I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't disappointed when I found out that Zelda Wii U featured yet another SS-esque art style. I didn't see the infamous Spaceworld 2000 trailer back in the day, since I barely knew what the internet was, I obviously had no way to access the content. But I think I can now fully appreciate the disappointment that came when the next 3D Zelda game was announced and it was absolutely nothing like what we had seen previously.
Now, please understand that I'm not knocking the quality of WW, SS, and now Zelda Wii U. This conversation isn't about how good those games actually are; it's about how they look. And as shallow as that may be, we live in a gaming world where technical prowess when it comes to visuals is one of the biggest factors when it comes to if your game will actually sell or not.
Having said that, I thought the tech demo back in 2011 was gorgeous. It did have the TP style, sure, but everything just looked so much better than what TP could ever offer. You could tell that the shading methods that Zelda seems to be all about these days had been applied, but that WW and SS clearly weren't the inspiration. Whereas 3D Zelda from now on will clearly be based in what WW founded for whatever reason I can't understand, this demo offered a look into just how great a Zelda game would look if they opted against another rainbow-blast art style with extreme emphasis on bright colors. People always seem to think that bright = beautiful, but this tech demo showed that not everything HAD to be bright in order to look attractive. Untrue criticisms of TP being "nothing but brown" didn't apply to this demo, and since we were seeing Zelda in HD for the first time, it looked absolutely spectacular.
But honestly, no matter how much I hoped..... I already knew when I saw it for the first time that this was all we'd be seeing of it. All it took for me was a single floating quote that said "this isn't necessarily what Zelda Wii U will look like" to arrive at that conclusion. I really don't know how I already knew, but I think SS as a whole just set it up for me. I was so, so sure that the TP style was going to stay around for a bit when that first SS piece of artwork was revealed (for good reason - that picture was border-line false advertisement, although I understand games in development still change). And when it turned out that the piece of artwork in question looked nothing like the actual game, THAT'S when my disappointment hit an entirely new level, because I just downright hate how SS looks (moreso than WW, even). I think I accepted right there that, for some reason, there's just some kind of fetish with the Zelda developers when it comes to what WW started, and they have no intention of ever changing that besides the one-off TP.
If you love the style, that's fine, more power to you. But as someone who's first Zelda games were OoT and MM, and whose favorite game in the series is TP, I'm just so sad that we're staying on this path from now on. I accepted when we saw the first SS trailer that my expectations and original interpretations of the Zelda series, a series that would get a bit darker and cooler like OoT and TP in contrast to SO MANY OTHER colorful Nintendo franchises like Mario, Kirby, Pokemon, Yoshi (the list goes on), just didn't apply anymore to the modern Zelda series.
That's fine, I'll play the games and hopefully have fun with them from a gameplay perspective. But as for ever being a truly unique EXPERIENCE that I can envelop myself in and never forget, instead of just another fun game? Zelda isn't the series for that when it comes to the factors I hold in high esteem, unfortunately.