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Why We Shouldn’t be Remaking Zelda Games in HD At All
May 07 2012 by Dylan James
Two days ago, our glorious leader Nate came out fan-guns blazing in support for a full HD Majora’s Mask remake for the Wii U, to which our secondary glorious leader (glorious secretary? pleasant leader?) Lex essentially said “no”, putting forth the idea for an HD…well, “remake” isn’t quite the right word (think Ocarina of Time 3D), but graphical overhaul of Twilight Princess - for the Wii U. Now, some minor re-texturing and enabling of HD resolution is one thing, but fully remaking games to be the best they can be graphically and/or gameplay-wise? That’s a big waste of time.
First, a bit of opinion on the good points raised by my superiors: as holding in the traditional Zelda Informer ways, I do tend to hold Majora’s Mask as the relative god-king of the franchise and the raging fanboy in me would love nothing more than a full remake of said game. An HD remake of Twilight Princess would surely move some copies seeing as it’s one of (if not the) most popular entries in the series. Both of these ideas have merits and I can see the logic behind them - but it’s time to call out some bullshit.
As Lex already mentioned, a total remake of Majora’s Mask for the Wii U would be an incredibly costly affair and a general waste of time - while it may be the (subjectively) best game in the series, it’s also one of the “lesser” games in terms of general popularity. Remaking Majora’s Mask in HD would be perceived as both uncreative and a way to bank out some time for real, original games to hit the Wii U system. It would also be a money-pit of a project, requiring a complete overhaul in terms of graphics, gameplay, sound, world - essentially built from scratch. It’s entirely unfeasible
On the other hand, remaking Twilight Princess for the Wii U is also a fairly nightmarish scenario. Remember some of the backlash against Ocarina of Time 3D based on the premise that it was nothing more than a needed play to buffer out the uncomfortably long wait for original games on the 3DS? How a sizable amount of people called “uncreative” (with some justifiability)? That was for the commonly-called best game of all time, that came out more than a decade ago, being ported from a home system to a handheld console. The Twilight Princess HD remake would be a game from six years ago being ported to the next home console up - the calls of Nintendo lacking creativity would be staggering. In addition, Ocarina of Time 3D was essentially a re-texture that didn’t need to go too far to expand for the 3DS - Twilight Princess needs an insane amount of work to meet the standards of the Wii U tech demo. In order for a Twilight Princess HD to go that far, it would be an expensive investment and would take away from making new games in the series with the same graphical power.
I’ll take this with an original plot, dungeons, characters, world and soundtrack please. And here we come to my real reasoning for why Nintendo shouldn’t be remaking Zelda games in HD at all - it stunts the growth of the series. More than any other series sans Call of Duty, Zelda is always at the brunt of the “every game is the same” argument, and this argument (though flawed) has some valid points. The series seems to be flitting about in a bit of stagnation at the moment (going to the forest region, then the fire region etc. in the game advertised as the series’ “revolution” was disappointing to say the least). I’m not one of those to argue that the series needs an overhaul - quite the contrary. It needs to relocate and refocus itself, and that’s a process that requires examination on Nintendo’s part, not calls from any given fanbase. Nothing could be more harmful for both the needed reflection of the series and the broad image of the franchise than to bill the next major title as a remake. It shows the face of Zelda to the world as nothing more than a money-grabbing scheme, and the faces of the players as mindless sheep who will eat up anything they’re given.
Remaking old console games for handhelds is all fine and dandy (bring on Majora’s Mask 3D), and even an “HD Collection” of Zelda games that have simply been shined up a bit down the road would be fairly nice, but full HD remakes for home systems are a definite “no”. They cost too much for too little real gain, they’re fundamentally uncreative at their core, they would further damage the reputation of the series as a whole, and in the end you’ve just spent $60.00 USD on something you’ve already played before. Keep the remakes out of Zelda.
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