GenGAME – The Wind Waker HD and Ocarina of Time 3D as remakes

Alex Plant from GenGAME has another article about the upcoming The Wind Waker HD, except this time it’s comparing the quality of the remake to Ocarina of Time 3D. We’ve all seen gameplay and some fantastic screenshots, but Alex had the opportunity to play The Wind Waker HD a little while ago at E3 and says that it offers quite a bit in terms of being a remake compared to what we saw in the remake on the 3DS. Hit the jump to read!

First, I strongly suggest you take a look at Alex’s article on GenGAME. It makes some fantastic points and offers some insight into details you wouldn’t necessarily notice without playing the game for a while.

The premise is that while Ocarina of Time 3D is a good remake that people are happy with, The Wind Waker HD goes farther in terms of improving the original game experience. Both, of course, offer graphical improvements over their respective originals and both make gameplay more smoother in similar ways, but The Wind Waker HD just does a little more.

One similar fix between the two is inventory management. In Ocarina of Time 3D, the iron boots were given a convenient place on the touch screen which made for quick switching compared to the original on the Nintendo 64. In the new Wii U game, items like the Wind Waker and ship attachments are assigned to the GamePad’s directional buttons automatically, allowing you to keep your frequently used items assigned to the other buttons.

New things that were added, but that were non-invasive of the original experience are Miiverse messages in the form of Tingle Bottles, ability to store more pictures in the Pictograph Box, and off-TV play.

Finally, The Wind Waker HD’s graphical improvements are more faithful to the original. While Ocarina of Time 3D characters were redesigned to look more like the character artwork, the new Wii U title’s characters and environment will look more similar to those on the GameCube, just in higher resolution. Additionally, The Wind Waker HD uses a brighter color pallet, which is a noticeable but positive change.

In all, Alex’s points about the remakes are mostly to say that The Wind Waker HD could support and needed the updates more than Ocarina of Time. The original The Wind Waker graphics already far surpassed those from Ocarina of Time, so smaller changes were made there, but improvements to inventory management and fewer gameplay frustrations have a bigger impact in The Wind Waker HD. Both remakes do well in their own right, however. That is for sure.

Again, if you needed to check out the original article by Alex on GenGAME, you can see it here.

What did you think? Let us know in the comments!