23rd February 2003, 12:59 PM
Quote:Maybe... but not totally different. After all, WW gameplay is similar to OoT's, but improved... I'd imagine that a more realistic game would do the same, but in a different way...
Sure, it would have been a very different game.
Quote:Yes it did... Link looks VERY different in LA then he did in LttP (ingame)... and LA looks slightly less cartoonish than LttP did...
They changed the character model a bit. That's it.
Quote:Thus, innovation largely has to do with the existing, in that innovation looks at what the current trends are, the current marketplace is, and does something that is accurately beyond the horizon of these trends. This "accurately" is what differentiates the "innovative" from the "different." Perhaps WW is innovative, but in the wrong direction for the audience. The intent of innovation is to get a big "WOW" out of the audience, and the sales numbers for Zelda in Japan indicate that this "WOW" does not exist. Thus, relative to the perception audience, Zelda:WW is not innovative...and the perception of the audience is really what matters.
The game isn't selling poorly in Japan because of the visual style. The Japanese weren''t turned off by the great visual style of WW as most Westerners were. The Gamecube is just terribly unpopular over there. Look at Mario Sunshine's sales. That game was the perfect evolution of Mario 64 (which was a huge seller in Japan), but it sold like crap (for a Mario game). Part of that was because of Nintendo's bad marketing (some people thought that it was some sort of weird-ass paint game), but also because of the Gamecube's inpopularity over there.
Quote:I have to agree with OB1 in that Nintendo should continue to innovate, but it should do so knowing that it must innovate relative to the audience. Not OB1.
What? That makes no sense whatsoever. Hey I think it would be great if Nintendo made games specifically with my tastes in mind, but that's not going to happen any time soon. And believe it or not, I'm not the only person in the world who thinks that WW's visual change was quite innovative. Most of the gaming media shares my views on this subject.
Quote:...WW is a completely different game? I doubt that. Have you played it? Peer Schneider of IGN states in his video preview, "...It's vintage Zelda. The gameplay is just like it used to be...yes it has cartoon elements,...but it won't get on your nerves." I have a hard time believing that a SW20002 Zelda game would stray any more from the Zelda gameplay. In addition, why must Nintendo innovate in a direction that disagrees with the audience when it could innovate the Zelda gameplay in a direction that agrees with the audience?
WTF is with this whole lightbulb analogy? It doesn't make any sense. And the gameplay has indeed changed quite a bit because of the graphics (of course it's still Zelda, but that doesn't mean that it's identical to OoT in every way). The way Link controls, the way fights were designed (flipping over an enemy real fast and landing right behind him and slashing him with your sword would look ridiculous if it were a more realistic-looking game), and even the dungeon designs were built around the visual style. Nintendo didn't just change the look of the game because they thought it would be nifty. This isn't just OoT cel-shaded. It's the difference between live-action and animation. There are certain things that you can do in animation that would look out of place in a live-action feature. The same applies to Wind Waker. Everything in Zelda obeys the laws of that world's cartoon physics.
Quote:Is "The Matrix" innovative?
No, not really. All of that cool stuff that you love in "The Matrix" was taken directly from anime such as "Ghost in the Shell", and live-action Hong Kong films like John Woo's "The Killer" and "Hard Boiled" (among many others). The only real innovation in that movie was taking techniques from Japanese animation and doing it in live-action.