides of islands and other undersea content.
Given that the animations are unseen, it’s likely they were made very early in development before all the details of the game were fully fleshed out. The opaque style of the water may have been a stylistic choice, made later on and rendering the animations obsolete. Since the opaque style of water is one of the trademark qualities of The Wind Waker aesthetic, it is plausible that the developers choose to render some animations unneeded in exchange for an appealing design for the Great Sea. This also makes sense because it would allow the game to stand out in an era of game development when visually striking water was notoriously difficult to implement into many other games.
