BS. You know what was well received? The Wii U launch Zelda tech demo. Darker and more mature, very TP-like. When they showed Zelda U people were like "it's not as good as the tech demo, but oh well, it'll pass. It's not THAT bad, it's acceptable, they have done much worse in the past, so we dodged the worst bullet."

Keeping Zelda kiddy and cartoony will eventually marginalize the franchise, just like the Wii U is marginalized now. The sales of OoT and TP are no accidents, maybe a vocal group of fanatical fans like the cartoony Link, but the market doesn't. And there are numbers to back it up.

Also, Spemanig, you sure love to treat your personal opinions and theories as truth/fact

No, I don't, but you sure love to not understand what opinions are, how they are meant to be conveyed, and how to read signatures specifically created to address such silly statements.

That was not the reaction at all. The reaction was that the artstyle was absolutely beautiful, and that people couldn't wait to "cut all that grass." The artstyle was almost unanimously and overwhelmingly favorably recieved. Almost no one with an audible voice had a negative or unimpressed opinion of what was shown there. People who don't like WW's artstyle are now in the shunned minority. Zelda U will do pheonominally, especially if/when it launches on the NX. And that will, in no small part, be due to its pheonominal art direction that is absolutely breathtaking.

Again, where does Nintendo say this is a new character model, rather than generic promotional art? If it is a new character model, why show it as a part of a picture of all sorts of other Nintendo characters? Unless you can show where Nintendo says this is Link's new Twilight Princess model, then the most rational answer is probably true. This is just promotional art, not some new TP character model.

Batman wasn't originally an elfen boy in green tights being helped by fairies and saving princesses and inspired by characters such as Peter Pan, Taran, and other Disney influencers. He was a rich, grown, muscular man clad in black, whos mascot was a nocturnal animal commonly associated with fear and darkness. That's why you haven't seen Pan slicing heads off with a beard telling kids "Yes, you do want to grow up." Zelda is not the franchise that needs to listen to an subset of audience that frankly shouldn't be playing these games if that's the kind of stuff they expect from the series.

I can't even say it's not their fault for getting into a series they would have never liked. It's entirely their fault. People say Ocarina of Time is some dark, gritty game when it is literally cartoon violence. Nothing happens that is grittier or has more scary imagery than the most violent scenes in Disney movies like The Little Mermaid or Snow White. Ganon was a cartoon villian with cartoon motivations, and that's fine. All the art for the game was blatantly cartoon art, and that's fine. The game was Rated E and that's fine. If you played OoT and expected the future to be some dark fantasy franchise for older audiences, you were horribly fooling yourself, and I frankly have no clue what you were playing. My advice is to play something else and get over it. Play the Witcher III. People loved that. Play Dark Souls. I personally love that. Play Shadow of Morridor. It won plenty of game of the year awards. There's plenty of high quality dark fantasy games about adult heroes with swords. Zelda has never been for you, and clearly never will.

TP was a misstep in direction. Aonuma has expressed this in literally every interview on the subject. He has literally never gleefully praised the artstyle of TP since release, and always talks back to that time as though he had been coerced into making the game look like that, which he basically was. Literally every single Zelda game since has been a fervant rejection of this direction, and for good reason - it doesn't belong and it never belonged. If Nintendo wants a Batman, they need to make a Batman and not try to make Peter Pan Batman. They learned over a year ago that trying to turn Peter Pan into Batman makes for a lower quality product, which is why SS was so opposite of that despite all its rampant failings, and why Zelda U is going even farther way from that. Which is absolutely as it should be.

Nintendo is the Disney of the gaming industry for a reason. If the idea of that makes you squirm, you shouldn't be here. If Zelda being E Rated puts a frown on your face, you shouldn't be here. If bright primary colors and a young, soft faced, "kiddy" boy clad in a bright colored tunic makes you blush in embarrasment, you shouldn't be here. You don't get it. These games were never made for you, and that's okay. But they never will be either, and that's okay too. Continue playing something else. Continue absolutely love those other games made specifically for you. Or get mad and rant about it. I don't care. These games are being made for me so I'm peachy, and that's as it should be, because I do get it.

It would make me happy if Zelda U was Rated E/E10. It puts a giant smile on my face that Link is visably younger than he's been in a very long time and wrapped in a world filled with lime greens, baby blues, and juicy oranges once again. It makes me dance that Nintendo is treating Zelda like the Disney-esque darling it always has been. That's as it should be. The word grit doesn't belong in any sentence describing The Legend of Zelda other than "This most recent entry in the franchise is totally lacking in any true grit. Why does that matter again? Oh right: Twilight Princess happened like 10 years ago and people still haven't gotten over that. Oh well. Anyway, yeah. The game's good."

Oh yes you do and I'm not talking only about this thread

It was favorably received, but not as favorably as the tech demo. People were disappointed that Ninty abandoned that art style, which is much more appealing to a much wider audience. The new art style is fine, but it's a step down comparing to the tech demo.

No, I don't, and I know you're not.

Of course some people were disappointed. More were relieved. I was unsurprised. I knew it would look nothing like that demo and I knew it would look as great as it ended up looking. The new art style is pheonominal, and runs circles around the tech demo. It's not even close. The tech demo is boring and un-Zelda. The actual footage is breathtaking and completely Zelda.

It's promotional art for Twilight Princess HD. Nintendo doesn't have to say anything. It's blatantly obvious. Link's in the same pose down to his fingers and it's the only instance where a character has gotten new art. Link already has other promo art, including ones based around his TP model, that could have been used instead, but it wasn't. It was likely used because it is being announced soon, and there isn't anything incredebly spoilerific about the image. It's a rerender of an existing encarnation of an existing character. All you need is a solid grasp of basic deductive reasoning to figure it out.

Disney is darker/grittier than most Nintendo fare anyway. Nintendo veers more into almost pre-school design categories with things like Animal Crossing, even the humor/"romance/sex" (ie: kissing) in Disney movies would be too intense for a lot of Nintendo franchises. 

I've owned every Nintendo consolefrom the 1980s onwards outside of the Virtual Boy (which I regret not picking up when it was on clearance at Blockbuster Video) and probably have one of the largest Nintendo collections on this board. 

And the 60s Batman was sillier than any version of Link, it's just up to the audience I think the dictate what they prefer. 

Zelda hardcore fans really aren't the big issue, they will buy the Zelda game no matter what the art style is. 

What Zelda used to represent (probably doesn't anymore) was it was still a mass market IP to the wider crowd of gaming, as in you would get Zelda fans to buy it, but MORE than just the usual Nintendo fans bought Ocarina of Time for example, I know even Playstation fanatics that bought an N64 basically for OoT and GoldenEye, but they had to have it. None of those people bought a GameCube for Wind Waker.

That's the difference between a Zelda game selling 5-8 million copies or the ho-hum 3-4 million that the cartoony ones top off at. When you have a cartoony version of it, it's just a turn off to that second portion of the market and they quickly go elsewhere. That's why it's not really smart business, Zelda fanatics will buy any kind of Zelda game in any art style, but Nintendo is otherwise cutting the legs off the wider mass appeal the franchise could have by force feeding a cartoony style that a very niche audience is asking for. 

Nintendo can push that "we're the sugary sweet company of the game industry" and that's fine. They just won't have a large slice of the home console market ever again I doubt. People don't buy consoles to play on 50-inch HDTVs (soon to be 4KTVs) to play cartoony games anymore, the home console is now for big screen experiences. They will do well with smartphone games though with that aesthic, which will more than pay for the bills, so at least there's that. 

This is where I stop reading. Let's not confuse cutsy art direction meant to appeal to a unisex demographic with educational media created specifically to teach toddlers their ABCs and 123s. Absolutely absurd. "Pre-school design catagories."

More realistic art style after WW art style that wasn't well received back then was one of the reasons, but you cant can not ignore facts that game was on two platforms and that was launch title on Nintendo best selling console ever.