The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker
When the GameCube was first revealed at the Nintendo Space World 2000 event, one of the stand out trailers shown was a proof of concept CGI trailer for The Legend of Zelda. This trailer took the art style from the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and boosted it up to look like a Lord of the Rings movie (and this was before the first LotR movie came out). Fans were excited, and it was also a big Ace up Nintendo fans sleeve to stick in the face of fans of the upcoming PS2 and Xbox consoles.
Then Nintendo officially unveiled the game and fans jaws dropped. It didn’t look anything like the Lord of the Rings -which unfortunately for Nintendo had now just been released and if they had a Zelda game that would have given LotR fans their fix of a realistic fantasy world may have sold gangbusters. Instead, the game looked like a Disney movie.
It had cell shaded graphics like the Dreamcast game Jet Set Radio, but to take things a step further Nintendo even called it toon shading. Link looked like a Funko Pop with a big round head and big eyes and fan reaction couldn’t have been more negative.
And then the game came out and whilst I’m sure there are many players who didn’t give it a chance based purely on its graphics, everyone who did play it was blown away at how good it was.
The graphics allowed Link to show much more expression than had been seen before, and the large ocean world that could be explored was perhaps only possible at this stage due to the stylised graphics.
The legacy of the game is that graphics wise the game hasn’t aged at all. Like. At. All. The Wii U update added some shape and depth to the graphics which made them prettier, but as an art style choice, a game could come out today and look exactly like Wind Waker and this makes it timeless compared to something like the eventual release of Twilight Princess which went for the realistic look and by the time it released around the launch of the PS3 was already greatly outdated looking.
