| ZyroXZ2 said: Your reply is worth a chuckle, too. Who said it looks like an N64 game? I didn't. Don't be that person that makes up narratives by clinging to select words. I clearly said it has textures that look like they come from an N64 game (and also the sprites that spin to face your camera, which you didn't mention because you know that's exactly how those sprites worked on the N64). You haven't seen the game yourself on your own TV, and you're also talking to someone who spent most of my overall gaming time in my life on the N64. So I'll humor your hyperbole despite knowing you'll see this on a tiny mobile screen or even a PC monitor, and not a big screen TV like I had to since I have to capture via HDMI for my recordings (ergo, imagine seeing this on a big screen TV):
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OK, first off, I wrote that post earlier when I was rushing out the door to do something and so I didn't notice that you were the one who actually wrote/recorded the review. I assumed that you had just linked to somebody else's review. I should have read your post more carefully before replying and so I apologize. I would have been more sensitive and precise in my delivery of criticism if I had known. I think what you have there is overall a good review and is worth watching. Thank you for your contribution.
That said, please keep in mind that if you zoom close enough into any texture it will eventually start to look like N64 res. I do not agree that these are N64 textures. What matters is what the game and the textures look like during normal gameplay at distances that players spend most of their time seeing. Take a screenshot of Kokariko village:
Now compare that to the picture I quoted from your post above. As much as I love OoT, looking at the cliff on the right frankly you can barely even tell that it is even a rock face. Honestly, you could probably even mistake that for perhaps being dense forest with green foliage on the top and this is because the texture resolution is so incredibly low. Now in your pic, if you look at the mountain in the background it is clearly a rockface which is made evident by the advanced textural bump mapping on it. Now I agree that the rockface doesn't appear to have much texturing apart from bump mapping but as I will discuss more later, that's a part of the stylistic decision that goes into cell-shaded games.
It's the same with the characters. If we were to zoom out in your above pic, I am sure that the texture detail on the character shown would look much better than the two Kakariko villagers shown on the left of my pic. For example, the use of bump mapping on the character's hat and jacket collar would create a much more realistic look than when zoomed way in. It's when you zoom in close that the artistic feel of the game starts to fail, but no game is designed to hold graphical fidelity when camera's go really close to objects. Keep in mind that bump mapping is something that didn't even start appearing on video game textures until the original XBox. I don't think that even the Gamecube had the shader support to draw bump mapping (if it did, it was never used in any of the AAA Ninty GCN games that I own).
Also, as I said in my original post, this is a cell-shaded game and so the art style does not require extremely hi-res textures to convey a sense of polish and feel. So even if these texture fidelity is say at a PS3 or maybe even Gamecube level, the stylistic choices of the game need to be factored in to the overall look and feel of the textures. Cell shaded games always focus more lighting and shadows the way that cell animation does and lets the player's imagination fill in the missing textural detail. This was done in BotW as well. It just didn't seem fair to me to make the textural resolution one the biggest points of graphical criticism for a cell-shaded game like this.
With regards to the grass sprites that always face the camera regardless of viewing angle, I get how this graphical technique was used on the N64 (as well as 100% of the time on the SNES and NES). That said, on the N64, that technique was used to render entire trees (Mario 64) or at best the grassy shrubs that link cut for rupees in certain places in OoT, not individual blades of grass in a large open field. Take a look at the grass in the above screenshot from Kakariko, that was about as advanced as grass effects got on the N64 (a flat green plane). Even the gamecube generally had completely flat grass textures with the odd use of grass sprites near cliff edges, etc (take a look at Tallon overworld from Metroid Prime). I didn't start to see entire fields of grass rendered vertically (using sprites or otherwise) until at least Mario Golf on the Gamecube and that was a game that used preset camera angles (plus it looked horrible, they should have just stuck with 2D textures, it looked way worse than in this pokemon game). This type of grass rendering didn't really become successful on Nintendo consoles, in my opinion, until Xenoblade Chronicles which was one of the most graphically advanced games on the Wii.
Anyways, again I apologize for my delivery and lack of precision in my original post. There are many points in your review that I agree with such as the outdated battle system and lack of voice-overs. Overall, I found your review insightful and helpful and frankly it is better than some of the stuff that comes from IGN. I just respectfully disagree with your position on the N64 comparison.
