Art Style In The Zelda Games

[A Black Falcon]

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.

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...

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.