Tag: Realism

In January, Zelda Dungeon reported on a collection of incredibly realistic Zelda artwork produced by online artist Nate Hallinan including hyper-detailed depictions of a Goron and a Skulltula. At the time, Hallinan was working on a realistic re-imagining of the forest-dwelling Deku Scrub as well, having already produced a series of preliminary sketches. He recently put the finishing touches on his Deku Scrub painting, and it can be seen in full after the jump.

Art styles are a pretty big deal among Zelda fans, but, while I have touched on the subject before in various articles and videos, I’ve never really dedicated an entire article to the topic. Until now that is. I’ve made no secret in the past of my general disappointment with Twilight Princess — I don’t hate the game by any means, but it did disappoint me when compared to most other Zelda games — and one of the biggest reasons…

There’s something about this kind of realism that I like when drawing fictional characters, possibly because it’s so rarely done. We’re all familiar with the way Zelda characters looks standardly, but with this kind of artwork, you might look over a Zelda painting. For example, did you guess already that the title image is skull kid? The skull kind of gives it away, but it’s still so radically different from the actual artwork that the image really throws you off. Interested…

I might be a little late to the party making this argument (although I’ve talked about it in the past), but I thought it was worth addressing because I still see this discussion sometimes. When Twilight Princess came out, some people — myself included — did not like its artstyle. A major criticism it receives is that it’s too realistic. I myself don’t agree with that… certainly the developers were trying for a realistic western fantasy artstyle, but I think…

The term Realistic Graphics gets associated with Twilight Princess far too often and it seems each time, it isn’t being used properly. What is really realistic about the graphical style of Twilight Princess? Can you even have a fictional race of rock-eating Gorons in a realistic setting? Perhaps the correct term that should be used here is Surrealistic graphics instead of Realistic. This really brings up the question, would you rather see realism or surrealism in Zelda?

The Zelda series is home to some radically different styles of storytelling, gameplay, and visual design. But if the entire Zelda franchise could be distilled to one set of elements, one preferred tone and graphical style, which would it be? Should Zelda games continue to pursue whatever direction they have grounded themselves in from their inception, or should they move forward into bold new territory? The tone of the earliest Zelda games is hard to pin down. Dialog was sparse…