Topic: Xenoblade's Graphics: Why HD Does Not Matter

[NWR_Neal]

Those faces might look bad, but the overall art design is to die for.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/blog/30064

I've heard arguments on both sides over the matter of Xenoblade Chronicles' graphics. "Man, this looks like a Nintendo 64 game!" "What? This is the best-looking game on the Wii! No contest!" The stark contrast of opinions makes my head spin a bit.

My personal reaction to the graphics? Well, I think a lot of the textures and models are kind of crappy, but the game runs smooth as butter and the art design is gorgeous. Simply put, the graphics technically aren't spectacular, but it doesn't matter because the game is awesome, bolstered by some of the best art direction and world design I have ever seen.

The world created by Monolith Soft is one of the most interesting I've seen in a game in years. It reminds me of the worlds I thought up in my mind when I played classics such as Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. It truly is those types of quintessential worlds fully realized with a modern graphical sheen. Is it HD sharp? No. Are the character's faces weird? Very much so. But the game is incredible. The world is filled with personality, and there are secrets strewn throughout the landscape.

The one thing I haven't heard discussed enough is the game's infrequent load times. Outside of initially starting the game, the load times are almost nonexistent. It makes the scale of the world even bigger in scope, and makes exploration even more enjoyable. I'd much rather play a game like this, where I can throw around a "this looks like a really good PS2 game" insult while it runs smoothly and without delay, as opposed to a graphically intensive game on another system that is bogged down by load times and bugs. Xenoblade Chronicles doesn't need HD to be a great game; it already is one.

[ShyGuy]

Give me your Wii-U when you get it, we must keep you standard definition pure.

[NWR_Neal]

I was shown the joys of HD gaming when I got my 360 at launch. Then, I actually liked it when I got an HDTV two years later.

[ShyGuy]

I think the TV has to be at least 30+ inches in size to really get the HD effect. I have a 26 inch TV and it seems little changed.

[StrawHatChopper]

HD or not, this game's already taken 70 hours of my life, with a ton of stuff left to go! Only a select few games manage to get me to invest that much time into them, and Xenoblade is most definitely one of them.

[Pixelated Pixies]

Agreed. I'd take great art design and fast load times over high definition graphics any day. Having said that, I'll gladly take a great art style, fast load time, AND high definition graphics. Xenoblade sequel for Wii U, anyone?

[Chocobo_Rider]

Great article, Neal!! Love the positivity.  Shows intellect to judge a game on its whole presentation rather than just its pixel count.  Does HD make something good look even better? Usually.  But if SD is what it takes to get the kind of games who don't requite bloated budgets, and zero-risk mainstream white noise? Sign me up!

I am looking forward to finally diving in to Xenoblade in a few weeks after the dust settles on the pursuit of my degree.

[Ian Sane]

While playing I was this game, my brother walked in, looked at the game, and remarked "how do you make a videogame look better than this?"  His attitude was that Xenoblade's graphics were such that everything looked like how one would expect it to look like, and it looked good, so why bother going much further?

His approach to graphics is pretty much:
NES - 2D that looks like crap
SNES - 2D that looks great and therefore is all you need for 2D graphics
N64 - 3D that looks like crap
Gamecube/Wii - 3D that looks great and therefore is all you need PERIOD

I think that art design is the most important thing.  One thing that was a bummer this gen is that North American devs took over and Western games usually look like boring horseshit.  There are exceptions of course but companies like EA and Activision make generic looking games.  There is the cliche "everything is brown" criticism and it is totally valid.  I prefer the Japanese style for videogames but unfortunately that has diminished as Japan has for some reason decided that home consoles aren't cool anymore.

Of course just because tons of Western games have a boring art style doesn't mean that HD is boring.  Ideally I would love to see what Monolith Soft would do with some more power.  What I really wanted was for NINTENDO to make HD games.  I wanted to see what they would do with it.  I don't give a **** what Activision does with it.

Back when Nintendo decided to not support HD my concern wasn't that their games wouldn't look as pretty.  My concern was that Nintendo wasn't matching the competition and therefore any third party that decided to make a game for the PS3 or Xbox 360 would leave the Wii out and the system would have lousy third party support.  And I was 100% RIGHT about that.  I also thought that it was stupid for Nintendo to dedicate the next 5+ years to a system that could not support HDTVs which were becoming the new standard for televisions.  Well, here we are in 2012 and a console that does not support HDTVs comes across as embarrasingly archaic.  Nintendo just wasn't futureproofing their system and I thought that was stupid.  And it was.  Missing that feature was archaic not even two years into the Wii's life.

Oh, and for all this talk about art design being more important, most of Nintendo's games this gen LOOK LIKE ****!   They made a system that was behind the times in graphics and then made games that would have looked unimpressive on the Gamecube.  Xenoblade, Retro's games, Skyward Sword, SSB Brawl and the Super Mario Galaxy games are exceptional.  Most first party Wii games have a bare minimum graphics approach that suggests that Nintendo's real goal was to see how little of effort towards graphics they could get away with.

Xenoblade's world is truly impressive but this isn't the norm on the Wii.  I put up with all sorts of half-baked nonsense before this showed up and for a while it looked like NOA wasn't even going to allow that.  Xenoblade is ambitious, unafraid to be complex when needed, looks great, is a new IP, doesn't force anyone to put up with unresponsive motion control, and just tries to be a great game without any conscious effort to appeal to the mass market.  NOA probably didn't want to localize it because it seems to represent the exact opposite of the typical Wii experience.  Xenoblade is the type of game I feel Nintendo used to make routinely and is what I want and expect from them.

[ResettisCousin]

Apologist article. If everything about Xenoblade remained the same, except it rendered natively in 720p, would the game be better? Of course. To those that would argue Xenoblade could only be made in SD given the cost requirements (even Sakaguchi wrt Last Story said this in a European interview), I would say that Nintendo is surely doomed, then. Because that is their reality moving forward with the WiiU. Of course, if a Xenoblade sequal is released for WiiU, such an argument (that it is impratical due to costs) is immediatly nullified.

[Enner]

I think the characters look fine, all things considered. Actually, I was surprised at how expressive they can become during cut scenes and the close-up dialog exchanges. It's a shame that the lip syncing is off and that some textures are low detailed.


There are certainly many ways to make the game look bad with it's low fidelity textures and simple geometry. Still, it would be a shame to ignore the beautiful landscapes the game provides. It would be more of shame to ignore that you could walk through most of said landscapes. Though, I guess it doesn't help when you walk through them and run in to a wall with low resolution details on it.

If everything about Xenoblade remained the same, except it rendered natively in 720p, would the game be better? Of course.

Screen shots of the game running on Dolphin look very nice.

[TJ Spyke]

The game would not be any better or worse at 720p. Do you say a movie is better in HD? No, you might say it looks a little nicer but the actual movie is the same. Same with a game, the actual game would not be any different in HD.

[NWR_insanolord]

The gameplay would be the same, but the total package of the game would be better. A movie is in better in 1080p than in 480p, and the 480p is better than 480i, or a lower-resolution internet stream. Presentation matters, and all other things being equal, the better looking game, or movie, or whatever, is better.

[broodwars]

Xenoblade is one of my favorite games on the Wii (it's easily the best JRPG this generation in my opinion) and easily one of the best-looking, but as someone who plays a lot of games on my HD consoles (and now HD handheld in the Vita) it's hard not to wish that this game had been saved for the Wii U.  That game's art direction could have been stunning in HD with higher polygonal models, but it's still a good-looking game with very memorable use of scale and color.  Monolith Soft also wouldn't have had to resort to cheap tricks to hide the platform's graphical limitations, such as the cute illusion with the grass (the grass being collections of 2D images that rotate to always face the camera).  It'll be interesting to see what this team does with better tech and HD output, assuming Nintendo of America actually cares enough to allow their next game over here.

[Mop it up]

The term "mixed bag" gets thrown around a lot, and though it may be cliché, it's definitely true of XenoBlade's graphics. The sizable landscapes and detail of the world are certainly impressive, but up close, everything looks blurry and blocky. At first I thought that I would trade fogging for some more clarity, but now I'm starting to think that the big, open world is a part of the game, and it probably wouldn't be the same with fog covering up distant views.

Not only that, but I realized that the areas where I found the graphical issues distracting were in ones that could probably be improved in other ways. For example, outdoor areas look good, but things like caves are where the lack of clarity is much more noticeable. Confined areas could have had higher-resolution textures and such, and cutscenes could have used more detailed models, and definitely should have given how close the camera can get to their faces.

Of course, optimizing the areas that could look better would take some time, and they were also probably going for a more consistent look. If they had all the time in the world I'm sure the game could look better, but given their deadlines, the game is as good as it gets.

[Oblivion]

I use an SDTV to play my Wii games, and I find the graphics to be completely stunning. I don't know why there's such a controversy.

[Infinitys_End]

One of my favorite games of all time is Vagrant Story and that was PSX.  Go back and play that game if you want to see some limited 3D models and textures.  As far as I'm concerned, that game still holds up today.


Graphics like this are more than sufficient and really don't bother me in the slightest.  Anyone who says otherwise is just a graphics whore and can't enjoy the game for what it is.

[greybrick]

Video games.

[Jonnyboy117]

One day I shall finally play the digital copy of Vagrant Story that has been on my PS3 for over a year. Today is not that day.

[Kairon]

I'd like to think that in the end, it's a game's "inner beauty" that counts.

[house3136]

 I know this a little off-topic; but I was watching some dolphin emulations of Skyward Sword and Mario Galaxy running in their native HD resolutions yesterday. Considering Wii U will be capable of full digital game downloads, I see no reason why full Wii games wouldn’t be downloadable through virtual console. Since Wii U is capable of running HD graphics, is there a chance these games, if they’re released, will be rendered in their native HD resolutions? I’m not talking about art-style changes and texture upgrades, but merely releasing these games with the full potential they were created with. At last years E3, Reggie Fils-Aime stated that Wii games would have no upgrades in graphics while running on Wii U. Is that because the games are written to the disk with a maximum output of 480p? Is it possible for them to release a patch that would allow these games to run in HD? The most plausible answer I could think of would be if Nintendo allowed gamers who purchased these games to insert them into Wii U and download the virtual copy for free or at a drastically reduced price (considering they’ve already purchased the rights to the game), and allow them to play the HD version only when the physical disk is inserted. I know I’m living in a dream world, but the reason why I’m asking is because I’m not a tech genius in this esoteric field. It seems to me this would reinvigorate and boost sales for games like Skyward Sword that didn’t meet the sales goals Nintendo expected.

[joshnickerson]

"Man, this looks like a Nintendo 64 game!"

Some people need to go back and actually play some N64 games. I would say, at worst, it looked like an early Gamecube game.

[TrueNerd]

Since Wii U is capable of running HD graphics, is there a chance these games, if they’re released, will be rendered in their native HD resolutions?

I think the best option to hope for is that the Wii U has some great upconversion technology so you can just pop in your Wii disc that you already own and it'll look way better on the Wii U. Sony had this in the PS3s that had the ability to play PS2 games and that worked well. But, this is Nintendo we're talking about. It's very plausible they'll do Wii backwards compatability the same way they always do backwards compatability by tricking the new system into thinking it's the old system, which would mean no upconversion in this case. Another sad truth is that this issue only impacts a handful of games. The large majority of Wii games not made by Nintendo (and even some that are made by Nintendo) won't benefit at all from proper upconversion. We'll have to wait and see, but I'm not holding my breath.

[ROiDS]

Great article.
What's funny to me is that I haven't even encountered an HD game that surpasses the ingenuity of Earthbound, and that game is really old.

[ejamer]

When the game is this good, graphics are just icing on the cake.


Would Xenoblade benefit from HD graphics? Sure. Are they necessary or would they improve the gameplay or story or overall design?  No. 


In fact, pushing graphics up to HD quality might detract from other aspects as resources are always limited when developing content like this. What would have been sacrificed to make the game look better?  If any of the scope or design was lost in order to improve appearance then I'd rather take "N64 quality" graphics without question.  (As a comparison, I would much rather play Xenoblade than the most recent Final Fantasy - that series still looks great and tells a good story, but has lost much of the wonder and exploration that I associate with my favorite RPGs.)

[Enner]

Monolith Soft also wouldn't have had to resort to cheap tricks to hide the platform's graphical limitations, such as the cute illusion with the grass (the grass being collections of 2D images that rotate to always face the camera). 

Heh, the HD games that bother to have grass (Crysis and Battlefield 3 come to mind) don't even bother with the rotation and just cross stitch a whole mess of sprites. As far as fields of grass go, Xenoblade is one of the prettier ones I've seen. It would've been nice if the upward flows of ether gas weren't a sprite (or whatever) that is scrolling out of the ground.