Stylized games - good or bad?

Every so often, a game comes along that have a completely different and unique visual style. They skew traditional presentations to give us a gaming experience that is rarely repeated. My question is.... are they really all they're cracked up to be?

For instance, I've been seeing stuff floating around about this game Sega put out recently, called Madworld. It seems to be entirely black and white, with other colors used only in splashes for blood or effects. But frankly, it looks terrible to me. I don't think I'd be able to enjoy something like that because I wouldn't be able to separate the characters from the backgrounds.

The first game I think of that falls into this category is Okami. And in that case, my answer is a big honking YES! I love the style of the game, because everything is so alive and vibrant.

I guess I'd have to talk about the Zelda series here and how Wind Waker looked so much different in graphical presentation than previous Zelda games. Personally, I hated the art style in Wind Waker and I still do. Due to this, I had a hard time getting into it, along with Phantom Hourglass. I found them to be the worst Zelda games. However, I loved Twilight Princess on the Gamecube, but the art style was more to my liking.

It really depends, stylized games like Okami I enjoy. But some are quite far-fetched such as a game I think its called Comic Zone (can't remember for sure though) on my sega megadrive collection disc that is quite wierd.

Comix Zone is what you are talking about. It's the game where you were trapped in a comic book and you went from pane to pane of the book fighting enemies. I remember that. It was a cool idea, but the brutal difficulty ruined it for me. That game was tough as nails.

I can't believe I forgot about Okami. That's a great example of a stylized game that is well done.

Comix Zone... yeah, the difficulty on that is crazy. I tried it out on the Genesis collection and couldn't get very far. I like the concept, but it seems more like a "memorize the path" game than anything else.

The art style for Wind Waker is definitely a big change to the Zelda series. If you can get past it, the game's quite good... but getting past the art can be hard. Given how poorly the art style has been received overall, I'm surprised that they're sticking with it so much. Minish Cap and the upcoming game, Spirit Tracks, also use it.

I usually like cartoon/comic art styles, so I generally think that stylized graphics are rather neat and interesting. As to whether they are good or bad, I think that it heavily depends on the title. Wind Waker had really good graphics, but the art style is a little too radical for me.