7 ms·

Final Fantasy remasters reignite controversies over pixel art

112 points by danso 5y ago

vmception 5y ago
That's one thing that always bothered me about 90s nostalgia from people born in the late 90s and early 2000s, all the fan-made stuff didn't have the scanlines. I like how this is being addressed, people go out of their way to emulate VHS artifacting now with dynamic filters, and then pretend to pipe that through a CRT. This is much more appealing to me aesthetically Square's Final Fantasy remakes do not do this, instead they try to show characters in the way the final result would have looked like if they had never had to use pixel sprites back in the 90s in the first place. Grave mistake. Nobody wanted that.
- colanderman 5y ago
  Worse still is the "pixel art" that... rotates and scales pixels!! It was very common a few years ago. It's such a weird sort of retro kitsch that doesn't bother to try to understand the original medium. Like NES graphics were Minecraft but 2D. I'm glad the idea is coming into the zeitgeist that true pixel-based video game art was drawn for the CRT medium, not for digital nearest-neighbor upscaling.
arduinomancer 5y ago
Tl;dr: Pixel graphics on CRTs look smoother (almost like anti-aliasing) because CRT pixels don't behave like the clean pixel squares in modern displays. Just displaying the same pixels on a modern display may not match the original artist's intent.
- musicale 5y ago
  Even without interlacing (which will alternate the set of scanlines that are used and thereby "double" the resolution), having black scanlines reduces the brightness and allows your brain to fill in the imagined intermediate image.
  - svachalek 5y ago
    I think this is why it's just not possible (or at least super difficult) to replicate the look of a CRT on a modern LCD. On a CRT it's firing an electron gun at one point on the screen which burns searingly bright, while the rest of the screen is fading out and between the scanlines it's perpetually dark. Your brain somehow turns that mess into a surprisingly coherent image, especially if it's animated, to the point I remember lots of people comparing 1080P LCD TVs in the store back when they came out to their old CRTs at home and asking, "is it really any better? I can't tell". (I still think they all needed glasses, but there were a LOT of people talking like that!) Maybe someday we'll be able to emulate the whole effect with fast enough, bright enough, LED/LCD screens but right now even the photos of CRT screens viewed on an LCD screen don't really give the right idea.
    - qayxc 5y ago
      > Maybe someday we'll be able to emulate the whole effect with fast enough, bright enough Please, never ever do that shit again. Ever. It was an actual strain on the eyes to watch TV back then (or work on a CRT monitor). You could actually catch tan if you were sitting too close to a CRT (hot sensation and slight discolouration of the skin from the electron radiation). Truly an ergonomic nightmare in every way (the flickering, OMG, the flickering...) - I don't miss CRTs.
      - dalmo3 5y ago
        You forgot the high-pitched noise, the worst offender imo. CRTs sucked.
- larusso 5y ago
  It also depended on the TV set you had. I was allowed to play secret of evermore a few nights on the TV set of my father for a few nights. He had a Sony Trinitron and the game looked amazingly sharp. It was also one with a flatter screen compared to the bludgy curved mess my TV was at the time. I still love pixel art. I would love to see a reinterpretation of FFVI with the Octopath Traveler engine. I know that for some the only way to play that game is as original as possible. But sadly that is no longer possible for the most of us.
  - foobarrio 5y ago
    I think that's what these people are doing at Project Final Fantasy 6. I haven't delved into the details but the screen shots look just like Octopath Traveler.
    - larusso 5y ago
      Thanks didn’t know this project exists.
- washadjeffmad 5y ago
  Any idea why you're being faded? That's an apt enough summary of the article. I keep a bunch of BNC to RCA connectors, S-video adapters, and RF modulators at work to connect legacy hardware we grew up on and started our careers with to some of our CRTs because they just don't look right on LCD. Gotta keep analog evil. I've also got a green phosphorescent display that I keep a raspi B+ connected to running asciicam that I sometimes point a camera at to use as an avatar for meetings. It looks cheap on LCD, but people get a big kick out of it when they realize what they're seeing isn't just a filter.
einpoklum 5y ago
Do these things run on Linux?
- dagurp 5y ago
  probably
underwater 5y ago
I don't understand the concept of a "Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster". How can you remaster pixels? If they were going for higher resolution assets, then sure. But they're just redrawing sprites at the same resolution using the same colour palettes?
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  Click the link and find out? There's pretty clear side-by-side comparisons showing the original & the remaster which answers your question.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  The article explains this in a lot of detail. Pixels are not pixels until they’re on a display, and different displays (CRT vs LCD for instance) display pixels differently in very not-subtle ways. So one interpretation of “remaster” is to emulate CRT-pixels as LCD-pixels through filters. Another is to re-design the pixel art to be optimized for LCDs.
  - underwater 5y ago
    That's what I get for skimming. I missed the connection being made.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
musicale 5y ago
One nice feature of the PS3 is that it has analog video output and plays PS1 games (and PS2 if you have a launch model.) I still think PS1/2 games look best on a CRT, as do 1990s-era PC games. Even modern games look pretty great on a CRT, which is why 16:9 CRTs command high prices.
underwater 5y ago
I've heard the revelation "that art was specifically drawn knowing it would ultimately pipe through a CRT" quite a few times now. It's becoming a meme. It makes it sound like artists sat down and specifically about colour bleed, and blurry edges, and designed the artwork while thinking about the mechanics of CRT monitors in an academic way. In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices.
- hellotomyrars 5y ago
  That doesn't really invalidate the point, and doesn't change the part where it looks different (and not necessarily as intended) on non-CRTs, or that they considered some of those aspects when they designed the art.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tshaddox 5y ago
  They presumably developed on CRTs, of course, but I would also guess that they drew while zoomed in and thus were very aware of each pixel and of tricks to make things look good.
  - jbverschoor 5y ago
    Drew while zoomed in? You mean using grid paper to create the sprites
    - gmueckl 5y ago
      DPaint was a thing, at least in the later years. That program supported zooming in.
- vmception 5y ago
  Many visual artists today also factor in the capture and display technology, specifically around color space which can have meaningful changes between mediums Nobody is suggesting pixel art was an advanced form of alchemy, they are saying many artists understood techniques or why their printed pixel art for a presentation would look one way while their digital version looked another way
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
If anyone is looking for a good CRT filter, I very highly recommend GTU v0.50 by aliaspider. Unlike some filters, GTU doesn't try to mimic CRTs with complete accuracy. Instead, it's like an idealized CRT tuned for pixel art, and IMO the results are shockingly good.
- viraptor 5y ago
  Here's a comparison with some screenshots https://filthypants.blogspot.com/2013/06/dedithering-pixel-shaders.html https://filthypants.blogspot.com/2013/06/dedithering-pixel-s...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jacksonlango 5y ago
They should make the tilesets easily moddable on the Steam versions, modern pixel artists could do some incredible work with these games. Maybe open up post processing modding to allow CRT effects too.
gman83 5y ago
If you've ever tried playing old games in an emulator, and thought to yourself, wow this looks terrible, take a look at how much better these games could look on a CRT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9C_TfmPgYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9C_TfmPgYM
vlunkr 5y ago
Well the new sprites are certainly an improvement from the last time they remade these games, but I still think it's a step down. I don't really get what they're doing. I fell in love with FF6 at a young age, and huge part of that was that the visuals blew me away, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. It reminds me of the Star Wars special editions, why do they insist on tinkering with something people already love? I understand the issue that stretching these pixels out to 50+ inches gets a little ridiculous, but there are already solutions that other re-releases have done. You can add borders to keep it from getting too huge, add optional filters for scanlines or crt blurriness, and if you want to mess with the colors a bit instead of sticking to the very limited original palette, that's probably ok.
leshokunin 5y ago
Some people not familiar with games might think the issue is overblown and the result of a vocal minority of zealots. How would you feel about a 4K colorized version Citizen Kane? The issue here is that these games are supposed to be a reissuing of the original games, with some small tweaks. People are often fine with that. The case of the Dragon Quest III remake and the 2D+3D simultaneous versions of DQ XI show that the exact same audience is fine with fully upgraded (or even downgraded) games. However, this in-between situation is frustrating. Is doesn’t help that Square Enid keeps on trying over and over with every version being the definitive one.
- rincebrain 5y ago
  I was disagreeing with one or two people I know over this point. I think they look nice, nontrivial edits and all, and might even buy them, though I'm still in the air about it. But don't advertise your remasters as "pixel-perfect" then redesign decent chunks of the sprites, especially when you're releasing these as an "our bad" after remasters which looked like Flash games on non-mobile platforms. Unlike some people, I would not mind if they were just making some minor tweaks because CRTs look drastically different. But from the limited examples we have, it looks like this is not that.
larsiusprime 5y ago
Frank Cifaldi, who worked on the Megaman Legacy collection and Disney Afternoon retro collection and is kind of an expert on this stuff (runs the video game history foundation among other things) has a lot of good nuanced takes on this: https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1408515001048961025 https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1408515001048961025 TL;DR -- every artist had a different workflow and approach. Some worked directly on CRT monitors, some worked on Amigas with Deluxe paint that had crisp pixel art akin to what we see today (yes the monitors were CRTs but there was a wild world of difference between some computer displays and televisions), some (like Miyamoto) worked directly on graph paper and then had someone else code them directly into the game. There is no single rule for knowing what an artist's "intention" was without looking at the context on a case by case basis.
joshspankit 5y ago
Hear me out: I feel like it’s only now where we have colour bit depth back (after decades of 24bit+8bit alpha when we started with 32bit) and OLEDs with per-pixel light emission that we can for the first time since they were made actually display the pixels as intended, and it’s also the first time we can create pixel art that is a real level up from the old pixel art. My mind is bursting with 12-bit per channel colours, retina-level bloom created in shaders, with sharp edges where the artist wants them.
- lupire 5y ago
  12 bit color is only really useful for HDR hinting tricks to make images pop next to non-HDR images/frames. When your image is full screen you don't need it.
- kibwen 5y ago
  Who has color bit depth back? Aren't modern mainstream computer, phone, and TV displays all still 24-bit?
  - joshspankit 5y ago
    We just recently got the tech for it: graphic cards, operating systems, display tech, and displays that support it. “10 bit” is 30 bit: 10 bits each for red, green, and blue. “12 bit” is 36 bit colour. Xbox One does 10bit, Dolby Vision is a 12bit spec, and so-on.
ndesaulniers 5y ago
Someone did ML based up-res textures for FFIX on pc. They look really great IMO, and I think the updated character textures+models on old backgrounds as in these new switch ports look bad. These FF remakes on switch were all 3D models moving on 2D backgrounds. I bought all of the switch remakes, and probably most interested to see the game play changes made to FFXII. Warning for folks that would like their games to work without internet in 20 years: the US release of FFX/X2 on switch does NOT ship with X2 on cart, and the box is not labeled as such. Buy the region free multilang from playasia if you care. Ah this article is talking about different remasters than I am...I guess no one can be happy with any such remaster. :P
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
derefr 5y ago
Always wondered why they haven’t remade the 2D games to just match the look of Yoshitaka Amano’s concept art. The monsters in the games were nearly always straight Amano digitizations, and looked out-of-place next to a world of semi-chibi reinterpretations of the PCs and NPCs (which always read to me more as compromises in the name of animatability, rather than a truly desired visual style. See e.g. the character menu portraits in the original FF6, which were also Amano art.) Why not make the rest of the world look like the monsters? Amano’s original art is still right there in their archives, cleaned up and digitized for their own art books and everything. Just take those, draw a few variations each, and use them directly as visual-novel-style taking heads in dialogue and battles; and then make much-closer-matched 3D models / hi-res spritework of them for overworld navigation.
- meitros 5y ago
  I guess it would be too small to translate well, but wow that aesthetic would be remarkable for a game
- least 5y ago
  As much as I love Amano’s illustrations I do not think they would transfer well into a video game like you say. There’s a somewhat disturbing and depressing quality to his art that I feel would struggle to convey some of the more light hearted moments in the games and be a huge mismatch with some of the cuter creatures like chocobos and moogles. I really don’t think things like Sabin suplexing a train or cute interactions between Locke and Celes would translate well at all, either. If they were to do a less chibi version then I think they’d have to make entirely new art (and not the awful thing they did with the mobile version of ff6)
colanderman 5y ago
Retro "video game" music, and many emulators and VGM players, have a similar (analogous) issue; using very high-quality (perfect) or very low-quality (exhibiting digital aliasing) square and sawtooth waves... and lots of them sometimes. In reality you had a very small number of fixed-function analog voices (= no digital aliasing) which were run through a cheap lowpass filter (= not perfect) on their way to the RF modulator.
grawprog 5y ago
Looking at the comparison, they're not great, but they definitely look better than the earlier 2013-2014 versions. By a huge margin. At least they tried to keep the style of the originals. On the note of CRT graphics in general, I have to be honest, despite growing up with these older games on CRT screens of various sizes and quality, as well as playing them on emulators on everything from crappy old computer monitors, to phone screens to laptop screens to high res monitors... I really feel like people pay way too much attention to and care far too much about tiny graphical details that don't really matter so much. You're really truly not missing much if you can't see these games on a tiny 20' flickery CRT screen. It really doesn't add anything.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  I remember when I was very young (8, 10, 12 years old) playing video games on CRT TVs. Atari and NES. I remember the flickery-raggedy-fuzzy vertical lines of the NES. I remember all the weird vertical-hold bounces of the Atari when games were reset. I remember the minute distortions of an RF-modulator-to-screw-attached-antenna-terminal connections. There's just simply something warm and magical and comforting about those details. You're playing old games to go back in time, to simpler times--so you might as well get those minute but important details right. It's part of the magic. Ultimately nothing can really recreate being the last one to go to sleep, in the living room or bedroom with no other lights on, maybe with the TV volume really low (to the point you could hear that faint background high-pitched noise all CRTs seem to make), and only the glow of the TV lighting up the room--sitting close to it--playing Atari or NES and fully enthralled in the game without a damn care about anything else in the world. It's a time long past and gone; I miss those times.

112 points by danso 5y ago

That's one thing that always bothered me about 90s nostalgia from people born in the late 90s and early 2000s, all the fan-made stuff didn't have the scanlines. I like how this is being addressed, people go out of their way to emulate VHS artifacting now with dynamic filters, and then pretend to pipe that through a CRT. This is much more appealing to me aesthetically Square's Final Fantasy remakes do not do this, instead they try to show characters in the way the final result would have looked like if they had never had to use pixel sprites back in the 90s in the first place. Grave mistake. Nobody wanted that.

colanderman 5y ago
Worse still is the "pixel art" that... rotates and scales pixels!! It was very common a few years ago. It's such a weird sort of retro kitsch that doesn't bother to try to understand the original medium. Like NES graphics were Minecraft but 2D. I'm glad the idea is coming into the zeitgeist that true pixel-based video game art was drawn for the CRT medium, not for digital nearest-neighbor upscaling.

arduinomancer 5y ago

Tl;dr: Pixel graphics on CRTs look smoother (almost like anti-aliasing) because CRT pixels don't behave like the clean pixel squares in modern displays. Just displaying the same pixels on a modern display may not match the original artist's intent.

musicale 5y ago
Even without interlacing (which will alternate the set of scanlines that are used and thereby "double" the resolution), having black scanlines reduces the brightness and allows your brain to fill in the imagined intermediate image.
- svachalek 5y ago
  I think this is why it's just not possible (or at least super difficult) to replicate the look of a CRT on a modern LCD. On a CRT it's firing an electron gun at one point on the screen which burns searingly bright, while the rest of the screen is fading out and between the scanlines it's perpetually dark. Your brain somehow turns that mess into a surprisingly coherent image, especially if it's animated, to the point I remember lots of people comparing 1080P LCD TVs in the store back when they came out to their old CRTs at home and asking, "is it really any better? I can't tell". (I still think they all needed glasses, but there were a LOT of people talking like that!) Maybe someday we'll be able to emulate the whole effect with fast enough, bright enough, LED/LCD screens but right now even the photos of CRT screens viewed on an LCD screen don't really give the right idea.
  - qayxc 5y ago
    > Maybe someday we'll be able to emulate the whole effect with fast enough, bright enough Please, never ever do that shit again. Ever. It was an actual strain on the eyes to watch TV back then (or work on a CRT monitor). You could actually catch tan if you were sitting too close to a CRT (hot sensation and slight discolouration of the skin from the electron radiation). Truly an ergonomic nightmare in every way (the flickering, OMG, the flickering...) - I don't miss CRTs.
    - dalmo3 5y ago
      You forgot the high-pitched noise, the worst offender imo. CRTs sucked.
larusso 5y ago
It also depended on the TV set you had. I was allowed to play secret of evermore a few nights on the TV set of my father for a few nights. He had a Sony Trinitron and the game looked amazingly sharp. It was also one with a flatter screen compared to the bludgy curved mess my TV was at the time. I still love pixel art. I would love to see a reinterpretation of FFVI with the Octopath Traveler engine. I know that for some the only way to play that game is as original as possible. But sadly that is no longer possible for the most of us.
- foobarrio 5y ago
  I think that's what these people are doing at Project Final Fantasy 6. I haven't delved into the details but the screen shots look just like Octopath Traveler.
  - larusso 5y ago
    Thanks didn’t know this project exists.
washadjeffmad 5y ago
Any idea why you're being faded? That's an apt enough summary of the article. I keep a bunch of BNC to RCA connectors, S-video adapters, and RF modulators at work to connect legacy hardware we grew up on and started our careers with to some of our CRTs because they just don't look right on LCD. Gotta keep analog evil. I've also got a green phosphorescent display that I keep a raspi B+ connected to running asciicam that I sometimes point a camera at to use as an avatar for meetings. It looks cheap on LCD, but people get a big kick out of it when they realize what they're seeing isn't just a filter.

einpoklum 5y ago

Do these things run on Linux?

dagurp 5y ago
probably

underwater 5y ago

I don't understand the concept of a "Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster". How can you remaster pixels? If they were going for higher resolution assets, then sure. But they're just redrawing sprites at the same resolution using the same colour palettes?

kllrnohj 5y ago
Click the link and find out? There's pretty clear side-by-side comparisons showing the original & the remaster which answers your question.
reikonomusha 5y ago
The article explains this in a lot of detail. Pixels are not pixels until they’re on a display, and different displays (CRT vs LCD for instance) display pixels differently in very not-subtle ways. So one interpretation of “remaster” is to emulate CRT-pixels as LCD-pixels through filters. Another is to re-design the pixel art to be optimized for LCDs.
- underwater 5y ago
  That's what I get for skimming. I missed the connection being made.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

musicale 5y ago

One nice feature of the PS3 is that it has analog video output and plays PS1 games (and PS2 if you have a launch model.) I still think PS1/2 games look best on a CRT, as do 1990s-era PC games. Even modern games look pretty great on a CRT, which is why 16:9 CRTs command high prices.

underwater 5y ago

I've heard the revelation "that art was specifically drawn knowing it would ultimately pipe through a CRT" quite a few times now. It's becoming a meme. It makes it sound like artists sat down and specifically about colour bleed, and blurry edges, and designed the artwork while thinking about the mechanics of CRT monitors in an academic way. In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices.

hellotomyrars 5y ago
That doesn't really invalidate the point, and doesn't change the part where it looks different (and not necessarily as intended) on non-CRTs, or that they considered some of those aspects when they designed the art.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tshaddox 5y ago
They presumably developed on CRTs, of course, but I would also guess that they drew while zoomed in and thus were very aware of each pixel and of tricks to make things look good.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  Drew while zoomed in? You mean using grid paper to create the sprites
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    DPaint was a thing, at least in the later years. That program supported zooming in.
vmception 5y ago
Many visual artists today also factor in the capture and display technology, specifically around color space which can have meaningful changes between mediums Nobody is suggesting pixel art was an advanced form of alchemy, they are saying many artists understood techniques or why their printed pixel art for a presentation would look one way while their digital version looked another way

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

If anyone is looking for a good CRT filter, I very highly recommend GTU v0.50 by aliaspider. Unlike some filters, GTU doesn't try to mimic CRTs with complete accuracy. Instead, it's like an idealized CRT tuned for pixel art, and IMO the results are shockingly good.

viraptor 5y ago
Here's a comparison with some screenshots https://filthypants.blogspot.com/2013/06/dedithering-pixel-shaders.html https://filthypants.blogspot.com/2013/06/dedithering-pixel-s...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

jacksonlango 5y ago

They should make the tilesets easily moddable on the Steam versions, modern pixel artists could do some incredible work with these games. Maybe open up post processing modding to allow CRT effects too.

gman83 5y ago

If you've ever tried playing old games in an emulator, and thought to yourself, wow this looks terrible, take a look at how much better these games could look on a CRT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9C_TfmPgYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9C_TfmPgYM

vlunkr 5y ago

Well the new sprites are certainly an improvement from the last time they remade these games, but I still think it's a step down. I don't really get what they're doing. I fell in love with FF6 at a young age, and huge part of that was that the visuals blew me away, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. It reminds me of the Star Wars special editions, why do they insist on tinkering with something people already love? I understand the issue that stretching these pixels out to 50+ inches gets a little ridiculous, but there are already solutions that other re-releases have done. You can add borders to keep it from getting too huge, add optional filters for scanlines or crt blurriness, and if you want to mess with the colors a bit instead of sticking to the very limited original palette, that's probably ok.

leshokunin 5y ago

Some people not familiar with games might think the issue is overblown and the result of a vocal minority of zealots. How would you feel about a 4K colorized version Citizen Kane? The issue here is that these games are supposed to be a reissuing of the original games, with some small tweaks. People are often fine with that. The case of the Dragon Quest III remake and the 2D+3D simultaneous versions of DQ XI show that the exact same audience is fine with fully upgraded (or even downgraded) games. However, this in-between situation is frustrating. Is doesn’t help that Square Enid keeps on trying over and over with every version being the definitive one.

rincebrain 5y ago
I was disagreeing with one or two people I know over this point. I think they look nice, nontrivial edits and all, and might even buy them, though I'm still in the air about it. But don't advertise your remasters as "pixel-perfect" then redesign decent chunks of the sprites, especially when you're releasing these as an "our bad" after remasters which looked like Flash games on non-mobile platforms. Unlike some people, I would not mind if they were just making some minor tweaks because CRTs look drastically different. But from the limited examples we have, it looks like this is not that.

larsiusprime 5y ago

Frank Cifaldi, who worked on the Megaman Legacy collection and Disney Afternoon retro collection and is kind of an expert on this stuff (runs the video game history foundation among other things) has a lot of good nuanced takes on this: https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1408515001048961025 https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1408515001048961025 TL;DR -- every artist had a different workflow and approach. Some worked directly on CRT monitors, some worked on Amigas with Deluxe paint that had crisp pixel art akin to what we see today (yes the monitors were CRTs but there was a wild world of difference between some computer displays and televisions), some (like Miyamoto) worked directly on graph paper and then had someone else code them directly into the game. There is no single rule for knowing what an artist's "intention" was without looking at the context on a case by case basis.

joshspankit 5y ago

Hear me out: I feel like it’s only now where we have colour bit depth back (after decades of 24bit+8bit alpha when we started with 32bit) and OLEDs with per-pixel light emission that we can for the first time since they were made actually display the pixels as intended, and it’s also the first time we can create pixel art that is a real level up from the old pixel art. My mind is bursting with 12-bit per channel colours, retina-level bloom created in shaders, with sharp edges where the artist wants them.

lupire 5y ago
12 bit color is only really useful for HDR hinting tricks to make images pop next to non-HDR images/frames. When your image is full screen you don't need it.
kibwen 5y ago
Who has color bit depth back? Aren't modern mainstream computer, phone, and TV displays all still 24-bit?
- joshspankit 5y ago
  We just recently got the tech for it: graphic cards, operating systems, display tech, and displays that support it. “10 bit” is 30 bit: 10 bits each for red, green, and blue. “12 bit” is 36 bit colour. Xbox One does 10bit, Dolby Vision is a 12bit spec, and so-on.

ndesaulniers 5y ago

Someone did ML based up-res textures for FFIX on pc. They look really great IMO, and I think the updated character textures+models on old backgrounds as in these new switch ports look bad. These FF remakes on switch were all 3D models moving on 2D backgrounds. I bought all of the switch remakes, and probably most interested to see the game play changes made to FFXII. Warning for folks that would like their games to work without internet in 20 years: the US release of FFX/X2 on switch does NOT ship with X2 on cart, and the box is not labeled as such. Buy the region free multilang from playasia if you care. Ah this article is talking about different remasters than I am...I guess no one can be happy with any such remaster. :P

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

derefr 5y ago

Always wondered why they haven’t remade the 2D games to just match the look of Yoshitaka Amano’s concept art. The monsters in the games were nearly always straight Amano digitizations, and looked out-of-place next to a world of semi-chibi reinterpretations of the PCs and NPCs (which always read to me more as compromises in the name of animatability, rather than a truly desired visual style. See e.g. the character menu portraits in the original FF6, which were also Amano art.) Why not make the rest of the world look like the monsters? Amano’s original art is still right there in their archives, cleaned up and digitized for their own art books and everything. Just take those, draw a few variations each, and use them directly as visual-novel-style taking heads in dialogue and battles; and then make much-closer-matched 3D models / hi-res spritework of them for overworld navigation.

meitros 5y ago
I guess it would be too small to translate well, but wow that aesthetic would be remarkable for a game
least 5y ago
As much as I love Amano’s illustrations I do not think they would transfer well into a video game like you say. There’s a somewhat disturbing and depressing quality to his art that I feel would struggle to convey some of the more light hearted moments in the games and be a huge mismatch with some of the cuter creatures like chocobos and moogles. I really don’t think things like Sabin suplexing a train or cute interactions between Locke and Celes would translate well at all, either. If they were to do a less chibi version then I think they’d have to make entirely new art (and not the awful thing they did with the mobile version of ff6)

colanderman 5y ago

Retro "video game" music, and many emulators and VGM players, have a similar (analogous) issue; using very high-quality (perfect) or very low-quality (exhibiting digital aliasing) square and sawtooth waves... and lots of them sometimes. In reality you had a very small number of fixed-function analog voices (= no digital aliasing) which were run through a cheap lowpass filter (= not perfect) on their way to the RF modulator.

grawprog 5y ago

Looking at the comparison, they're not great, but they definitely look better than the earlier 2013-2014 versions. By a huge margin. At least they tried to keep the style of the originals. On the note of CRT graphics in general, I have to be honest, despite growing up with these older games on CRT screens of various sizes and quality, as well as playing them on emulators on everything from crappy old computer monitors, to phone screens to laptop screens to high res monitors... I really feel like people pay way too much attention to and care far too much about tiny graphical details that don't really matter so much. You're really truly not missing much if you can't see these games on a tiny 20' flickery CRT screen. It really doesn't add anything.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
I remember when I was very young (8, 10, 12 years old) playing video games on CRT TVs. Atari and NES. I remember the flickery-raggedy-fuzzy vertical lines of the NES. I remember all the weird vertical-hold bounces of the Atari when games were reset. I remember the minute distortions of an RF-modulator-to-screw-attached-antenna-terminal connections. There's just simply something warm and magical and comforting about those details. You're playing old games to go back in time, to simpler times--so you might as well get those minute but important details right. It's part of the magic. Ultimately nothing can really recreate being the last one to go to sleep, in the living room or bedroom with no other lights on, maybe with the TV volume really low (to the point you could hear that faint background high-pitched noise all CRTs seem to make), and only the glow of the TV lighting up the room--sitting close to it--playing Atari or NES and fully enthralled in the game without a damn care about anything else in the world. It's a time long past and gone; I miss those times.