Disclaimer: I have nothing against remasters. I don’t see OOT as a sacred and perfect thing that nobody’s allowed to touch.
But everyone is swooning over the graphics of the new remaster and I really dislike them. For me, it’s ATBGE: all technics and no art direction.
Sure, the physics are impressive, the texture high res, and the models detailed. But they’re too detailed. It looks like they’ve taken any flat surface and said “ooh, we need to add some detail here”.
So you’re left with something cartoony but with very realistic texture, shaders etc. There’s a mismatch in style between the big geometry of OOT models that they’ve kept and the small geometry they’ve added on top of them. On the other hand, Elden Rings also has an ultra detailed style and I’ve got no problem with it because it’s not trying to be cartoony at the same time.
I’ve found this mismatch repugnant as well, because it reminds me if genAI. I’m not saying they used AI, but when you ask one to “improve” a cartoon, you end up with something similar: it adds unnecessary detail e-ve-ry-where.
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The visuals is the one thing I’m not too worried about. That Nintendo is struggling to get new experiences out is more concerning.
They keep looking backwards and are stagnating on new stuff. At least for now. Breath of the wild and Mario Odyssey was 9 years ago. Mario Kart world is the only really decent new thing since.
So when they are just slapping new paint jobs on nearly 30 year old titles, it makes one think they are running out of steam.
It’s botw fault, they just have to copy its formula for every franchise. What an awful legacy
Mario kart world is another dogshit example of it, fuck all the worthless open world bloat
BotW was a decent title in its own right but slapping the Zelda name on it completely distorted the way it was seen internally and externally. Also Nintendo and Zelda had been known as quality over quantity and BotW & TotK are just huge collection fests with no real focus.
Open world can be great but it also needs to be refined. For isntance, GTA4 was a brilliant in that sense, GTA 5 lost that focus a fair bit but still kind of made it work, and here is hoping that GTA 6 is more like GTA 4. Here hoping the next Zelda is more in line with the older titles than just another BotW/TotK.
I did enjoy botw itself, it could have been a sweet love letter to the original if they didn’t bork the dungeons so badly and actually had things to discover with mechanical functionality, but its legacy has done so much damage.
It’s like gears of war popularizing no color for the 360 era plus fucking forced walk and talk sections. Just make it a god damn cutscene that’s skippable.
The reasons people want to skip cut-scene is because most of them are rubbish. It was the title Ryse on Xbox One/PC, it isn’t the greatest game and it can be finished in about 5 hours, but they got the cut-scene just right in that you actually didn’t want to skip them.
They’re even stagnating on their lazy nostalgia publishing! I day one bought Metroid prime remaster, and would have sat one bought 2 and 3.
The biggest problem with Metroid Prime 4 is that it came right after Metroid Prime Remaster. They reminded everyone of that brilliance only to turn around and produce an adequate but forgettable experience with MP4. Retro studios admitted that they didn’t have the resources to do it all in house and it showed.
Makes me think the only reasons Nintendo hasn’t entirely gone down the same path as other AAA studios is just because their hardware is behind the others and the budgets haven’t completely blown out yet.
I don’t care that I’m in unpopularopinion. This is ⬇️
You can feel like it’s too detailed if you have some nostalgia with the original or whatever, but, to say there’s no art direction is just insane to me.
I think they managed to marry the cartoony with the realistic in a perfect blend with this game. I’m in awe.
Not to mention how the game feels. It feels absolutely incredible to play. Buttery smooth frame rate on top of everything. Chef’s kiss. 10/10 as a remake, 8/10 as a game.
Agree. I’m enjoying this game a lot.
I can’t put it down. Loving it.
The original one looks so dated by now anything would work tbh. If this is getting sold and gets more people playing it. Hard to argue with results.
It’s so overdone and looks so bad. Honestly though the voice acting so far is worse. They would’ve been better off just not having it with how it is. Navi especially.
Nah, I agree with this.
Take Link’s tunic. What the actual fuck is going on with those designs? I wouldn’t have minded much if it was like his hat, which has a decent rough cloth texture, but his tunic has all this intricately stitched leather which just looks really out of place.
Everything is just so busy when it comes to the art design.
Yeah, honestly, I had the same reaction when seeing it in the videos. Then I played it and all that criticism melted away and no longer mattered as all that fine detail and uncanny valley nature stuff just…didn’t matter or was no longer noticed as you play. Nothing felt out of place and everything just clicked. You realize as you’re playing it that all that same uncanny nature in the character designs were also there in the original. Didn’t matter as much then and, turns out, doesn’t matter now. It’s just a solid and fun game, graphics be damned, and that’s what should matter the most if you’re going to judge a game.
Exactly my experience.
Solid 60fps on top of it doesn’t hurt. Game feels great.
it’s supposed to be a fairy tale… people seem to forget that.
they seem to be backreading the newer zelda art styles and their ‘mythological’ stories onto the older game, which was never conceived of that way. the modern zelda’s are built around a fairy tale concept they are less ‘magical’.
To my brain, it feels like the opposite of BoTW. World looks more realistic-ish while Link looks like a Blender project.
Both look fine (to me) but player models is a tad jarring in OoT to me.
Not liking the style is perfectly ok, saying it does not have an art direction is ridiculous.
It much more stylized than the original, TP or Skyward sword. It’s why you get a strong reaction instead of just going meh.
Finally the original OoT does not have cartoony graphics, they are just old. They were also quite detailed for the time.
Yeah, the takes here are just… completely ignorant.
Fine to not like an art style, but the rest of this just ignorant nonsense that has no appreciation for the context of the game in it’s own time.
“Art direction” is a term G*mers heard a journalist say once. And have now been parroting it, as if troglodytes like them would know what it means.
It’s a remake not a remaster but I agree with you. Might not even be that much of a unpopular opinion. Personally I think a more stilized art direction would have been much better, oot was never about insanely realistic graphics to me.
Link and Zelda look specially terrible imo
I think that’s a fair opinion.
Then went for something that looks a bit like dolls and crafted props. A bit like doll-theater or stop motion, and I think the set art style does make perfect sense for that, but I do feel that it’s all a little sharp and textured for my taste as well. I think I would have preferred more subtlety and nuance. All materials feel very harshly defined, where it would have been nice to have some softer textures and shaders thrown in as well.
ocarina of moist
It looks so greasy
I just watched Dunkey’s video about it and the first thing I said to myself seeing Link was “what the fuck? Is he a half-Rito now? Is this Shadow Over Hyrule?”
They kept the grotesque shapes and proportions but added this hyper realistic style to it that just massively triggers the uncanny valley.
Same. He also looks very greasy when he was in tge water which is just weird to me.
I like it. I don’t look at it with this much detail. The game has captured me and i have been playing a lot. I didnt even complete the original. I completed majoras mask but never oot. Personally the graphics are secondary to gameplay in all games for me. I never care how a game looks of i can enjoy the way it plays.
My joke when I first saw it after launch was calling it The Legend of Texture: Ocarina of Bump Mapping. It looks OK, but Nintendo has famously steered away from heavy texture work. This shows them giving it another try, and while it isn’t bad, it’s definitely blown out. It reminds me of all of those super high contrast HDR photos that people used to make and swear they looked good. There is a time and a place for everything, and not every texture in your game needs to shout at me for attention.
Have you played the game? I was shocked as well when it was first announced, i thought everything was overdetailed and too realistic, but then it grew on me and i quite like it now. It took a whole for me to get used to it, now i appreciate how much work went into it, and it’s refreshing to me after about a decade of cell-shaded Zelda games. (Speaking of, i do find pricess Zelda quite ugly in the remake haha)
I didn’t play it, but I’ll watch some streamer play. We’ll see if it grows on me or if it is a definite turn off!
I do agree with you that a variety of style is better than the same formula each time.
I kinda like the look of Zelda to be honest! It’s nice to see some kind of departure from the usual standard of beauty, especially for a child.
