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S.Peelman on 18 February 2021
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Marth said:
S.Peelman said:

Doesn’t really matter to me in this case, it’s an adventure game, not a racing game or a fighting game. A game like this is fine in 30fps because it’s slow enough. Sure, higher is better if you can but if you have to choose then in this case I’d pick an increase in graphics and effects and lighting. Skyward Sword looked fine for a Wii game, but even on that console it wasn’t the best. It’s kind of flat now. They brought Wind Waker into a more modern age but they didn’t do that for Twilight Princess and don’t seem to be doing it for Skyward Sword.

(..)

They had to because otherwise it doesn’t work for a lot of people. Besides, the way they did it seems to destroy a lot of the finesse the motion control has when you use that. In my mind, I thought they would make it so that Link’s sword would mimic your motion of the control stick if they’d ever make a controller operated version; like if you’d slowly rotate the stick Link would slowly move his sword in a circle. But it doesn’t really seem like that’s the case. It looks like he just stabs when pushing it down and slashes at a perfect 45 degree angle when you push the stick diagonally. Now I could be wrong about this, because we haven’t seen how it works when you have to solve one of the eye puzzles.

Anyway having said all that, obviously I’ll buy it day one. It’s a mainline Zelda game and therefore good; it’s still on my honourable mentions in my Top 50 list after all.

60 fps does help Skyward Sword to be more responsive to the motion controls. And Switch has no problems getting to that performance.

The contrast is that Wind Waker mostly just popped with some modern shaders added. Gamecube did not support that. Those shaders already exist for Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword which is why they look largely the same but with a much higher resolution.

Twilight Princess is also a Gamecube game though, and it uses Wind Waker's engine, but that's beside the point; the point is that with Wind Waker HD they actually did do something to modernise its look. I agree that upping performance is always good, I mean, why not, but it's a bit of a letdown that they wouldn't give the rest of the game some love. Continuing;

mZuzek said:

Ehh...

60fps is not necessary for a Zelda game, I agree with you on that, but it makes the game look a lot nicer. Having built a good PC recently, I've grown quite tired of playing games at 30fps whenever I go back to consoles, it just feels like a thing of the past to me. And sure, you could say Skyward Sword's graphics look like a thing from the past, but like... I can go back to older games and I don't mind outdated graphics, at least not as long as the art direction is good. But I do mind, say, having to play old games at a 4:3 aspect ratio. And to me, 30fps is slowly entering that same territory, where it just makes games feel old.

It does feel lazy from their part, I suppose. Not even the textures look upscaled, never mind the blocky models and basic lighting. Given enough effort, I don't think they'd even need to sacrifice 60fps for a graphical overhaul, but, it is what it is. To me, 60fps is a massive upgrade on its own.

Yeah, I'll be the last one to complain about graphics on for example an N64 game if I would play one right now, if I'm playing it on N64. For a rerelease though I think it'd be nice to see some kind of progress; there's always something you can do to get a game's appearance to be closer to the original vision or tweak some stuff with some more modern tech. There's a lot of shades between just upping the resolution and doing a FFVII style remake. Or even between upping the resolution and a OoT3D style remake. WWHD was one of those shades.

So that comes back to the first thing, if for this game and these kinds of games they had to choose between fps or graphical fidelity (which indeed I don't really believe, Switch is plenty powerful enough), I personally would have picked graphical fidelity. If they didn't have to but just chose to not do anything about the graphics, to, I don't know, stay as true to the original as possible regardless or something, then I guess I just don't agree much with Nintendo's line of thinking on that part.

So long story short, what they did with fps and controls is good, but they could've done more.