Don't think I've ever seen people turn on a game art style as quickly as I have with the HD2D trend. Which is a shame, because it's likely a lot cheaper to make than a modern game while still looking somewhat better than usual 2D game.
People always say they want less powerful graphical games for cheaper, but whenever a quality one like that gets made everyone's quick to rush and call it the ugliest PoS they've never seen. It's really depressing, tbh.
They absolutely do not look better than 2D games. They could just make new 2D games. Or they could just make lower fidelity 3D games in a different style. You realize it's not a binary choice between big budget, high fidelity modern 3D graphics and HD-2D graphics, right?
Octopath Traveler was an interesting stylistic experiment in combining FF6-inspired pixel art with tilt shift photography to create a miniature diorama world, but now that it's become the default look for Square Enix's low budget RPGs and 8-/16-bit era remakes, the cracks are really showing in the style.
The problem is that while Octopath built its world out of FF6-inspired pixel art textures that matched the character sprites, the later games tend to take these really lovely character sprites and put them in environments with low-res textures that feel less like a deliberate retro aesthetic and more like they're just a bit shit. Then they slather all of these extra post-processing effects on top that really do them no favors. All this bloom and focus blur and whatnot. People always complained about that aspect of Octopath's art direction, but at least there it felt deliberate, whereas in most of the other games since it feels like they're just doing these things arbitrarily.
Look at this cave environment from the Adventures of Elliot, for instance. Look at that dirt. Look at the sharpening and chromatic aberration that make it look even worse than it would as a raw texture. You cannot tell me that this looks better than if they'd just made a 2D environment to match the sprites.
If you think I'm cherrypicking by zooming in like this, let's look at a whole screenshot from the Steam store page. This looks horrendous. You can barely make out the character sprites.
I think it's very telling that the best recent HD-2D games, the Dragon Quest remakes, are the ones that abandon the low-res environment textures altogether and just have the characters walking around maps with HD textures, while also showing a lot more restraint with the post-processing effects. But then at a certain point what does "HD-2D" even mean? Because it sure as hell doesn't look like Octopath anymore.
I am a professional pixel artist! I have opinions on these things! Sorry. I do not like this trend and I think RPG Maker U2U pushing for it to be the new default for retro RPGs sucks ass.
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