So I hadn't set my wii up since moving into my new house, so I hadn't played on my new tv yet. when I got home from the store and put skyward sword in, the graphics looked TERRIBLE. They were very gritty and people only a little ways away were blocky/gritty. I was rather disappointed because it did not look how it did in all the trailors. I then realized the screen was set to wide screen, and the wii is meant to be played in 480 standard. I adjusted it to standard screen and it looks much better! has anyone else made this mistake? Also thought I would make this thread in case anyone else is having this problem
With the original console, you can get a somewhat better image if you use component cables (red/green/blue for video only + red/white for audio) instead of the outdated composite cable (only one yellow video + red/white audio cables). And of course you should set it to progressive mode.
The problem with the Wii though is that it doesn't support any anti-aliasing, the absence thereof combined with the low resolution gives some very flickering and pixelated edges in some situations. Additional problems arise with the composite cable because you can only get an interlaced signal from it, which depending on your TV's internal de-interlacing filter can cause ugly comb effects in motion. And there are interferences especially in areas with higher contrast, plus the colour transmission isn't that accurate so that black areas are dark grey etc.
I actually played through the whole game in Dolphin, which works amazingly well with this game, other than in TP there are neither massive slowdowns nor random crashes in the game. You can't use anti-aliasing (leads to glitches in this game) but you can set the internal res to up to 2112p for a much sharper and more detailed image.
Here's a small comparison:
1. Wii composite quality (made by taking the second pic, saving on SD card, playing with my BD player and re-grabbing it to PC):
2. Wii "component" quality (actually a bit better because it's a direct digital Dolphin shot at native resolution):
3. Dolphin with 4x native internal resolution (2112p), scaled to 853x480 for forum-friendly display (looks of course better in HD):
As you can see you can already get quite some improvement if you upgrade from composite to component (better and more vivid colours, less blurriness, no "stripe" artefacts which is even more visible in a moving picture). And to improve it even more to get rid of the "stair" effects you can use Dolphin.
A better comparison especially between 2. and 3. can be seen by cutting out the same part of the image:
