It feels like every recent installment of the best/cutest/most terrifying RPGs/farm sims/horror games – or whatever your preferred descriptor and genre pairing is – holds on to a bit of nostalgia like a purse in the form of retro graphics. But even though low-poly games are extra hot right now, some industry vets like Square Enix programmer Koji Sugimoto can't understand why modern developers would ever want to go back to 1994.
Automaton noticed and translated one of Sugimoto's recent posts on Twitter, in which the Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, and Final Fantasy 10 dev reacts to a Unity update posted by its Japan account. The game engine will now allow users to add "no perspective" to their shaders, making projects look unstable, like they're made of wet paint getting blasted in every direction by the wind, to which Sugimoto says, what the hell?
Or, more specifically – and I imagine him donning the scraggly white beard and gnarled wooden cane necessary to uttering a sentence like this – "Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called 'charming' nowadays.”
He follows his post up with a link to an older and even more incredulous reaction to PS1-style graphics; in 2019, Sugimoto said on Twitter that '90s texture warping was "detestable."
"I spent so many work hours in vain," he continued, remembering how he used to strain to work around wobbly textures. "I just don't get what's so interesting about trying to replicate that." Um, vibes – obviously!
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