Development Heaven / Video Games

• Alan Wake deserves its place here. Remedy, the developers, went out halfway across the world to sit down and take thousands of pictures of a small pacific town surrounded by forests and mountains just so they could capture the appropriate feel of it. As a result, they created one of the most atmospheric games out there.

• Assassin's Creed qualifies: Scenery Porn abounds all the way back to the very first game in the series, and the environments of each successive game just become more and more detailed. This even extends to the NPCs, who don't need to often be placed where they are in the game, but it just makes the historical environments seem more alive. Several good examples of NPC placement come up in Assassin's Creed Syndicate, where the player can wander the streets and rooftops of Victorian London and, among other things, find people posing for photographs, men playing crank-operated music boxes in parks, and chimney sweeps on the roofs doing their jobs. There's also the exquisitely recreated (if sometimes anachronistic) landmarks in each of the games, ranging from the Dome of the Rock in the first game to Buckingham Palace in Syndicate. On top of that, starting with the second game, there's an encyclopedia in each one which goes into great detail on landmarks and other events, even if those events and places don't play a major role in the story.

• An early but Awesome example was Dale Disharoon's video game based on Below the Root. Not only was this a black sheep in the Windham Classics series, which had adapted "Classic" literature like Treasure Island and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in that the Green Sky Trilogy was a fairly obscure YA series, but that Disharoon worked directly with Zilpha Snyder to make detailed maps of Green-Sky. Snyder's husband (a music professor) composed the music based on chants within the book. It had a bunch of Genius Programming (a choice of the age/race/gender of your Player Character, NPCs reacting differently based on that choice, and hidden stats and features based on that choice as well - all of this in 1984!), completely non-linear gameplay, multiple ways to win the end goal, and due to Snyder's request to base the game on an Author's Saving Throw, it is possibly the first video game ever to be considered a canonical Sequel in Another Medium.

• BlazBlue has idle animations for characters. Idle animations in a fighting game, something that remains a rarity in the genre. (SNK, responsible for the below Metal Slug, is another prominent example, best seen in The King of Fighters.) In normal, serious gameplay, you would just never see them.
  • Arakune’s animations have tiny little details that are almost invisible and require viewing his animations outside of the game. His jump B attack has tiny, tar hands trying to hold up part of his body like a skirt, for instance.

• In Brain Age, Concentration Training's Music Appreciation mode has 33 original music tracks whose only purposes are to be appreciated and help you relax.

• Chrono Cross, ventured in a completely different direction for the sole reason that its creators felt Chrono Trigger was so good that trying to replicate it would merely be redundant. Both written and directed by Masato Kato, the head writer for Trigger, Cross features a more personal and ponderous narrative and explores the themes of its predecessor from very different perspectives; the game incorporates a number of incredibly ambitious ideas (such as an absolutely huge roster of playable characters, complex and branching storylines, and high-minded philosophical themes) that few, if any games have attempted since. By far the most done-for-the-art aspect of the game, however, is the soundtrack: even though he had just quit Squaresoft, Yasunori Mitsuda was hired to score the game simply because Kato considered him an indispensible part of the Chrono formula. The decision to compose two different songs for each area—one for each dimension—was made at the last minutes, simply because Kato and Mitsuda thought it would be a good idea. The singer and lyricist for the ending theme, a relatively obscure artist by the name of Noriko Mitose, was chosen despite Square Soft PR's wishes for a more popular and marketable singer, simply because her style was deemed right for the game.

• Conker's Bad Fur Day has a staggering amount of attention to detail in it with an insane amount of different animations for Conker that are subtle enough that you could easily miss them (e.g. his expression and walk cycle slightly changing when he gets wet, context sensitive idle animations that only happen at very specific times such as when the tickling bees are following you, his arms reaching out when you're near money, etc). In the director's commentary for the game, the developers mentioned that many would consider these additions pointless and a waste of time, but they made them anyway as they knew that the people who would notice them would appreciate them.

• Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time:
  • Walter Mair, the game's composer, was so dedicated towards working on a brand new Crash game that he actually acquired a bone flute for the Eggipus Dimension levels' songs.
  • For the game's Nintendo Switch port, instead of a simple downscale, the staff actually went to the effort of reworking the game's models and assets to account for the console's lower output, without sacrificing much (if any) of the game's detail, and giving it a bit of a cel-shaded look as a bonus.

• Cuphead counts as well; it was made by two brothers, who went through hand-drawing every single frame in the game to make it look like a 1930s cartoon and worked for over two years just to make everything perfect. It paid off in the end when the game won Best Art Direction at The Game Awards 2017, as well as Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie Game.
  • All the tracks are also recorded using actual instruments, which is very impressive for an indie game.
  • You may have noticed a few set pieces in the background that aren't hand drawn, like the castle in Grim Matchstick's level or the pyramid in Djimmi's level. Those aren't computer models, they are real models stop-motion filmed for use as background sprites.
  • For the PlayStation 4 version's launch trailer, instead of using hand-drawn animation or a mix of live-action and animation like in the Switch trailer, it's done entirely in stop-motion with the techniques of the era.

• Everything done by CyberConnect2. The .hack franchise is known for creating a fascinating world in its fictional MMO known as, well, The World. The Naruto games they make do their very best to capture the essence of the franchise in its action, art direction, overall style, and makes them legitimately good licensed games.
  • Then there's Asura's Wrath by the same people, of which the creative process was a painstakingly long one and a half years of world building and story creation, and that was before the game itself was developed to tech demo level. Plus there's the enriched, well-researched Asian mythology aspects of the game, mixed with Science Fiction and Space Opera, to craft a unique and interesting world, with similarly beautifully-designed characters and monsters. And the sheer scope of the game. All of this, combined with the above examples from CyberConnect2's other games, created just because the CEO of CyberConnect2 genuinely loves what he does: making games.

• Solatorobo: Red the Hunter spent ten years in Development Hell and was only saved due to CyberConnect2 repeatedly approaching Bandai Namco Entertainment with their idea for a Spiritual Sequel to Tail Concerto, a little game that didn't sell so well.

• The DS Dinosaur King game looks like your average Pokémon clone, and is a licensed game. However, it has some of the best 3-D effects on the system (80+ dinosaurs in full 3D), puts effort into reconstructing the dinosaurs as accurately as possible (feathers on the ones which had them), uses many dinosaurs which otherwise would not be in a game, and has a Pokédex-clone which goes into depth in terms of dinosaur classification.

• The Xbox 360 version of DoDonPachi: DaiOuJou BLACK Label ended up being a Porting Disaster. Why? After an investigation at Arika at Cave's request, the source code was being held by a management company and 5pb., the company in charge of the 360 port, stole the source code from the PS2 version. Normally, a company would sue 5pb. into next week. What did Arika do instead? After an apology from 5pb.'s CEO, Arika's CEO, Ryo Mizutani, forgave them and Arika Vice President Ichiro Mihara is now helping 5pb. make a better port of DDP: DOJ.

• The entirety of the "Once Upon a Time in Arad" event in Dungeon Fighter Online. The wild west-themed event consists of all new assets designed for DFO Global (barring some music tracks), notably with English dubbing from Neople themselves - with quite a bit of Surprisingly Good English, to boot. The devs were clearly quite proud of themselves, considering how happy they were to announce the event on their Twitch stream. After the event ended, Neople published three behind the scenes articles on their website, revolving around the event's exclusive artwork. (Wyatt, the Sheriff Kid, Loading screen artwork)

• In EarthBound (1994), Welcome to Corneria is averted. Every single NPC in the game has at least one dialogue change, and often more. Never mind that most of these NPCs are in towns you'll never visit again once you're done with your business there. Mother 3 does the same thing.

• The Elder Scrolls:
  • While most of the developers are doing these games for the money, the enormous and detailed world and back story show that at least someone put a lot more effort in to the games than they had to. Several ex-developers and writers for the series continue to write Loose Canon "obscure texts" to expand the series' lore.
  • There are in-game readable books, and they're not just one or two pages long but usually in the 10s. In fact, every book you pick up in that game almost always has a unique story/information in it. All the in-game-books and notes of Morrowind alone put together amount to 1241 pages!
• One thing that really stands out about Mabinogi is that every NPC with a name and a face has his or her own music. Every single one. And it's pretty good music, too. Someone must've really been feeling creative.

• EZ2DJ is basically South Korea's beatmania, featuring its own unique twists on the game such as a foot pedal, modes where the player has to also press the upper "effector" buttons, hold notes years before beatmania had them, and courses with their own unique charts. So it's no surprise that in 2007, Konami sued Amuse World and as part of the settlement, Amuse World could no longer produce new EZ2DJ cabinets. But nowhere in the settlement did it say that Amuse World couldn't make new software for the existing cabs anymore, so they continued to produce new updates and installments of the game, with arcades simply refurbishing their existing cabinets. EZ2DJ would eventually get a Continuity Reboot in the form of EZ2AC, featuring new PC hardware while keeping the existing cabinets, and in fact new versions of the game would continue to be released all the way up to 2020, 13 years after the cessation of cabinet production.

• The original plan when making the English port of the DS version of Final Fantasy IV was just to text dump the game's GBA script, and then hire someone to quickly translate the new scenes that didn't have counterparts in the GBA release. Translator Tom Slattery, however, considered IV his favorite title in the series and felt that previous translations had not been as good as they could have been. Thus he convinced his superiors to let him re-translate the entire script from scratch, both to make it more faithful to the original Japanese script and to give it more polish and flair, as long as he could still finish within the already-decided development schedule. His hard work is very noticeable, and so appreciated that parts of it been integrated into the game's mythos, particularly his terminology for world terms, attacks, equipment, etc. The PSP Complete Collection that came out a few years later is mostly based on the GBA version with the translation polished a bit, but it also includes some of Slattery's scripting too.

• The whole backstory of Final Fantasy XII: imagining a whole functional world with dozens of ethnicities, political subplots, more than a thousand NPCs, secondary characters who are more detailed than main characters from other games, detailed work on the different countries' architecture and clothing fashions.
  • A lot of work went into the bestiary, especially how much information they provided about all the monsters, and the small articles about different areas of the game. A lot of time and effort obviously went into what a lot of games usually throw in as a basic monster list.

• Forza:
  • For Horizon 3, in an effort to make the sky look as authentic as possible, Playground Games filmed the actual Australian sky by using a custom-made 12K HDR camera and camping at the Australian Outback over several months to continuously film the sky. Not only was the environment extremely hostile for the team, but they also had to change the camera's lenses every hour!
  • The developers have a policy of only using genuine vehicles as bases for their in-game versions whenever possible. During the development of Horizon 3, the sourcing team ended up canceling their flight home and making a nine-hour road trip after discovering a perfect condition 1951 Holden Ute.
  • Playground Games spent 18 months trying to perfect the opening sequence of Horizon 3.
  • That camera rig they used for Horizon 3? They used it again for Horizon 4 to film a whole year's worth of photo shoots, with each individual shoot resulting in 1.5 terabytes of photography data. And they have a whole in-house team dedicated to processing the skies as their full-time job.
  • Doubtless making the effort to include so many car models that have appeal to enthusiasts but hardly scream marketability to teenage gamers could count. The Horizon games especially could probably get by without the 1991 Honda CRX, 1977 Holden Torana, the MGA, the Triumph TR6, three different generations of Mazda MX-5, and six of the Subaru Impreza/WRX and Nissan Skyline, but they wouldn't be quite the same without them.

• Freedom Force. Most people just see wacky technicolor superheroes doing wacky technicolor superhero things. Those geeky enough to know about The Golden Age of Comic Books and The Silver Age of Comic Books just feel an overwhelming sense of awe.

• In spite of being an indie game with less than a dozen staff not counting the voice actors, Freedom Planet has a lot of pretty sprite art and detail. While the developer Strife could have simply made a good Sonic fangame, she decided to take her love of Treasure games she loved growing up and go all the way with her inspiration with complex and challenging boss fights, crazy designs, and fun game mechanics, revamping it into an original title.
  • Elements like the Blooper Reel Easter Eggs are definitely this. Not only did the devs see fit to include some voice acting bloopers, but they also animated them and even made a few custom sprites. All for something that can only be seen with a special button combination.
  • The Fortune Night stage is also made of this. Lots of extremely detailed scenery depicting period Chinese New Year celebrations with streamers, dragon floats, the distinctive Chinese fireworks, and paper crafts. The second half has a sprawling market where you can see signs in accurate Chinese and Japanese scripts that are perfectly readable, advertising things you'd find in any mall such as bike shops, clothing stores, food, and bathrooms. If you go into the male restroom you'll instantly be kicked out. If you go and press down on a bench, the character will sit on it, and if you wait a few seconds at the disco ball, the character even has unique dancing sprites! All three of them! All these details, in a stage most players usually blaze through without a second thought.
  • Unlike most games that include anti-piracy features, this game does not lock you out of its content if it senses that you have a pirated copy. Instead, you get a fully voice acted message encouraging you to donate to the developers so that they’ll have more resources to make future games. Even the tone of the message is kind.

• G-Stream G2020 is well-known for its Troubled Production, in which the programmer and composer were not paid by their publisher for much of the development time and were given inferior hardware which, among other things, resulted in ridiculously compressed and poor-sounding soundtrack audio. But later down the line, after they had formed Triangle Service and produced games under that name, they were able to get the rights to G-Stream G2020 and give it some major touch-ups to make it a complete and more polished product, rereleasing it as DELTAZEAL.

• Gran Turismo: The level of detail they put into it is pretty much mind-blowing.
  • Despite being rendered at a native resolution of 480p, two games on the PS2 supported 1080i output - GT4, and Tourist Trophy made by (you guessed it) Polyphony Digital.
  • Allowing race modifications for almost all cars in the second game. Doesn't sound very artistic, until you consider every race-modified version of every car is an Expy of a real world racing car. Even cars such as the early 80s Toyota Starlet - a 174HP economy car which was never professionally raced - is based off an actual racer built by an amateur team for track days.
  • In the first two games, all FWD saloons from the late 90's could be turned into their touring car counterpart from the period.
  • The FIA themselves have actually applauded how accurate Polyphony's track recreations are.
  • Sometimes, it seems like Polyphony does it just because they can - such as the astronomically accurate stars, or the background music changing to festive jazz at Christmas time.
  • Gran Turismo 5 appears to be invoking this trope. It has been in development since some time in 2005, and has apparently had every developer in the employ of Polyphony Digital working on it at the same time, during some of the development cycle anyway. The reason for that? It has one thousand individual cars. Extreme attention to detail is apparently the prime directive of Polyphony.
  • Most of the cars (labeled "standard cars" in-game) were copied from Gran Turismo 4 and the PSP Gran Turismo game, however, including such iconic cars as the Bugatti Veyron.

• Granblue Fantasy:
  • This game has a high production quality in terms of sound. Majority of the story cutscenes are fully-voiced (in contrast to other countless gacha games that have voiceless story content), that Nobuo Uematsu of Final Fantasy OST fame is involved here, that the music is recorded using an orchestra, and that some of the background songs/OSTs themselves can be long, with "Zero" being 12 minutes in its full version. There's also an interview that basically explains the team's decision to make the game browser-based, since being a native app could require a lot of data and storage just for the sound files alone. And did we mention that Cygames also likes to churn out Image Songs for some of the game's characters?
  • If the 5th Anniversary interview is anything to go by... "the team draws new art for every possible character in GBF on Valentine’s Day and sends those out to the fans as thank-yous for their gifts." Almost every named character, villain or Primal Beast has a Valentine's-exclusive card artwork that can be ordered by players, no matter how story-relevant nor popular the character may be. All of these efforts for such a seasonal event? That's just how they want to thank their playerbase.

• Granblue Fantasy Versus:
  • Characters like Katalina and Vaseraga having capes or other flowing accessories in their designs was a notable hurdle to jump over, to the point where they were considering simplifying the designs for gameplay, but they ultimately decided to stick as faithfully as possible to the original artwork for the fans.
  • Lowain's entire moveset has been described as an indisputable labor of love by Arc System Works for going above and beyond with a character idea that was originally just being able to use Yggdrasil as an add-on to Lowain's gameplay. It's been noted by the animators that Lowain's animations are far and away some of the most unique and fun that this game has to offer with their sheer variance. They even have an entirely unique environment with the cafe table which only appears just for their win screen.

• Remastering Grim Fandango for modern computers wasn't an easy task because no one thought to preserve the original source material in its entirety. The team responsible for the remastering had to cobble together what they could by going through LucasArts' archives, tracking down original team members who took bits home as souvenirs, and even obtaining modders' homemade code. All that hard work paid off to create a well-received update.

• In Indie Pogo, every character has a unique death animation based on that of their home game, with the sole exception of Orcane, who had none in his home game (he could only be KO'd by being knocked out of the screen) and thus had one made for him. Characters were also given unique entrance animations as part of the Heavy Metal Update. Similarly, every stage has a unique countdown animation based on the Heads-Up Display from their respective games.

• Judgment:
  • Takuya Kimura has spent more than 100 hours in total to help in mocap and voice acting sessions for Yagami, more than likely due to Judgment being his first video game role.
  • The fact that the English localization team was able to convince the higher-ups at Sega to let them localize the game's story twice: once for the Japanese voice acting, then again for the English voice acting. The Japanese dub is accompanied by a subtitle track that is much more faithful to the original material, while the English dub had been rewritten to maximize the performances of the dub cast by making easier to deliver dialogue. This turned out to be so successful that all future RGG games have followed suit for their own localization efforts.
  • Greg Chun actually dressed up as Yagami with his leather jacket, jeans, white shirt and sneakers in interviews and promotional events.^note He shaved his goatee for this.

• The Legacy of Kain series likewise featured a rich and complicated story fleshed out with hours of surprisingly eloquent dialogue that would not appear foreign in a work of Shakespeare's.

• Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel both dwell at length upon the major themes of Star Wars to a level that fans did not expect, with seemingly insignificant lines having major impact not only on the storyline, but upon the extended universe as a whole. This, despite The Problem with Licensed Games being already legendary — the creators could have phoned it in and still made a profit, but instead created legendary games.

In order to prepare for writing Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Chris Avellone went on a major Archive Binge of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, playing through the entire first game, rewatching every Star Wars movie, reading nearly every Expanded Universe book at the time (!), and even enduring the The Star Wars Holiday Special (!!!) for the sake of fully understanding the universe he was writing. As a result, there are an impressive amount of nods to the Star Wars canon—down to the most minute details—as well as entire plot threads woven from throw-away background material from the first game. It also tears the basic mythological and ethical system of the setting into pieces, but that's par for the course with him.

• According to Tokita, the staff involved with the remake of Live A Live loved the game so much that they drew twice the amount of expected animations for the game's pixel art.

• Metal Slug. How many run and gun shooters were there back then—or even today—that do as much random stuff as Metal Slug? Enemy conversations, animated chin movements, fifty different ways of watching the exact same tank explode? Nobody asked for all this: somebody just really wanted to make a detailed shooter.
  • If you have the chance, try going to the first stage of the first game. Early on, you get the Flame Shot and you can pass through a destroyed part of an airplane fuselage. Firing it will actually lighten up the area around you. This, in a fully 2D game with no added lighting effects of any kind, is just another mark of how incredibly detailed a game Metal Slug is.
  • Oh, and the first stage of Metal Slug 2/X? The Arabic writing in the background is not only accurate, but silly as per series standard.

• Metal Gear. Hideo Kojima in general not only shows off his work quite a bit (even though some things turn up wrong) but put most of that info into the game. The amount of things found in the CODEC conversations is vast... to say the least. He also loves to play with the engine even if the feature is absolutely useless. For example, you can find realistic melting ice in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

• The Metroid series in general goes to great lengths to make things atmospheric when they could have just given you a map and said "shoot this".
  • Super Metroid has aged incredibly well due to such attention to detail and is still seen as one of the best games in the genre. Samus has an Idle Animation consisting simply of her breathing. While wearing full body Powered Armour. Series co-creator Gunpei Yokoi is on record as actually being furious about his team putting so much effort into the title, only to later admit that all that effort created a fantastic game that the development team themselves wouldn't even attempt to follow up for another eight years due to fear they wouldn't be able to surpass it.
  • Metroid Prime: Rain droplets appearing for the briefest of seconds on Samus' visor, her involuntary jerking her hand to protect herself when she takes heavy fire, being able to see the bones of her arm when wearing the X-Ray visor, and that's without taking into account all of the fluff info you can find out by scanning, like what sort of rations the Space Pirates eat. These little details helped make Prime into one of the most atmospheric games ever.
  • Metroid Dread is an admirable case of a developer just plain not giving up on a project they're passionate about. Dread was initially going to be a Nintendo DS game, but due to hardware limitations at the time, the lead producer of the series, Yoshio Sakamoto, had to cancel development. Development was rebooted again, but was then cancelled again due to hardware limitations, again. Then, when Sakamoto saw the potential that the developers of Metroid: Samus Returns had, he was finally convinced he could bring his vision that he had kept with him for almost twenty years to life.

• The Myst series, to varying degrees. Myst was a complete gamble: nobody had done anything like it before, Cyan didn't know whether the available tools were up to it, and they had no idea whether it would sell. They didn't even have work premises when they started on it. Riven not only pushed the boundaries of rendering technology, but also featured a complete invented language with novel glyphs (which was entirely non-essential to the plot and gameplay). While being considerably less of a financial gamble, the following sequels have all followed the same philosophy of lavish and intricate design and production.

• The Monkey Island games feature an enormous amount of detail, especially impressive when we consider that the early games only had something like sixteen colors.

• Mortal Kombat really deserves a mention here. Not only because of little touches like the continuity references sprinkled throughout the game for the fans to enjoy but because of the dedicated team members who are as integral to each game's development as much as many of the characters are. Ed Boon, John Vogel and Steve Beran are just a few of the developers at Midway—now NetherRealm Studios—who give so much for their game series. It has to be said that, in spite of whatever mixed reactions people may have had to the MK games over the years, it takes a lot to do things like add six-hundred and seventy-six unlockable extras in Deadly Alliance, including a lot that are only there to make the player smile.

• M2 is one of the most well-known names in retro game porting, and many of their games are Polished Ports. Many fans are amazed to discover the lengths that they go to in order to accurately emulate the games, or the nice little touches they add:
  • For SEGA AGES: Virtua Racing, not only did they get the game to work at 60 FPS while still being an accurate emulation of the original, they even repurposed the "live camera" feature from the arcade version for this port's replay feature, and an arrangement of the replay theme from Virtua Racing Deluxe for the Sega 32X was whipped up to match the arcade version's sound font.
  • Their flagship products are the M2 ShotTriggers series. Each port in this lineup is clearly the result of the porting team taking their work seriously, featuring not only arcade-perfect recreations but also each port showing about a half dozen to dozen widgets showing real-time information and various quality-of-life options (such as reducing input lag, turning on visible hitboxes for games that don't have them, and turning off slowdown for the Aleste Collection games). These are the ports that M2 seem to put the most effort into alongside the Sega AGES series, even though M2STG ports aren't exactly going to be huge moneymakers; their other, non-SEGA and non-shmup ports (such as the Konami 50th anniversary port compilations and Collection of Mana) usually have just enough apparent effort to emulate the games correctly and have remappable controls. All of this, by shmup fans and developers, for shmup fans.
  • Because their ports are emulation ports rather than remasters coded natively for their target platforms, every time they introduce modifications such as Super Easy modes or Arrange Modes, they're effectively doing official ROM Hacks. The same goes for their much-vaunted M2 Gadgets, which pull real-time info from the ROM.

• Just one of the many examples from NetHack: There exists an enemy named the Quantum Mechanic. Upon death, it will sometimes drop a box. Inside the box is either a live cat or a cat corpse. If you check the source code, you'll find that the contents of a quantum mechanic's box, unlike all of the other boxes in the game, are not determined until you open it, just for the little extra joke that most people will never find. And the game is free, people!
  • To elaborate: Nethack has been developed by computer nerds with too much time on their hands since the 80's, has been ported to pretty much every operating system known to man (yes, even the iOS). And even though Nethack had ceased active development for 12 years, people were STILL MAKING PATCHES AND VARIANTS of the game. Then, in December 2015, the team behind NetHack released update 3.6.0 out of the blue, setting the stage for future updates to this long-running labor of love.

• Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl:
  • The staff went out of their way to make Ren & Stimpy as faithful to their series as possible, mainly by replicating their fluid insane animation and different head models are used to represent their Off-Model moments. Concept sketches were expressly made as a base for their moveset, as well.
  • According to this Polygon interview, the developers watched through every episode of the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon to accurately recreate its version of April O'Neil's design, noting how animators of the time tended to draw her differently.

• Odin Sphere is an incredibly detailed game for the PlayStation 2 that is made to have story book-fairy tale aesthetics. From background to foreground, it has tons of detail (every limb has its own animations) that only adds to the fantastical nature of it's setting. The entire design team consists of eleven people.
  • Vanillaware, the aforementioned design team, essentially has this trope as its motto. The lead designer and founder, George Kamitani, has a deep love of both breathtaking visuals and video games, so much that his team's early titles managed to nearly strain the limits of the systems they debuted on. Vanillaware's later works, such as Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Dragon's Crown, continually show off Kamitani's love of art and gaming, and are considered some of the best-looking 2D games ever produced, as well as being fun to play to boot.

• Opoona was conceived of by its creators of being a relaxing, fun RPG that anyone could enjoy. To that end, not only did they devise a unique one-handed control scheme with attacks performed purely through control stick combos—so the player could play while doing other things—they also decided to completely eschew the high fantasy style favored by most RPGs, to the point of designing abstract monsters based on parts and machinery rather than animals or mythical creatures. The level of detail that went into the game's world and history is also astounding: There are museums filled with real artworks designed by the game's staff, the dances and choreography performed in-game were mo-capped from real professional dancers, and the music was all performed live. The game itself is set within a fictional society where one's station in life is based off how much "work" one does, and explores both the pros and cons of the situation. The game is often compared to EarthBound (1994) for the sheer detail that went into every aspect of it.

• Planescape: Torment featured an incredibly complex and detailed non-linear plot exploring existential themes. The dialogue is a few books worth and features superb voice acting. Many critics have compared Torment favorably to literary works, a stunning achievement for the ghettoized genre of video game fiction.

• Police Quest 4: Open Season has narrator/character dialogue for most items and background objects/NPCs, even in dangerous situations and/or when they'd do absolutely nothing, adding to the realism. Teddy will also hold most of the items you give him, which have their own sprites.

• Primal: A tribute to old-school hard graphics problems.

• In most video games, incidental NPCs—even named ones—generally have no voice acting, two-dimensional personalities, and don't ever get up to much of anything. Not so in Psychonauts. Every single character in the game—and there's gobs of 'em, around 30 or so—is fully voiced, with their own quirky personality, and their own mini-story they follow through the course of the game—such as the Love Triangle between Nils, J.T., and Elka, Quentin and Phoebe's garage band, and Mikail's search for the camp's bear population, which somehow leads to him and Maloof becoming the camp's local mobsters. It must be seen to be believed.
  • This level of character detail is more or less a staple in Tim Schafer's games. In fact, rumor has it that he managed to flesh out each character in the game so well was by creating fake accounts for each character on a social networking site and playing out their lives through them.

• Radiata Stories has over one hundred and fifty recruitable NPCs, each of which have their own unique back story. The game keeps a twenty-four hour clock mechanic, and every character has a schedule they keep to. Characters will spar, go shopping, visit the doctor's, go to the bathroom, get plastered at pubs, you name it. Every character has a unique schedule suited to their personality. One fun thing to notice is what time characters go to bed and rise: one dedicated monk checks in at 8 p.m. and wakes at 5 a.m.; another drinks his nights away until 2:30 and doesn't get up until noon.

• The Resident Evil remake has a nice touch that has probably not been seen in the ten years since: Wesker's boots are detailed to the point where it's shown that the top holes are not laced through. Each character also wears a unique watch, and at the time of the game being made you could actually buy the watches.
  • It's astounding how much modeling work went into Resident Evil 4. One cutscene has Luis hand a bottle of pills to Leon and each one of the pills rolls around realistically; One cutscene has Salazar walk down a flight of stairs perfectly modeled; the game has highly detailed textures and environments for the Gamecube among other things, all because Shinji Mikami wanted to prove that the Gamecube could handle it all. Leon specifically, but other characters in every game tend to have incredibly correct firearms discipline, specifically their shooting stances and never having their fingers on the trigger except when shooting, even in concept and promotional art. Most developers can't even be bothered to make sure a gun is modeled so it can function. One thing in particular is that the world is geographically and architecturaly consistent. In one cutscene, Salazar appears on a balcony to taunt Leon before locking the door forward. When you finally open it, you can find a tiny hallway that leads up to that very same balcony, even though there's nothing up there. It's just there to justify Salazar getting around.
  • Resident Evil 5 takes this up a step further with the Desert Eagle. Most devs model pistols as firing in double-action only (i.e., pulling the trigger cocks and then drives the hammer into the firing pin, causing the weapon to cycle and the process must be repeated every time the weapon fires) if it's a factor at all. However, on some pistols, such as the 1911 and Desert Eagle, the weapon will only fire with a cocked hammer. Rather than depict the gun incorrectly, Capcom took the time to animate the hammer cocked and striking the firing pin for every pistol in the game. Considering this is a third-person shooter and your gun won't always be in sight, this is impressive. The same mechanics are at work in Resident Evil 6 and Revelations 2 and even though all pistols in the first Revelations are in DAO (likely a graphic limitation from the 3DS system it was originally built for), they all still cycle and eject shell casings, and slow-framing the animation will actually show a new cartridge feed into the chamber. Now that's attention to detail.
  • ResidentEvil.net is a completely optional site maintained by Capcom for every Resident Evil game since Resident Evil 6. On it players can come together and compete in contests to earn prizes in-game based solely on their participation; in Resident Evil 6 this is the only way to unlock the EX customs (something any other developer wouldn't have bothered with or sold as DLC); for the Resident Evil Zero HD edition, users could design and then vote on t-shirt designs for Rebecca to wear as alternate costumes, which were then made free (and exclusive) DLC for anyone who participated, again, without money ever changing hands.

• The English localization of Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love is said have been NIS America's biggest undertaking to date. To start, more than 70,000 lines of written dialogue and 10,000 voice samples had to be translated, which was far greater than any other localization in their history. A Wii port was commissioned to Idea Factory just for the North American release. To somewhat minimize the inevitable Subbing Versus Dubbing debate, the game's first run shipped with two discs for the PS2 version, one containing the English dub and the other with the original Japanese audio (both otherwise containing the same game). Subsequent shipments, if any, would only contain the English audio disk; but given how large the voice data is that two dubs apparently couldn't be included on one disc, they could have easily left out one or the other entirely to begin with. In addition, some names were changed in the dub, but the original names are preserved in text in the Japanese version, rather than simply sharing the same script. It speaks to NIS America's faith in the American Sakura Wars fanbase that all of this effort was for a then-five-year-old game that consists mostly of Dating Sim segments, a genre that had very little following in the Western market. Shame that Sega couldn't be bothered to bring it over themselves.

• Shenmue. Each and every character has their own personal schedule and voice acting, along with a lot of information about them you can't even find without the player's guide. There are tons of buildings you can enter that have no point in the game world other than to be entered and looked at (compare to Grand Theft Auto, where if a building can be entered it has to have a point). There's a mode which has completely authentic weather for the year. No wonder it was the most expensive video game of its time.

• Sid Meier and his games go here. His manuals are first-rate door-stoppers due to the sheer amount of research and historical accuracy he places in them. His manual for the 1987 original of Sid Meier's Pirates! had historically accurate routes for the Treasure Fleet and Silver Train routes, a brief guide to how period sword fighting worked (combinations of attack/parry), another guide to pike and shot (early firearms) warfare, yet another guide to how sailing a ship worked, a choice of backstory that suited the time period (like a Dutch trader, Spanish Coast Guard, or English corsair), and biographies of famous real life era privateers. Enough detail to bluff one's way through half a semester of Carribean history.

• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • There is a reason the series is critically acclaimed for its music. Masato Nakamura has stated that when he composed the music for the first two games, he didn't treat it as game music but as a film score, aiming to create an emotional, cinematic experience.
    "I wanted 'Sonic' to come across as cinematic... I wanted melodies that the player would hum along with as they were playing, dramatic music for when the scenes were intense, climactic music for when bosses would show up, and then tie it all together with an uplifting theme for the end credits. That was what I knew I wanted it all to be like."
    "When I composed the music for 'Sonic the Hedgehog 1&2', I tried to write a soundtrack for a movie. I imagined the game like a movie."
  • When Sonic 3's development time was cut short by a deadline imposed by a deal between Sega of America and McDonald's, the devs were forced to scrap half the game. Instead of moving on, they reworked the game's second half into Sonic & Knuckles. This wasn't good enough for Sonic Team, so they went the extra mile to implement a new technology called Lock On that allowed the player to connect the two cartridges, combining them into a large, ambitious game as originally intended.
  • When Sonic Adventure was in development, Sega sent Sonic Team on a paid trip to Central America to get inspiration for its storyline and setting, which ended up contributing to much of the game's Scenery Porn and Mayincatec influence. Also, the nameless low-poly NPCs found everywhere in the hub areas? They're all unique and have a different piece of dialogue for each point in the story, and for each of the six playable character's stories. Even though most players are unlikely to talk to all NPCs again after each cutscene, if you do so you'll find out that they have their own character arcs that intertwine with each other and advance as the player progresses the story.

• Super Mario Bros. Wonder has received praise for fresh ideas for the series, and for a good reason: according to the dedicated Nintendo Direct for the game, the developers were allowed to experiment with ideas and were not pressured with deadlines.

• Super Mario Galaxy: Koji Kondo had to force Mahito Yokota to scrap all 28 musical pieces the latter had composed for the first game because Kondo didn't think they fit. Once they got the soundtrack's direction sorted out, though, Yokota soldiered on once again, and his extra efforts yielded what is generally considered one of the greatest video game soundtracks of all time.

• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island:
  • A large amount of work went into making the game look the way it did, defying market expectations by straying away from the pre-rendered graphics that had risen to prominence in the wake of Donkey Kong Country's success. All of the game's sprites and tiles were drawn by hand with markers on paper, digitally scanned, and then traced over pixel-by-pixel to replicate the look within the confines of the SNES's graphical limitations. While this is far more work than what would be necessary even for conventional 2D spritework, the end result was a distinctly vivid art style unlike anything seen before or since.
  • The game was in development for the vast majority of the SNES's lifespan as Nintendo's incumbent home console, starting development in 1991 and releasing in 1995^note for reference, the SNES released in Japan in 1990 and the Nintendo 64 released in 1996. In addition to the art style, much of this time was spent cramming in as many technical tricks as possible— to the point of reprogramming the game to support the Super FX 2 chip once that became available— while still making a cohesive product. The result was a critical and commercial success, widely praised for its graphics and technical achievements in addition to its gameplay and design.

• Super Robot Wars, especially in Z, where the artists gave the older shows some truly awesome Retraux effects simply to show that, yes, they still love the oldies that much.

• Super Smash Bros. started out as a fun, but relatively simple brawler featuring Nintendo all-stars—a concept so inherently fun that messing around with it wasn't really necessary. The reason it's on this list is for its sequels, namely the trophies: starting with Melee, the series features trophies of countless characters from Nintendo's past, all with descriptions of several sentences. It's a subset feature of the game which many people don't even look at. For those who do, it's hard to shake the feeling that somebody out there really, really admires Nintendo's history.
  • There's a video series on YouTube about the "History Behind Smash Bros." (link, if anyone's curious), which reveals that nearly everything in the game, from random parts of the stages to every item to the characters' fighting moves is a reference to the games on which they are based. The music is filled with random bits from various games, the stages have multiple references to older stages from the original games, and the moves, even quickest and most random, are from older games. The sheer amount of it is staggering.
  • The Shadow Moses Island stage in Brawl is a huge reference to a future game on a competing system. Now that's dedication.
  • The best example of this might be Mr. Game & Watch's moveset. Every single attack he has is a reference to one of his games, including the moves that would usually be a generic punch or kick on a different character.
  • The additions of Ryu and Ken and Terry Bogard take this a step farther: Not only are their moves as accurate as possible (as per normal for this series by now), but care is taken to import as much of their mechanics from their own series as possible into the Smash Bros framework. You can perform a Hadouken/Power Wave for example, by simply pressing the Special button if you like, or you can do the traditional Quarter-Circle-Forward motion, and the game will even reward the extra effort with a stronger attack. This goes for all their special attacks. Burn Knuckle, Shoryuken, Power Dunk, etc.... This gives veterans of more traditional fighting games a frame of reference for entering the game, and those who've only played Smash an easy way to experience the style of the more traditional Fighting Games (which has often been accused of being complicated for beginners).
  • Steve?/Alex bring their ability to place blocks from their home game to Smash in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. To accommodate for this, the development team actually went back and altered the programming of every stage in the game so that the characters could place blocks on them.

• The background lore of Sword of the Stars is rich enough to put Role Playing Games to shame. Just check out the official forums, where writer Arinn "Erinys" Dembo addresses lots and lots of fan queries. Most developers would be content with short backstories, never mind actually building on the existing lore in response to fans.

• For Tekken 8, according to Harada, rather than porting the models from Tekken 7 over to this installment (since UE5 allows for seamless porting of UE4 assets otherwise), they were redone from the ground up with entirely different rigs, improved textures, and overall quality.

• Thunder Force VI utilizes two different languages for in-universe text and speech, neither of which are Japanese or English. One of these languages is Tangut, an ancient language somewhat related to Chinese, and the other is Mongolian, an uncommon language to employ as a Gratuitous Foreign Language. And the even better part? The omake material has translations into Japanese and transliterations into katakana and roman characters for the in-game speech.
  • Thunder Force Gold Pack 2's version of Thunder Force IV has the Styx from Thunder Force III available to use through a secret code. When you play as the Styx, look at the font for the HUD: it's the same style of Thunder Force III's HUD text.

• At a time when computer Role-Playing Games meant Dungeon Crawling, the already-established Ultima series changed focus to dwell upon the nature of heroism being more about helping people than beating up goblins. The creators also insisted upon revamping the engine completely between each major installment, and making the world as interactive as possible.

• For Virtua Fighter, Yu Suzuki had the development team learn martial arts so that they could realistically portray the various fighting styles.

• For Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monolith Soft commissioned custom-made flutes for the composers to use on the game's soundtrack, just to make the game's soundtrack sound that much more different, and are effectively as close to real world versions of Noah and Mio's flutes.

• Xenogears, Xenosaga's predecessor, suffered from budgeting and timing problems, leading to the infamous second disc featuring the protagonists relating much of the story in walls of text. However, it says a great deal about the creator that the story continued to shine and grow even more detailed and complex.
  • The English translator forced himself on his own to translate the game by the deadline, even sleeping under his desk to give himself more time to work even after the rest of the team left him. It shows, as the script, with themes based on Gnosticism, reincarnation and the concept of God is faithfully localized, with very little changed and is still an amazing translation today.

• Xenosaga required loads and loads of manpower in order to pull off the technical feats it could—especially when you consider that it was a first-generation PS2 title. But man, did we really need that many cutscenes?

• Localization example: in 2010, XSEED Games formed a partnership with Falcom to localize some of the latter's games on the PlayStation Portable. Three of them are from The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy, which is known for having thousands of lines of text per game. (Although no specific publishers were confirmed, that alone was apparently enough to have other publishers refuse to translate it.) Although the trilogy is popular in Japan, XSEED has to deal with a market in which gamers are either aren't familiar with the series or associate The Legend of Heroes name with Bandai's (later Bandai Namco Entertainment) "Blind Idiot" Translations of the previous three installments. Needless to say, it takes balls for a game localizer, and a fairly new one at that, to localize that many games under such circumstances.

• The World of Assassination Trilogy not only has some gorgeous Scenery Porn in each location, but the NPC's within them have fairly unique routines and behaviour, believable human dialogue (especially when held at gunpoint) that could go on for literally a hundred hours if you put them all together, and some of the more notable ones contribute to the story in some aspect, even if its minor. The levels are interconnected with Foreshadowing to later targets and levels, there are a bunch of hidden kills per level the developers thought ahead to add.

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