


looking how cel-shaded characters stand apart from the more muted background in Breath of the Wild feels intentional and sometimes even remind me of old style cartoons where background artwork were often (slightly desaturated) watercolored paintings whereas characters were more vibrant/saturated cel-shading that would "pop out" in the image further. Similarly Breath of the wild was itself inspired by the work of other painters, something that can be lost upon with unbalanced use of shaders and lighting. Skyward Sword was clearly inspired by the art of impressionists who'd paint environment in small brushstrokes that have to be viewed at a distances to truly appreciate the way they blend and meld into hue and shapes(as up close the brushstrokes would seem too thick to truly notice the details, ironically).

If you look at recent games like not just Zelda titles but even stuff like Mario Odyssey, you can see that Nintendo was often drawing from specific artistic inspirations and styles and balanced a lot of the visuals, palettes and lighting to try an convey such effects.Įffects that can be easily lost in "upscales" like this which focus only on technology and not how they can be used to enhance the original intent instead of overwhelming it.

It doesn't make the game look "awesome" because the artstyle, designs and other artistic/programming work that went into the production already did that before, in the original resolution. That's still the whole problem of all this graphical fluff - it's just NICE. Rucksack? How about fitting that "kind of power" into one's wallet to begin with? 2 Tb SSD alone can cost like a whole Switch.
