BlackTron
Member
The art style is part of the creativity and artistic vision. Realism is not some ideal to be targeted.
I think this was true of Wind Waker. They made a conscious choice to pursue that direction. Wind Waker was their artistic vision to realize. They had more hardware power than ever and wanted to do that.
After that things changed. Twilight Princess was "mature" because, as Miyamoto said, people really, really REALLY wanted a realistic Zelda. So they answered what people "wanted", and that "poisoning of the well" in their mission resulted in a poor looking game. I'm not saying it was bad because it wasn't cel shaded or toony, I'm saying it was bad because when they sat down to make it their priorities were clouded by complaints. OOT was made just by chasing the best looking Zelda on the system that they could. They didn't do that on GC, they chased OOT 2 and we got a lame looking game for it IMO.
I don't think Skyward Sword was pure artistic vision either. In SS the style was chosen as the best one possible to hide the deficiencies of the Wii hardware, without putting out a game that looks completely old and last gen by the time it comes out. Business and hardware realities affected the "art". So we get their best artistic efforts inside this box they are placed in.
You better believe the same thing happened with BOTW. I first played most of it on Wii U where the hardware was tasked even further. Once they made the decision to make an open-world game, they had two choices. Cover it up with as much toon shade trickery as they possibly can, or allow the game to look like complete dogshit. The result was a very skillful pairing of hardware and software that I would call art of game making. But if you want pure artistic vision, just give a designer hardware power and let them do what they want without being boxed in by 1GB of RAM. BOTW and TOTK are still "the same game" designed for Wii U with 1GB of RAM and PowerPC architecture. No TOTK would not run on Wii U but you know what I am getting at here.
What I'm trying to say is that Nintendo deserves accolades for making incredible Zelda games on limited hardware that kept the IP on the map. But don't BS me that this is just some artists pure creative vision unsullied by the constraints given. It would be a huge, huge coincidence that the artistic vision of the designers of the past many years of Zelda games just so happened to be the only one really viable for making them look acceptable on the hardware given. A+ job doing it though.