Lighting/shadows - they all mostly look prebaked and inaccurate...look at day battle, then night battle and you'll see lot of strange stuff there...lack of torch lights reflecting on objects, lack of shadows from torches, same shadows in night as in day and so on...while you don't notice lot of these things if you're focused on battle, I always look for that stuff when tech demos are released...hence why Deep Down amazed me so much.

Anyway, even with those flaws it still looks very nice, so, as I said, I wouldn't mind at all that style.

I can't believe people are still talking about this, given this GLARING contradiction in this abomination of game design.

I hope this is true this sounds incredible! Online multiplayer is surprising.

I guess I really didn't pay that deep of attention to what I saw of it then. But I liked the art style, for sure.

That's actually the part of the rumor that Iove most. It sounds like Zelda U is taking a Metroid approach to exploring and completing dungeons.

Fake as the cake!

I'm going to doubt the accuracy of a lot of this rumor for the time being. Sounds too good to be true honestly :P

I hope they greatly improve the difficulty of enemies and bosses.

Well Zelda have never been a hard game since the NES days. I don't expect them to change that unless they add a difficulty mode, and even the Skyward Sword "hard mode" (Hero mode I believe it was called) was very easy.

No, it sounds like Zelda U is entirely unrelated to this fabrication found on 2ch.

Seriously, explain this to me. You can play the first five dungeons in any order you choose -- but you can only progress in them by playing them all concurrently.

This is an outrageous contradiction!

Aside from not making any logical sense, it's awful game design. The sort of thing that sounds really great until you actually wonder how it would work. Imagine that you're playing Ocarina of Time, and you're in the Forest Dungeon. You get a couple of rooms in... and hit a wall. You are unable to progress. You don't know why, or what you have to do, because there's no handholding any more because nobody likes Navi. You actually need an item from the Water Temple to continue -- maybe eventually you figure this out. So you head to the Water Temple to get said item. But you can't get deep enough into the Water Temple to get that item, because there's a locked door that can only be opened by a switch in the Shadow Temple. I don't know how you figured that out, because there's no handholding or hints in this game, but you did. You went to the Shadow Temple, hit the switch, went back to the Water Temple, got the item, went back to the Forest Temple, progressed through a room... and hit another wall. Now you need something from the Fire Temple, but you can't get to that thing without first going to the Spirit Temple... and so on.

Maybe you're still thinking that sounds great. Well, you're wrong. It's a horrible, horrible idea.

Nobody seems to have any appreciation for the cleverness of the dungeon designs in Zelda games. You know when you're in the third dungeon in Skyward Sword, and you're using the item you got in the first dungeon in new ways that make for some really interesting puzzles, as well as adding to its combat applications against new enemies? That would all be scrapped if the dev team had to make it possible for you to play through the dungeons in any order. To say nothing of how the plot would be affected!

One last issue with the first quote -- Aonuma hated the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. He went out of his way to "fix" it in the 3DS remake because he was so dissatisfied with how complicated it felt. There is no way he would use that dungeon as his inspiration for the entire overarching design of a new Zelda game.

This entire "rumor" reads like a fanfiction by someone who has played maybe two Zelda games in their entire life -- Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess -- and who doesn't understand why you can't just slap a green tunic on Dark Souls and call it the best Zelda game ever.