My God, SD3 seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

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iNCEPTIONAL

My God, SD3 seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

If someone had told me this Trials of Mana boss fight was coming from a Sat/PSX game, I totally would have believed it:

https://youtu.be/TG-KDvn7Rl0

And this one too:

https://youtu.be/xjOU-qL4UNE

I'm not exaggerating when I say both the visuals and sound there could 100% convince me that I was looking at and hearing a game on a 32-bit console.

And that music, again, Christ, it's stunning the ambience and atmosphere it creates.

Sometimes, I realise that I actually have no clue just how good looking and sounding SNES games can actually be in the right hands. :shock:

I really wish someone would do a full 4K video of all the bosses in Trials of Mana now--what a gorgeous game.

PS. By the way, these Japanese artists are on another level.
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Dwedit
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by Dwedit »

Good art direction and a visual style are the most important things in graphics, and Seiken Densetsu 3 has these in spades.

Regarding effects on the screen (first video), it's just color addition using 16-color background layers, and line scrolling. This can all be done in Mode 1.
To save on video memory, tile flipping is used in places, so that the right half of some things are reflections of the left half. You can see this in the dark wavy background, as well as the two monsters.
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turboxray
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by turboxray »

Yeah, beautiful artwork - but nothing here would be confused as Saturn/PS vs SNES, unless your exposure to those 32bit systems as limited.



I do find it fascinating that SNES did translucency right out of the box in 1990. People like to mention mode 7 as the defining characteristic and standout feature of the SNES, but I think the translucency effects are what pretty much separates and makes graphics distinct. Even arcade systems at the time, and even years later, lacked any sort of translucency effects. Even the mighty Neo Geo.

And then you had systems like the 32x and Jag where they don't do it because of pixel performance reasons. Even the 3DO had performance issues dealing with blending (let alone trying to maintain 2D games at 60fps without it). You really didn't see a match let alone exceed in that area until Playstation pretty much hit the scene (Saturn having its own issues if you're mixing VDP1 and VDP2, but still capable). The only other console I can think of at that time, was the PCFX. It's technically a 32bit system; only because of the CPU - really it's just a PC-Engine SuperGrafx with SNES features tacked on (but more of them).
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

Here's few more cool boss fights from the game, with the first one just looking really pretty:

https://youtu.be/rzA3Nyz89dY

And the second one just being cool because it has a dragon:

https://youtu.be/o0l-TX1XEbQ

And this one just for the hell of it:

https://youtu.be/lT6K-5z_HXA

Me thinks someone needs to do a 4K video series of all these boss fights, for what I think must be one of the most all round stunning games on the console.

It's amazing what the combination of great design, really well done presentation, beautiful art and brilliant audio can accomplish on a 16-bit console. It's that whole sum of the parts thing at work. I even like the way the menu wheels spin in and stuff, so dynamic.
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Sat Aug 06, 2022 5:39 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Pokun
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by Pokun »

I guess the fascination around mode 7 was a forerunner to the upcoming 3D craze at the time. NEC and Hudson should have seen it as a hint to put 3D hardware on the PC-FX from the start, but they focused on anime-heavy games which was popular on their previous system. But I guess it's easy to be afterwise, if you think 2D would still rule it was probably a good decision, and so was Sega's Saturn and Nintendo's Nintendo 64 which were both designed to handle both 2D and 3D.


SD3 is one of the most gorgeous games on the system indeed, Square Soft had really mastered working with the SFC at this point in time. The game never made me cry like the developers before the release claimed it would do to players (and actually the story and characters are honestly pretty simple for a Square Soft game), but it's still one of my favorite games of all time.

The weapon system is a bit boring though as each character can only use a single type of weapon which all looks identical through the whole game, and weapons no longer has any use outside of battle like in the two previous games (swords cuts grass, axes chops down trees, whips/flails allows you to swing over gaps Indiana Jones-style and so on). Weapons are only to make you stronger and simply progressively gets stronger and stronger the further into the game you are, this makes them having a very little impact on the game as you can easily skip a weapon upgrade and simply rely on your experience level being high enough.
This trend where each character specializes in a single type of weapon seems to have started with Chrono Trigger and continued with most later Square Soft games like FF7.
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by Dwedit »

What do you mean by a "4K video series"? Do you just want to view large pixels as rectangles?

SNES video is 240p video (Not to be confused with the color-subsampled and compressed junk that YouTube calls "240p"), and intended to be viewed on a CRT television. Some people use modern CRT filters to try to imitate that look.

Most 4K upscales for YouTube are just a workaround to make up for YouTube destroying the video quality of low-resolution video. It gets color-subsampled down to 128x120 color resolution, then lossy DCT compressed with H.264. There's no wonder that native SNES video looks awful on YouTube.

You can actually encode lossless RGB H.264 video for low resolution video, and it will look perfect. It's just not usable on YouTube.
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iNCEPTIONAL

Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

I just mean like this quality, so everything is really crisp and clean with no compression artefacts and the like: https://youtu.be/0fQ54I5N2kU
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Sat Aug 06, 2022 4:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
turboxray
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by turboxray »

Side topic:
Pokun wrote: Sat Aug 06, 2022 2:26 pm I guess the fascination around mode 7 was a forerunner to the upcoming 3D craze at the time. NEC and Hudson should have seen it as a hint to put 3D hardware on the PC-FX from the start, but they focused on anime-heavy games which was popular on their previous system. But I guess it's easy to be afterwise, if you think 2D would still rule it was probably a good decision, and so was Sega's Saturn and Nintendo's Nintendo 64 which were both designed to handle both 2D and 3D.


SD3 is one of the most gorgeous games on the system indeed, Square Soft had really mastered working with the SFC at this point in time. The game never made me cry like the developers before the release claimed it would do to players (and actually the story and characters are honestly pretty simple for a Square Soft game), but it's still one of my favorite games of all time.

The weapon system is a bit boring though as each character can only use a single type of weapon which all looks identical through the whole game, and weapons no longer has any use outside of battle like in the two previous games (swords cuts grass, axes chops down trees, whips/flails allows you to swing over gaps Indiana Jones-style and so on). Weapons are only to make you stronger and simply progressively gets stronger and stronger the further into the game you are, this makes them having a very little impact on the game as you can easily skip a weapon upgrade and simply rely on your experience level being high enough.
This trend where each character specializes in a single type of weapon seems to have started with Chrono Trigger and continued with most later Square Soft games like FF7.
Unpopular opinion: I played Chrono Trigger when it first hit State-Side in NA/US. If was fun, but it really felt like a "B side" game to me.. coming from the likes of Square. I would have never guessed it would go on to be a cult classic as it is now. But I have my suspicions as to why.

The PC-FX is just the Tetsujin system, which was supposed to come out in 1992, with a slight upgrade to the CPU. It's 100% a raster based system and really is the tail end of the 16bit generation (it follows all the characteristics/designs), rather than a 32bit era system. I mean it's literally a Supergrafx, and then a KING BG chip, and an upgraded VCE to handle blending from the two. Same audio as the SGX too. I think in some ways NEC was right. 3D is still primitive during 1994. Things were changing really fast with technology. And it's not like NEC exited the 3D space.. they went on to develop the Power VR chips (including the one used in the Dreamcast). They just waited.. and then eventually decided to step out of making a whole console. Unlike Sega and Nintendo, it wasn't a "make it or die" sort of thing for NEC. There weren't solely reliant on consoles as a company. Neither was Sony, but Sony was taking their first toe dip where as NEC has already done that.
Dwedit wrote: Sat Aug 06, 2022 2:46 pm You can actually encode lossless RGB H.264 video for low resolution video, and it will look perfect. It's just not usable on YouTube.
Yeah, the chroma subsampling and additional microblock encoding lossyness, the absolute minimum is 480 IMO. But in 2022, there's not reason to ever go that low. I'd say 4k is overkill unless you're trying to replicate CRT filters. Otherwise 1080p60 or 720p60 is preferable. Though I've seen a few people upload 240p60 content as 1080p50, with no reason why. That's a different but still annoying thing.
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by Catyak »

turboxray wrote: Sat Aug 06, 2022 3:50 pm Side topic:

The PC-FX is just the Tetsujin system, which was supposed to come out in 1992, with a slight upgrade to the CPU. It's 100% a raster based system and really is the tail end of the 16bit generation (it follows all the characteristics/designs), rather than a 32bit era system. I mean it's literally a Supergrafx, and then a KING BG chip, and an upgraded VCE to handle blending from the two. Same audio as the SGX too. I think in some ways NEC was right. 3D is still primitive during 1994. Things were changing really fast with technology. And it's not like NEC exited the 3D space.. they went on to develop the Power VR chips (including the one used in the Dreamcast). They just waited.. and then eventually decided to step out of making a whole console. Unlike Sega and Nintendo, it wasn't a "make it or die" sort of thing for NEC. There weren't solely reliant on consoles as a company. Neither was Sony, but Sony was taking their first toe dip where as NEC has already done that.
Another aside:
PCFX was supposed to have 3D, the PC98/IBM PC card version (aka the PC-FX GA) has a 3D co-processor, and early versions of the system like the Tetsujin had a 3D Coprocessor. It was cut late in development for the regular console, partially for cost, but also because the 3D coprocessor was relatively low-performance. (closer to the 3DO in performance than Sega Saturn or PS1) Keep in mind that the released PC-FX was (I believe) priced above the PS1 and Saturn on launch.
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by Pokun »

Yeah that's why I said the PC-FX should have had 3D hardware from the start if it were to stand a chance against the PS1.
But good point about NEC and Sony not having much to loose while they stepped into Sega and especially Nintendo's main territory (I mean Sega were always bigger in the arcade halls).

It's almost a bit ironic that the Saturn ended up being such a 2D-dominant console when Sega (or more specifically Yu Suzuki) had always experimented a lot with 3D-like games before the Saturn with titles like Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run, After Burner, Virtua Racer and even invented the 3D-fighting game genre with Virtua Fighter.



As for Chrono Trigger being a cult classic, it was already very hyped ever since Square announced that the Final Fantasy team was working on an RPG together with the Enix Dragon Quest team, the two most popular Japanese RPG series at the time by far. I also loved Chrono Trigger but always thought that FF6 was Square's greatest RPG during this late-SNES-era time. It beats Chrono Trigger in most ways including story and especially music.
Square-Enix has also stated that they couldn't see the Chrono Trigger cult status reflected in the sales of remakes for the Nintendo DS.

What I love about Chrono Trigger is that isn't as much of a Square game as the FF series. It has a lot of Square goodness (and some of the bad) but it also has that down-to-earth feel of the DQ games that I love so much, so it's really the best of two worlds. Chrono Cross on the other hand is a pure Square game with all the good and bad things that means, and it's much less fun (Radical Dreamers on the other hand is an absolutely fantastic little Square adventure game on the Satellaview that I can't recommend enough).
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by creaothceann »

Pokun wrote: Sat Aug 06, 2022 5:54 pm and even invented the 3D-fighting game genre with Virtua Fighter
Battle Arena Toshinden was the first "true" 3D fighter though, according to Wikipedia.

Pokun wrote: Sat Aug 06, 2022 5:54 pm always thought that FF6 was Square's greatest RPG during this late-SNES-era time. It beats Chrono Trigger in most ways including story and especially music
I played CT first, so for me FF6 was worse. The graphics were not quite as good, I hated random enemy encounters, couldn't really connect with the characters, and overall it seemed like a depressing and even a bit edgy story. (Guess which one's music I still listen to these days...)
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

Can anyone think of what music/movie/game the tune here is reminding me of:

https://youtu.be/TG-KDvn7Rl0

It's so cool and really sets the tone of the fight to something very different from most boss battles you hear in typical 16-bit games, and I know I've heard something like it somewhere.

Edit: I think maybe it's a bit of Nine Inch Nails that it reminds me of:

https://youtu.be/mXOgc2p5HyQ
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by Pokun »

The fantranslation of SD3 by Neill Corlett, Lina'chan, Nuku-nuku and SoM2Freak had a very cool sound test by holding L+R and pressing RESET. It had all the songs with their proper names from the OST. It wouldn't work on the Japanese cartridge however since it was added by the hackers.


creaothceann wrote: Sun Aug 07, 2022 1:26 am
Pokun wrote: Sat Aug 06, 2022 5:54 pm and even invented the 3D-fighting game genre with Virtua Fighter
Battle Arena Toshinden was the first "true" 3D fighter though, according to Wikipedia.
Well Wikipedia says that Toshinden introduced side-stepping to the genre so that you can freely move in 3 dimensions (the games also has that roll/cartwheel move sideways).
But gameplay still happens in 3 dimensions even in Virtua Fighter as it's fully possible to get to the side of an opponent, there's just no convenient way to move sideways normally, there are a few moves like rolling sideways while lying down however.

Sidestepping aside Virtua Fighter and Tekken (which was made by Seiichi Ishii for Namco after making Virtua Fighter with Yu Suzuki for Sega) are no doubt the true grandparents of the 3D-fighting genre.

Toshinden is the first 3D-weapon-fighting game however, although the genre was popularized by Namco's (much better) Soul-Edge/Soulcalibur games.
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by turboxray »

Catyak wrote: Sat Aug 06, 2022 4:50 pm
turboxray wrote: Sat Aug 06, 2022 3:50 pm Side topic:

The PC-FX is just the Tetsujin system, which was supposed to come out in 1992, with a slight upgrade to the CPU. It's 100% a raster based system and really is the tail end of the 16bit generation (it follows all the characteristics/designs), rather than a 32bit era system. I mean it's literally a Supergrafx, and then a KING BG chip, and an upgraded VCE to handle blending from the two. Same audio as the SGX too. I think in some ways NEC was right. 3D is still primitive during 1994. Things were changing really fast with technology. And it's not like NEC exited the 3D space.. they went on to develop the Power VR chips (including the one used in the Dreamcast). They just waited.. and then eventually decided to step out of making a whole console. Unlike Sega and Nintendo, it wasn't a "make it or die" sort of thing for NEC. There weren't solely reliant on consoles as a company. Neither was Sony, but Sony was taking their first toe dip where as NEC has already done that.
Another aside:
PCFX was supposed to have 3D, the PC98/IBM PC card version (aka the PC-FX GA) has a 3D co-processor, and early versions of the system like the Tetsujin had a 3D Coprocessor. It was cut late in development for the regular console, partially for cost, but also because the 3D coprocessor was relatively low-performance. (closer to the 3DO in performance than Sega Saturn or PS1) Keep in mind that the released PC-FX was (I believe) priced above the PS1 and Saturn on launch.
From what I've seen, it's not even close to the 3DO (the 3D "co-processor"). Which is why I assumed they ditched it. Whether co-processor actually had a 2D blitter or not - unclear. The KING does have real bitmap modes (8bit and 16bit/24bit).
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Re: My God, this seriously could pass for a 32-bit game imo

Post by olddb »

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