Ever since Nintendo’s Zelda tech demo at E3 2011, people have been speculating whether or not the new game in the series should sport a more realistic look. Michael Eurek, a very dedicated fan, decided to recreate the famous Temple of Time with realistic graphics using Unreal Engine 4.
While impressive, the video gives me very mixed feelings. I think the Legend of Zelda series always has to be stylized to a certain extent. A more realistic look is certainly fresh, but it takes some of the series’ magic away from it. I actually thought Twilight Princess found the perfect balance in that regard.
What do you think about this video? Would you like to see a new Zelda game with this kind of realistic look, or do you prefer something more stylish? Let us know in the comments!
Temple of Time from Michael Eurek on Vimeo.
Source: Nintendo Life
It’s certainly pretty, and clearly took a great deal of talent and time to put together. I’m with Anthony though – stylized, self-consistent fantasy art “feels” more like Zelda than straight realism. Take the floating spiritual stones. In OoT’s stylized presentation, floating and spinning there while looking all cool completely works. Here, they seem a little odd. Are they levitating magnetically? Should a little motorized platform be under them? Little stuff that goes unquestioned in the magical world of Zelda starts to feel off if the setting is too realistic.
Plenty of fantasy can work very well with a real-world aesthetic (see Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or Game of Thrones) and perhaps Zelda could too, but it would need some nontrivial tweaks. Becoming Link is a big deal as a gamer, not because his sword has great shader effects, but because he can fire a grappling hook and get yanked across a room in a way that would tear a real person’s arm off. He can whip heavy iron boots out of nowhere and suddenly just be super-heavy. He will always catch a boomerang that just hit five targets without affecting its speed or trajectory.
See that stuff happen in a stylized Zelda game and it’s magic. See it happen with super-realism and it would feel like a cheesy 80s action movie.
Well, maybe so. We obviously don’t want to lose cell-shading forever. But once, just once, I do want to try a completely realistic Zelda. Just to see how it works.
Don’t get me wrong, a realistic Zelda would be just another shake-up to the formula which I’d be all over as usual. Multiplayer Zelda, touch-control Zelda, side-scrolling platformer Zelda… We’ve had plenty of variations that reinterpreted the series while keeping true to its basic themes and appeal.
Apart from the presentational stuff I mentioned before, my only real apprehension about a realistic Zelda would be the nagging suspicion that in the time it takes to create it, there could have been two or three non-photorealistic ones. :^)
I’d be all over a hyper-realistic Zelda. Twilight Princess’ graphics on steroids would be a thing to behold. I agree with Anthony, though, in that Zelda games, Twilight included, do always have some kind of stylization going on (it’s not like the people in Twilight are super real-looking, right?) that makes them stand out. We can have our cake and eat it, too, as Zelda fans. Go real, Nintendo!