was thinking about a tweet someone posted how when we talk about stylization in graphics, the examples given are always games that look like cartoons
it made me think about how stylization over realism can still be applied to much more than just cel-shading and particularly how there are a lot of very stylish looking ps2 games that don’t rely on looking like comic books or cartoons
also cel damage still looks really bad
I am interested in these ideas. My brain is bad at pulling things like this lately, but could you identify a couple of the PS2 games in question?
this feela like cheating but lament of innocence and manhunt. eveb resident evil 4 while pushing for realism pops with fun epements of palette and color usage to make a desaturated rural nightmare come alive.
its also had me thinking more about how technological limitations used to make developers work “around” the concept of realism
ICO
Beyond Good and Evil
Crackdown
Breath of the Wild
Mario Odyssey
Superhot
Overwatch (eugh…)
Fortnite (eugh…)
Minecraft (eugh…)
Apex Legends (…)
I think artists are raring to do these things but they’re usually not allowed, out of top-down fear of how restrictive the market is, despite, you know, all the biggest games being non-photorealistic
I recently played through Final Fantasy IX. It has anime-esque character designs, sure, but it isn’t cel-shaded and doesn’t pretend to be a cartoon, while still being intensely stylized, stepping away from the gestures toward realism in FF VIII.
Also, bring back fixed cameras.
I also really miss the house aesthetic of Atlus/SMT games from the PS2 era. Definitely anime-adjacent, but their visual stylizations were distinctive, were ideally suited to Kaneko Kazuma’s drawing style, and played really well with the PS2’s technical limitations.
After playing spider-man I’ve been thinking about the sort of hyper real stylization the games of that nature have
They are not quite photo realistic because of uncanny valley stuff, but you can’t quite put your finger on what is exaggerated
Also all of the models they use for reference are completely boring looking people
Dog Days
REZ? Darwinia? DEFCON? Journey? Kentucky Route 0?
Aren’t there a couple impressionist painter-based games on itch?
Red Dead Redemption 2 has a very particular style that works really well, I think
Look at these screenshots! They look almost like paintings! The color grading is great! The lighting is fantastic! Good highlights and shadows! Realistic without being TOO realistic!
It’s basically all global illumination, but still. An effective style.
Ironically, the only other game that I can think of which takes GI to this extreme is… DQ11
The color grading in Red Dead 2 is absurdly good. The same goes for Breath of the Wild. There’s some knowledge that’s gotten SDR tonemapping much much better recently even as some of these games (like Red Dead 2) have a poor HDR tonemap.
this was alluded to a lil in the recent HL/2 thread but the characters in that game are really excellently stylized/animated in a realistic style. Garry’s Mod machinima took off for a reason
HAHAHAA good
i take the entire psychedelic games thread and place it in this one as an example
Superhot
i actually think that Breath of The Wild stumbled a little on the color grading. If you emulate it with Cemu, you get options to tweak it and it became obvious to me very quickly that there is some easy ground to gain with color saturation and joy.
think stylization is usually used to mean “doesn’t look like a videogame” but maybe another helpful use would be “blows up and exaggerates standard videogamey forms of visual representation for effect.”
example, Monster Party is great but I always especially love how it seems to be toying with the noisy repetitive abstraction intrinsic to tiled graphics themselves. crude grinning faces and noise textures smeared around in rough approximation of trees and hills.
faxanadu and castlevania 3 are maybe also good nes examples, playing with the strange tactile quality and the dramatic black vacancies of tilesets respectively. LSD for psx does something similar with repeating textures I think.
maybe stretch panic is also an example of what I mean in that it feels to me less like it’s playing on cartooniness than on something latent in supposedly “cartoony” 3d games themselves, their tendency to devolve into just bright chaotic clusters of geometric primitives zooming around and breaking apart. or even just the stylization that takes place in videogame adverts/packaging?
I think horror games are more likely to lean into this stuff in general. maybe the mist in silent hill 1 counts - from what I’ve seen “…iru” could also be a good example in the way it uses unexpectedly bright or vivid colours to offset pitchblack darkness.
I mentioned it here before but the pc88 version of “golden grave” is really inspiring to me because of how hard it leans into the jagged, spiky lineart of early graphic adventure games (mystery house etc) for atmospheric and expressionistic effects. the straight lines are crooked, out of kilter, projecting at crazy angles. little scratches of detail or patterning are played against dramatically unbroken solid colours. objects don’t sit neatly on top of each other so much as they’re flattened together as a weird cluster of lines - maybe taking advantage of the ways that uniform line thickness tends to flatten perspective.
stuff that acknowledges and explores the frequent basic awkwardness of portraying anything at all in a videogame is always more exciting to me than like “wow they sorta got this 3d to look like a visually unappealing cartoon, a little, perhaps”
