the reason people praise Wind Waker is the fact that it holds up well because of it's style, when so many games of that generation (which looked better at the time) hasn't.
So the takeaway I'm getting from this thread is that I need to watch the fuck out of some Sword of The Stranger, Akira and Redline like right now. Good job guys.
Honestly, I want to see all the attempts at getting this kind of style (more animated) that the upcoming gen will allow. Hyper stylized graphics are master race and the more things that get closer to some of the examples in here, the better.
Super nitpicking, but I'd say Redline is about 99.9% hand animated. You can see in several shots during the redline race that many of the red camera hovercraft ships in the background are cell shaded style CG animated models. The first shot I could find was 01:07:28 on the BD.
I guess that's evidence that cell shading in games has a bit to go. It was impossible to notice my first couple runs through the movie.
This clearly looks like a game and not even close to how an anime looks.
Also, I disagree with people saying the only thing anime-styled games are lacking in is animation. There are many anime games that look too polygonal ("gamey") and not as flat or in a graphical style that an anime would look like. There's still a ways to go, and I'm looking forward to what the upcoming gen brings.