Final Fantasy Remasters Reignite Controversies Over Pixel Art

The new sprites aren't massive departures from the originals, but they're different, and it's led to speculation about whether the company is going to address a longstanding issue with older games being released on fancy new televisions and computer monitors.A comparison of Final Fantasy sprites made by RPG Site."I really do think the redesigned sprites for the Pixel Remasters are trying to get the images closer to what the original sprites looked like on a CRT," said Digital Eclipse editorial director, former games journalist, and retro gaming enthusiast Chris Kohler on Twitter recently.I've always loved the way video games looked—fuzzy and crunchy—on those humorously heavy and bulky older cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs that used to populate family rooms. I figured it was just so you could get that nostalgic experience of playing on a CRT, but no, that's how the graphics were supposed to look."A screen shot from the old school RPG Ara Fell: Enhanced Edition.The CRT Pixels account is run by writer and designer Jordan Starkweather, who's been collecting CRT TVs for more than 20 years now and has remained fascinated by the technology in the era of high-definition and 4K. One solution that Starkweather proposes is Square Enix spending time on a refined CRT filter.A screen shot from the NES classic with a CRT filter.CRT filters, a way of modifying the look of a modern display to try and capture those old CRTs, isn't new. "But unfortunately, they also give an inaccurate impression of what Atari games looked like on a television."A screen shot from Ian Bogost's CRT filter emulator experiments.Bogost's work is an example of early CRT filtering, though other emulators had been engaging in the practice even earlier with various approaches. "I'm usually a stickler for preserving the correct aspect ratio of media, but the difference between raw pixels and their appearance on old CRTs is small enough that I really don't notice it unless I'm comparing images side by side."Pittman later released his CRT filtering techniques as its own piece of software, SuperCRT, allowing people to turn anything on their computer desktop into something akin to an old TV."Filters are simply filters and they change visuals without having any artistic intention behind," said renowned pixel artist Thomas Feichtmeir. (It's also worth reading his analysis of how the simple technology of adding backlighting to the Game Boy Advance resulted in changes in how Nintendo approached art for Fire Emblem.)Though Feichtmeir has no specific insight into what Square Enix is or isn't planning for its Pixel Remasters series, watching what's been released gave him pause on the CRT theory."Considering the couple of screenshots and snippets we saw in the presentation, I would not say any of it really accounts for the gap between CRT and LCDs," he said.