Final Fantasy remasters reignite controversies over pixel art | Hacker News Reader

Final Fantasy remasters reignite controversies over pixel art

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112 pointsdanso60 comments

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.

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)

I guess it would be too small to translate well, but wow that aesthetic would be remarkable for a game

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.

> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices.

Oh you don't even know the half of it, believe me! That was not how it went back in the day.

While every monitor was indeed a CRT, the difference between composite, EGA (later VGA), and RF cable, TV and computer monitors were in fact quite visible.

You could draw perfectly good pixel art on a nice, well calibrated 14" computer monitor only to see the same graphics look like a blend of mouse excrements and frog barf on a PAL TV via RF cable.

In fact, artists needed to make sure their palette and graphics worked reasonably well on both PAL and NTSC devices (different resolutions, slightly different colours, etc.).

Some companies made good ports that worked- and looked well on both PAL and NTSC, while many games had terrible PAL versions.

^ Can confirm. The tech itself might have had less “complexity”, but devs had to practically (or actually) become engineers of every single piece of the pipeline. The different connectors, the different tubes, how colour works, how the memory functioned (not just how the docs said it functioned), the math that each chip did as the functions were run, everything.

Lack of knowledge of any specific part could mean anything from muddy graphics to a bug in the retail version of the game in a time when there was literally no way to patch a game after release. Those bugs could ruin a company.

Also the other way around, using alternating patterns on analog tv standards you can confuse the comb filter and create extra colors.

The example in this tweet is amazing: https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587

Single red pixels bleed into each other, creating eyes that span multiple pixels. It's an incredible effect.

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.

The focus here should really be on output signal, not CRT. Specifically, composite vs. RGB output.

And yes, at least in some cases, designers very carefully took into consideration how the art would look on a CRT via composite, in contrast to how they saw it on the high end monitors they were designing on via RGB.

Here are two of the designers of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games discussing the point:

https://twitter.com/MegaDriveShock/status/139046602041917849...

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.

Drew while zoomed in? You mean using grid paper to create the sprites

DPaint was a thing, at least in the later years. That program supported zooming in.

> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices.

Vector games look atrocious in modern monitors, but beautiful in vector monitors. Developers couldn't know what monitors the future would have, but they certainly designed for the monitors of their time and counted with their quirks in their visual effects.

IIRC, the developer of the 2600 VCS version of Pac-Man decided that the ghosts should display 1 of every 4 frames not because it looked well in his monitor, but because he was running out of time and relied on phosphor persistence to mask his sprite reuse hack.

Edit: The correct VCS Pac-Man story of the flickery ghosts https://boards.fool.com/atari-2600-hardware-and-pac-man-2527...

TIL that Motley Fool has a community where people discuss video games.

I don't understand the distinction you're making here. If every monitor was a CRT, the artists sat down at one of those monitors and thought about (while observing) color bleed and blurry edges, and drew what looked good on their development devices.

Are you saying that people are saying that artists back then didn't use monitors, and had to imagine what their art would look like?

This is a solid rebuttal to the idea that things were carefully crafted to the pixels. https://t.co/pGAxa87C1e

Odds are high that things were varied considerably. Such that it is tough to really claim too much.

Edit: as the follow-up shows. Down res and cleanup probably works better than folks are allowing in the conversations. With the major caveat that the "and cleanup" is tough to automate.

One large, high resolution (relatively you the realm of pixel sprites) B&W image does not rebut anything.

It was the down res comparison of that specific image that was a stronger message.

In the days of 8-bit and 16-bit home computing, monitors were an expensive luxury, and a lot of game developers will have used a TV connected by a composite or even RF connection.

They didn't have to 'think about how it'd look on a consumer TV', as that's probably what they were developing on.

During the era of 16-bit console development, the Amiga (with DPaint - which was never as good on PC) was still a popular pixel art tool. And even if you had a monitor, you could easily preview things on a TV too.

The opposite, I believe. A lot of people do make it sound like art was mastered on pixel perfect displays, and the artist had to imagine how it would ultimately look on some far off CRT.

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

Even if they didn't draw specifically for CRT output, I imagine the process to have been iterative -- if something ended up looking bad on end-user output devices, they would make tweaks until the product looked good enough on CRTs.

Or are you suggesting that artists of that era never looked at their art on CRTs at all?

Seriously, and also pixel art is so constrained designing "for a CRT" doesn't really mean much of anything, especially when different CRT's had drastically different properties.

At most, it might mean artists perhaps tried to increase color contrast between pixels a bit, to compensate for known blur. But on the other hand, they were usually working with a limited color palette so that kind of subtle adjustment often wouldn't even be possible -- the colors just are what they are.

The preference to blur 8-bit video games on modern systems is totally valid, or to even try to emulate actual CRT characteristics, but so is the preference not to. It's an entirely aesthetic preference that doesn't really have anything to do with original "design intent".

And then stuff like this (from the article) is just ridiculous:

> Look at how much detail you're missing when youre only looking at the raw pixels. Richter's hair is barely visible! Look at how much clearer his boots read as leather on the right!

Color contrast (the hair) has nothing to do with pixellation and everything to do with different overall gamma, contrast, and brightness of the display -- which you can customize on your modern display to your heart's content. I guarantee you "Richter's hair" was "barely visible" on plenty of CRT's as well.

And I don't know about you, but his legs/boots read equally skin/leather to me in both images. But I guess you can see anything you want if you're motivated to...

> In reality, every monitor was a CRT. They just drew what looked good on their development devices.

True, but there was a huge difference between a good-quality RGB monitor and a consumer TV connected via composite video or RF. Ideally designers would have been using development devices that took that difference into account.

For example, I've heard of artists at Sega drawing on PCs and using custom hardware so they could simultaneously view their work on a real Genesis connected to a typical TV.

A watercolor artist doesn’t necessarily sit down and think about the Navier-Stokes equations, but they sure do take advantage of the fluidity of their medium.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here's a comparison with some screenshots https://filthypants.blogspot.com/2013/06/dedithering-pixel-s...

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Who has color bit depth back? Aren't modern mainstream computer, phone, and TV displays all still 24-bit?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks didn’t know this project exists.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

You forgot the high-pitched noise, the worst offender imo. CRTs sucked.

Do these things run on Linux?

probably

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?

Click the link and find out? There's pretty clear side-by-side comparisons showing the original & the remaster which answers your question.

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.

That's what I get for skimming. I missed the connection being made.

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