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Chark said:
When this game came out my brother and I were very divided. He borrowed a GameCube to play it, I didn't have an opportunity to play it so I can't say anything about gameplay/story but this isn't about that. I strongly disliked the graphics and to a lesser extent the art. Windwaker is the example of games I choose to example bad cell shading. Cell shading has come a long way since then and has produced some great looking games, but in the early days like with Windwaker, cell shading was void of detail. Colors covered large spaces and touched eachother without pleasant transition with movement. Shadows were ugly, darkening colors flatly on surfaces making it look more like the colors were glitching from dark to light more than actually displaying a shadow effect, atleast when movement was involved.

Cell shading looks hundreds of times better today; more detail, better shadow effects, and a wider array of colors. I've played about half of Phantom Hourglass and that game looks better than Windwaker. Early cell shading just looked bad. This is obviously opinion, but if you look at the modern examples of Cell Shading how can you attribute Windwaker as having the best? If anything, its one of the worst. Perhaps your appreciation of the games stems from the game itself, how much fun you had, the story, the world, or even how much you liked the graphics back then. Just because something is new and different doesn't make it better, it helps though. To me Windwaker never looked good, I felt it looked like a blotchy mess of solid color, like playing a game of a children's coloring book with only 3 crayons and half of the lines missing.....ooooh that's a good one, I should have told my brother that back in the day, lol.

That's what I love about windwaker and makes it look like a hand drawn cartoon. I don't like the gradients and soft shadows of 'evolved' cell shading. The hard transitions is what makes it look great to me. I love the way the shadows play around when you carry a torch into the volcano.
Movement worked fine with this technique and gave it depth where a static screenshot would look like a flat drawing. This play off between a 2D and 3D look gave it its unique feel.