After doing an EXTENSIVE 100% playthrough of Wind Waker... yeah its second half can be rough. Getting 100% in any open world game can become tedious, but Wind Waker's entire second half is just exploring (for anyone that hasn't played you need to find eight items to progress. To find these items you need to find a map for each specific one. Each map also needs to be decoded, which costs a lot of money. Essentially to find one of these items to you need to sail to Point A, grab the map, go get it decoded at point B, then go to point C to retrieve the item. Do this eight times)
There's virtually no story progress outside of the Earth and Wind temples during this time, and the game doesn't really have that many proper sidequests. I couldn't even stop my 100% run to go do something else because at this point in the game, story progress was basically the exact same thing I was already doing.