Sorry but no. Maybe it looked like shit on whatever TV you own, but its a damn good looking game and its widely accepted as such.
Yeah, what an awful looking game. Trully a "fucking eyesore" >_>
Holy shit wat?!
Holy shit yes.
This does not look good. It looks acceptable at best. It's a prime example of how tech can actually make great art look bad. Skyward Swords Design is almost impeccable, but it's technical realization is severly lacking.
The whole painterly look, that tries to mimmick pointilist artists is a neat idea in theory, and in fact, when looking at the filter that is applied to the background in Dolphin Shots makes it clear that they were truly on to something spectacular, but they completely botched it by having all those sharp defined and jagged low poly models and low res textures. Even more so considering how the image quality is ruined thanks to all the jaggies.
With Skyward Sword I feel that people simply give the game a free pass due to it's intended (but completely failed) painterly look.
I don't know if the Wii is simply too weak to pull off a decent filter to actually make everything on screen look like it's painted or if they simply didn't care. Either way, the game ends up being a schizophrenic mess between amazing art design but lackluster execution that either suffers from a lack of consistency or a lack of horsepower, probably both. It's halfway there, but not quite.
Again, I loved the game, but most of the time the graphics just looked outright weak, even for Wii.
If they do a new Zelda on WiiU, I expect them to put as much emphasis on getting the graphics right as they put effort into the Gameplay. I just hope that they won't botch such a great visual idea again.
The background is actually amazingly done, and in Dolphin you can actually see the texture of the brushstrokes, but why on earth they decided that the foreground should be all clean and defined with clear edges and all is beyond me. It really creates a disconnect between the painterly look of the background and the Dreamcast-ish Figures with low res textures draped over them.
Again, maybe the Wii wasn't able to create two or more layers of filters that would be needed to complete the painterly look and combine fore and background together. Who knows. All I know is the current end result looks like ass thanks to it, and it's a damn shame too as the design and art looks amazing.