I know I’ll get downvoted to hell for this even though I’m literally posting the kind of stuff Unpopular Opinion is here for, but so be it.
I can’t even make out the faces most of the time in BotW. Just look at the screenshots for yourself. And it always bugged me just how featureless and uninteresting Link’s face looked, especially his eyes. Compare it to literally any other Link’s face (in-game for 3D, artwork for 2D).
In contrast, Pokémon XY had really good cel-shading for the Pokémon during battles. I was honestly impressed that a 3DS could have such a high polygon count and such clean, clear cel-shading lines and colors during its battles. For some odd reason, I have not seen such clean cel-shading before or since.
I would also like to say that Skyward Sword on the Wii had a much cleaner, more detailed, more beautiful look than Breath of the Wild did, and I will die with those words.
It just goes to show you that there is simply no replacement for good art direction— raw power and long draw distance aren’t enough.
I feel like the art part of my brain must be somehow underdeveloped, because I’m looking at the screenshot right now and I’m like… it’s a face? What else should it look like? I can see that the faces in Skyward Sword are in a different style, but I don’t know what “better” and “worse” mean in this context, other than “I like one better than the other.” And this happens every time topics about game graphics/art styles come up.
Like, I could try to explain everything, but I’d basically have to open up a video presentation to show what I mean. It’s very hard to show my points over text— people’d just have to take my word for it.
But several of the points I would be showing off would be stuff like:
- The lack of clear, purposeful direction and shapes for the facial structure and the eyes, turning them almost into squishy globs or weird “tears of paper”
- The fact that the cel-shading is so weird that features do not have clear start points and end points, and often disappear altogether depending on the camera angle and lighting— and by “often” I mean like 25-50% of the time
- The fact that the few actual textures that exist are really dirty-looking and poorly-executed, like the eyes
- The extreme amount of blur that is constant in every frame and is really dirty and bad-looking when there’s particles, which this game loves
- The sloppiness of the models, of the hair, of the cel-shading, of the shapes of the eyes, pretty much everything makes me believe all this was done on purpose. This game’s sloppy and blurry visuals aren’t exactly incompetence, I am guessing— instead it’s like they’re trying to go for some form of Japanese painting style or something. And it doesn’t really work in 3D because the engine can’t fine-tune any results to look nice
These are things I noticed from the very first trailer reveal. I was talking with my friend and saying stuff like “this is the blurriest game I’ve ever seen. Objects just kinda melt into each other and have no clear start or end; and the execution of the particle effects just makes everything worse”
I believe that if this game wasn’t a Zelda game, it would get shit on for its visuals. I mean, there will always be people who are fine with anything, and there will always be fans of anything. But I find this Zelda to have the worst visuals of any Zelda ever, and the landscapes don’t save it for me.
