It’s all in the name
This is the most obvious reason, but as a selling point it holds weight on multiple levels. The game is called The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD. Meaning, every last bit of the game, every tuft of grass, and each far-reaching corner of the Great Sea has been overhauled to modern 1080p presentation standards.
This is nice in general, but with GameCube and PS2-era games, it doesn’t always improve every visual aspect. Remember the Jak and Daxter Collection? Despite being “remastered in HD,” the makeover did just as much damage highlighting jaggies and the games’ general old age as it did to smooth things out and sharpen them up. It was still for the better, but barely.
Wind Waker, on the other hand, is absolutely made for something like this. Have you seen the original game running under the Dolphin emulator on a PC? It looks incredible. And that’s completely before Nintendo’s professionally-done modern paint job. The Dolphin version is essentially just a well-hacked-together native resolution boost.
The new game not only effectively does what Dolphin aimed to, but also gives us high resolution new textures, a healthy dose of bloom lighting (perhaps too healthy at times), and an overall refreshed and restored game that will match the remembrance you had of the original in your brain. When you actually go back and see it running on a GameCube, you’ll realize how wrong your remembrance actually was.
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Published: Sep 25, 2013 12:41 pm