Role-Player said:
The more I get into Wind Waker the less I feel Ocarina of Time deserves that position. There's a lot that Wind Waker gets right and better than OoT that's it's just staggering to see people after all these years cling to it while neglecting the game on accounts of "kiddie graphics", which to eloquently quote many users of this site... Is just retarded.
I might be wrong but I don't think that most of those who dismissed wind waker on account of its "kiddie graphics" are the ones who would choose an n64 zelda as the best game ever. Those two games are pretty cartoonish looking in their own right and the nintendo 64 has the reputation of being a "kiddie" console so brats who felt their sexuality was threatened if they played a kiddy-looking game à la mario stayed away from it- you must have noticed this in Portugal where the n64 sales were catastrophic because most kids wanted a playstation instead of an n64 due to the kiddy game rep.
Most of the fuss I saw about the wind waker's looks was on the internet right after they first showcased it and it was either people whining because they wanted the "realistic" looking zelda from the
spaceworld 2000 demo or because they were disappointed that they would be playing a child again instead of the adult character they had in Ocarina of Time.
Anyway, I for one loved Wind Waker's looks and think it's one of the few 3d games whose graphics are timeless, even though I would have preferred it if they kept one the early designs they had for the main character.
As for why I prefer any of the n64 zeldas to wind waker it has to do with the game's focus. The n64 zeldas were action/adventure/rpg-lite/whatever they were set in a vast gameworld with plenty of different cities/villages each with their own style/races , shitloads of npcs with unique lines for each one and most of them had quests for you.
In those games as you progressed further into the main storyline you could see the gameworld changing as a consequence to your actions and the npcs also reacting to it.
Wind Waker, on the other hand is an action/adventure game with not even that much adventuring in it, there are few villages(3) with even fewer npcs and even fewer quest givers. Of course the controls and combat are vastly improved and some new mechanics like the rope swinging are pretty fun but the gameworld is pretty much empty, instead of exploring the land to find villages of different races all you find is mini-islands with mini-games, filler content, and it all looks the same there's no variation in environment, always the same kind of islands, most of the game is going from one dungeon to the next and beating the minigames as you travel from one to the next, in the n64 zeldas every dungeon was deep in the territory of some race with its main village, npcs, side-quests etc, wind waker has a static world by comparison that doesn't really feel endangered, you're just there to prevent the bad guy from becoming all mighty, in the n64 games the world is already fucked up and you're trying to fix what little is left.
