Well I'm almost finished with Twilight Princess, and thought a discussion about the art style of the Zelda games was warranted. Most of the games have been incredibly artistic even when they weren't testing the technical limits of graphical capabilities at the time. Anyway, here's how I would rank the games:
1. Wind Waker
2. A Link to the Past
3. Link's Awakening
4. Twilight Princess
5. Majora's Mask
6. Minish Cap
7. Ocarina of Time
8. Oracle Games
9. Adventures of Link
10. Legend of Zelda
I think the art in Wind Waker blows them all away, and I only wish the difficulty had been up to par with TP. I kind of group LttP and LA together as the art style for both games is very similar, but those two games are what I think of when I think of 2D Zelda. The twilight realm in TP is very cool, and the characters all have distinct personalities without even talking to them. This is similar to Majora's Mask. Minish Cap had a cool style, but I prefer the style from LttP and LA. OoT was obviously a great advance for the Zelda series, but while the game was incredible I don't think it compares artistically to some of the other Zelda games. Of course, it is still leagues beyond most other games out there, but Zelda games have a higher standard when it comes to artistry.
Odd. I prefer OOT's artistic style over all the others. It was in some ways stark, but in all ways vivid and had a unique storybook surrealism that was more subtle than Wind Waker.
Quote:1. Wind Waker
2. A Link to the Past
3. Link's Awakening
4. Twilight Princess
5. Majora's Mask
6. Minish Cap
7. Ocarina of Time
8. Oracle Games
9. Adventures of Link
10. Legend of Zelda
But a good 90% of the Oracles series graphics (and a lot of its music too) are straight rips from LA...
I agree with Ryan though, OoT has the best art style in the series. LttP has some nice background artwork, but I still don't like the character art so much... LA is beautiful though, it's as good as you'll ever get on the original GB. Wind Waker... looks good, but I don't like the water so much...
OoT vs. Majora's Mask is a tough one. While MM perhaps has better art, it has the expansion pack so it can push farther, and the game is definitely not as good as OoT... plus, OoT was more original. MM does have some amazing artwork in it though... I think I'd rank OoT higher in the end even so. Still, Clock Town and Ikana Canyon look amazing...
Numeric rankings are so hard... if I wrote this list five times I'd probably get five different lists... :)
1. Ocarina of Time
2. Majora's Mask
3. Link's Awakening
4. Wind Waker
5. Link to the Past
6. Oracles (I could make an argument for this going above LttP, but for now it's here)
7. LoZ
... I don't have AoL, Minish Cap, or TP (yet).
A Black Falcon Wrote:But a good 90% of the Oracles series graphics (and a lot of its music too) are straight rips from LA...
Maybe I'm remembering the Oracle games wrong, but I don't remember being all impressed with the style while playing the games. I guess I'd have to go back and compare them to LA.
A Black Falcon Wrote:LttP has some nice background artwork, but I still don't like the character art so much... LA is beautiful though, it's as good as you'll ever get on the original GB.
I guess if you don't like the character art in LttP you wouldn't like it much, but the character art in LttP is probably my favorite in the series so that's why I rank it so high.
A Black Falcon Wrote:OoT vs. Majora's Mask is a tough one. While MM perhaps has better art, it has the expansion pack so it can push farther, and the game is definitely not as good as OoT... plus, OoT was more original. MM does have some amazing artwork in it though... I think I'd rank OoT higher in the end even so. Still, Clock Town and Ikana Canyon look amazing...
If you compare the NPCs in Majora to those in OoT you will see why I rated it much higher. Every character in Majora is awash with personality, a practice that continued with Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Important NPCs in OoT had this personality, but NPCs that had no importance to the main game weren't given the same care.
So far I think I like TP's art style the best. After that, OOT (I think it was the instruction booklet artwork that did it for me there).
Of course, it could have been worse.
<img src="http://www.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2006/12/Tingle_Fanart_by_torokun-thumb.jpg">
He's either holding a force gem or the ENTIRE pyramid of power from LTTP.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Of course, it could have been worse.
<img src="http://www.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2006/12/Tingle_Fanart_by_torokun-thumb.jpg">
He's either holding a force gem or the ENTIRE pyramid of power from LTTP.
I would totally buy that game in a second...
I get this odd feeling that Tingle may be somehow related to Wario...
At any rate, when are they going to release the Tingle RPG in America?
Ho ho ho.... greeeeen giant.
Quote:At any rate, when are they going to release the Tingle RPG in America?
Probably never.
I can't wait that long! C'mon Nintendo! Zelda is the ONE series you have where you've released every single game in the series in America as well as Japan. Don't ruin a perfect record!
Oh, too late. They screwed us out of Tetra's Trackers.
Quote:Oh, too late. They screwed us out of Tetra's Trackers.
Nintendo can't afford to pay voice actors. Their business isn't doing so well, you know... :(
Oh yes, how many Wii did they sell, like... seven?
Apparently though the problem wasn't voice acting. It was how you could name your characters in that game phonetically using two characters that were pronounced in-game. They apparently figured that would be too hard to translate into English.
So drop that and just call them players 1-4... its not hard...
Was that game even all that good anyway?
From reviews I've heard, it ranges from the worst to the BEST of the offerings of that collection, but I'd rather make that decision myself. Face it GR, we were DENIED.
Quote:Maybe I'm remembering the Oracle games wrong, but I don't remember being all impressed with the style while playing the games. I guess I'd have to go back and compare them to LA.
The new artwork isn't quite as good as LA's, and it's in color and I preferred LA in b&w, but most of the stuff is straight out of LA, so the overall look is very similar... it does deserve to rank lower because of the unoriginality and lack of improvement over the original, though.
Quote:I guess if you don't like the character art in LttP you wouldn't like it much, but the character art in LttP is probably my favorite in the series so that's why I rank it so high.
But the guards and other monsters are strange looking and Link has purple hair (I know giving characters bright hair colors that isn't reflected in the character art was common back then, but it's still a bit odd)... and the monster designs just aren't nearly as cool as the backgrounds and other art... I don't know, I just never really liked the character art from LttP as much. OoT/MM clearly beat it, LA is hard to compare because of technical reasons but I do like it a bit more personally, and I think that WW too has better character designs...
Quote:If you compare the NPCs in Majora to those in OoT you will see why I rated it much higher. Every character in Majora is awash with personality, a practice that continued with Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Important NPCs in OoT had this personality, but NPCs that had no importance to the main game weren't given the same care.
OoT is the original though, and that counts for a lot... MM just builds on that (and is mostly better, but not all; I don't like the main field area in MM much... and while Clock Town and Ikana are beautiful and parts of the swamp, mountain, and oceanside areas look great too, I think that overall OoT does rank higher. Though MM is a very artistically beautiful game as well, certainly... they're obviously the two most impressive works on the N64, no question.
I gotta say that I prefer LA colored myself. As for LTTP, I like the design of the characters, monsters and all. In fact their style somehow reminds me of the art in Warcraft 2. (Game art, not book art.)
Quote:I gotta say that I prefer LA colored myself.
If you mean the red and green of putting the cart in a GBC/GBA/GB Player, then I agree. Otherwise no. :)
Quote:As for LTTP, I like the design of the characters, monsters and all. In fact their style somehow reminds me of the art in Warcraft 2. (Game art, not book art.)
Warcraft II has way better game character art than LttP...
Eh, to each their own. For the record, I actually DON'T prefer using SGB style coloring of the black and white LA. It's too transparent that it's "not quite right", so even on systems that could colorize that version, as with all original GB games without an SGB mode, I play it in black and white intentionally. LA DX however looks great, at least to me, with the colors actually added intentionally and fully realized. Admittedly the coloring in the Oracle games is more subdued, with Link's tunic, for example not being such a bright green, but it still looks pretty good, to me anyway, and I prefer it to the black and white.
Quote:Eh, to each their own. For the record, I actually DON'T prefer using SGB style coloring of the black and white LA. It's too transparent that it's "not quite right", so even on systems that could colorize that version, as with all original GB games without an SGB mode, I play it in black and white intentionally. LA DX however looks great, at least to me, with the colors actually added intentionally and fully realized. Admittedly the coloring in the Oracle games is more subdued, with Link's tunic, for example not being such a bright green, but it still looks pretty good, to me anyway, and I prefer it to the black and white.
Going from black and white or that basic red and green to the bright colors of LADX... I just didn't like it. Oracles was okay, but it still is obvious that the games are built on an engine not designed for color... the GBC was a nice console, but it usually wasn't really completely was convincing that the games really were meant to be in color as opposed to black and white games that were colorized. Of course, this is in part because half of the games ARE colorized b&w games (black cart titles)... :D Oracles may be Color-only, but they're still built on a B&W engine...
Anyway, Oracles might have done a bit better job of coloring than LADX (not as bright perhaps, as you say?), and they used the color nicely in some places, but with the color limit per sprite and the reuse of so many old sprites (it's the LA Link sprite again, despite the character art being completely different! That makes sense!), it's not THAT different.
... that is to say, I didn't mind the color as much in Oracles as I did in LADX, I think, but LA the original is still best. :)
What is a 'black and white' engine?
Reading that, I have to agree. Graphics engines don't care what hue you pick. You may have an argument if you argue that the artwork was really designed around the black and white color scheme, but that's not what you seem to be saying. Nope, there's no such thing as a "black and white" vs "color" graphical engine, except in terms of adding different possible colors to what it can support, and they did that. Any arguments against it can really only be on artistic merits as opposed to the technical limitations. I mean the GBC is basically an NES.
I mean that the engine the Oracles games use is the LA engine, which was designed for the original GB. It's not a new engine designed for the GBC, which is slightly more powerful than the original GB. Now, they do push things farther by adding color, etc, but the fact that the engine is recycled through all four titles (including LADX) is obvious...
That much is true. I was just caught on your descriptor of it as a "black and white engine".
As in that it was originally designed for black and white and might not use all of the power of the GBC... though maybe it does (if they enhanced it). The GBC isn't THAT much more powerful than the original GB... but it is by a bit. Eh, they did a pretty good job in Oracles. They were good games. I just think that for the most part, with just a few alterations they would have worked just as well without color... of course, that's pretty much the story of the GBC -- it's a GB, but with colorized games -- so that's not really an insult. Color is nice, usually. :) (when something is designed for color, that is... LA? Think of it a bit like those colorized versions of old black & white movies... the colorized versions aren't thought of nearly as well.)
Of what I have played...
1. A Link to the Past
2. Ocarina of Time
3. Wind Waker
4. Minish Cap
5. Link's Awakening
I still haven't seen Twilight Princess on my own TV...or any TV for that matter. From what I've seen on the internet it will probably land right after Wind Waker.
That's a demographically acceptable list, congratulations!