Art style should never matter.

Good grief that looks awful.

art style is important.

Unfortunatley not. My original impression upon seeing WW Link, was that he looked like Parapa the Rappa. A "cartoony" Zelda with that old booklet art style would be FAR superior to WW's very odd "Toon" look.

The two main problems with the toon design were (A) those horrible football-shaped heads and tiny bodies; Link and co looked like the fucking Powerpuff Girls, (B) reducing objects to big, bland slabs of one colour. Yuck.

Your post fails, because art style and graphics are two distinct things. While better graphic opens up more options for art style, great art style can be achieved with shitty graphics. Look at all the images of retro games in the different sigs on this site. Monkey Island (the first one) had a great art style, while the graphics was eons away from todays standards - just as an example. Or Wind Waker HD keeps the art style of the original, while having better graphics. So the rest of the post after your initial words totally missing the point of the thread.

Only played OoT so I can't really comment unless I look at videos of the other Zelda games. I was hoping you were referring to Anime when I clicked on this thread.

To me it's a question of whether the art style gets in the way of my enjoyment of the game. Dragon Quest uses a cartoony art style but I don't care as it's a turn based RPG. Wind Waker annoyed the hell out of me because the art style had all sorts of gameplay implications: Shooting arrows felt worse than in Ocarina of Time, swinging the sword was less fun due to the exaggerated animations and in general action sequences (fights, etc.) felt less intense because you were in a cartoon. And you certainly can't replicate Ocarina of Time's epic last fight in a cell shaded game.

Other examples:
- I appreciate the simpler art style of the new Smash Bros. as it'll help keep track of your character.
- I think Mario 3D World should have a simpler art style because you get confused in multiplayer and forget what your character looks like all the time.
- I hated Skyward Sword's style because to me Zelda should feel more epic and less funny / cartoony

In general,I'm not a big fan of cell-shaded graphics. So,I care about the artstyle to a point,but gameplay is always first in my book.

Agreed. Cel-shading ultimately wasn't the problem. It was the way they did it that put me off. I just don't like how Toon Link looks. And the 2008 Prince of Persia proved that you can do cel-shading that still has a good amount of texture and detail. I saw a lot of people claim SS was cel-shaded, but it really wasn't. I thought the graphics for SS were fine, though I'd still prefer something more akin to TP or the E3 demo, as they are a natural extention of teh OoT art style.

I'd rather not have a cel-shaded Zelda, at least not for home consoles. But if I'm goin to have one, I'd rather have it look more like the old Zelda art than Toon Link style.