Cell shading in WW was a scam. It's the same level of "let's make a low-res, heavily pixelated game to hide the fact that we can't afford proper artists and sell it as retro style" scam.
Nintendo was always about colorful/cartoony games. But that doesn't mean they weren't good at making natural looking graphics. Their best looking game to date is Mario Kart 8, god that game looks amazing. It's cartoony but at the same time uses very natural looking lighting, effects and materials. Nintendo was always good with this. Most of their games use that kind of style, which is why they look so good. In GameCube Luigi's Mansion also looked great because of this. But with WW i feel like, at the time, they decided it was too much work making a big Zelda game that looks like that. But making it look like Mario 64 all over again would be too obvious, plus it would be unacceptable on a console as powerful as the Gamecube. So how can they make a big game without spending too much money and effort with it's textures and materials and get away with it?
Enter Cell shading. This technique is pretty good at creating a certain style, i can't imagine games like Jet Set Radio without it. It's also pretty good for games that are supposed to look like anime shows, such as Dragonball for instance. But in a game like Zelda? I really don't think it's an ideal style. These games are big and heavy on exploration. You can spend a lot of time looking around, searching, scanning the environments.
Cell Shading may look nice in certain scenes with many objects and characters on screen (since the effect is mostly used on the 3D models and not the environments), but it can also look completely dull in most other situations. And Zelda is a game where the surrounding environments are more important and prominent than the 3D characters and also features large spaces that not necessarily have a lot of things in them. Especially such environments as... the empty sea! I mean, of all games, they chose the one that features sailing on large, empty bodies of water with nothing else on sight for most of the time. A game like this would benefit from a naturalistic look and especially some nice water shading. But no, have a flat blue colored surface with zero features instead. In any other game this would not be acceptable. But WW gets away with it because "style".
Making TP after this was a step in the right direction. I guess they did listen to all the criticisms but with Skyward Sword they regressed again, though not fully. It's a weird mix of cell shaded characters/flat colors/slightly natural look. BOTW is a further improvement thanks to it's visuals/art design benefiting a lot from the huge view distances but still relies on low-def graphics being justified by cell shaded characters and objects.
In conclusion: Not a fan.
