I'm not sure what your disagreeing with, but by all means let me know
Really? Okay.
Yes, cell shading was actually born as a cost saving technique as well as a visual one,
Incorrect, the first implementations of cel-shading required
literally doubling the polycount of models to create the 'overdraw' edging effect; the effect was achieved by taking an existing mesh, duplicating it in its entirety, inverting its normals, and texturing it the colour of the desired outline and then expanding it to be slightly larger than the original mesh, so that when rendered the 'duplicate' mesh is visible only where the camera frustrum intersects the original model with the duplicate, providing the outline.
It was created purely for aesthetic reasons, and IIRC first demonstrated in Auto-Modellista
because you use less polygons and less detail that would otherwise be filled in to look right.
A pleasing cel-shaded effect requires a
higher than normal polycount, particularly to create curved surfaces, as modern cel-shading effects utilise edge detection post-processing effects such as rim lighting.
Games without realtime lighting and shadowing can achieve a visually pleasing cel-shaded look by using a baked ramp shadow, but games with realtime lighting and shadowing offer no performance benefits from a cel-shaded aesthetic than a traditional 360 gen diffuse/specular/normal workflow does.
Cell shading is all about simplified models being shaded in a way that stylizes them to the point where you don't notice inaccuracies.
Good looking cel-shading requires an actual artist to hand draw textures in a painterly style consistent with the aesthetic.
Photo realistic texturing requires downloading a photo and maaaaaaybe using clone tool in Photoshop to make it tilable if you didn't get your photo from somewhere like CGTextures who already did that work.
Without that shading, Zelda's model would look like a below PS2 model, but because of how he is shaded, it comes to life in a different way.
Buuuuuullllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.
The same goes for the rest of the world. They don't focus on realistic textures or having a lot of realistic physics to save on overhead.
Unrealistic physics still 'costs' more than
no physics.
In terms of render costs, there is literally zero difference between:
and
So they can animate fewer blades of grass for example with super big blades of grass that animate in a stylized way instead of having to conform to realistic large patches. Trees are simplified with designs to hide their lack of dimension and such.
Interactive 'toon' grass is more expensive than non-interactive mesh grass.
Interactive cartoon trees are more expensive than non-interactive speedtree generated meshes.