The new Ocarina of Time gameplay impressed me technically much more than I expected.

The environments look extremely strong — dense vegetation, great materials, stable image quality and framerate, and some really nice fog/mist effects. There also seem to be a lot of game-specific touches rather than this just being a straightforward visual upgrade.

What I’m less convinced by is how the characters sit inside those environments.

In some scenes, the environment feels very physically rendered — strong material definition, directional lighting, fog, vegetation, and fairly realistic surface response — while the characters are much more stylized and anatomically simplified.

A teammate pointed out something interesting: maybe the mismatch isn’t specific to this game at all. If you put highly stylized, non-anatomical characters inside an environment that is rendered with much more physically grounded lighting and materials, does that naturally create a disconnect?

On top of that, Link’s skin sometimes looks softer and more uniformly lit to me, with less obvious self-shadowing/contact shadow than the surrounding environment. I’m not saying the shader is technically wrong — we obviously can’t know the actual setup from footage — but visually the characters sometimes feel slightly detached from the scene.

The broader lighting also occasionally gives me that familiar “modern Unreal-style” feeling — technically impressive, but a little generic compared with the very distinctive visual identity I usually associate with Zelda.

Maybe recent DLSS/AI-generated-looking demos have biased my eye, but something about the combination of lighting, materials and character shading feels strangely familiar.

So I’m in this weird position where I’m genuinely amazed by the technical execution and by how much they seem to be getting out of Switch 2, while still not being sure I actually prefer the visual direction.

**Curious what other people think: is the character/environment mismatch mostly a lighting/shader issue, or is it simply what happens when highly stylized characters are placed inside much more physically rendered environments?**

[OoT] The new Ocarina of Time looks technically incredible on Switch 2, but do the characters feel disconnected from the environments?