2D lives! (so does this site)

Monday, February 12, 2007 » art gaming image thought

Sometime last year I talked about how 3D game graphics are slowly approaching the artistic quality of hand-drawn, 2D graphics, thanks to HD cel shading and some creative art direction. I just wanted to point out the Final Fantasy Tactics remake for PSP as another great example of this trend, and it's not even HD. The characters in the shot above are actually fully 3D with some amazing shader applied. Stills don't do it justice, so if you're interested you can watch the trailer at the game's horrific Flash site.

Another notable 2D revival game is the Final Fantasy Anniversary Edition, which I believe is the fourth time FF1 and 2 have been remade. Seeing those familiar sprites in crisp, high resolution is great, but they also give me kind of a cheap Windows RPG vibe. Hopefully it's just because of the terrible compression in the screenshots.

Finally, there's Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles, which has 3D graphics but 2D gameplay like New Super Mario Bros., and it looks amazing. I mean, look at this new Richter design. It's good to see Ayami Kojima making a comeback.

The only thing that could improve on this trend is if developers would start putting together some new titles instead of all these remakes.