Wind Waker use simple tricks. The game feels long because you have far ways from point a to b to a to c and so on. Toonish Graphics aren't that impressive. The used effects on that graphics are truely great.Wind Waker HD is only 1.8GB. It's not quite 1GB but it's close. And that's one of the longest Zelda games and also has great looking graphics.
http://imgur.com/gallery/ib8nW that would be really great graphics.
WW itself is actually a short game if you could instantly port to the next needed place. That's an open world problem, if you dont have really much side quests.
Ahhh yes and no. Compressen is a thing, mostly for console games. Why? What do you think uncompressing takes most? Right! Ram & CPU. Somewhere we have to store all the uncompressed files. RAM! Right.Totally flawed logic at its best and you really should know better since its you do that for a living ^^. Compression is a thing that exist you know.
Many games "itself" arent even that big in size. Much of the size comes from uncompressed videos in several languages or just uncompressed data.
Why more on consoles and not on pc? Where do you think it is easier to get to the uncompressed files in ram?
Yeah, Videos and Sound Files are mostly that what does take much space. But also high poly models.
But game Xalso has files .Y on pc. There you more or less have archived files instead of compressed. Something like a 7z file on the lowest setting and few bytes changed on the result so you can't open it with 7z.