Amid all of the online debate that immediately sprang up when footage of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake went live during Tuesday’s Nintendo Direct, I found myself smack in the middle of the range of opinions.
I’m not in love with the graphical style. The new visuals fill in too many gaps in the lower fidelity of the Nintendo 64 original, while giving the whole thing a hazy, chunky, glistening quality that resembles the fan-made Unreal Engine remakes we’ve been watching circulate online for years. But I also didn’t hate it?
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I Can’t Decide if the ‘Ocarina of Time’ Remake Looks Great or Terrible
There’s a weird, toyetic charm to it. Link, Zelda, Ganondorf, and the residents of Hyrule look like they’re caught somewhere between extremely expensive vinyl action figures and those grotesquely funny Photoshop images imagining what Mario or Homer Simpson would look like if they were real people. It’s as compelling as it is repellent.
The reaction online has been all over the place, with some immediately declaring it an ugliness that dips too heavily into the uncanny valley and others praising the designs, with a particular subset making clear that they think the character models are ugly but everything else — the enemies, the environments, the small nuances lurking around every asset — looks just fine, with a particular emphasis on Hyrule Field itself and the Great Deku Tree. Both of which, to me at least, do the thing that any good game remake should do: make it look like how I remember it and not necessarily how it was.
The Zelda franchise is no stranger to controversial artistic swings that pay off. I am old enough to remember the freak-out over Wind Waker’s turn toward a cel-shaded art style, particularly after a GameCube tech demo released the year before Wind Waker’s official reveal got people hyped for a more “realistic” take on the characters and the world.
That is to say, Nintendo generally has a good track record of eventually making you realize why they made the artistic choices they did. Whether that will be the case here remains to be seen.
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