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Why did opinions on these 2 Zelda games completely change after 10+ years?


Zap!

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When The Wind Waker was first released in 2002, it received quite a bit of negative press, mostly for the cel-shading which resulted in it's cartoony look. Now the it's considered to be among the best Zelda games ever, which I blame hipsters for.

 

Then there's the case of 2006's Twilight Princess, which got near universal praise by critics and players alike when it came out in 2006. Now it gets hated on quite a bit, especially if you rank it too high.

 

Why is those though? Why were so many opinions the opposite when these games were first released? You don't hear about this in any other Zelda game. Why these? Did opinions really change that much, or is this revisionist history?

 

Side note: Any other games where the majority of opinions have changed? I can think of a movie where I will predict it will. Come back in 15 years and see how low The Force Awakens goes <runs & hides>.

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Nothing revisionist about it, or hipster.

 

The only people who hated really on Wind Waker fell from what I recall into 2 groups. One were the babies who couldn't get over themselves with the art style and just mocked it. The other, depending on how they like their Zelda a legit gripe was all the sailing and having a smaller amount of dungeons. Personally up until Breath of the Wild I've always considered Wind Waker the best of the 3D titles and that never changed as it had real charm, a good distance play/time wise to it, and it was fairly unique beyond the cartoon presentation that still holds up.

 

TP though I think it got probably overkill praise at the time because of the whole GC and Wii situation more than anything. Grossly delayed GC game gets pushed further to be a prop for the Wii. People forgave it then because it was one systems parting shot, and anothers selling point so people gave it a general pass being a starting game on Wii which in turn would see the fairly decent third party support the GC saw dry up because they didn't go HD. TP though once people got over the initial year into it or so impressions the cracks showed. You had some horrid levels of slow dragged out moments with vast fairly empty areas slow to cross just eating time. They retained a dated save mechanism of the SNES that when your save picks up (items and all) at the last door(door, cave, etc opening) you exit causing loss of goods/work. You had a heap of poorly handled time and again repetitive annoying glowing ball fetch quests to inch a bit more in the game to be stuck doing it again and again. The presentation value, story, the intrigue was there but the game play and other bottlenecks are a dog.

 

About that era is also when you caught media companies like IGN (they may have started it) doing 'a look back' bits when they re-review a game that got just spooged over with hard core praise. They'd come back a year or two after when the love died off and would re-play and re-review games and you'd find some pretty shocking drops in score as people went in fresh and with no hype. GTA4 had this happen and it went fairly lower as have other games.

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I'll have to agree to disagree. I still say that WW is possibly the worst Zelda console game ever, and think that art has no place in a Zelda game, while TP was possibly the best Zelda game ever. I loved every minute of it, and it was a challenge to the very end. It also had the best dungeons I have ever seen in any Zelda game.

Edited by Zap!
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The biggest problem with wind waker was the annoying shouting/grunting sounds he made every time he did anything. I hadn't played a Zelda game since snes, started up WW and almost took it and thew it in the trash.

Other the game play was fine - I wish I hadn't sold the game with a game guide to a friend for just $10 bucks tho. :(

Still play though Link to the past at least once a year.

Edited by H454
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I understand people got used to WW style after these years. Initial shock from an expected continuation of Ocarina style was a barrier for some.

I don't know what changed about TP.

 

Personally, I always loved WW. Its style is beatifull, and I enjoyed the sailing too.

I never really liked TP. I don't like playing the dog with a demon riding me.

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WW got at just that time when realistic meant good in the eyes of the gaming public (and by that, I mean drooling morons). It was not a time when stylistic graphics were given any credit no matter how creative or well done they were. Opinions on that have relaxed somewhat, so WW has been given another chance.

 

TP... I cant comment, since I didnt play it much, but I agree that it was like OOT, which was the first Zelda in a long time and was loved just for being something new. I personally put OoT near the bottom of my Zelda pile, maybe Ill do the same for TP when I finish it.

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TP would have been great if they trimmed off the BS chase/fetch quests that were there just to pad the play time. Finding those pillars toward the end, while easy, just felt like a time eater. And I agree with those who talk about the wolf part-searching for those bugs sucked. I didn't like they used that concept for the trials in Skyward Sword.

 

WW was alright. The graphics were gorgeous but the sailing felt tedious as the world itself wasn't really "big". The game was a tad on the easy side if you were decent at Ocarina of Time.

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I think you're exaggerating the dislike of the Wind Waker toon graphics. It got great reviews when it was new. Personally, I love the style and think it looks amazing. This was around the time of LEGO Star Wars where style could make a boring concept seem fresh.

 

Twilight Princess was a launch game, and had some motion controls for aiming which were considered fresh and interesting at the time. There was also a vocal group of people who wanted more realistic graphics. I think this is a brown, boring mess, and the fact that it's all in standard definition makes it age badly. I got stuck in the endless tutorial section and lost interest.

 

I never finished either one, which led me to believe that maybe I don't like Zelda games as much as I thought I did.

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I think you're exaggerating the dislike of the Wind Waker toon graphics. It got great reviews when it was new. Personally, I love the style and think it looks amazing. This was around the time of LEGO Star Wars where style could make a boring concept seem fresh.

 

Twilight Princess was a launch game, and had some motion controls for aiming which were considered fresh and interesting at the time. There was also a vocal group of people who wanted more realistic graphics. I think this is a brown, boring mess, and the fact that it's all in standard definition makes it age badly. I got stuck in the endless tutorial section and lost interest.

 

I never finished either one, which led me to believe that maybe I don't like Zelda games as much as I thought I did.

The reviews did great but in the six month~ run time before it was out was a wall of entitled whining and bitching because it didn't look like Ocarina of Time and therefore sucked and was heresy. It's not hard to come across the period crybaby stuff just going absolutely nuts over it. WW though is the only pre-Switch Zelda 3D game I've finished and gone back to do it again happily. I tried a few Ocarina restarts with no luck after so long. TP I never did more than maybe 1/3 of it, I forget, and SS I did maybe 2/3 of that game. TP just wasn't that good for the reasoning brought up here by myself and others already. it was a lot of fetch quests and very dated mechanics that held it back along with the wide empty open spaces and slow movement through them. And you're right it didn't age well which is why it got that rapid fire HD update after WW on the WiiU. Hopefully those HD remasters make it to Switch so they can see some proper sales.

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Side note: Any other games where the majority of opinions have changed? I can think of a movie where I will predict it will. Come back in 15 years and see how low The Force Awakens goes <runs & hides>.

 

It happens with a lot of games. At release there is often either too much hype, which makes people view it as better than it is. Or at release there are too many gamers with an ax to grind, who are angry about what they heard about the direction of a game from pre-release news and can't wait to skewer the game.

 

In the second case, eventually the haters get bored of slagging the game, and they stop drowning out the voices of the people who appreciate it.

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A lot of it's the mob mentality that gamers have these days, fueled by the internet (which, yes, existed even back in 2003). A few people pick something to hate on and everybody jumps on the bandwagon so they feel like they're part of some "movement", however minor the issue. (You see this in other parts of life too, not just gaming.)

 

The criticism of WW started because there were some screenshots released a little bit prior to that that showed a realistic looking Link, so a lot of people were excited to have a Lord of the Rings style "gritty" Zelda made possible by the GameCube. They were upset when that didn't happen. In the beginning, this was just a *few* people, because honestly I don't think many people had even seen those early screenshots before until people started posting them on public forums and such. But it spread quickly.

 

Over time, bandwagons tend to fall apart and people grow up and make their own individual decisions.

 

I don't know about TP; I think I own it but I don't think I've ever actually played it, and I hadn't heard about its changing fortunes like I've noticed WW's.

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A lot of it's the mob mentality that gamers have these days, fueled by the internet (which, yes, existed even back in 2003). A few people pick something to hate on and everybody jumps on the bandwagon so they feel like they're part of some "movement", however minor the issue. (You see this in other parts of life too, not just gaming.)

 

 

yes it happens in all aspects of life. But it is very prominent in gaming communities, in part because the games media actively feeds the behavior.

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yes it happens in all aspects of life. But it is very prominent in gaming communities, in part because the games media actively feeds the behavior.

 

Yeah I agree, they definitely fan the flames. I do remember some of the big gaming sites posted comparisons themselves to the original tech demos.

 

Funnily enough I was covering SpaceWorld 2000 for a web site at the time and I just realized I actually have the original tech demo screenshots that people lost their minds over later. These were released along with the announcement of the system. Nintendo said at the time that this was not a game; it was just a tech demo. But some people assumed that the game would look like this, and instead Wind Waker is what we got.

post-6166-0-55389400-1510601568.jpg

post-6166-0-77346400-1510601572.jpg

post-6166-0-77306400-1510601576.jpg

post-6166-0-25815000-1510601581.jpg

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I remember those photos from the tech demo. I can also remember when both games were new and yes WW was panned essentially for the most part mainly because of the Cel graphics. I didn't care and picked it up anyway bitd and thorough enjoyed it! However, the biggest complaint that was justified as the sailing. Luckily the HD remake takes care of the gameplay issues of the original. TP...I also snagged this and played through it start to finish at the Wii's launch. I thought the graphics were nice, but I really didn't care of the story much and have never played through it again since.

 

However, my favorite 3D Zelda has been Skyward Sword as I literally played through it twice in a row and still had hoped for an HD re-release on the WiiU. I'm sure that will appear on the Switch or whatever comes after.

 

2D Zelda? Nothing can beat the masterpiece that is Link to the Past...

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Thanks for posting those spacecadet!

 

That was my initial complaint with WW. We knew the GC could produce prettier graphics than what we saw in OoT, and then Nintendo gives us cel-shaded Toon Link from out of nowhere. It was obvious that Big N had wanted the full 3D polygon look, but knew in order to get the game out in a timely manner, they were going to have to forego that and use cel shading. A major copout imo. I've said as much on other forums and been attacked and derided, but it's the simple truth. Some people prefer the toon look, and that's ok, but it's not the best Nintendo could have done at the time and we all knew it.

 

The actual gameplay in WW was lacking too. Instead of an interesting world map, we were given a mostly blank blue ocean in a conveniently divided grid. Sure, the grid worked for original LoZ, but by the time of Gamecube, we had moved past that. Again, Nintendo cut some corners in the interest of time and the game suffered for it. Why some people still think it's the best 3D Zelda ever is beyond me, as it simply makes no sense (from a technical pov).

 

Twilight Princess is a bit more difficult to pin down. I don't remember anyone being in love with it at the time. But we were in love with the Wii console itself at launch, and the new Zelda got to ride the wave. It was a decent enough Zelda game, but (like Majora's Mask) wasn't ever going to be a flagship title for the series.

 

Btw Crossbow, I was really hoping for a Skyward Sword HD release on Wii U also. It would have been great to have all the major post-64 Zeldas remastered together on one system :)

Edited by glazball
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^^Oh come on. Obvious? Hardly. Nintendo chose to go with that art style because it wasn't like Ocarina of time which was even showing its age ever so slightly against even Majora's Mask. They wanted something with a style to it that would continue to age gracefully and look good for a good time to come and cel-shaded visuals were it for them and other developers too. People back then were already steadfast and vocal how Link to the Past still looked as fantastic as it did over a decade earlier and didn't show it's age. Ocarina was already getting digs like FF7 for being jaggy, low res, looking very dated and ugly. To avoid the age effect they went away from direct polygons and chose to lay beautiful art that'll stand up over a polygonal mask. Yes those tech demo guys look fairly nice, but they do look dated against even Twilight Princess which was a Cube game too. Both TP and WW have held up on a visual stand point that even the HD upgrades on WiiU weren't like a blown out of the water situation but just upgraded visuals with more attention to detail but it wasn't like redoing ugly into beautiful say like the 3DS did to those 2 N64 Zelda games.

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Twilight Princess is a bit more difficult to pin down. I don't remember anyone being in love with it at the time. But we were in love with the Wii console itself at launch, and the new Zelda got to ride the wave. It was a decent enough Zelda game, but (like Majora's Mask) wasn't ever going to be a flagship title for the series.

That's interesting. What you say certainly rings true in retrospect, but I seem to recall people being in love :lust: with ZELDA AT LAUNCH!! but you're probably right, it was new system infatuation.

 

The only negative review that I remember was from a crazy site called Actionbutton.net, and it was VERY negative, hilariously so in my opinion. One star out of four. The site's graphics are deliberately monochrome and grainy, just as pasted here. The site's archive is down but I found a copy of the review on wayback. https://web.archive.org/web/20070716173345/http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=70

 

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TWILIGHT PRINCESS (*)

zelda.gifa review of

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

a videogame by Nintendo

published by Nintendo

for the Nintendo Wii

text by heather campbell

score: star.gif (out of four)

 

Bottom line: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is “Grandma’s way of tricking you into taking out the trash.”

 

star.gif

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is video-game busywork. Eiji Aonuma and Shigeru Miyamoto had a long weekend and didn’t have time to come up with a lecture, so they handed out some old worksheets at the beginning of class. Like High School teachers who subject children to Xeroxes until they think word problems are interesting, ZTP gives you tons of shit to do until you think it’s your duty to go play games just like it.

It isn’t. It’s nobody’s responsibility to finish what amounts to video game homework. We game for fun, for adventure, for revelation. We game for the pleasure of a well-designed, properly balanced combat system. We don’t game to sit through a re-skinned version of a Barnes and Noble discount books puzzle.

There is no reason to find a twig somewhere to light a candle to open a door to get a bigger stick. There’s no bliss in shifting blocks around till they line up. And there’s no fun in bringing a barrel of water across an ugly field. Maybe I’d do these things if they were entertaining, but Twilight Princess is a cover; it only reminds you how much you liked the original song.

And the trick is momentum, teasing you into thinking that Fun Is About To Happen. Zelda: Twilight Princess is the Eyes Wide Shut of Gaming.

I hate games without choices, and there are so few choices in this newest Zelda. Every moment is muted by the clamor of a committee.The game hides in the corner, frightened that you’ll discover its insubstantial self, and deflects your investigation with fishing rods and “more arrows!” It’s so afraid of real exploration (and curiosity’s consequences), that it places you gently at a doorway after a fall into a bottomless pit. Sure, that’s Zelda for you, but at what point are we going to stop making excuses for these games, and start taking them to task? Link doesn’t have extra lives. If human being falls into lava, he shouldn’t wake up next to a door holding his head. UNLESS HE NEVER MOVED TO BEGIN WITH.

Maybe every action is a dream of Link’s?

Or are his failures the only fantasies he has?

We play Zelda because we feel a Gamer’s Obligation to do so. To be up on the current conversations, to say we’ve played it. We’re a community of abused wives, staying in a relationship because it’s our duty. What we should be shouting is after he hit me again, I stomped on his throat and threw him out the window. We shouldn’t hold our heads down and apologize for mistakes that aren’t ours. ZTP is not your fault. Well, it might be. You should have bought a copy of Wind Waker. At least that game made some honest mistakes.

And the truth is, I guess, that none of The Tasks would be so grating if not for the fact that the entirety of Hyrule is populated by Idiots and Retards. Even the fucking cat is retarded. In the first and most maddening of quests, you have to catch a fish for a cat, and the cat refuses the first fish. This serves nothing but to make you hate the cat, and sets the tone for the rest of the world. There are stupid snowmen who can’t remember where the fuck they put a box, sub-human rock creatures who’ve lost their ability to talk, and then there’s that fucking mailman who shows up just to stop you from dashing across the countryside. God, I hate that mailman. He’s a credit card phone call during tedious sex.

Doing things for the people of Hyrule does not elevate Link to the role of hero. He’s just a country-wide caretaker; a blithe pill-giver in a nursing home. Link’s lack of frustration is passed on to the player. He doesn’t give a shit what he does, so the joke is on you.

I swear the game feels like a well-crafted prank. Or like the designers hated us just a little. Splitting hearts into 5ths carries the sting of mild spite. Carry that bottle of water across a field, and you’re rewarded with a 5th of a heart. You know, I’d rather pick up an Actual Bottle of Water and carry it across the street. At least when I’m done, I can drink my Actual Bottle of Water -OR!- be across the street, as opposed to back where I started with a 1/5th of a piece of paper or something.

Imagine doing a favor – and that’s what this whole game is, favors for retards– doing a favor for a friend, and in return, they hand you a bite of sandwich. “Do me four more favors, and I’ll give you the rest of your lunch!” You know what you’d say to that person? “We are no longer friends, dickfuck.”

The story isn’t rewarding enough to put up with block-puzzles and fetch quests. The graphics aren’t so startling that you charge through the world just to catch the next vista. And the control is so stupid, it’s like playing Mario 64 with a Dual Shock broken in half. Swing-swing-swing, crackly swoosh sound — I’m already tired of the Wii-mote.Thanks, Nintendo. With your flagship launch title, you’ve told me “It gets old after a while.”

 

zeldashot.gif

What’s worse, this is a game that speaks a vocabulary only known to gamers. Show it to a friend who doesn’t game, and they’ll disarm you with the simplest question: Why? Ask the game why, and it falls apart like a sculpture of ash. Ask your professor why and he’ll reply, “Because that’s your assignment.” The fact is he was too busy getting drunk to come up with a new lecture. I know. I’ve dated teachers.

At this point, the language of Zelda is stunted. Twilight Princess is inbred, the offspring of games fucking other games in the same small town. If the series wants to flourish, it’s going to have to head out into the wild.

 

Maybe that last line is the inspiration behind Breath of the Wild?

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That is funny, but around the humor which probably made no one take the site seriously but as a troll review to get attention a lot of his points are not only valid, they're correct which is pretty sad.

 

Think back to what IGN and others started to do around the time of GTA4 coming out. Retrospective 1yr later look back re-reviews of games. You find once the rose tinted hype machine stupidity wears off reviewers finally have the balls the lacked before to be honest about things and suddenly you see 10s turn into 7s. TP is much in that realm. Everyone wants to pile accolades on the franchise as long as it never goes so far off the range with some damning gimmick that harms play (like touch only DS zelda with an overly twitchy roll mechanic.) TP was just a great story and atmosphere with a lot of crap that sullied it but so many Zelda sycophants were fine just calling it perfect as they had been chomping at the bit with over a years worth of delays so it would hit Wii too. I think perhaps with perspective people should stop ass kissing known game makers and franchises and be a bit more objective about problems than just giving free passes for the greater good.

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/\/\/\ Above review is hilarious and I actually really get where they are coming from.

 

My experience with these two is a little unusual. I played TP in about 2009 and was playing it at the same time as other AAA games of the era like Mass Effect and Bioshock and God of War II. My reaction to TP was not colored by any blind love for Zelda or the Wii, and I was pretty underwhelmed by TP. The fishing tutorial was confounding, and I found myself wondering what kind of game they were trying to make exactly. The dungeons were nice, but the open world was really empty and the total lack of any real RPG elements made shopping for arrows feel pretty pointless. I finished the game, but couldn't figure out where all the high reviews were coming from.

 

I had purchased WW used for the Gamecube after never owning a GC. I started playing it right after TP (on the Wii). That was a mistake, because I played it long enough to get through the first dungeon which had some puzzles that were repeated 100% from TP (or the other way around). I didn't really get into the boat thing, and so I quit playing the game and never went back.

 

I've played all these games out of order and only recently played Ocarina of Time. I think I like Ocarina better than either of them, but the gameplay is so reminiscent that I'm not sure they are all even worth playing. My advice would be to skip every other 3D Zelda to avoid fatigue and only play one Zelda 3D game per year.

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