(05-19-2013, 04:16 PM)PrettyNier Wrote: the "tools" were perfectly competent; the issue is not what those tools were, but how the artist chose to utilize them and what they chose to create. super metroid came out 8 years prior and very clearly understood everything it was doing. it is the fault of the creators that they weren't able to design a quality game that worked around the utilized technology.
While that's true, but lets not forget even back in 1998 that 3D games were still fairly new.
Sure, even if the release date of the game doesn't matter we have to remember that not many developers really understood what they could do with 3D at the time, and those who did would have to figure out what would work and what wouldn't work. And to be honest comparing the development of a 3D game to a 2D game's development feels kind of unfair because the reason why games like Super Metriod were good because developers figured out how to make good 2D games.
Even if Ocarina of Time was mediocre, I kind of have to say that given what they could do at the time and with what they understood from the tools that were used, it's still a pretty good game for it's time.