BRRRRRING
Octorok
- Pronouns
- He/His
I think there's generally been a lot of either misinformation or misunderstanding of what these games actually. My view is that they are broadly the original aesthetic, but without memory or storage limitations that dictated a whole bunch of design decisions.
I apologize for the comparisons. To get a more accurate perception of the issues and what opponents of these versions are saying, you should make sure to full screen the GBA or SNES versions of the game to full screen on your big HD TV or monitor.
In the old days, they didn't have the storage space to come up with a wide variety of tiles, so most any scene used the same single floor tile copy and pasted over and over. In these remakes, floors that only had a single tile design often now have about a dozen or so, giving the impression of way more detail despite being the same resolution.
vs.
The next major change to point out is resolution support. I'm skip over the bad FF4/FF5 SNES backgrounds and use the better GBA redesigns. The Pixel remasters are natively ultrawide resolution. This applies to both any full screen backdrops or backgrounds, as well as battle backgrounds.
vs.
There's been shockingly little discussion of the battle backgrounds, but all of them are natively around 21:9, and then cropped down on the left/right for regular widescreen, and then trimmed a bit at the top and bottom when on the iPad aspect ration.
vs.
It isn't just an expansion, but also more defined detail in the grass itself.
In the images you can also note that the sprites are no longer confined to 16x24 in size. Capes, hair, shoulders, legs during walking animations, etc. are allowed to go outside of the box, but this is mostly during animations and people don't really notice the difference. The FF6 sprites are now actually larger, to account for showing the two legs, are now a few pixels taller so don't have as scrunched upper toros.
Spells are now pixelated 3D effects, so they are fully 60 FPS or whatever instead of just being 3 or 4 frames of animation. Some of the game reused in some spell animations in the PC release, but it looks like they've been made more distinct in this version.
vs
There's a whole ton of changes, but people do lazy comparisons between sprites without showing how they look in game. Stuff like being able to see Zozo from Mt. Zozo, or Coin Toss having a full ultrawide starscape instead of just a blue background, is a really visually appealing change.
Spells in FF6, in particular, are one thing where I genuinely cannot comprehend how people thing the original spells look better.
vs.
Other good examples, the FFV Siren scene:
vs.
Sorry for the bad comparisons. You should be blowing up the GBA screens to be full screen on your TV, because that is what people are seriously recommending here. Resolution, 3D spell and atmosphere effects, more detailed backgrounds, more detailed sprites, on top of faster animations and smoother UI performance, make for really appealing version of these games.
I apologize for the comparisons. To get a more accurate perception of the issues and what opponents of these versions are saying, you should make sure to full screen the GBA or SNES versions of the game to full screen on your big HD TV or monitor.
In the old days, they didn't have the storage space to come up with a wide variety of tiles, so most any scene used the same single floor tile copy and pasted over and over. In these remakes, floors that only had a single tile design often now have about a dozen or so, giving the impression of way more detail despite being the same resolution.
vs.
The next major change to point out is resolution support. I'm skip over the bad FF4/FF5 SNES backgrounds and use the better GBA redesigns. The Pixel remasters are natively ultrawide resolution. This applies to both any full screen backdrops or backgrounds, as well as battle backgrounds.
vs.
There's been shockingly little discussion of the battle backgrounds, but all of them are natively around 21:9, and then cropped down on the left/right for regular widescreen, and then trimmed a bit at the top and bottom when on the iPad aspect ration.
vs.
It isn't just an expansion, but also more defined detail in the grass itself.
In the images you can also note that the sprites are no longer confined to 16x24 in size. Capes, hair, shoulders, legs during walking animations, etc. are allowed to go outside of the box, but this is mostly during animations and people don't really notice the difference. The FF6 sprites are now actually larger, to account for showing the two legs, are now a few pixels taller so don't have as scrunched upper toros.
Spells are now pixelated 3D effects, so they are fully 60 FPS or whatever instead of just being 3 or 4 frames of animation. Some of the game reused in some spell animations in the PC release, but it looks like they've been made more distinct in this version.
vs
There's a whole ton of changes, but people do lazy comparisons between sprites without showing how they look in game. Stuff like being able to see Zozo from Mt. Zozo, or Coin Toss having a full ultrawide starscape instead of just a blue background, is a really visually appealing change.
Spells in FF6, in particular, are one thing where I genuinely cannot comprehend how people thing the original spells look better.
vs.
Other good examples, the FFV Siren scene:
vs.
Sorry for the bad comparisons. You should be blowing up the GBA screens to be full screen on your TV, because that is what people are seriously recommending here. Resolution, 3D spell and atmosphere effects, more detailed backgrounds, more detailed sprites, on top of faster animations and smoother UI performance, make for really appealing version of these games.