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This is a thread for appreciating the unique art style of Japanese HD surrealism. Japanese HD surrealism is a term coined (by me) to describe art styles in Japanese-developed games on HD consoles with certain commonalities such as: -Painstakingly crafted real-world objects/brands -Weird boxy architecture -Seemingly inhuman proportions/scale -Flat-ish lighting -Semi open world -Limited animations - no mo-cap, very simple cutscenes often without lip sync animations -A strange emptiness like a bad cheap movie set So what are some examples?  Yakuza Series  Yakuza Series  Metal Gear Solid 4  Metal Gear Rising Revengeance (note the strange scale of the walls and doors)  Metal Gear Rising Revengeance (surreal, wide empty streets)  Deadly Premonition Series  Deadly Premonition Series  Bayonetta 2 It's important to note that not every Japanese game has this unique art style. Here are some examples of games that are close but would ultimately be excluded: -Persona 5 - too stylized, Persona 4 might fit -MGSV - Kojima graduated to actual realism with this title -Souls games -Any Sony first-party game - too detailed and realistic -Resident Evil 2 - that burger looks too real compared to the horrendous food creations of the other titles Possible precursors to this style: While the style didn't hit its stride until the HD era there are some examples of games that most likely precipitated the trend.  Sonic Adventure - the OG  Resident Evil 4 - Later RE games achieved too much fidelity to be included Please use this thread to share your examples and appreciation for this unique art style. If you're like me, starting a game within this category is like slipping into a warm bath. A glimpse into another reality where the goal of game design is no longer realism, but just the same crappy models and textures from 2 gens ago in HD and characters with really detailed pores. And with that, I'll leave you with a question for discussion: Does Mario Odyssey's New Donk City fall into this category? 
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Aug 10, 2020 17:43
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Deadly Premonition is a very strong example. The clashing of repetitive animations, often very empty locales that are still bursting with life (like the exterior of the diner versus the interior) and much higher-detail character models than the environments they are in. There is a wide gap in texture quality throughout the game and the lighting is all over the place. Heck, Deadly Premonition even features a character in a bed with sheets, and that's something you very rarely see in video games (or 3D animation, period) due to the complexities of having characters interact with cloth without it looking terrible. It's not great and the artists hide it by not showing York directly holding anything, but still, it's cool that they tried. He's even wearing pajamas (well, to be precise, he's wearing his suit and shirt combo minus the suit), which is a step above many games where characters go to sleep fully-clothed. It's full of weird little details like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUVkLeQChXY&t=2743s
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Aug 11, 2020 00:19
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That's a very good example right there. You touched on another point which I hadn't thought about until now but I think theatricality is one of the key elements. In that clip, York's room is laid out like a stage with various props (stacks of books treated as a single object, the phone on the desk etc.) shown less to depict a hotel room or bedroom and more to signify one. It touches on something else I'd noticed in the Yakuza series which is how characters handing objects to one another is depicted. In the games, Kiryu moves his empty hand toward the other person and they receive an object. You are then told what this object was through text or a menu. In all likelihood it's a cost-saving measure but the effect is that the game is making no attempt to convincingly render the object itself and is fine to use some visual shorthand and rely on the player's familiarity with the menus and video games in general to glean that knowledge.
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Aug 11, 2020 00:35
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Robot Alchemic Drive is totally like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmnVHIvOQEw
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Dec 5, 2020 06:12
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I can think of no better candidate for these criteria than Ghostwire Tokyo The screenshots sincerely do not do it justice. It feels like they spent years working on the city and then went "oh poo poo we have to make a game out of this" and... it went okay. I hope they make a sequel because there is so much potential in the city that the gameplay failed to fulfill.   
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Sep 11, 2022 15:39
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Marvelous. Simply marvelous.
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Sep 11, 2022 15:56
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isnt this just the general vibe of most AA games in a realistic setting lol
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Sep 11, 2022 18:17
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The ancient and mystical Eastern tradition of grand theft auto 3
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Sep 11, 2022 18:23
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Violen posted:isnt this just the general vibe of most AA games in a realistic setting lol I can't quite put my finger on the language to use to express the difference but i get what the OP is talking about. It's like Elder Scrolls Oblivion vs White Knight Chronicles. Left Alive vs MGS 5. Red Dead Redemption 2 vs Yakuza. Dark Souls is like it too. OxMan fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Sep 11, 2022 |
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Sep 11, 2022 19:36
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True connoisseurs recognize and celebrate Japanese HD surrealism. For instance, the poster who bumped this thread 2 years and 1 month after its initial posting.
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Sep 11, 2022 21:04
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Violen posted:isnt this just the general vibe of most AA games in a realistic setting lol I think what makes a lot of the games in the aforementioned category stand out is that they create a deliberate tonal clash between relatively mundane modern realism and far more exotic or bizarre elements, like Sonic the Hedgehog running down a normal-rear end street with normal-rear end people. The not-quite-there elements of realism like flat lighting, low polygon background architecture, and restricted playspace combine with that aforementioned clash to create something that feels very dreamlike. I think it's the same kind of "unfamiliar familiarity" that makes something like the modern Backrooms series on Youtube compelling.
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Sep 11, 2022 22:04
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Shenmue? Same era as Sonic Adventure but actually trying to be "real world". Precursor to the Yakuza games.
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Sep 12, 2022 01:42
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Skrill.exe posted:-Limited animations - no mo-cap, very simple cutscenes often without lip sync animations But some of your examples are the most mo-cap cutscene heavy games ever made. I'm not trying to sound like a dick, I'm just not sure I understand this qualifier  Skrill.exe posted:True connoisseurs recognize and celebrate Japanese HD surrealism. For instance, the poster who bumped this thread 2 years and 1 month after its initial posting.  man this is not the smiley I wanted but I spent too long trying to find the right one credburn fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Sep 12, 2022 |
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Sep 12, 2022 05:00
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To save our mother Earth from any alien attack From vicious giant insects who have once again come back We'll unleash all our forces We won't cut them any slack The E.D.F deploys! 
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Sep 12, 2022 05:44
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Disaster Report, DR2/Raw Danger in particular oh, and Boku no Natsuyasumi
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Sep 12, 2022 06:22
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kirbysuperstar posted:Disaster Report, DR2/Raw Danger in particular Disaster Report 4 is a good example of the worst of this trope because there's obviously a lot of work that's gone into the cityscape and all the canned building destruction animations but they forgot to actually make it playable.
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Sep 12, 2022 10:59
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Disaster Report 4 owns.
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Sep 12, 2022 13:11
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You put sonic adventure in the op, but Sonic 06 is the platonic ideal. Tried to make an HD version of Adventure with half the time and resources, so you end up with a huge empty city made of mismatched stock textures populated by a handful of npcs that all use the exact same animations  
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Sep 12, 2022 13:52
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So probably not L.S.D. - Lovely Sweet Dream. I put forward all of the first two levels of Hakaioh - King of Crusher.  Dude gets bitten by a bug. Shows up to his crap job and begins the journey to becomming a kaiju by raging out on the copy machine and poo poo. He moves so loving slowly. The game is not actually very fun but it's one of my favorite PSX curios. Gameplay is about 6 minutes into this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIqC7bC_rTw
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Sep 12, 2022 14:01
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I think City of Heroes is a pretty strong western example, in particular the office/warehouse interior levels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX__vwEGjeo (hard as hell to find examples in 2022) I think it's a combination of wanting a setting that can accommodate fights with groups of 20 gangsters with a variety of superpowers that also looks somewhat realistic. And on a budget, of course. A lot of MMOs would probably qualify except modern day settings are so rare.
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Sep 12, 2022 14:19
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flavor.flv posted:You put sonic adventure in the op, but Sonic 06 is the platonic ideal. That was purely a historical example. To understand the Dutch Masters one must first start with the Lascaux Cave Paintings.
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Sep 12, 2022 16:07
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I dig the weird dollhouse vibe that the entire MegaTen series gives off at this point
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Sep 12, 2022 20:43
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I remember turning the HUD off in Yakuza Kiwami 2 and walking around in first person slowly and just pretending I was Rambalac, the guy who posts 4 hour long videos of him walking around Tokyo
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Sep 13, 2022 00:09
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thiccabod posted:To save our mother Earth from any alien attack giant insects
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Sep 13, 2022 02:11
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buglord posted:giant insects giant INsects
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Sep 13, 2022 03:39
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EDF! 6 is out and owns. Play 4 and 5 on pc, or any console you own.
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Sep 13, 2022 08:59
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The Moon Monster posted:I think City of Heroes is a pretty strong western example, in particular the office/warehouse interior levels. Dang, good call. The office maps in particular stand out because the architecture is insane. They sometimes tried to make them semi-non-linear, but generally you have to go up one elevator to the next floor, traverse the entire floor to its conclusion, wherein you'll find another elevator that only goes up. And tons of quirky rooms that feel more like the artists were just fooling around making stuff that looked cool, because so many of them have nooks and crannies that serve zero purpose outside of the rare mission objective tucked away in an obscure corner of the map. They'd be hell to actually work in if they were real spaces. I'll try to remember to grab some screenshots next time I happen across some of the real doozies.
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Sep 13, 2022 13:40
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I think I get what the op means, something like Binary Domain perhaps:  I feel like washed out grey is a key component of the whole esthetic somehow...
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Sep 13, 2022 14:07
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It's an American production, but looking at the examples, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed seems to quality. Weird washed out color palette, bizarre level layouts, interiors which are way too large for the characters inside them...    And then there's bits like the default walking animation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPB9A7733LM&t=143s
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Sep 13, 2022 16:28
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I'm glad this thread exists, because it gives focus to the feeling of unease I get wandering around certain worlds in vrchat, almost always ones lifted directly from video games I rarely noticed these things in the original games, but when you're physically walking around the maps, it's stark
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Sep 13, 2022 16:50
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flavor.flv posted:I'm glad this thread exists, because it gives focus to the feeling of unease I get wandering around certain worlds in vrchat, almost always ones lifted directly from video games You're not alone in this feeling - there was a video that popped up in my feed a while back that remarked on how Source maps often have this strange sense of unease to them, and they're in the same sort of Japanese HD wheelhouse of being large, empty spaces with unrealistic proportions and not-quite-there lighting.
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Sep 13, 2022 16:51
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I can give some insight into this. In the distant past one of my coworkers and leads was a WoW Art Director and he explained level design in the following way: In TPS or FPS games, the camera needs to be adjusted to the proportion of the player, not the character. The idea is that, due to the small size of the monitor, a real life sized room would occupy a tiny fraction of your field of view especially if you're sitting far from the screen. Unlike VR where the image is stretched to the entirety of your FOV, a regular game is a compressed version of reality, but still seen from you in first person as a person and first person as a character. Later on I worked with someone with a very good resume and I had worked at SWTOR at the time and said those were the same level design philosophies applied there so those are two big western games with that ideal that I know did those things on purpose. I don't know where it came from or who came up with it but it seems to be pretty standard. You overdesign a street because a real life sized street would look strangely small to the pov of your 1:2 to 1:6 scale character. So you design the streets to be very big, the roads to be huge, the corridors to be equivalent to what you'd be seeing if you were there through the small screen so scaled up, and the doors to look as how they'd look like at that distance from you, given an average monitor size of 21'. There's actually math that goes into this in the extremely high end studios; but it's mostly been solved so art directors with that kind of experience just pass down a scale to the level designers and let them work with it. Hope this gives you some insight on this kind of phenomena.
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Sep 13, 2022 17:06
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Vermain posted:You're not alone in this feeling - there was a video that popped up in my feed a while back that remarked on how Source maps often have this strange sense of unease to them, and they're in the same sort of Japanese HD wheelhouse of being large, empty spaces with unrealistic proportions and not-quite-there lighting. I recall some dev diary for the Left4Dead games which pointed out that your standard residential hallway isn't wide enough to fit four people with guns, and wide hallways were a necessary gameplay accommodation that was partially masked by FoV of the player
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Sep 14, 2022 16:46
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Whizzing Wizard posted:I think I get what the op means, something like Binary Domain perhaps: Binary Domain is the first game that sprang to mind for me. That and maybe Vanquish.
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Sep 14, 2022 19:29
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Elentor posted:I can give some insight into this. In the distant past one of my coworkers and leads was a WoW Art Director and he explained level design in the following way: In TPS or FPS games, the camera needs to be adjusted to the proportion of the player, not the character. The idea is that, due to the small size of the monitor, a real life sized room would occupy a tiny fraction of your field of view especially if you're sitting far from the screen. Unlike VR where the image is stretched to the entirety of your FOV, a regular game is a compressed version of reality, but still seen from you in first person as a person and first person as a character. Good post. It's not quite the same but you can sometimes see this strange disconnect in proportions when walking up to things in an FPS - for example, your gun will be comically small next to someone's face because the game let's you get way too close to them without having a boundary or clipping, due to the forced gun perspective/camera. Vermain posted:You're not alone in this feeling - there was a video that popped up in my feed a while back that remarked on how Source maps often have this strange sense of unease to them, and they're in the same sort of Japanese HD wheelhouse of being large, empty spaces with unrealistic proportions and not-quite-there lighting. Many of the urban textures that shipped with Source, including the ones used in the Gmod map the video highlights, are weathered and old. Half-Life 2's art direction had lots of aging, decaying cityscapes and it all adds to that effect. However, this only addresses the visual aspect of it. Speaking of Source games, INFRA is a non-violent game about civil engineering and exploring abandoned spaces. Sometimes there will be old and trashed factories that nobody has set foot in for years, other times you'll happen upon office spaces where the presence of people still lingers because everything is pretty clean - or they're just out of sight. But one important part is that you almost never see other people, only the spaces that people would inhabit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWTAenqeyVQ
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Sep 14, 2022 20:48
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Thorhighheels has a great video on this era. He dubs this aesthetic “the sophisifuture.” https://youtu.be/aWLKc9LJ__A
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Sep 15, 2022 22:53
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Detective No. 27 posted:Thorhighheels has a great video on this era. He dubs this aesthetic “the sophisifuture.” Highly recommend this whole channel. Very vibes. They also did music for Umurangi Generation which is a very cool little game that kinda fits the theme as well.
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Sep 15, 2022 22:59
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Detective No. 27 posted:Thorhighheels has a great video on this era. He dubs this aesthetic “the sophisifuture.” Thor is the first person I think of as far as editorializing about / celebrating this whole aesthetic. there be SKUNG here. I wonder if Uchikoshi counts? I'd say so, but as much as his games are inarguably Japanese HD Surrealism, they're also extremely specifically Uchikoshi at the same time. I just finished Ryuki's branch in AI Somnium 2 and I can't decide if it's the pinnacle of this aesthetic, more like a tribute, or just What Uchikoshi Does.
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Sep 15, 2022 23:50
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Looked at some gameplay from Street Fighter 6 and I thought of this thread. Not the Streetfighters themselves of course, but the backgrounds and the background characters especially got a certain look to them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuPt2JHpp5c
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Sep 16, 2022 15:13
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The Dragonball Xenoverse games, despite their stylized look, definitely fall into this. Binary Domain is another good example e: that was already mentioned Improbable Lobster fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Sep 16, 2022 |
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Sep 16, 2022 23:16
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