Wind Waker Wii U and Other Zelda Business

Its a big Nintendo news day.  "Bayonetta 2" was discussed, we got to see the first images of Monolith Soft's new game, which looks like "Xenoblade but with Giant Robots".  But those things immediately cease to matter now that we have this:

Oh... monkey.  I guess first off we had Eiji Aonuma, the lead Zelda director since "Wind Waker", talking about what Zelda is going to be like on the Wii U.  If you recall, I hated "Skyward Sword" because the controls were only semi-functional and because the game seemed to offer nothing new other than those lackluster motion things.  Well, it appears Aonuma is proud of his "Skyward Sword" achievement, but now offers up two big changes for Zelda on the Wii U.  And these are.... "you can beat the dungeons out of sequence"* and a sinister downright villainous threat of "[forced] multiplayer".  So what he's offering is basically "a thing you could do in Zelda games up until roughly 'Ocarina of Time' but that we removed in order to increase story relevance" and "a thing I never wanted in a Zelda game to begin with".

So I guess by the time "The Legend of Zelda: Woebegone Wombat Wars" comes out on the Wii U, I'll be forced to make friends.  Damn you, NINTENDO!!!

And that was the sum total of everything Aonuma had to say.  Then he showed off the "Wind Waker" in HD.

For awhile now its been the tradition of money-wanted game companies to polish off their old PS2 titles and release them with a filter and a little polish and call them "HD remakes".  Or in the case of "Okami HD", they didn't do anything at all, they merely ported the game over to the PS3 and got away with it only because Sony still is too evil to make a PS3 model that can play PS2 games.  We'll have to wait for the PS4 for that... and watch, that console won't play PS3 games.  However, "Wind Waker HD", despite being only four shots of Windfall Island, actually is an HD remake.  They bothered to upscale the graphics, include realistic shadow effects, and they even overhauled the character models to look like something that belongs on a next-gen console.  Game companies, if you must make HD remakes of everything for whatever reason, do it this way, with actual effort**.

However, I still have my slight doubts.  "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker" actually is my standard for the GREATEST VIDEO GAME EVER MADE, so any changes at all make me immediately frightened and confused like a giant panda suddenly finding itself hosting an MTV talk show***.  Like, the new graphics look good at first glance, but everything seems so freakishly bright.  When compared against the old graphics, the world still looks like a proper cartoon, instead of cartoon characters juxtaposed with realistic lighting.  I mean, look at the shadows on Link and Tetra's faces, what is up with that?  It looks like they gave up on cel-shading and instead made a game around Toon Link from "Smash Bros Brawl".  "Wind Waker" is one of the most beautiful games ever made, I really hope they didn't muck it up.

And if you they put any goddamn motion controls into "Wind Waker" I will be so angry, so furious, so filled with terrible fanboy rage that I'll... that I'll... not buy it and instead play "Majora's Mask" or something.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Trust me, Aonuma, Zelda speedrunners are well ahead of you on that point.

** Though don't do it the way Square Enix is doing the "Final Fantasy X HD" project.  Which somehow has lagged into development hell.  I don't know how an HD remake is too much for this company to finish, considering that they claim to be the industry standard in pretty graphics.  Well, the answer there is that SE is run by morons.  See:  "Final Fantasy: All the Bullshit".

*** Worst simile ever.