Looks Good for a Wii Game

It's become quite common for reviewers, when discussing Wii games, to make the comment 'the graphics are good for a Wii game.' And to be perfectly honest this statement and the sentiment behind it really annoys me. In my opinion it puts an undue emphasis on graphics and also belittles the games artistic direction.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword using a large colourful cell shaded art style not because the Wii can't handle a more realistic tone, after all The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess used a more realistic style, but rather because the motion based gameplay requires the player to be clearly shown what they need to attack and the direction they need to do it from. This is similar to the way that cell shading in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker enabled the use of a much larger draw distance, so that players could spot distant islands while sailing.

The PlayStation 1 and 2 era Final Fantasys received critical acclaim for their jaw dropping cut scenes, but these were all pre-rendered, hence their ability to look substantially better than the in game graphics. Nintendo generally doesn't pre-render their cut scenes, Miyamoto has said a key reason for this is that if you change something late in development then pre-rendered cut scenes need to be remade. Another consideration is customisation. In the Gamecube version of Resident Evil 4 the cut scenes were rendered in-game and as such if you unlocked and equiped a new costume your characters would be rendered wearing that costume during cut scenes. However the PlayStation 2, having a weaker graphics chip, couldn't render the cut scenes and they had to be pre-recorded which meant that your character was always shown wearing the standard costume during cut scenes.

Xenoblade Chronicles deliberately uses low resolution textures to enable the use of a massive draw distance and playing area, generally if you can see it you can walk to it. It also renders the cut scenes in-game which means that changes to your characters equipment are always accurately represented. I have come across people asking why wasn't this game released on other platforms, with better graphical capabilities, the short answer to which is that it is a second party Nintendo game. I would also like to ask the question back of why should it matter? The graphics clearly represent and communicate what is going on, and the game runs smoothly.

Ultimately I think that people have become too obsessed with having realistic graphics and have forgotten how important graphical direction is. Given the choice of high resolution textures, 'pop-up', and slow down vs low resolution textures, large draw distances, and a smooth frame rate I'm going to side with the latter. Maybe it's because I started gaming in the 8-bit era that I don't mind unrealistic graphics, but I honestly don't think people should be making their purchasing decisions purely on what looks prettiest.