The Legend Of Zelda - General Thread

Visual-wise, TPHD was gonna be hard-pressed to look as good anyways since the cel-shaded visuals from WW naturally age better over time. They didn't even need to put the bloom on everything honestly.

And exactly this is the reason why I think it's silly that some folks write off any of the more stylistic artstyles and want the Zelda series to go full realism only, because it's bound to look super crappy compared to what the "hot new standard in realism" is in at least, say, three to five years. And I'm being generous here.

edited 3rd Feb '17 1:11:30 PM by Jaryl

I can't help but feel that, when compared to the remakes of OOT, MM and TWW, the one for TP has only marginally improved upon the original, and the just-barely polished visuals are a huge evidence of this. Wouldn't it have been rad if they had implemented the visuals of the 2011 tech demo into this game?

That would probably take forever.

TP HD's issue is that on a gameplay level there's not much that can be improved from the base game. Like, Wind Waker had the Swift Sail that cut down on one of the original's biggest problems. TP doesn't have anything like that. It's issues are either in pacing (slow opening, too many bugs to find) or QOL (everything with Rupees) which doesn't really make a big impact despite being important to deal with. Tantalus did what they could.

As for graphics, I like TP's muddy look. I'm not biased enough to say it looks better than Wind Waker, but it works quite well for the type of game it is.

TP's concept art looks nice, not a fan of how it was implemented in the actual game. Way too much bloom.

I can actually think of several things TPHD could have done to improve on the original. First and foremost is making new character models, because damn, those are some dated-looking models. Maybe they don't need to look as good as the ones from that Wii U tech demo, but look at how good the models look in Ocarina of Time 3D (compared to the original, I mean). Up the poly count at least a little, for Pete's sake.

Here are some more ideas I've had:

• Implement a day-to-night mechanic to make hunting Poes easier. The Ghost Lantern is a good idea, but it's not enough.
• Change the magic armor so that it works like the one from WWHD (that is to say, it only consumes rupees when you get hit).
• Make it so the hawkeye and bomb arrows aren't mutually exclusive.
• Make it so you don't need to forget a scent in order to learn another one. Add a "scent menu" like the fish and bug menus. Yeah, this is pretty much useless, but it'd be another neat way to gauge your completion percentage.
• Let Wolf Link use the finishing blow on regular enemies. There's nothing more annoying than waiting for a Bulblin to get back up before you can attack it again.
• Make it so you can dash indefinitely as a wolf by holding down the dash button. One tires of "Bark! Oh! Bark! Oh!"

They're pretty minor, but I think they'd make a difference.

That was never going to happen. Way too much effort for a remaster. Better textures or just small touch-ups were all that was going to go into this from the beginning.

Why? Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask got redone models in their remasters.

It's easier to improve old blocky models like the N64 games than the gamecube-level models from TP, which no doubt they thought were fine as they were for the most part. Most PS 2 remasters don't get model overhauls either.

I don't even think they look that bad in TPHD to be honest.

edited 3rd Feb '17 2:42:36 PM by Draghinazzo

They don't look much better in HD than on the Game Cube, and the lack of the blurry filter makes their jagged edges much more obvious. It's not terrible, but I certainly expected better.

I don't really know why you did, given that, again, it's not really much worse in that regard than most other HD remasters of PS 2 games.

Because Wind Waker HD looks a hell of a lot better than the original, even taking the relative timelessness of its art direction into account.

I'll admit I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but I would assume the assets of Wind Waker, being a bit more simplistic, would be easier to touch up in HD than the assets in Twilight Princess.

Yes, but Wind Waker was moreso the lighting than anything else as far I've seen. I'm not sure if you could just call it a straightforward improvement since a lot of people feel like the bloom was a bit much, but that's irrelevant to the point that they obviously put more effort into it.

IIRC they toned down the bloom on TPHD for the non-twilight sections but not by a lot.

If anyone cares Chuggaconroy's starting a Skyward Sword LP tomorrow.

YMMV, but in my opinion, the new lighting effects in Wind Waker HD really made the world come alive. Some people complain that the shifts in lighting are too harsh, especially when you open a treasure chest and suddenly see the contours in Link's model, but I thought it all looked hella cool.

Not that I think the original looked bad, it's just that the remaster looks much better.

I haven't been able to watch LP videos since my Internet connection stopped being the same. I'm lucky it has enough intensity to allow me edit the wiki and post in the forums, and sometimes not even that.

In the near future I plan to start ALBW in Hero Mode. It's going to be fun.

WWHD literally hurts my eyes whenever the sun is up.

That game and TP may be the only Zelda games I've ever liked.

edited 6th Feb '17 3:12:20 AM by RAlexa21th

I just had a thought concerning the series: Does the series stretch itself too thin by continuing to attempt to do everything?

I've always said that Zelda is the Jack of All Trades when it comes to sword-and-sorcery games. It has to do a lot of jobs: field exploration, navigating dungeons, NPC interaction and sidequests, puzzle solving, fighting enemies, and storytelling. Most other games specialize in two or three of these aspects.

During the SNES and N64 days, this practice seemed practical since games back then were much smaller, but with the GCN and Wii, Aonuma seems to have had a lot of difficulty maintaining every aspect of the series with equal love. The overworlds get emptier, dungeons are more linear, sidequests get smaller in number and/or give more useless rewards, puzzles are little more than using the appropriate item on a target, and despite embracing linearity to tell tighter stories, even narrative quality declined.

Come to think of it, this is probably the reason why games that try this do everything approach that Zelda does are hard to come by. Only Okami and Darksiders seem to have matched it, and even those games focus more on story and combat respectively.

There's quite a dilemma here. They could either focus on a few aspects at a time and do those well. They could either focus on "doing everything" some more and risk being a Master of None.

Though it seems that Nintendo has taken the option of "do everything", but take a really fucking long time developing the game. Which is probably the best option possible.

edited 8th Feb '17 9:37:58 PM by WaxingName

Hey, does anyone know if the Rupee overflow glitch was patched out of Hyrule Warriors?

It still works.

I started Hero Mode in A Link Between Worlds, and holy crap is it unforgiving. I haven't even dared going to the Lynel area yet for this reason (in my Normal playthrough, I had gone there right after completing Tower of Hera).

In fact, my first Lorule dungeon might be Swamp Palace just to get the Blue Mail earlier.

I just recently found out that the clam enemies in Twilight Princess can only be killed with a horizontal slice and not a vertical slice. In other words, you either have to not target them or hold right or left while targeting them.

Which begs the question: why didn't they design more enemies like that? I know that Skyward Sword eventually designed a game based around the direction you're swinging your sword, but why can't they just have enemies that block like in that game but only based around left, right, and down slices without motion controls? It would be a good way of not polarizing enemies between "go crazy with sword" and "wait for enemy to drop guard."

And I just found out that you can easily roll through the spiderwebs in Skyward Sword and that said game also has a jump attack.

Seriously, Chugga's LP is teaching me some things already and we're only halfway through the Skyview Temple.