There is a clear trend when it comes to remasters of Zelda games and it gets more obvious with every new one.
Wind Waker HD was a pretty good remaster, wasn’t it? It implemented a completely new lighting system with dynamic shadows, SSAO, Global Illumination and upscaled the textures beautifully. Maybe the bloom was a bit overkill, but it was a huge step up from the GameCube version in every way. Also had many QoL improvements.
Then Twilight Princess HD released. With that one, they just remade the textures and a couple of models (plus some QoL), while the lighting system remained the exact same from the 2006 version. This is why it still looks so dull to this day, that is absolutely **not** due to the art style but due to the lack of modern rendering techniques like physically based rendering, dynamic shadows, Global Illumination, screen space ambient occlusion and many more. If Nintendo were to remake Twilight Princess properly, it would look so much closer to the E3 2011 Zelda WiiU Tech Demo and that looked really awesome. You can and absolutely should expect that level of effort for the price, especially considering what the other companies are doing for less money.
Now we will get Skyward Sword HD and that is another significant step down. Aside from some exceptions, not even the textures were redone. Lighting is still exact the same. It will probably have not many QoL changes based on what we have seen so far. And all that for 60 bucks.
So what is Nintendo doing here? It’s pretty obvious in my view, they are testing how far they can maximize profit. Meaning, they gradually decrease budget and effort for their remasters and see if it still sells well. If Skyward Sword HD sells well, I can see them not bother with good Zelda remasters or even remakes in the future for quite some time, because why should they invest more money into the games than needed? From a company perspective, that makes total sense. Just put a simple HD port out there of GameCube/Wii games and it will sell.
I love Twilight Princess and I do like Skyward Sword. It really saddens me to see that these won’t reach their true potential for probably another decade in their life.
This is what Skyward Sword HD should look like:
[https://i.imgur.com/o6rdyI8.png](https://i.imgur.com/o6rdyI8.png)
And here for Twilight Princess HD:
[https://images.cgames.de/images/gsgp/226/zelda-hd-wii-u_1258552.jpg](https://images.cgames.de/images/gsgp/226/zelda-hd-wii-u_1258552.jpg)
Man, it really, really pains me to see the wasted potential here. I would have been so excited for true remakes of Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess. Anyone else agree? I think we should be more vocal about this, so our beloved games get the HD versions they deserve.