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VitroBahllee on 28 January 2014
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F0X said:
VitroBahllee said:
I wonder if you would argue the same points if you didn't happen to like the art style. Frankly, the people who prefer the whimsical art styles are in a vocal minority - definitely less people, but more passionate. That doesn't make them 'right' about their preferences. It doesn't make those preferences the best possible choice for keeping Zelda a top series appealing to the most people.


Meaningless. I wonder if you would argue the same points if you liked the art style. And what is this notion of being "right" about art style preferences? It's a subject with much more room for subjective judgement than most, to begin with. 

"It doesn't make those preferences the best possible choice for keeping Zelda a top series appealing to the most people. "

This is what I'm getting at, but my view extends to a much broader scale.

There's a clear difference in sales between 'regular' Zelda games and games which look deliberately weird and call it an 'art style.'

One can argue the merits of such a 'style,' but the games that do not purport to have a 'style' all sell better.

Nobody talks about Mario's 'art style.' Mario games simply look like Mario games. 

If they made one that deliberately looked different, as 'Yoshi's Island' did, they would say it had an 'art style.'

To act like the correlation between 'regular' looking Zelda games and high sales is spurious is willful blindness, at best.

To ascribe the lower sales of the stranger looking (i.e. 'style-having') games to other issues such as controller add ons and install base is reaching because there is a different supposed 'factor' involved for each game. They all have two things in common. One is the differing art style. The other is their lower comparitive sales.

In fact, one could easily point to the fact that the period of time in which Aonuma has been directing Zelda has been one of series sale decline, aside from the one time he made a game he operated against his desire to 'surprise' fans of the series and made the game they expected, Twilight Princess.