Defeat Cheapness With Equal Cheapness

I sequence broke like I said I would.  Grabbed everything that was remaining and went back.  Hit the boss with the Magic Rod three times, battle over.

LOL.

Anyway.

The 8th dungeon is quite the maze, but once you figure it out you can get right to the boss without issue.  After beating it, the game isn't over.  After all, you're collecting the eight instruments to wake the Wind Fish.  So then you go to the Wind Fish's egg in the mountains and play the Ballad of the Wind Fish on your ocarina.  All the instruments appear and you get the extended version, then the egg opens up.

Now, a long time ago, I'd heard that if you never looked up the proper sequence to go through in the maze inside the egg, it would be the same as the maze at the end of Zelda 1, i.e. North-West-South-West.  However, I avoided the library for the entire game and it spit me back out to the entrance after going North-West-South.

Read the book, got my (apparently random) order, and got to the final fight, which has a few different forms.  Nothing too difficult, you just have to swap weapons around (and for one form, try different tactics) until you figure out what damages it.

Once that's done, you get the cutscene and end credits.  The cutscene all but flat-out tells you that this entire game is a dream sequence.  If you think back, it all makes sense.  All the bosses are called Nightmares.

Also, the opening cutscene should be a clue.  You know, the one you see every time you start up the game.  Link is trying to sail through a storm, lightning hits his ship, Marin finds him washed up on the beach, and...  Wind Fish's egg.  Even the game's name suggests he's asleep.

I know nothing of the Zelda timeline, but... all the talk in the closing cutscene of "waking" and the wind fish, and the fact that Link was on a huge ocean and continues to be on a huge ocean after waking up, leads me to think that Wind Waker comes after this game in the timeline?  I dunno.

All I know is, I've beaten a Legend of Zelda game now.  Next up, Final Fantasy 4.