The Vibes of Twilight Princess

The Zelda game I have played the most is A Link Between Worlds. Yet, the entry I think about the most is Twilight Princess. I think this is due to the superb artistic direction of the game.

Many people have drawn comparisons between the games and the Lord of the Rings movies. Considering the developers have explicitly mentioned the movies in a contemporary interview, it is very likely that the game was influenced by them. That being said, there is a key difference between the two artstyle. In Twilight Princess everything in the game looks unique to some degree. To me this seems like a conscious effort by the artists to avoid what I call the generic medieval fantasy signature.

One of the things that stood out to me the most about the game is its color palette. The game feels like a playable fantasy book cover.

While taking screenshots before writing this article, I ran around in Hyrule Field a bit. Although the artstyle is good, the overworld is way too empty for my liking. There are long stretch of grass with nothing in them. It is quite easy to spot repetitions in the grass texture. I think the game shines the most in closed areas. Nowadays, empty open worlds are common complaint among games, but I this game show that this problem is not exclusive to this genre. It should also be noted that Ocarina of Time has the same exact problem, so I guess Nintendo just can't resist making very large maps.

Although the artstyle is generally executed well, there are some head-scratchers. The bridge seen in the title screen cutscene always puzzled me. It is very blocky and just looks wrong in general. I am not sure if this is the broken bridge you fix during the story or not, but regardless I am still in the opinion that it looks like placeholder geometry that someone forgot to remove.

It should also be mentioned that some hylian NPCs looks very strange. Some of them looks like they belong to a different race. I am not sure why everyone couldn't look like similar to Link and Zelda.

Overall, I think that Twilight Princess has a pretty solid pseudo-realistic. I think it has aged better than most people give credit for. I will however admit that the artsyle is not very scalable. Twilight Princess HD show that higher resolution textures and mid-poly models can have some rough result.

On a final note, it should be said that I really like the music in this game. It is very bombastic and really makes you feel you are on a journey.

Written by manpaint on 05 July 2025.