Hi everyone. I've been reading a bunch of old issues of Heavy Metal magazine that I downloaded a few days ago, and I've also been playing old PS2 games with crap graphics. The art in those magazine issues is breathtaking, both in the sense that the art is usually beautifully drawn and colored, as well as that the character designs (as it relates to costumes, especially) are master-tier trippy.
I loved the magazine back in the nineties, when I was an adolescent and then a teen, so I had thought that rediscovering the magazine (the issues I've been reading have been past the 00s decade) would be great and an awesome experience... but they've actually made me kind of sad. Sad that American animated shows never evolved to look this good past the early nineties (instead devolving into the low-effort, badly-drawn aesthetics of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network style cartoons). But also sad that, outside of a relatively small amount of games like JetSetRadio, the Hoyoverse games, Tears of The Kingdom and the later Bandai Tales games, the gaming industry never tried to do more with cel-shaded graphics; instead videogames went in the direction of trying to have "realistic" graphics.
I don't mind 3D graphics so much nowadays, as the technology has just recently been able to do photorealism, but I hated the leap from 2D to 3D with the PS1 and N64. Those blocky polygons were just so ugly. The textures and the way that colors/light and shadow looked were also an eyesore. And it just went on for so many years through so many console generations. I would play something like Final Fantasy VIII, and wonder why they didn't just try to use well-drawn pixel graphics like in the Marvel vs. Capcom games.
Don't get me wrong, the PS2 is one of my favorite consoles of all time, and it has more games with epic storylines and great gameplay than it's got any right to. But I've recently jumped back into playing PS1, PS2 and PS3 games on emulators, and wow those games look awful. Thankfully more and more people are getting into upscaling the graphics from those eras of consoles... but I've noticed that no one has ever tried to take a game like, say, Shadow Hearts, and turn the graphics into cel-shaded graphics, to give it that "Hoyoverse" effect (where you feel like you're playing an anime movie). The same could be said about some Western games; no one has ever taken a CRPG with bad 3D aesthetics and tried to make it look like a 1980s action cartoon like He-Man or Thundercats, or taken a character action game (like God Hand) and tried to make the graphics look like a 1990s style American comic book, drawn by someone like Todd MacFarlane or Jim Lee.
That leads me to my question: I've been wondering, is it even possible to do something like that? I'm now enamored by the idea of Devil May Cry 3 with graphics like Honkai Impact 3rd. Or G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout but instead of the bad 3D graphics it has, it would look like the eighties Saturday morning cartoon. or Borderlands except it looks like an Image comic book from the nineties. Or that terrible Treasure Planet game, except it looks like the hand drawn parts of the Treasure Planet movie. Is it possible to dump the graphics of a random PS2 game, use filters or AI to make them have a flat/2D hand drawn aesthetic, and have it come out looking like that Marvel What If animated show? Or is this just a pipe dream about pie in the sky?
Thanks for reading this far. Apologies for the post being so long; it was way too long and I wrote way too much, but I had the interconnected ideas in my head and I don't know how to summarize it or give it more brevity.
I loved the magazine back in the nineties, when I was an adolescent and then a teen, so I had thought that rediscovering the magazine (the issues I've been reading have been past the 00s decade) would be great and an awesome experience... but they've actually made me kind of sad. Sad that American animated shows never evolved to look this good past the early nineties (instead devolving into the low-effort, badly-drawn aesthetics of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network style cartoons). But also sad that, outside of a relatively small amount of games like JetSetRadio, the Hoyoverse games, Tears of The Kingdom and the later Bandai Tales games, the gaming industry never tried to do more with cel-shaded graphics; instead videogames went in the direction of trying to have "realistic" graphics.
I don't mind 3D graphics so much nowadays, as the technology has just recently been able to do photorealism, but I hated the leap from 2D to 3D with the PS1 and N64. Those blocky polygons were just so ugly. The textures and the way that colors/light and shadow looked were also an eyesore. And it just went on for so many years through so many console generations. I would play something like Final Fantasy VIII, and wonder why they didn't just try to use well-drawn pixel graphics like in the Marvel vs. Capcom games.
Don't get me wrong, the PS2 is one of my favorite consoles of all time, and it has more games with epic storylines and great gameplay than it's got any right to. But I've recently jumped back into playing PS1, PS2 and PS3 games on emulators, and wow those games look awful. Thankfully more and more people are getting into upscaling the graphics from those eras of consoles... but I've noticed that no one has ever tried to take a game like, say, Shadow Hearts, and turn the graphics into cel-shaded graphics, to give it that "Hoyoverse" effect (where you feel like you're playing an anime movie). The same could be said about some Western games; no one has ever taken a CRPG with bad 3D aesthetics and tried to make it look like a 1980s action cartoon like He-Man or Thundercats, or taken a character action game (like God Hand) and tried to make the graphics look like a 1990s style American comic book, drawn by someone like Todd MacFarlane or Jim Lee.
That leads me to my question: I've been wondering, is it even possible to do something like that? I'm now enamored by the idea of Devil May Cry 3 with graphics like Honkai Impact 3rd. Or G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout but instead of the bad 3D graphics it has, it would look like the eighties Saturday morning cartoon. or Borderlands except it looks like an Image comic book from the nineties. Or that terrible Treasure Planet game, except it looks like the hand drawn parts of the Treasure Planet movie. Is it possible to dump the graphics of a random PS2 game, use filters or AI to make them have a flat/2D hand drawn aesthetic, and have it come out looking like that Marvel What If animated show? Or is this just a pipe dream about pie in the sky?
Thanks for reading this far. Apologies for the post being so long; it was way too long and I wrote way too much, but I had the interconnected ideas in my head and I don't know how to summarize it or give it more brevity.
)