They're right. Zelda: LttP looked ****ing awesome. Graal looks like crap. And yes, it is just a paintjob, no one ever denied that! They took Zelda graphics and drew over them. However, they don't really look like Zelda graphics. Sure, the houses are the same dimensions, the walls are the same perspective, the cliffs have identical layouts... but that doesn't mean the final image looks the same, from an artistic perspective.

The designs going on are quite different. This is like saying that because the characters are just paintjobs of Link, that they look the same. Fung Si Yan(the noob character) looks nothing like Link. Just like the trees looking nothing like the trees from LttP. Yes, they're the same proportions, but they still look very different, and that's all that matters. No one here ever tried to deny what Graal is, just that legally Nintendo can't do anything about it.

This seems oddly appropriate right now:
http://dustyshouri.dreamhosters.com/noobs/images/noobsig_5.png (Unsupported image host)