Especially Skyward Sword is in dire need of a Switch remaster. Game looks absolutely gorgeous in HD.
Nah its a great game.
Twilight Princess feels less finished to me, actually. Like a story that was released in the middle of its secondary drafts and not the final one. Wind Waker had things hardly cut out from it, but what was left felt mostly final. TP's plot has so many weird turns and shift in direction from its premise, it makes it feel sort of incomplete to me, particularly the almost total negligence of Wolf Link after the third dungeon, if it wasn't for how it comes back into play very abruptly in City in the Sky. The story, is god damn terrible in TP, that's for sure. Without Midna I wouldn't like anything in it.
I thought the dungeons tended to lack complexity. The best ones I recall are the first one, the pirate ship and water/zombie one. But the second temple is absurdly short, way below the Zelda norm at that point in time, and a trend I feel continued with ALBW and BotW. IIRC, it took me just 20 minutes.
Now this is a weird argument to me. Wind Waker clearly has large parts cut from it. Like think about how the beginning of the game sets up 3 orbs and 3 dungeons except when you get to the 3rd dungeon, it's not there and you instead are forced to run around the overworld and shoot a wall before the game just gives you the last orb. Clearly there was meant to be a dungeon there and it's so obvious and awkwardly paced because of it. Then there's the Triforce Hunt which is even more clear padding in place of what was supposed to be more dungeons. Twilight Princess does nothing like that and never feels like there should be something there like a dungeon but instead there's some fetch quest being put in place of one. TP has a great progression of dungeons that build upon one another while Wind Waker has half the amount and they only start to develop into something interesting by the last one. By last one, I mean the Earth Temple because Ganon's Tower is another very clear cut corner compared to something like Hyrule Castle in TP.
I really felt like Jabu and the ghost ship could have done with a dungeon after the work to find it. Instead of the trifoce quest the ice and fire islands turned into dungeons for the pieces would have been better but even the lack of 1 or 2 more dungeons only scratching the surface of things wrong with WW.
Hell no
True, true, but they work their way around it. I guess I'm just more critical of how story is implemented than gameplay, because it was like "Oh, I thought there'd be a temple, oh well" as opposed to "This story is actually nonsense" which is how I started to feel once you get to the twilight realm in TP.
Even from a story perspective it feels cut short. Like, it's apparent that what happens is a work around and it just feels awkward. Like Ganon uses some curse to make it eternal night but then it just kind of goes away even though you do nothing to confront that? You meet new people and cultures at the first 2 orb locations and so you'd assume the 3rd would be the same but the island is destroyed. Did they all die? Was there no one there ever? Why is Jabu Jabu behind a rock on Link's island? It's very slapped together because they clearly intended for there to be more there. And the Triforce Hunt is nothing if you want to talk about story. Literally nothing happens. I don't really think there's any moments that egregious in TP. Even when that game has its fetch quest, there's story reasons, things happen and characters develop.
There is a timeline where WW had another full year of development and ended up being the best 3D Zelda game.
Funny, I'd have said SS has bad presentation and bad content, despite some decent stuff.
Listen to this guy. Wesker knows what he's talking about.
To me, Wind Waker's exploration was very much a beta Breath of the Wild. The first time exploring it, it was so full of mystery, you'd come across random islands and wonder what was going on there, some islands you couldn't even land on, etc. And while out on the ocean, you'd come across pirates, new enemies, crazy storms, etc.
I didn't mean necessarily those exact scrapped dungeon concepts, I just mean create more dungeons from scratch to finish the game. Sort of like how Link's Awakening added a new dungeon in its DX rerelease (though obviously higher quality than that one).
The bolded is just flat out wrong. We only have to look at the main gimmick of each title. One has you influencing the wind, not only a part in traversal but also other gameplay aspects like the deku leaf. The other has a shitty wolf transformation that does nothing but make you wish it didn't excist every time it comes up. It adds absolutely nothing positive to the experience.
Wind Waker's map becomes fairly systematic once you get a look at it.
Wind Waker's map becomes fairly systematic once you get a look at it.
This is what I dislike about it. It's just a grid. One square means one island. The rest is almost always just empty water. And when you're in water, your very limited to what you can do. Sailing is just kind of boring and for me, it just started to feel like I was passively sailing the same blue water texture until I found the rock that belonged to that square. There was just so much empty space in between everything and a lot of the time, like you said, you couldn't even do anything or there was hardly much to do.
I preferred Hyrule Field in TP because it was much more condensed. It's not really a huge mass, in fact it's smartly divided into smaller parts and the variety in landmass, altitude, environments, etc. allow it to be more interesting and varied than the same old empty ocean throughout WW.
It was cool how, for example, you could get to Lake Hylia a number of different ways: Ride the river down from Zora's Domain, come through the mountain pass in Southern Hyrule or approach from Castle Town. With Castle Town as the central hub, everything fit together interestingly and funneled into one another in a more organic way rather than just having a grid and putting one main point of interest in each grid. It wasn't flat in the way the Great Sea was, there were levels to things. At least with Epona, I had to consciously steer her around obstacles and through environments. Horseback combat was really fun too. In Wind Waker, I would set the direction of the wind and let go of my controller as I passively sailed to my destination. Even when things like sharks would appear, it was humorous how often they wouldn't even touch me. It wasn't even worth trying to deal with them because using the cannon was boring and cumbersome and used up resources compared to horseback combat.
Also, people really tend to undersell how much there is to do in Hyrule Field. I would argue there is almost as much extra stuff to find and do in TP as there is in Wind Waker. What Wind Waker has in Pirate Outposts and submarines, TP has in hidden grottos and caves. TP has hidden mini dungeons and environmental puzzles that require the use of your dungeon items. You need 5 pieces of heart to get a heart container which means there are more to find and more places to find them. There are bugs and poes to collect too so it's not like there aren't any collectibles like korok seeds. I think it's unfair to compare shrines in BotW to what TP has when TP has 9 full dungeons, a lack of which is what the shrines in BotW literally compensate for. Exploration is much more streamlined in TP but I think that's a strength not a weakness. Exploration in WW easily became boring and too dragged out. The Triforce Hunt was the ultimate limit.
