The effect that art has

[andrewducker]

Over here you can see Far Side cartoons done in a photorealistic style. What's interesting is that they just aren't as funny as the original. It's now clear to me that Larson's clear, simplistic style contributes a lot to the humour of the strip.

versus

Which reminds me of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Which a lot of people complained about the art style because it was simple, cel shaded and cartoony. This was unpopular because lots of people think that new, modern games ought to be getting closer and closer to photorealism rather than aiming for some kind of thematic artistic unity. What I loved about Wind Waker was that it revelled in its identity as a game - items only existed if you could interact with them - there was none of the usual disconnect between the visual environment and what you could play with, because everything was iconic - a representation of its function - pretty, but there because it was part of the process you were going through. But no, because it didn't look "real" the players rebelled.

And while I like Twilight Princess it lacks a certain amount of the simplistic purity that its direct predecessor had:

Comments

[johanna-alice.livejournal.com]

Interesting that you should post this today - this morning I was reading about Scott Adam's 80% rule in Dilbert: The Joy of Work. He was discussing that he could make the cartoons a little better with a lot more effort, but that doing so would impact negatively upon both his free time, and the character of the cartoon strip.

Simplicity is good more often than its given credit for.

[andrewducker]

10/10 for applying Scott Adam's rule to this post. Especially after electricant noticed that it also applied to my post here:
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/1244006.html

0/10 for not noticing that I linked to the rule myself yesterday :->

[johanna-alice.livejournal.com]

Yesterday?
**error: unknown concept**

I'm not very with the program ATM :)

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I'd agree about Zelda.

Twilight Princess looks really pretty, and I really like the odd slightly cartoony/Majora's Mask-esque graphical style... but it's not as jaw-dropping as Wind Waker. I appreciate that the cel-shaded thing was briefly overdone, but damn - Wind Waker does it so well! I'm not sure what it is, but somehow the big slabs of colour work really well for the really big open spaces and huge rooms in temples, better than any amount of fancy lighting, carefully shaded stone slabs, all different and detailed grass. Wind Waker looks more...epic... somehow.

Not talking about Zelda here (since TP is still very stylised) but I think aiming for photorealism is generally a very bad thing, in games and animation. You can always aim, and you can do what is, at the time, the best you can do. Final Fantasy movies maybe, or the effects in any of the flagship "OMG now computer graphics look real!" films over the last couple of decades. Without exception, they all look dated after a while - some very quickly. Now, maybe there will come a point where it -does- all look real and seamless (more likely in films, I guess) but if you aim for realism, you're kind of setting yourself up to fail in the long term at the moment. Going for a defined stylised look can make you last a lot longer in an aesthetically-hyped up marketplace. I'm not saying you -shouldn't- strive for realism if that's your thing... but people often seem to say "this looks photorealistic/real" when what they mean is "this is as good as we can do right now".

If you want a laugh, look at old film and computer game reviews from the 80s and early 90s and see what effects/graphics get described as "realistic" back then. I've seen reviews of wireframe graphics games that said that.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Plus there's the whole uncanny valley problem: Even leaving aside the whole datedness issue, things - especially people - which look nearly real just look wrong, and slightly creepy. That makes realism frequently a bad thing to aim for, because we still can't actually attain it, and the attempt can badly get in the way of having sympathetic characters.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

I couldn't agree more. Take Another World as a further example. Games from the very early 90's almost all looks pants but that game still looks pretty stylish.

[andrewducker]

And the high-res version released last year is pretty damn good looking too:
http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

I'd love to agree, but for some reason Wind Waker's style got on my nerves with lightning quickness. I loved it... until I started actually playing the game.

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

On the PS2 there actually seems to have been a renewal of the 'cell-shaded' style of animation: the most recent DragonQuest game, a couple of new games just out. And these have been getting very good reviews.

Having said that, there's not many games that aren't heading towards photo-realism.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

The complaining about the graphical style of Wind Waker came from a small but very vocal group of hardcore fans. Nintendo had shown a technical demo of Link and Ganondorf fighting at E3 before the Gamecube was released. The demo was in a style very similar to the style that ended up in Twilight Princess. Some people felt more than a little shocked because their expectations were geared towards something very different.

I don't recall, for instance, any professional reviews of Wind Waker that criticized the graphics.

I loved the style in Wind Waker but think that Twilight Princess is a *much* better game.