The "I GOT WIND WAKER!!!" thread

[OB1]

Originally posted by A Black Falcon


On some issues in this thread dropped for several months. Textures... yes, they are better than in OoT. But not by that much... its more because they are clearer and higher resolution than more detailed -- the game does have fairly simple textures and envrionment graphics that just don't look like they do anywhere near as much as the Cube can do. Sure, the cel shading total effect looks very nice and stylistic... but how is it pushing the Cube so hard? I still don't see that... it appears to be a very stylistic game which is graphically nice but not something pushing the Cube's power... the textures are simple, and the poly count doesn't appear to be that high...

Wow, you really don't have an eye for graphics, do you? Most of the textures fit the game just perfectly, although some of them definitely could have been better. Cel-shading (right cel-shading) is very taxing on hardware, and Wind Waker does it best. The poly count is higher than you think. Only a few of the characters in the game have obvious edges which is a sign of a low-poly count. Also, the animation is unparalleled. No other game in existence has animation as sophisticated as WW's.

And the water. Just like the walls and the enemies, it does look straight out of a cartoon. The problem is, as I said, that in this environment cartoon water just doesn't look very good. Sure, realistic clear water wouldn't be as true to it being a cartoon, but it'd look SO much better!

The funny thing about that is that the final boss battle features more realistic-looking water that would have fit the game quite nicely. And I'm talking about the very last part of the boss fight, guys. Not the mirror water stuff.

Oh, I played OoT yesterday. It reminded me that my cart was erased (by that other bad N64 I had...) and I'm only in Dodongo's Cavern. I died (the third in that game) well before reaching the boss... that game is still nice looking. Sure the textures are bad, but it has a great style... very different from WW (and I would say that WW done on the N64 wouldn't look nearly as good because it wouldn't have the detail level that cartoons have... OoT doesn't emulate anything like that so it doesn't rely on that.

And anyway when I first played it I noticed how low resolution the graphics are (compared to circa 1999 PC games), so they haven't changed that much in my eyes...

You just have a very different idea of what Zelda should look like. Zelda isn't supposed to be a realistic-looking series. ALttP is what it should look like, and WW did a good job of maintaining that feel while having a unique look of its own.