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Tears of the Kingdom is no doubt a masterpiece from a gameplay perspective, but when it comes to its visuals, there’s a few differing opinions. On the one side, its cel-shaded and playful charm epitomize the nature of a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
You need only look at some the crazy inventions coming out of it, such as this enormous Gundam mech, to agree. But some people aren’t too impressed with Tears of the Kingdom’s visuals. One of them is David Jaffe, the original creator of the incredible God of War series, who called the graphics ‘bland’ and ‘old looking’. The full Tweet we have captured below
I think, while the artistic style is stunning, if we look at Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom purely down a technological lens, Jaffe does make a point. The game doesn’t boast high res textures, or anything like ray tracing. But it’s also running on hardware that is years old. In fact, the Nintendo Switch doesn’t even have a GPU, opting instead for an APU. This is the same console that has managed to run the likes of the recent reboot of Doom despite its technological limitations.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter reacted to Jaffe’s statement pretty predictably – although some agreed with his points: “Who said anything about wanting realism? People just want nice, clean graphics no matter the art style. This game looks rough,” said one.
Of course, plenty voiced their displeasure with Jaffe’s comments, tweeting: “Thank God I never played any of your games, you don’t have to point this kind of things since your platform is Sony, of course PlayStation is better looking in graphics but do you have a game there that’s like TLOZ? No? Zelda is 37y old, GOW is 18y old don’t compare NEVER again!”
While Tears of the Kingdom won’t win any awards graphically, such is the richness of the game world, it opens up a bigger question, do graphics really matter? Great books don’t need pictures to make them better – your imagination can fill in the gaps. Tears of the Kingdom is a similar case – but the art style and sheer level of interactivity in the world draw you in – more so than games boasting every single graphical feature dialed up to Ultra settings.
If you’re planning on a trip to the world of Hyrule, check out our guide to the Great Fairy locations – or, alternatively we’ve got the rundown on the Tears of the Kingdom shrine locations so you can build up that stamina to get to the location for this trick.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Collector’s Edition
