Visual Effects Of Awesome / Video Games

This game features:
Rotating Background Graphics
Rotating Background Textures
3D Vector Sprite Objects
3D Vector Polygon Graphics
Realtime Zoom
Full Motion Video Compression.
All running without the use of additional hardware.

— Opening text from Red Zone, running on the Sega Genesis

• The NES could deliver surprisingly impressive effects in the right hands.
  • Elite. That's right, those are honest-to-God 3D vector graphics on an NES.
    • What makes this even more interesting is that the NES is a tile-based system. You have to specify any non-sprite elements as tiles on a grid. How was it done despite that? The game actually uses the tile memory space as a dynamic display. That is, the game draws the entire 3D viewport on those tiles each frame, and then assembles them in the correct order!
  • The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner is another NES showcase with impressive mode 7-esque environments and scaling sprites.
  • The above game, as well as Rad Racer also include a red/blue 3D effect.
  • Kirby's Adventure is an all-around graphics-pusher for the NES, with the most famous part being the 3D rotating tower in Butter Building.
  • Vice: Project Doom on the NES has a train stage with a whopping 8 layers of parallax scrolling in the background. Keep in the mind, the NES did not have that by default, and it had to be done in-software!
  • Batman: Return of the Joker is a true hardware pusher that has large, detailed and fluid animation combined with parallax scrolling. It could easily be passed off as an early Sega Genesis title.
  • The video game adaptation of Willow has such an impressive number of sprites on-screen and such vivid sprites and use of color, that people have favorably compared it to the graphics of A Link to the Past on SNES! (The main issue was that, to cram all that graphical data onto a NES cart, the corner cut for the game as a whole was variety in individual screens.)
  • EA's NES port of The Immortal, which has some of the largest and most detailed spritework ever done on the console.
• The Sega arcade game SubRoc-3D included 3D graphics viewed through a polarizer in front of the screen which was very impressive for an arcade game of the 1980's.
• You'd think the Game Boy, which had hardware that was primitive even for its time and was stuck with a meager palette of four shades of gray, wouldn't have much to offer in the visuals department, but you'd be surprised!
  • Faceball 2000 is a FPS game with pseudo 3D environments done in 1991—and months before Wolfenstein 3-D came out, at that. And it can support up to 16 players at once!
  • V-Rally seamlessly imitates mode 7-style scaling and rotation while maintaining an oil smooth framerate.
  • Jeep Jamboree, Bill Elliot's NASCAR Fast Tracks and Days of Thunder (the latter being made by Argonaut Software) were likewise ambitious attempts at achieving pseudo-3D racing environments on the handheld.
  • The port of Race Drivin' was an ambitious attempt to transition the arcade games 3D graphics into sprite form, and it does a very impressive job of giving the illusion of playing in real 3D, even if the framerate was slow and clunky as a result.
  • The obscure game X achieves fluid and convincing Elite style 3D vector graphics on hardware that shouldnt possibly be able to support such a thing.
  • But surpassing all of the above is the 2011 homebrew port of Stunt Race FX, which delivers big, detailed sprites and animation with faux-3D environments, and all while maintaining a solid, fluid framerate!
  • The Donkey Kong Land trilogy successfully managed to transition the fluid, pre rendered 3D sprites of the Donkey Kong Country games onto the handheld.
• The Game Boy Color had some showstopper titles too.
  • The remake of Donkey Kong Country for the system surpasses even the example set by the Land trilogy.
  • Toy Story Racer has pseudo 3D courses that are so convincing that you'd swear they were done in real time 3D!
• The Game Boy Advance was a powerful handheld, basically a portable Super Nintendo, and many games took advantage of this.
  • Some of the most ambitious titles attempted 3D style sprites or even went the extra mile and did games with real time 3D. Kill Switch (a third person cover shooter), ATV Thunder Ridge Riders, DRIV3R, Star X, Super Monkey Ball Jr., Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam and Asterix & Obelix XXL (a 3D platformer that comes close to looking like a portable Nintendo 64 game) are the best examples of this.
• The Sega Genesis in general, with or without add-ons, was a respectable powerhouse in of itself. Its flagship Sonic games are its most famous examples, but there are many other technical showcases for the console.
  • The game Red Zone is one of the shining examples of just how powerful the hardware was on its own when pushed to its limits. The intro actually brags about all of the games technical achievements and how they were all achieved without add-ons or enhancement chips. It has smooth scaling and rotation for both sprites and backgrounds and for the time amazing 3D vector objects, all while maintaining an oil smooth framerate. It even has an FMV opening, something that even Sega themselves thought was impossible to achieve on the console!
  • The games Zero Tolerance, the port of Duke Nukem 3D and the homebrew port of Wolfenstein 3-D all pull off smooth 3D FPS environments with scaling and rotation effects, which are all done in-software!
  • Res Q has bonus stages done entirely in real time 3D akin to the original Star Fox, and Hard Drivin' and Star Cruiser are done in real time 3D as well. Bear in mind that both of these were achieved in-software, with no enhancement chips or add-ons.
  • Virtua Racing was another showcase title done entirely in 3D. And thanks to the Sega Virtua Processor chip, it has models and a smooth framerate that even put the SNES showcase Star Fox to shame. The Sega 32X port, Virtua Racing Deluxe, made it look even better.
  • To say nothing of the homebrew port of Star Fox, which runs a successful imitation of the game on Genesis software, and without any enhancement chips!
  • Traveller's Tales' video game adaptation of Toy Story not only uses amazing prerendered sprites, but even has a full blown 3D first person level ala Doom.
  • Mickey Mania famously has faux-Mode 7, sprite rotation and 3D effects done in-software in levels like Moose Hunters, Lonesome Ghosts and The Mad Doctor. And to say nothing of the fluid hand-animated sprites.
  • The Adventures of Batman and Robin employs 3D backgrounds that are so convincing at points it feels like you're playing an early PlayStation game!
  • Vectorman showcased Prerendered Graphics, extremely smooth animations made up of multiple sprites, transparency, rotations, and other effects. And unlike many examples of games using early prerendered graphics, its visuals have aged surprisingly well, still looking pretty smooth and clean to this day.
  • The homebrew scene has showcased the system's ability to display 512 different colors at once independently of palettes (or even around 1500 if shadow and highlight mode is used), and render Mode 7-esque effects.
• The Sega CD may have squandered a lot of its potential on dated and grainy FMV games, but in the right hands the add-on could deliver an incredible visual experience.
  • Silpheed uses realtime 3D models rendered over Full Motion Video footage rendered in a similar style and fidelity than the realtime graphics, allowing for more elaborate camerawork while still maintaining a smooth framerate. The effect is so seamless than many game magazines of the time (and some casual observers still) thought the Sega CD rendered everything on screen.
  • Stellar Fire and the port of Starblade likewise achieved, for the time impressive, real time 3D on the hardware.
  • The Sega CD was capable of sprite scaling, rotation and Mode 7 and was more than keen to show it off. The Batman tie-in games and the shoot-em-up Soul Star have some of the most immersive and impressive use of them.
  • Bloodshot pulls up an impressive Doom style FPS experience on the hardware as well.
  • Lunar: The Silver Star and Popful Mail used sprite-based Full Motion Video for its cutscenes, as opposed to many other games that used pre-rendered videos. The effect looks incredible in action, with Popful Mail in particular featuring masterful cutscenes with differing camera angles and fluid animations.
• The Sega 32X add-on is not a well regarded piece of hardware, but it did achieve some impressive visuals in its best games.
  • The port of Doom actually looks superior to its SNES counterpart.
  • The ports of Space Harrier, After Burner and Mortal Kombat II are near arcade perfect ports and look stunning in presentation. The port of Virtua Fighter and Star Wars Arcade, along with Darxide and Shadow Squadron, were real showcases of the potential the 32X had for 3D graphics.
  • Games like Tempo, Kolibri and Knuckles' Chaotix tried hard to show off the fact that the 32X could display 32,000 colors with no on-screen limit. Even if the results tended to look garish, it was a big technical step up from what either the Genesis or SNES could do with their color palette restrictions.
• The Sega Game Gear was no slounch in the sprite department either since its basically a portable and souped up Sega Master System.
  • Arena: Maze of Death is an impressive isometric shooter game with spritework and a color palette so impressive that it could easily be passed off as a Sega Genesis title at a glance.
  • Sonic Blast, the second to last game released for the handheld, has large pre-rendered 3D sprites a la Donkey Kong Country, making it one of the most ambitious looking titles for the handheld, even if it wasn't the most fun to play.
• The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was likewise a powerful piece of hardware that consistently delivered the goods and then some.
  • Thanks to its built-in Mode 7 capabilities, racing games like Super Mario Kart and Touge Densetsu-Saisoku Battle had oil-smooth, faux-3D racing environments to drive around. Other driving games like Super Off-Road: The Baja and Speed Racer in My Most Dangerous Adventures took it further by including the illlusion of hills and inclines thru their courses. Games like the Super Star Wars trilogy made liberal use of it to stunning effect in vehicle and space battles.
  • Super Castlevania IV has the spinning room from 4-3. Its only a brief background setpiece, but its an unforgettable use of the SNES mode 7 effect that gives a disturbingly convinging illusion of 3D—maybe too convincing to some.
  • Any of the games equipped with the Super FX chip, most famously the original Star Fox, which made achieving then-revolutionary 3D graphics possible on the SNES.
    • Stunt Race FX went further than Star Fox by rendering an entire worldspace in polygonal 3D. More, the Big Ravine course features rain that splatters on the screen when driving in first-person view, and actually distorts the view through them a little.
  • The original Donkey Kong Country trilogy looks amazing to this day due to the pre-rendered CGI sprites and environments and vivid color palette. Most amazing is that they did not use the Super FX chip or any other enhancement chips—everything is done in-software!
• Blizzard is well known for their excellent cinematic work, but Diablo III sets a high water mark not just for video games but for motion picture animation as well!
• Journey. Just look at a screenshot or video of it, you'll see what we mean.
• While it seems dated now, the second level in Unreal was, for the time, nothing short of mindblowing. The first level was a rather standard, if well-done indoors level, which would not look out-of-place in Quake. Then, the second level, you step out of the ship into a massive, outdoors world, with no clipping or fog to be seen. The sheer difference is amazing, even now. Back then, when even the best graphics designers in the game industry where still playing with shades of brown and green and talking about "polygon counts", here comes a lush, fully 3D jungle environment in believable color. For anyone that was into PC gaming at the time, no other game graphics triumph has ever come close, mere logical progressions to Unreal's quantum leap.
  • Unreal Tournament. Facing Worlds.
• Wolfenstein 3-D. Real-time, texture-mapped 3D rendering on a 286 PC with stock VGA graphics — something that didn't even have a blitter, much less any sort of Polygonal Graphics hardware. Back in 1992, that was mindblowing, especially considering how weak a 286 was even then.
• In 1993, expanding on the visual features that Wolfenstein 3-D brought, Doom added flats (floor/ceiling textures), height and light-level variation, and a variety of sector-based effects that, combined with the realistic and gritty artwork, looked amazing. Other idtech1 games, especially Hexen, added even more features such as horizontally-moving doors (polyobjects), fog, translucency, and scripted events to further the immersion.
• Gradius Gaiden, stage 7. A seemingly ordinary volcano stage getting sucked into a black hole, rock by rock, along with enemies, their projectiles, and your own missiles. And with very little slowdown too, unless you're playing on a PlayStation 2.
• While the in-game graphics for Warhammer: Mark of Chaos are ho-hum for the time (2006), the opening cinematic holds up well even a decade after-the-fact.
• Mass Effect's space scenes were good, but less than mind-blowing: the technical "graphics" of the game had been toned down to fit in the massive amount of content. Mass Effect 2, however, spanned 15 GB on the PC and 2 disks for the 360. The graphics, particularly those that apply to people speaking, were stunning.
  • What stood out was the planet from the Normandy Crash Pack DLC. It's a beautiful ice planet, with the low sunlight creating areas of both light and dark, the stars visible in the sky, and some aurorae just for good measure.
  • Used in the Overlord DLC, in which the Firewalker's VI prompts you to look out at the scenery when "Sensors indicate that an aesthetically pleasing view" is nearby.
  • Really, almost every environment and location in Mass Effect 2 looks excellent. Illium and Omega in particular are breathtaking and also have an awesome sci-fi feel to them. You get to discuss the view on Illium with something like half your teammates. Some of the downloadable content also has some outstanding environments. The Shadow Broker's ship in Lair of the Shadow Broker and seeing the Mass Relay get closer and closer in The Arrival.
  • The entire 'Escape from Earth' scene in Mass Effect 3. As the Normandy lifts off, you see Anderson running back to the soldiers from earlier. The camera pans across the wreckage of Vancouver, and you see shuttles being loaded with survivors (including Vent Boy). As the shuttles life off, a Reaper destroyer shoots them down with its main gun. As the Normandy flies away, you can see more Reapers landing on Vancouver, and the wreckage of the Fourth Fleet falling from the sky and burning up in the atmosphere. It's gorgeously rendered, and a brilliant Tear Jerker, set to a hauntingly sad Lonely Piano Piece.
    • Menae is utterly breathtaking. As you make your way across the moon, you can see Reaper capital ships stomping across the surface off in the distance, and watch as husks attack the smaller turian outposts. And off in the distance, you can see the world of Palaven burning.
    • Then there's Thessia which manages to be both Scenery Porn and Scenery Gorn at the same time. The architecture and skyline through the mission is utterly gorgeous with an almost Roman/Greek look but with a futuristic feeling, and combined with total destructions as the Reapers lay waste to democratic center of the galaxy.
    • The bits of Rannoch that aren't covered with geth. No wonder the quarians were so gung-ho to get it back.
• In Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3/Shutokou Battle 01, the boss Blood Hound, when challenged in the rain, causes the rain to turn into blood. Rejected Angel, when battled, results in a dramatic shift of the screen's tones and the Saint Elmo's Fire effect to appear when going up to higher speeds.
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night brings us Alucard, who at the time of the game's release captivated gamers with his sprite animations. Especially his cape.
  • Go to Spriters Resource or such and look at his sprite sheet. There are about 30 frames for his running animation.
• Crysis is a game that lives and breathes this. There is a reason 'Does it run Crysis?' meme is stil relevant even after 12 years after it was released!
  • Crysis 2 is excellently described by its producers as "catastrophically beautiful".
    • And Crysis 3 managed to surpass both of them!
    • And then Crytek released the Remastered version of the first game in 2020. You thought the original was insane? Wait till you see the Remastered trailer.
• Uncharted is one of the very few seventh-gen shooters to avert Real Is Brown, and it looks amazing.
  • Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception has mind-blowingly gorgeous scenery, from a mansion burning to the ground around you to firefights in a sinking abandoned cruise ship, which as it starts to fill turns the entire environment sideways. In fact, you're fighting on a ship that is rocking on actual waves. The desert scenery is similarly beautiful.
    • Special mention goes to the facial expressions. They could have used motion capture, since they already had the actors playing the scenes, but they animated the expressions from scratch, and the Unintentional Uncanny Valley is mostly avoided with only a few major exceptions.
    • "Naughty Dog outdoing themselves with the third game"? Hm. Sounds familiar.^note  Without counting the first game, of course. On the other hand, some levels in "CB 3: Warped" are, for lack of better words, gorgeous.
  • The world in Uncharted 4: A Thief's End is magnificently detailed. Every bit of scenery, from the ground Nate is standing on to as far as the camera can see is all rendered in the in-game engine (4 is also the first and only Uncharted game to not use prerendered cutscenes; everything from start to finish is done in-engine). Liberatlia in particular is utterly awe-inspiring, with its picturesque mountain scenery. The level of background detail is huge but even tiny things like the way Nate's hair is rendered is detailed.
• Shadow of the Colossus:
  • The vast, open backdrop, through which you can make your lonely way; the soft lighting effects, as if you were looking at this world through a permanent Dulcinea Effect; the fluid animations of Agro and Wander, and of the Colossi themselves. Pretty much the entirety of the visuals counts as this. It's so awesome that others have attempted to replicate some effects to various degrees. The Colossi in particular are simply breathtaking in their detail and sheer scale. Special note that all of the above was done before the era of HD Consoles!
  • The PS4 remake ups the ante. Every asset was rebuilt from the ground up and everything from the fabric of Wander's clothes to every single blade of grass to the textures of each rock has been given a makeover that transcends even the best lookers of the PS4's library. Doubly so if you have a Playstation 4 Pro, allowing you to experience this absurd amount of detail in 60 frames per second with absolutely no dips.
• Ōkami. One of the most beautiful art styles in gaming, ever. It truly looks like a painting in motion, and easily holds a candle to more technologically impressive games like the above examples.
  • The effects when you restore a cursed zone are just screaming Scenery Porn.
    • While not as beautiful, the sequel still maintains the same effects on a tiny DS processor.
• The Bendy series has an absolutely jawdropping hand-drawn cartoon look. The sketch lines have such a natural feel you could easily assume they were drawn in pencil, your jaw will drop to the floor when you learn they were actually drawn with a mouse. The lighting sells the look even more with it's highly exaggerated depiction where supernaturally bright spotlights leave everything else in shadow.
• Ori and the Blind Forest has an almost spiritual beauty, practically throughout. Just watch the trailer. The graphics and animation are quite simply heavenly.
  • Many Steam games have jaw-dropping graphics and many more can reduce hardened gamers to sobs, but very few can make players cry in just the first 10 minutes based on the graphics alone.
• Find a video of BioShock's intro on YouTube. Watch it. Would you kindly pick up your jaw from the floor?
  • Naturally, the BioShock 2's looks even better.
  • Even more so is the trailer of BioShock Infinite, you'd be amazed on how much detail they put in on it.
• Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader boasts some incredible polygon counts and lighting effects in a game that was released in 2001. Its sequel, Rebel Strike, has the highest polygon count of any game during the last generation (in the Battle of Hoth level.)
• Recca, an NES game released only in Japan until the 3DS Virtual Console, features extremely fast-paced space shooter action as well as trippy, almost polygonal background effects.
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare might have "cheated" by using Real Is Brown, but even now the graphics still look absolutely fantastic.
  • C'mon, why else did they set the intro level on a cargo ship in the middle of a raging storm?
  • If that didn't say something about the graphics, the invasion at the beginning of the Marine campaign certainly did.
  • On the darker side of this trope, we have the nuclear explosion.
  • The Prypiat missions contain some of the most gorgeous usages of gray filter.
  • Modern Warfare 2 keeps up the amazing displays. The exterior of the Gulag and the Rio missions are wonderful displays of beauty, but war-ravaged Washington D.C. is simply jaw-dropping, whether from amazement or sheer horror.
  • And Modern Warfare 3 keeps up the trend, with more war-torn cities like New York, Paris, London and Prague. The scene with the Eiffel tower collapsing is absolutely jaw-dropping.
• The original Call of Duty is one of the best-looking games that use the id Tech 3 engine. Not only the visuals are quite realistic for their time, they also look beautiful. its expansion pack, United Offensive, is even better looking.
  • Perhaps the best example of this trope in the original is a level where you raid the German battleship Tirpitz. In the sequel, the looks of the Sicily and Bastogne levels are simply fantastic.
• After years of using the standard IW engine to growing mockery and dated results, Infinity Ward decided to rebuild it from scratch for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), allowing for more advanced lighting, improved physics, ray tracing, and advanced photogrammetry ^noteThe technique of using photographic images to obtain reliable distances and data for an object.. The end result has thus been praised as one of the best looking FPS games ever, even years after its initial release and not being a PS5 and Xbox Series X|S game. Special mention goes to the weapon reload animations, which many have touted as being some of the best in the history of the FPS genre.
• The way Middle-Earth is presented in The Lord of the Rings Online is a lot of the time breathtaking, especially Moria. From entering through the Hollin Gate and all the way to the East Gate, you can really see why Moria was considered the grandest of the Dwarvish halls. One could only imagine what it would look like before its fall.
  • Honorable mention goes to Caras Galadhon (Lothlórien), especially by night, and the view when first entering Rivendell.
  • Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor not only has rain as a dynamic weather effect, but also hail. Hail that bounces off characters, to boot.
• Shadowverse: Some of the visual effects in animated cards, like ripple effects, are simply gorgeous. Other cards have particularly stunning summon or attack animations. A special mention goes to the various trailers for the new expansions that not only have gotten better with each new one released, but are downright gorgeous to behold and especially when taking into consideration that all of it uses the original card art in the animations.
• Square Enix:
  • Final Fantasy VII: This game was probably the defining one for seeing games could have good graphics in the West. It's more than just the impressive FMVs and the seamless integration of them into the gameplay, it's also the style resembling a film more than a game. FFVII made use of panning cameras and styles unusual for games, and some of the FMVs are still impressive today for their camera work (the opening FMV panning up over Midgar, another one panning out as the train goes around the plate, the dramatic fall of the rain when you face down a dragon with Sephiroth in a flashback etc. etc.)
  • Final Fantasy VIII: The opening FMV raised the bar again. It still looks good now and it was created on the PS1. Even the in-game models are very impressive for the console, and some could be mistaken for early PS2.
  • Final Fantasy XIII: It's just the little things, really. Like how they got the hair to look so nice in game, despite the fact that it's probably just a bunch of flat planes sticking out of their heads with a partly transparent texture mapped on.
    • On a related note, by now we have to admit that Square Enix has a "squeeze the console like a melon" policy that simply can't go unmentioned. There's a reason^note  other than pride, as Square themselves confirmed in retrospect they wanted to use CDs instead of cartridges as soon as possible. Since then, they managed to pull off beautifully-looking Final Fantasy-ised portrayals of Disney characters as summons, stick Full-Motion-Videos into a Game Boy Advance, create a mind-blowing town in eternal sunset, faithfully recreating said town in handheld format... and so on. Really, after the latest title of mind-boggingly good graphics, after leaving fans wondering how they could possibly ever top themselves off, they show people exactly how it's done. Two games even require data to be installed on the console in order to make load times faster - as the console's power gets squeezed that much.
    • Even in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, they had this policy of graphics hardware abuse. Pop in Final Fantasy for the NES or Final Fantasy VI for the SNES sometime. The monster graphics were stunning for the time.
  • Square Enix are masters of FMV...particularly in the Final Fantasy series. Some of their cut scenes are so beautiful that you can almost forget you're playing a video game. The Art Evolution with each progressive game means that by the time Final Fantasy XIII came out, the gameplay was almost as beautiful as the cut scenes.
  • Final Fantasy XII: The views are awesome, the creatures are interesting, but for really, really neat, you can't go past the Quickenings. You will probably see each one dozens if not hundreds of times, yet they never stop being breathtaking.
  • Super Mario RPG. Probably the pinnacle of graphical achievement on the SNES, it puts Donkey Kong Country to shame with its digitized environments, creating a very convincing pseudo-3D world with detailed environments and character designs. The first snow level in the first game looks stunning with the nearly (at the time) realistic snow covered trees in the background and the soft glow in the mountains for the sunrise. As you progress, the glow turns to gray and snow starts to fall, picking up in intensity until fog covers the background so that you can't see the mountains anymore when the blizzard comes in full force. Even to this day, not many games can (or don't even bother) pull off a seamless weather transition like that.
  • Trials of Mana and Chrono Trigger were arguably the most graphically intense games on the SNES, in between the incredibly detailed and colorful environments, (relatively) lifelike animation (most notably with Flammie, the dragon mount in Trials of Mana), and pseudo-3D spell effects.
  • Final Fantasy Type-0: The original PSP version is gorgeous, and one of the best-looking titles produced for the console. The in-game graphics are highly detailed, massive and detailed enemies and environment are common, red tints are used to enhance the mood and atmosphere, and the art direction is great.
  • Final Fantasy X was the first test of what a Final Fantasy game could look like on the PS2's graphics engine, as well as the first test on how a Final Fantasy series would look rendered in fully real time 3D, and it passed with flying colors. To this day, it still looks impressive, even as the PS2's infrastructure looks outdated. Any scene where Sin is displaying its full power is a technological marvel and the Aeons are nothing short of gorgeous. The FMV scenes are also stunning.
  • With Final Fantasy XV, it's gotten to the point where you can't even tell at first glance if a render is pre-rendered CG or rendered in real time. They've gotten visual effects down that good.
  • Dragon Quest III: The Game Boy Color re-release of the game faithfully recreates many of the visual effects of the SNES release, including a complete remake of the opening sequence, the battle over the volcano included.
• Tales of Vesperia, full stop. It's nothing short of stunning sometimes.
  • Also Tales of Xillia and its sequel. Xillia starts off in Fenmont, a city that has an eternal night and is beautifully lit up by glowing trees. Starts. The animated cutscenes done by none other than Ufotable deserve a mention too.
  • Tales of Zestiria: The final, Beast-centric Punch Parry looks absolutely amazing.
• The inevitable Heavy Rain. Wow. If that's what this generation can do, then the next generation is already here.
  • They actually topped themselves with Beyond: Two Souls. You might be forgiven for mistaking the game for a PlayStation 4 title rather than a PlayStation 3 one.
  • And again with Detroit: Become Human. The ENTIRE GAME looks photo-realistic. Luckily Quantic Dream managed to avoid Unintentional Uncanny Valley while showcasing possibly the best visuals and animation ever seen in a game.
• Project Origin. The Origin facility crater is nothing short of mind-boggling. Scenery Gorn at its finest.
• Panau in Just Cause 2 looks absolutely spectacular on its own, but try putting your destination on the opposite side of the map. A little marker saying "15 km" or something like that pops up... and you can see your destination. That's right, this game renders stuff over 15 kilometers away (about 9.3 miles if you're American), still looks amazing, and it's all one seamless map. Try to top that.
• Nintendo:
  • It's easy to take it for granted now, but Super Mario 64 was a stunning showcase title for the Nintendo 64. Expansive, colorful worlds, clever mixing of sprites with 3D environments and characters, fun animation, crisp anti aliased character models, cool particle effects (i.e. jumping into a painting) all running on an oil smooth 30 FPS framerate. Even though the low polygon presentation looks very dated now, the appealing cartoon art still allows it to stand tall in this day and age. The Nintendo DS remake only took the presentation even further, on a handheld, and without compromising the cartoon charm of the original game!
    • Super Mario Sunshine is still considered to have some of the best water effects in a video game, and it was released in 2002.
    • Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel have some of the most utterly gorgeous levels in any game, a fantastic art style and color palette, and brilliantly creative areas (although many of the levels in the sequel were mostly copy pasted from the first game, even if they are pretty to look at).
    • Super Mario 3D World brings the Mario franchise to high definition, and it looks gorgeous as a result. The later stages of the game really show how beautiful the game can look, and it definitely showed how well HD graphics could look on the Wii U.
    • And then we have Super Mario Odyssey. One look at the trailer and you'll see why people are impressed: the visuals are completely breathtaking. In terms of graphics, this game looks to be to Galaxy what Galaxy was to Mario 64.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 3D. Even if you don't play in 3D, it is absolutely jaw-dropping. The moment when you walk out of Link's house into Kokiri Forest is truly jaw-dropping and magical. The Water Temple is so beautiful, it's hard to hate it. The pan-over of the Temple of Time when you first enter it must be seen to be believed. And then you put it into 3D....
    • Heck, the 3DS as a whole. Did anyone really think Nintendo would pull it off when it was announced? The augmented reality games are especially incredible.
    • The original Nintendo 64 version of Ocarina of Time is no less impressive. There's a reason why the game runs at just 20 FPS on stock hardware - the polygon counts are quite large for a Nintendo 64 game, and areas like Hyrule Field were so hardware-intensive that Nintendo thought it could never get the game to run at all. There are also some subtle but impressive effects. For instance, the fishing rod has real-time physics applied to it, and the mirrors in the Spirit Temple exhibit real-time shadowing (not the cheap cones of light that Link has as shadows).
  • The two Nintendo 64 Zeldas have their moments of this, but The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker AND The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess are just works of art in comparison. The credits sequence of Twilight Princess edges into Scenery Porn.
    • The graphics for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword were inspired by Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne. It really shows, especially if you look at something at a distance - it all looks like something from a water-colour painting. Skyward Sword took the best parts of the styles previous two games, blending into the best-looking game possible on the Wii's outdated hardware with a hugely colorful, detailed world reminiscent of those paintings.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker had gorgeous anime-styled Cel Shaded art that really pushed the Nintendo GameCube to its limits, with its dazzling water, fire, particle, and distortion effects, as well as its impressive rope bridge and cloth physics engine. One cutscene features a gigantic tower rising from the ocean, complete with drying patches of water. And it's all rendered in real-time. The scene is especially impressive at sunrise or sunset.
    • Wind Waker HD has been announced for the Wii U. Imagine all that plus ten years of improvement and 1080p resolution.
    • Now with more real-time shadowing!
    • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess looked equally awesome, going with a more "realistic" look with a huge emphasis on scale (Hyrule Castle is visible from most any point in the field).
    • And now we have The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hyrule is absolutely massive in scale, and at any point you can get a good enough view, you can see practically all of it in spectacular detail thanks to the absolutely insane draw distances. Of note is the very first scene when Link runs out of the Shrine of Resurrection and with a musical swell, the camera pans up and reveals Hyrule in all of its beauty.
  • In the Metroid Prime Trilogy, there are two that immediately come to mind:
    • When a flash of bright light occurs, be it from an explosive blast or regular Scan Visor use in Corruption, you can see Samus's eyes. It's especially impressive in Corruption, since you can also see how far she's been corrupted in her eyes and the other facial features.
    • In Prime 1 and 3, when you use the X-Ray visor, you can see the bones inside of her hands. Prime 1 also has her hand change positions for each beam she uses, which is a very nice easter egg.
  • Captain Falcon's Falcon Punch was just straight awesome in Super Smash Bros. 64: after shouting the name, he unleashed a fiery punch complete with a 2D image of his emblem. Then along comes Super Smash Bros. Melee and he keeps the punch, only now the flames morph into a falcon spreading its wings.
    • Many of the things in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Next time you play, go look at the trophies for the playable characters or the assist trophies and look at how detailed the skin, clothes, etc are-Peach's dress has several layers to it that make it seem like something from the real world, Ness' backpack, hat and t-shirt have real visible seams in them, denim jeans and overalls has seams, buttons, etc. to look like real articles of clothing, the Ice Climbers' hoods have very well-rendered fur, Dedede, who normally just has a weird sash underneath his coat, was given a kimono, and Link's, well, everything. Character designs aside, many of the Final Smashes-particularly Triforce Slash, Great Aether, PK Starstorm, and Lucario's Aura Laser-look REALLY great. Some people will only turn Smash Balls on to see those Final Smashes.
    • Also, the cutscenes from "The Subspace Emissary," especially "The Great Invasion." The Subspace Gunship is pretty darn detailed.
    • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U takes everything that Brawl did and improved upon it. Lucina has her birthmark on her eye, a detail that the creator himself admitted NO ONE WILL SEE, but had to include anyway. The crowning gem, however, HAS to be Orbital Gate Assault and The Great Cave Offensive. You can see individual threads on character clothing and the color palette is gorgeous. Special mention goes to the particle effects, which make all the animations appear MUCH smoother and the actions given MUCH more impact, as well as the colored trails from when you send a character flying, and the badass red lightning appears when you land a killing blow. It all makes the game look incredibly awesome. Specific examples include:
    • Peach's realistically seamed glove (where before she might as well have had a white arm) complete with a tiny ring on one hand.
    • Greninja's Substitute doll, which gained memetic status when it was revealed how gorgeous it looked. Three words: Hyperrealistic Substitute Doll. And yes, it's all completely rendered.
    • Link's chainmail under his tunic.
    • All of the details on Shulk's clothes. Were he put in the game in a previous installment, his design might have been simplified.
    • The off-the-screen KO effects. The characters actually look like they're pressed against the glass screen.
    • Mega Man is clearly made out of metal plates and bolts. His design was actually given more detail than his own games! Plus, his animations actually use distortion and model trickery to match how he moved back in the days of the NES.
    • Fox and Falco's visors are constantly updated with scrolling bits of information. You only EVER see this in motion during their victory animations.
    • The big white scar on Ganondorf's chest is constantly glowing dynamically.
    • As far as stages go, Kalos Pokemon League is an absolutely gorgeous stained-glass masterpiece, Gaur Plain looks WAY BETTER than the source game, which is quite a feat, and Magicant captures the heart of the original Magicant perfectly. Any Mother fan is bound to cry when the rift tears open and starts displaying scenes from the first two games.
    • The Pilotwings stage in the Wii U version is undiluted beauty. The characters battle atop a plane, starting at a landing strip and then taking off, flying around a beautifully rendered landscape while gorgeous music plays. And the Midgar stage, as showcased in the Cloud Strife DLC trailer, looks INCREDIBLE, and has some fans asking for a Wii U port of Final Fantasy VII!
    • All this and in both versions, the game runs at a constant unbroken 60 FPS. Yes, even in 3D on the 3DS version.
    • The Final Smashes. They already looked amazing in Brawl, but here, they're even better. Many characters got theirs updated, such as Kirby, who now pulls out a Super Ability, which looked amazing in its source game, and now it's in HD. Ness and Lucas's PK Starstorm covers the entire screen in enormous, firey stars. Ryu's perfectly replicates the style of the combos in Street Fighter. But the most stellar example has to be Mega Man's, which features every incarnation of Mega Man appearing for a split-second and then teaming up with him to shoot an enormous laser. Despite only showing up for a few moments, each incarnation is as detailed as any of the fighters, even though you could blink and miss them!
  • When you really look at it, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island really is a beautiful game. There's typically several layers of foreground and background, all of them hand drawn. Not to mention the fact that it really stretched the SNES's capabilities, often using Mode 7 in many different ways.
    • The Super FX chip certainly helped. While Yoshi's Island did have some Super FX-powered polygon graphics (the pause and game over screens, a paper effect for when the characters get flattened, and the occasional spinning platform come to mind), the chip was used mostly for rotating and scaling sprites.
  • Turn on Mario Kart 8. Pick a track. Any track, new or returning. The level of detail is nothing short of stunning. Nintendo really went to town for this one.
• One of the main draws to the original Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis was that the graphics looked incredible, with the genius use of parallax scrolling and vibrant colors really showing off the console. Indeed, the Sonic franchise as a whole is generally known for having great graphics with a majority of their games, given that the series was made to look visually stunning from day one.
  • All four (or three, counting Sonic 3 & Knuckles as one game) of the main Sonic games on the Sega Genesis had astoundingly well-drawn sprites that look great even into contemporary times. Some even had a pseudo-3D effect to them, like the trees in the Green Hill Zone or the indentations in the checkered soil. It was even more impressive that the Sega Genesis was able to draw these complex sprites very quickly, showing off the console's power. Sonic 3 & Knuckles shows the peak of the graphical capabilities of the Genesis-extraordinary pixel art, amazing parallax scrolling on the backgrounds, and loads of tiny cosmetic details to the graphics that aren't even necessary for building the game. There's also Sonic CD for the Sega CD, with dreamlike environments that range from bright, colorful, and cheery to dark, grim, and spoiled.
  • Likewise, Knuckles Chaotix showed what the Sega 32X was capable of. Easily one of the most gorgeous games of its time, its graphics still hold up really well, with beautiful, colorful graphics and eye-popping visual effects.
  • Sonic 3D Blast pushed the graphical capabilities of the Sega Genesis to their limit with its impressive rendered graphics. It even features a Full Motion Video opening, almost unheard of for cartridge titles of the time. The Saturn version of the game looks great as well, with more colorful and detailed graphics, and being further spiffed up with atmospheric lighting/fog effects.
  • Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 demonstrated what the Dreamcast was capable of, and the first game blew away the competition of 1998 and 1999. The graphics may not have aged well, but they were mind-blowing back then. Adventure 2, in particular, had some amazing lighting and shadow effects in its original incarnation.
  • While Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) was a glitchy mess, the pre-rendered cutscenes are beautiful, especially the Soleanna fire festival at the beginning, in contrast with the rather stiff and awkward in-engine cutscenes.
  • Sonic Unleashed, especially the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 versions. Day or night, the Hedgehog Engine has really done this game some justice, a huge improvement from the rather bland visuals of the previous titles. Even Eggmanland looks amazing.
    • The Wii/PS2 version's graphics aren't too shabby, either. The levels look pretty nice, but the Gaia Gates look beautiful.
  • Sonic Unleashed seemed to be a turning point in graphics when it came to Sonic games. Following Unleashed was Sonic Colors, a Wii game which looks better than a lot of games look on the Xbox 360. Following Colors was Sonic Generations, which used the same graphics engine as Unleashed, and looks incredible as well (despite actually being scaled down in some areas). The re-imagining of the original Green Hill Zone now includes huge backdrops full of amazing scenery; of particular note are the massive waterfalls and the underground river in Modern Sonic's level. The graphics become even more eye-popping on the PC version.
  • Sonic Generations takes all the previous games' art and turns them into wonderful HD graphics.
  • Sonic Lost World gives a nicely stylized and simplified spin on the the bright, colorful aesthetics of the earlier Genesis Sonic games, and translates the result into a HD setting.
  • Sonic Mania draws inspiration from the 16-bit classics, but takes advantage of modern tech to make the game look incredibly slick. The title screen, alone, looks absolutely gorgeous in motion.
• The Sakura Wars series has always looked pretty, and the cutscenes, in particular, are a feast for the eyes. Just look at the intro to Sakura Wars 3: Is Paris Burning?: between the sleek 2D animations for the characters and the smooth 3D animations for the mecha, it holds up incredibly well, especially for a game released in 2001!
• Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 stays true to its 2.5D predecessor, and offers next to the comic style the famous long-time CG scenes of the series, realistic particle effects, very advanced shading and literally brilliant water.
  • It also features FMV cutscenes of the actual in-game units, all beautifully rendered — it's one thing to see, say, submarines that can turn into aircraft or floating tanks or four-story mecha in gameplay, but it's quite another to see them in live action.
• The Myst series has a few. You might consider pre-rendering to be "cheating", but some of the pre-rendered graphics are incredible.
  • Serenia in Myst IV, full stop. It's like some Tolkien-esque fantasy world, only you get to run around in it. Haven and Spire were good, but Serenia was breathtaking.
  • Riven in, well, Riven. A vast world that is far removed from the emptiness of Myst.
  • All of the coming-in-for-a-landing clips that play when you use a linking book should rate a mention, as do the various roller-coaster animations that mark the completion of Ages in Exile or Revelation. Whoa...
• Remedy Entertainment was founded by members of the Finnish demoscene, a subculture all about getting the most out of a computer's audiovisual capabilities, so it's no wonder that mindblowing visuals have always been in their blood.
  • Alan Wake looks fairly good on its own, and then you get the flares and flare guns. Dramatic, awesomely flickering red light? Check. Amazing-looking smoke? Check. Bullet Time if you pull one out while surrounded by mooks? Check. And, above all, safety (because Light Is Good and Dark Is Evil are literal)? Check.
  • Control is full of this. Remedy's trademark of incorporating live-action video into the game no longer even seems all that jarring compared to the cinematics, and there's remarkable attention to detail regarding the textures and even the smallest items of bric-a-brac scattered around, but what really tops it off is the destruction physics, which avert Critical Existence Failure hard. Desks, rather than falling over or exploding into splinters when shot, actually break in the place where they were hit, pillars erupt satisfyingly into splinters of concrete, revealing the support beams inside, and fire extinguishers explode, violently spraying foam everywhere. The end of the gameplay trailer showcases this and the game's raytracing capabilities by showing the player telekinetically picking up a running film projector, which continues to accurately project the film across the environment, and then hurling it at a bookshelf, scattering books and papers everywhere in spectacular fashion.
  • Alan Wake II keeps the tradition going. Light dissipates beautifully through the fog and rain, and the character models are almost photorealistic in their level of detail, particularly Saga and Alan, from the hair on their heads to the fuzz on Saga's sweaters and the seams on Alan's jackets.
• In 2023, Russian artist Alexey Savvon created the Sam Lake Mod for Max Payne 3. Sam Lake is the writer of the first two Max Payne games and is well-known for giving the titular character his likeness in the first installment, due to that game's lack of budget, and for many fans, despite Remedy recasting Max's likeness in the second game with Timothy Gibbs and Rockstar modeling Max's appearance in 3 after his longtime voice actor James McCaffrey, Lake is commonly considered the face of Max Payne. As this breakdown shows, the mod is not only a face-swap or even head-swap- which proved to be a challenge all on its own due to the absence of photos and video footage where Lake has a completely neutral expression -but a full replacement of Max's entire character model with a detailed recreation of Lake's likeness and body, fully rigged so that all of the body and facial animations still work as intended. What's more, Max sports almost a hundred skins, including clothing and injuries, and fourteen different hairstyles over the course of this game, and Savvon altered all of these so that they would be a proper fit for Lake's slimmer frame and features, on top of recreating Max's original leather jacket and gaudy shirt combo from the first game for this game. The results are so impressive that Sam Lake himself commended Savvon's work.
• One of the most amazingly impressive effects ever achieved on the Game Boy Advance was the Catastrophe summon from Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Watch it here. The series' psuedo-3D for battle scenes pushed the GBA. Nearly all of the higher level summons were multi-sprited.
  • With the leap to the Nintendo DS came Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, which manages to exceed the originals in graphical quality. Say what you will about the gameplay, but this game really pushes the DS.
• You can use an Action Replay MAX to ramp up the frame rate and visual quality in XGRA and it looks brilliant.
• Treasure has a lot of renown for making visually stunning games, one of the best examples being their debut Genesis game, Gunstar Heroes. The game featured scrolling and rotating effects that could give games on the SNES a run for their money, coupled with explosions going off with great volume and regularity, all without a single drop in framerate.
• Bethesda's flagship series games are renowned for their absolutely gorgeous landscapes and massive worlds to explore, at least by the standards of when they were released. To note:
  • The Elder Scrolls series, starting with the series' 3D Leap with Morrowind, is well known for its beautiful landscapes and skies. It is helped that in Morrowind and Oblivion, you step out into the game world (from the inside of a boat and from the Forced Tutorial dungeon respectively) only to have your breath taken away by the views (the Green Hill Zone around Seyda Neen and the Ayleid ruins of Vilverin, respectively). Skyrim takes it to another level with the beauty of its world, which is introduced to the player during a cart ride in the opening sequence. Additionally, the series takes great pains to make each area of the game world have its own unique feel. Morrowind ranges from the swampy Bitter Coast to the grassy Grazelands to the broken-up islands of Azura's Coast to the flat-out Mordor-esque Red Mountain. Oblivion has the peaceful southern coasts turning into temperate forests as you go north, ending in the snow-covered mountains on the border of Skyrim. Skyrim likewise ranges from boreal forests in the south to central taigas with sparse trees to frozen-over polar-like regions in the north.
  • Fallout, since Bethesda acquired the property with Fallout 3, has also take this approach. Fallout 3 starts out when you exit your vault and see natural light for the first time in your life. After the screen stops glowing you get to see this◊. Words fail to describe the awesome, but it's also rather depressing...
    • Say what you will about Fallout 76, but the Appalachia can look downright gorgeous at times, should you get lucky and land yourself in a relatively stable server.
• The animated sequences in the Professor Layton games. Fluid, beautiful animation on the Nintendo DS, a system not known for its graphics capabilities, and they only get better in the newer games. The game itself has some beautifully done background areas.
  • The destruction of Anton's Mansion from Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, the Mobile Fortress from Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, and the titular Last Spectre.
• Odin Sphere. The entire game.
  • And you can't mention Odin Sphere without mentioning its Spiritual Successor, Muramasa: The Demon Blade.
  • Or Dragon's Crown for that matter. Vanillaware is well-known for turning out games with absolutely amazing 2D art that look just as good years later.
• Homeworld. Never before have such limited techniques and technology been put to such utterly beautiful use. Despite being 11 years old.
• Blizzard's games, such as World of Warcraft and Starcraft are not known for this...but the cinematics very, very much are. See the Cataclysm trailer.
  • StarCraft II actually has outstandingly cinematic graphics, and most of its cutscenes are rendered is the same engine.
• It may not be the shiniest game, but Sins of a Solar Empire is impressive in that you can zoom in to see a single fighter craft in battle, or zoom out to see several star systems, and every single level in between that. All of them quite detailed and able to manipulate the camera in a 360-degree sphere.
• Indie developer Studio MDHR took great lengths to making their first game, Cuphead, look authentic to the animated shorts of the 1930s it is inspired from-the backgrounds are painted, every character and visual effect is hand-drawn animation (the only digital effect used is the colorization), the game even uses a grainy filter to evoke the film quality of the time period. The result is a game that can◊ and would◊ fool anyone◊ into thinking they were watching a honest-to-god Fleischer Studios short, and not a videogame made in the 2010s. All of this at 60 frames per second, done in a such a way that both the visual style and the framerate coexist naturally.
• Injustice 2 is a good looking game all around, but one area in which the game looks particularly amazing is in each character's facial animations, which are some of the most realistically rendered in any game of its generation.
  • Mortal Kombat 11, Netherrealm's next fighter after IJ2, is no slouch in the facial animation department either. And that's before going into the gore and how amazingly visceral it is.
• City of Heroes' Ultra Mode was added to allow players with higher-end graphics cards to take advantage of their processing power. When it's turned on, detail goes through the roof, including real-time shadows and reflections in glass and water. The new areas in Praetoria were designed to take advantage of Ultra Mode, and they look amazing.
• Super Robot Wars seems to outdo itself with each major release, both in recreating the feel of existing characters as well as doing their own thing with their Original Generation. Sure, it's made entirely out of anime visual cliches, some of which were originally "shortcuts" to begin with, but it's pulled off so well that by the time of Super Robot Wars Z you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is basically a sprite-based game with Super Deformed characters. Heck, even the DS games are absolutely amazing.
• Say what you want about Fable III, you can't deny that the graphics are beautiful.
• Kirby's Epic Yarn. People argue it looks better than God of War 3! Other games, like Super Star Ultra, have beautiful looking sprites, and games like Canvas Curse have cool looking backgrounds. Kirby games are always beautiful, graphically.
  • Kirby games are usually the last Nintendo-published games of their respective systems, and thus tax those systems to show what they're really capable of. Case in point: the beautiful painterly backgrounds of Kirby's Dream Land 3.
  • Kirby: Squeak Squad. The final level. The space-y background looks like a gosh-darn painting.
  • The Super Abilities and the backgrounds in Kirby's Return to Dream Land.
    • And the stage in Dangerous Dinner where Kirby is dodging miniature stars.
  • Kirby Star Allies makes full use of the Switch's power to deliver absolutely stunning backgrounds and amazing effects. For example, if you look closely you can actually see the stitches in Yo-Yo Kirby's hat.
• Battletoads used a lot of cool tricks in several levels that you wouldn't believe would be possible on the NES.
• Any Metal Slug game. The sprites are all extremely fluid and detailed, and the backgrounds have a metric ton of touches put into them. How fluid are the animations? This is the spritesheet for Marco.
• The Halo series has some of the most beautiful skyboxes you will ever see (and not just in the campaign - the multiplayer maps, like Reach's "Anchor 9", can look wonderful). The art style of the four different factions you encounter is also wonderfully contrasting - and each is beautiful/cool in its own way. Take the Forerunner designs, particularly the Sentinels.
  • While the cutscenes for Halo Wars and everything in Halo 4 (which was made at the end of the 360's life cycle) definitely qualify, The Master Chief Collection improves even further in two regards; the slight update that the already impressive Halo 4 received, and the Halo 2: Anniversary content. The remastered gameplay looks gorgeous as it is, but the cutscenes that were animated by blur Studios, who have since been brought on full time, are indistinguishable from reality, and retain the more-popular artstyle from the original game, rather than the mixture used in CE Anniversary. The Gravemind is a notable example;in the original game, due to time constraints, he looks rather...silly, often described as an Audrey-ripoff. In Anniversary, he's far visibly more gigantic and horrifically grotesque; befitting a being composed of thousands upon thousands of combined corpses. They also brought new sound design that made the scenes feel grounded in reality.
• Half-Life 2. The Source Engine has aged brilliantly (and Portal 2 is proof of this). The facial animation is great, and the water effects are flat-out amazing. Oh, and so are the fire effects, while we're at it.
  • Speaking of Source facial animations, Valve has taken to giving non-human characters facial animations as well despite having no visible face, and it's stunning. Just look at Atlas and P-body but especially Wheatley from Portal 2.
  • Portal 2 also features an absolutely stunning opening sequence where a room is destroyed and falls apart around the player character.
  • Some more specific examples... despite coming out in 2004, Half-Life 2 still has quite impressive graphics, and the later games (in particular, Episode 2, which was the first to use the updated version of the Source Engine used in Portal) only go even farther. Some moments that stick out in particular from the Half-Life series are the bridge from Half-Life 2 (it's... just stunning), the moment when you step out of the underground in Episode One and see the ruined city and the Citadel rising above everything, and the moment when Alyx and Gordon overlook City 17 in Episode Two after the train crash—the energy seething around the Citadel over City 17 is as gorgeous as it is dangerous.
  • Meet the Medic from Team Fortress 2 also counts. Yeah, it's cartoonish, but who says it has to be realistic to be awesome?
    • Why not the whole of Team Fortress 2? Valve set out to create a game with the visual flair of midcentury illustrations, and boy did they get it right. The stylization works in the game's favor and makes sure it's not going to age poorly.
  • Actually it seems a lot of Valve games seem to fall under this, due their source engine having a distinct visual flair.
• Black Mesa deserves its own entry by virtue of being just... incredible in its visuals. One of Crowbar Collective's goals for the remake was to give Half-Life the graphic quality that the game deserved after the dissapointment of Valve's own port to the Source engine, and it shows.
  • Many of the game's areas have been scaled up in size and impressiveness. The original test chamber, the rocket engine test chamber, the rocket launching facilities, the Black Mesa Electric Dam, the Osprey landing zone, the explosives room and many others are now enormous, spacious and full of details like posters, lights, and others.
  • The infrastructure has also been upgraded; the test chamber's material analyzer now fills the whole area with amazing lights and shadows when active. Power Up features our first Gargantua being killed by a massive electrical discharge, and On A Rail features a believable and extensive underground cargo rail system, with military traps and a rocket launch facility included.
  • What little we've seen of Xen is straight up marvelous. The dull platforming map at the beginning is now a whole area that reeks of alien wildlife, lush skies and danger. Colors complement each other really well, and the whole place is an intelligent maze. Of special note is the addition of a Black Mesa's research camp and FOB near the teleport platform, backing up what we've learned in Questionable Ethics and Lambda Core; hell, the whole place shows signs of human alteration and research.
• Rayman Origins was hands-down one of the best looking games of the decade, all thanks to the UbiArt Framework engine that allowed artists and designers to produce the game's art without having to worry about it technical issues. It really, really, shows. The sequel Rayman Legends took it even further by using dynamic lighting and 3D models in addition to altering the artstyle to something out of an oil-painting.
• Child of Light is not only powered by the same engine that brought us the visuals of Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends, but also has an art style that lends to a presentation not unlike a moving picture book, leading to some absolutely breathtaking visuals.
• L.A. Noire looks phenomenal, using advanced motion capturing techniques to create the most realistic faces video games have ever seen. Truly has to be seen to be believed.
  • Barring that, the fact that late 1940's LA is recreated with a great of accuracy is nothing short of impressive. Not to mention other details like store signs, window displays, cars and period accurate clothing. It's really hard to deny that this is a very, very pretty game.
  • Another Rockstar effort, Red Dead Redemption, also stands out as visually stunning. The western desert setting generally justifies the Real Is Brown approach... and when the game isn't brown and gritty, like in the snowy, mountainous forest area of Tall Trees, it's colorful, bright, and beautiful. The deserts manage to be gorgeous, too, especially when the player is riding into the sunset, and the city of Blackwater is absolutely lovely to look at. Go onto the ferry dock and watch the sun rise over Blackwater some time in the game. It's absolutely stunning.
  • And then came Red Dead Redemption II, which is even more detailed than the first one's ultimate Xbox release, with greater distance, 4K support, great detail to graphics in each section of the story and the map. The same sunrise over Blackwater even with the same character as the first one is even more gorgeous than ever.
    • Then the PC release dropped, surpassing via the removal of frame locks, adding more realism into the game, and many ordinary computers displayed beautiful imagery even in the low to medium range of graphics.
  • Regardless of the platform you are playing on, another Rockstar game, Grand Theft Auto V is an immensely good looking game, period. When you also take into consideration the sheer scale and scope of that detail in such a massive game world, it's an astounding display of graphical prowess.
    • The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions push their respective consoles to their absolute limits. While there are some instances of texture loading problems and the game freezing, the fact that Rockstar gave gamers a game that can pass off as an early next-gen looking title on almost 10 year old hardware is an amazing feat nevertheless.
    • Then there is the rerelease that came out on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2014, and the PC version of the rerelease (ie the very first launched version) has turned out to be the utmost superior version.
• The Donkey Kong Country trilogy.
  • The original game was one of the first console games (it had already been done in arcades) to feature pre-rendered graphics: something that even Nintendo thought was impossible on the Super NES. In-game graphics have ultimately improved over the years, but when it first came out it was something most people hadn't seen before in a console game. Whats more impressive is that this was all done without any enhancement chips or add-ons; everything you see is done by the actual SNES.
  • It's easy to miss in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest because you're busy dealing with the level's hazards, but the background in Lockjaw's Locker is actually a fully 3D ship deck that changes your angle of view depending on your vertical position in the level. This was pulled off on the Super Nintendo, but it wouldn't look out of place in a PlayStation 1 game.
  • Fast-forward by fifteen-or-so years. How do you replicate that "oh-this-game-has-the-best-graphics-ever"-esque feeling, considering that by now there's a well-established rivalry in this medium? How about taking an already beautifully-looking third game in a trilogy and using three times as many polygons?
  • The Wii U sequel Tropical Freeze is no slouch in the graphics department either-like the aforementioned Mario 3D World example, Tropical Freeze shows a great job at showcasing the DKC franchise in high definition. One particular graphical enhancement touted in the game's reveal and by the developer was the Kong family's fur, which now looks so detailed, it looks downright lifelike.◊
• If you really want Visual Effects of Awesome, look no further than Stargate (the sequel to Defender; no relation to the movie), specifically when you use the level warp trick (by flying through a stargate with a certain number of rescued Earthlings). It's truly a sight to behold (and this was 1981; one year after the original came out).
• Midway released an arcade game called "Kozmik Krooz'r" in the early 1980's. It featured a realistic looking, rotating "flying saucer" that actually wasn't part of the game itself. It was just a prop that was reflected in a mirror. Nonetheless it was considered groudbreaking for the time.
• Laserdisc games are considered to be a subversion, since they're more like interactive movies than true games (e.g., Dragon's Lair, etc). On the other hand, other games tried to invoke this trope by giving more interactivity (e.g., Cobra Command). However, this usually meant creating actual game graphics to overlay onto the video.
  • Brain Dead 13 actually defies the whole laserdisc genre with the end of this game, combined with Scenery Porn: The confrontation scene with Neurosis has only small lights lined up in a row that light up the total blackness in the room, and it's all in CG (except for the characters, of course). Add a bit of the Gratuitous Disco Sequence with More Dakka from Fritz that lights up the scenery, and the whole thing is just awesome indeed. Whoever thought up a final confrontation to be a whole disco that takes place entirely in the dark should be very proud of themselves, like something that only Quentin Tarantino would think up.
    • Also, most of the resurrection scenes, such as floor panel lights that make Lance reappear if he dies during the dark disco sequence; the lightning bolts that bring him back if he dies during Moose's sequence; and the "flames of rebirth" that reform Lance's body if he dies in haunted rooms. These are just awesome indeed.
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. The in-game graphics were rather nice but the story trailer really takes the cake.
• F-Zero X and F-Zero GX: Being made for the Nintendo 64, X isn't very detailed, but it never drops the framerate. GX looks wonderful, and also never drops the framerate. Why is that awesome? Because not only do the games move at a really damn fast pace, there are 'thirty' vehicles going at once, and they can all be on screen at once, without any slowdown whatsoever!
• Conduit 2. The first level takes place on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean. If you look down, you can see waves. Not still water with vague ripples on them, actual waves. Most PS3 and 360 games don't even have that, and the developers pulled it off on a Wii.
• The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. THE.WHOLE. DAMN. THING. If you don't agree, then you haven't seen it, or just plain out lying.
  • And given even more attention to detail in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - even Yahtzee heaped praise on it for getting on the near-side of the Unintentional Uncanny Valley, with a special shoutout to the "eyebrow wrangler". The "Blood and Wine" expansion cranked it up even further, as Toussaint is an idyllic area compared to the frozen beauty of Skellige and the Scenery Gorn of Velen, as well as the way the countryside is detailed and rendered. And the way Geralt's hair is detailed using Nvidia Hairworks is just amazing. And the way Geralt actually performs his signs in-game has generated a lot of praise for being accurately rendered by the game engine. Not to mention the battle visuals even when you're just running around getting to your objective.
• So maybe the Dead or Alive Xtreme subseries is just a blatant excuse to show the girls of DOA in the skimpiest bikinis known to man, but all "playing with one hand" jokes aside, it features some pretty amazing visual effects... Yes, other than the physics-defying breasts. Just consider that whatever girl you chose is rendered in real time in whatever ridiculous outfit you chose, plus the jiggling of her hair, clothes and... Other aspects.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The Game Boy Advance iterations of the series (Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones) feature incredibly fluid and dynamic sprite animations for its battle sequences.
  • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance brought us the cel-shaded cutscenes. They have this cool anime-style appearance that at times almost look hand-drawn.
  • The series continues awesome-looking-cutscene trend with Fire Emblem: Awakening. The visuals look like the game is for the Vita.
  • Fire Emblem Fates continues the trend of using stunning cel-shaded cutscenes and adds an awesome effect of its own: the environments you see on the map translate directly into the combat scenes, zooming in on the environment when fighting starts, then zooming back out to a bird's-eye view afterwards.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses takes advantage of the series's move to a more powerful console to deliver a feast for the eyes. The cel-shaded character models look amazing, and the FMV cutscenes are no slouch either. Even the non-animated CG images for key story scenes look incredible.
• Baten Kaitos:
  • Good lord. The stunning pink and purple clouds of Diadem, the vibrant trees and lush jungles of Anuenue, the hallucinatory beauty of Mira and the Trail of Souls...everything in that game is gorgeous.
  • Then Origins came out two years later and topped it. The scenery mostly looks the same, but the character models are infinitely better, especially the battle animations. Pull off something like The Apotheosis or Crimson Skytooth and tell me it doesn't look amazing.
  • How about the spiritual predecessor, Chrono Cross? Sure, the PS1 graphics haven't aged that well, but it still looked fantastic back in the day.
• Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Just look at these videos and try to deny that your jaw didn't drop to the floor!
• DJMax Technika. An arcade game running at 720p, it has some of the most stunning music videos to grace the Rhythm Game genre. All while the gameplay runs at 60 frames per second, no less.
• When Street Fighter III first came out, many reviews insulted the sprite graphics; 3D models were becoming the norm. Indeed, a still shot of the game looks pretty mediocre by today's standards with the limited technology making it very pixelated. However, a still image misses the most important thing about Street Fighter III's graphics: The movement. Most sprite-based fighting games have very choppy movement because easy individual frame requires a ton of work, so only the ending post and start-up are given frames. Street Fighter III has tons of sprites for each character, more than any other fighting game at the time. This made all the movements and actions of the game, including ones as simple as breathing, incredibly smooth and complete looking, to the point that some retroactively consider its spritework the best in any fighting game. The sheer effort put into making all those sprites deserves a round of applause alone. There is also the game's endboss, Gill, who takes full advantage of the CPS3 hardware to avert having Ambidextrous Sprites: his body is red on his right side and blue on his left, and those colors remain consistently on the correct sides of his body, regardless of the direction he is facing.
• The way Pokémon Red and Blue make the screen flash when a wild Pokémon appears is pretty ambitious for the original Gameboy hardware.
• Pokémon Gold and Silver pull off a real-time clock which fully changes the color of the game's world on the Gameboy Color. In addition, a few of Johto's cities manage to appear in a Japanese look.
• Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire take advantage of the Gameboy Advance's hardware by making Hoenn have the most diverse variety of areas yet. Hoenn features an active volcano, a desert, a route in a jungle with a city in the trees, and a city made out of floating rafts. In addition, the games pull off on-field weather effects including a thunderstorm and a sandstorm.
• The scene from Pokémon Black and White when N's castle rises out of the ground.
  • How about the Skyarrow Bridge? At first, the game's just been typical Pokémon fare and settings - small towns, forests, rivers, etc. Then, you go across this huge bridge, with trucks and boats and other things going underneath it, and the camera swooping around to show it all off, and finally you see Castelia City looming on the far side.
  • It seems to have become a new tradition in the Pokémon series, from Black and White onwards, to give each Legendary mascot of the game a breathtaking 3D intro. Special mention goes to when you summon Reshiram/Zekrom for the first time and are given an awesome display of their power on the environment, and in HG/SS when Lugia or Ho-Oh swoops out of the sky to face you. Even more incredible at night.
  • While the graphics and animations of the 3D core games are huge points of contention among fans, the legendary Pokemon's introductions are still beautiful to look at; special mention goes to Nebby's evolution into Solgaleo/Lunala in Pokémon Sun and Moon, which will leave your jaw hanging open in more ways than one.
• Pikmin 2: The Man-at-Legs. In the Piklopedia, the game will lag if you get it moving, and the Piklopedia won't even show the thing firing its gun, which must be seen. It's incredible and yet grotesque at the same time.
• Pick a CyberConnect2 game from the PlayStation 2 era onwards: Any of them will qualify, especially after CyberConnect2 formed the studio Sensible Art Innovation, which they used not only for movie making, but utilizing it as part of their current console generation cutscene maker. With the power of the unreal Engine, Asura's Wrath by CyberConnect2 takes the engine to its limits to get really awesome visuals. Here's an example.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1 pulls off huge environments with plenty of wildlife with dizzying attention to detail, with fantastic draw distance near unprecedented for all but the largest sandbox games. Many reviewers actually complained that the game was on the Wii and not a High-definition system.
  • Then you get stuff like the colored mist in the swamp at night, the golden light from the crystals on the snowy peaks, and whenever there is a thunderstorm in an area.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles X fixes its predecessor's "Not in HD" problem, bringing an even bigger game world to boot.
• Undertale somehow manages to make relatively simple sprite artwork look absolutely incredible at times. Special mention goes to the black-and-turquoise areas in Waterfall, the fact that only a handful of enemies' battle sprites are actually one sprite and not multiple sprites stitched together (while we're at it, the battle sprites themselves are surprisingly detailed considering the aforementioned low-res graphics and only using black and white), and the final battle against the newly-resurrected Asriel.
• No love for the X-Universe series? As an example: This game is a spaceflight game that models everything from miniscule scout ships to monstrous destroyers and stations, each of which is meticulously modeled to the last panel. And you can look at all of it. From any angle. While floating about equally beautiful planets, ranging from earth-like Argon Prime, to the ocean world of Nishala, the Boron home planet.
• The graphics may not be the best (though this was done on purpose), but stand on top of a mountain in Minecraft, look out at the landscape, and tell me it isn't absolutely gorgeous.
  • Even moreso with the advent of ray tracing.
• Valkyria Chronicles looks and feels likes a World War II-inspired anime saga with very beautiful sketchbook-style flare...until you realize that everything you see is entirely rendered in-game and that you're actually playing it.
• The Dawn of War games are some of the best looking PC Strategy games around, especially the sequel and its expansions. Down to the amazing detail on the unit models themselves, crafted to closely resemble their tabletop model counterparts to an exquisite degree and the incredibly good looking particle effects and Scenery Gorn. And let's not forget those beautiful cutscenes like the Exterminatus of Typhon Primaris and the Opening cutscene to both the original and the sequel.
• WipEout. Even in the first two games, there were some EPIC visual effects for that era: in the first Wipeout, the visual effects of every weapon were incredible, and it was a 1994 GAME. 2097, with the racetracks Gare D'Europa and Spilskinanke which have sudden and blinding flashes which can distract you, and the Quake weapon which makes the road up ahead shaking like crazy, this is an high quality Fifth Gen videogame visual effect porn.
  • HD and 2048 push this trope even further than 2097 did with the Zone mode, in which the track and scenery become very simple with one shade of a certain or multiple colors, and the billboards and the road become also music equalizers! How cool is that?!?
    • Also, ALL OF THE INTRO CLIPS OF EVERY GAME fall into this trope. Just watch for example the intro for Pulse. HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.
• If we weren't so busy being scared out of our wits, we'd appreciate the foggy beauty of the Silent Hill series. The first three games pushed the graphical limits of whatever console they were. Special mention goes to Silent Hill 3, where the animations where on par with current gen consoles.
  • P.T./Silent Hills was one of the most jaw-dropping things to come out of video games lately in terms of visuals. Some fans have watched gameplay footage and thought it was a live action movie! And this was for the TEASER, and it is a shame we may never know what the full game would look like.
• In the Resident Evil series, the Resident Evil remake has amazing graphics. Resident Evil 4 still looks good today too, despite its age.
  • The R Emake still holds its own, even in the current gen.
  • Shout out to Resident Evil: Revelations for looking so, so good on a 3DS.
  • Revelations famously pushed the 3DS to its limits, with detailed modeling, high-resolution texture work, superb and dynamic lighting effects, multiple CG cutscenes, tons of high-quality voice acting, and a stable framerate (bar a few hiccups during in-game loading segments). The way Capcom achieved this level of quality was via the MT Framework Mobile engine, a simplified version of the MT Framework engine used on Capcom's console titles. The similarities between the two engines allowed the developers of Revelations to deliver self-proclaimed "console quality" visuals on a smaller system. It really shows.
  • The remakes of RE2 and RE3 use the same gameplay engine as Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which allows for a level of photorealism that absolutely blows the original PSX versions out of the water. Everything from the dynamic lighting to the gory damage inflicted upon zombies look amazing.
  • All RE games have this at some point or another. Even the early ones are aesthetically appealling, but is there seriously no love for RE4 and its stunning detailwork within the games' levels?
  • RE5 doesn't look like it has aged a day since the original release. Stunning background details at the starting town sections and cave areas with beautiful lighting are to name a few.
• Syberia has some beautiful visual effects, especially when it comes to water. That it is a brainchild of an artist more than of a writer or game designer probably explains the loving attention given to its visuals.
• The Metal Gear series. If there's anything Konami does best, creating impressive graphics may certainly be it. Thanks to Kojima's meticulous eye for detail, these games still look good despite their age. The HD remastering of MGS2, MGS3, and Peace Walker, give new appreciation for the visuals in these games. MGS3 really pushed the limits of the PS2, and its HD remastered version can give some games from this generation a run for their money.
  • Although PS1 games haven't aged well at all, the first game is considered to be one of the best looking games◊ from the period◊, due to realistic lighting and high level of detail.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, despite using Real Is Brown, manages to look very pretty, pretty enough to make the game of the best looking out there currently.
  • Then there's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and shames the developers who say that there's little to no more room for graphical improvement after this gen. Take a look for yourself.
    • Konami posted a generational comparison of the game. Some lighting effects aside, you would be hard pressed to figure out which version is which.
  • New fans of the series who were introduced to Snake Eater via the HD Collection have played it thinking it was a PS3 game.
• Xexex had gorgeous rendered graphics and pulled off other amazing graphical feats such as warping and zooming back in 1991. The graphics were so ahead of their time, it was impossible to port this game to the Sega Genesis or the Super Nintendo Entertainment System without a severe downgrade.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum has an amazing, gritty, realistic style (if you aren't using Detective Mode).
  • Batman: Arkham Knight: Despite being a Contested Sequel and the PC Porting Disaster, the opinions on the graphics has a broad consensus.
    • Once the game came out, everyone was impressed that the PS4 graphics shown in previews weren't dolled-up for E3 but actual in-game renders. The early trailers amazed people to the point that they believed the actual gameplay was still only cutscenes. Knight doesn't even have any pre-rendered cutscenes - everything uses the in-game engine. Rain in particular looks great, but the real kicker is seeing it land on Batman - the moving textures and the effect of the rain dripping and sliding off him looks fantastic. Some glitches show rain landing inside of buildings, but still has the same wetting effect, showing that the rain itself has physics.
    • Likewise the animation and Cast of Snowflakes character design with special credit going to the seamless way Joker's hallucination AI follows Batman around and appears in any areas, with myriad details of idle animation and voicework to comment on situations and events. The pathfinding of the Batmobile has also been praised.
    • Of course the most impressive feat is the fact that the game's large map, thrice the size of Arkham City can be traversed with no loading times, the fact that thugs and mooks can hide inside buildings (with the interiors of buildings no longer being larger than the exteriors) to escape a street brawl. Many were suspicious of the boast made by Rocksteady since a similar one made for Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed: Unity was proven false, but the game really does pull it off brilliantly.
• Everything from Alice: Madness Returns. The facial expressions, Alice's dresses, the fighting motions...hysteria mode.
• Bayonetta has some of the most stunning and beautiful environments and locations ever seen in a video game, especially on the Xbox 360 version.
• Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed did an excellent job at recreating locations from classic Sega games in beautiful HD. You know the developers did a great job when one of the original developers of Skies of Arcadia cried tears of joy when seeing how well-made the Skies of Arcadia racetrack is.
• The characters in Skullgirls are all made with HAND DRAWN ANIMATION. This is especially incredible with Double and Robo-Fortune, who constantly have things moving on them.
• Studio Ghibli had a hand in Ni no Kuni, and it shows. You could be fooled into thinking you're watching some kind of Ghibli movie.
• Wonder Project J featured incredibly fluid animations on the Super Famicom, looking like it was taken straight from an anime directed by Hayao Miyazaki and Osamu Tezuka. The N64 sequel, Wonder Project J2, looks even more incredible: the N64 was not well known for 2D games, but the sprite work in this game, particularly when Josette runs up to the screen to address the player directly, look phenomenal!
• Sony and Guerrilla Games were so confident in the graphical qualities of Killzone 2, they used in-game rendering for a commercial. That you can download off the PSN store and run it on your PS3 in real time.
  • And spared no effort on Killzone: Shadow Fall to make sure that the PS4's prowess could be felt as a launch title.
• Guilty Gear Xrd. The most common reaction for the first trailer is "Wow, they really made some very detailed sprites HOLY CRAP THAT'S NOT 2D ANIMATION".
  • Also a strange example of awesome visual effects coming out of Stylistic Suck, since the 3D models have no tween animations, creating a sort of stop-motion effect to make it look more like the 2D games, but still allows for Street Fighter IV-style dynamic camera angles during certain parts like introductions, Overdrives and Instant Kills.
  • Junya Motomura's presentation at GDC 2015 only adds to this, showing out-of-the-box use of existing tools and techniques to make everything look perfectly imperfect.
  • This visual style would quickly become the bread-and-butter of Arc System Works, with most of their games since Xrd adopting the same "tween-less anime-style" animations. Just look at any gameplay from Kill la Kill if, Dragon Ball FighterZ, and Granblue Fantasy Versus!
• Jet Set Radio was one of the first games to use cel-shaded graphics, and it looked amazing when it came out in 2000. Both the HD remaster and the original Dreamcast version still look very good. Future has held up even better, being an Xbox game, and is among the early Xbox titles that holds up against modern releases.
• Ace Combat Infinity: The explosions of enemy aircraft and ground targets look very detailed, the views of the battlefield (especially in "Dubai Night Assault") look really neat, the aircraft are very well detailed as well.
• No Man's Sky is shaping up to be nothing short of incredible. See that mountain in the distance? You can hike toward it. Feel like swimming? The ocean is there waiting for you. Looking out at that Alien Sky above you? You can get in your spaceship and fly toward every single one of the planets in it. Looking out at the starfield while you're on patrol? Every single one of those stars you see is its own solar system, with planets waiting to be explored, all procedurally-generated.
• Assassin's Creed: Unity: The Next-Gen Paris in the Gamescom Trailer is kind of surreal for how gorgeous it is. The team spent five thousand hours recreating Notre Dame. And damn does it show.
• Dragon Ball Xenoverse. Good God. The visuals are just off the scale. And none of it is pre-rendered, its all in-game graphics.
  • Prior to Xenoverse, Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit held the crown for best visuals in any Dragon Ball game ever, and it's hard to argue. Just look at the opening. It's stunning.
  • And prior to Burst Limit, Dragon Ball Z Budokai 3 was considered at the time the number one Dragon Ball game in the visual department. It's safe to say that that Dimps have a damn good record when it comes to visuals in Dragon Ball games.
  • Remember CyberConnect2 from earlier on the page? They are the developers of Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, and their attention to detail shines through as ever, making it one of the best looking games based on DBZ.
• Touhou Project games are known for Bullet Hell patterns that are Nintendo Hard, but are also absolutely mesmerizing, using intricate patterns with a variety of objects. Try watching a replay sometime and just watching all the beautiful patterns unfold before your eyes.
• Bastion had some of the most gorgeous 2D art and Scenery Porn at the time. Its Spiritual Successor, Transistor, ups the ante even further, to the point that even as Cloudbank is being slowly converted into an empty void of white cubes it still looks breathtaking.
• Armored Core as a franchise tends to incorporate extremely neat CGI introductory cutscenes for each instalment. This is really upped in the 4 era and beyond, using photorealistic CGI to new levels of cool and augmenting the game's pacing to match the overall lightning-fast feel of the game.Hereare someexamples of such cutscenes.
• Dark Souls II improves upon the original Dark Souls in many ways, a chief factor being the graphics evolution. In addition to maintaining a solid 60 frames per second at max settings on mid-to-low-end PCs, the new engine is capable of some downright gorgeous lighting and blur effects. Not only are you going to stop several times throughout your journey to stare at the glorious scenery, but also at your own clothes, many of which avert No Flow in CGI like the plague.
• Dark Souls III: To put it simply, the graphics look like the graphical engine of Bloodborne was overlain on a Dark Souls game, and it looks beautiful.
• Bloodborne makes full use of the PlayStation 4's available graphics output and gives us a seamless experience in a Victorian-era city. Surges of electricity and the flow of the action never looked more realistic. And great care was taken to avert No Flow in CGI, with even the Hunter's Garb found early on sporting a long tail, a flowing shoulder cloak, a loose belt and a swinging pocket watch. One of the most impressive technical feats of the game is how moving past NPCs at close distance will cause their clothes to flutter dynamically.
• Dm C Devil May Cry: At one point during Bob Barbas' Boss Fight, he teleports you to another place where you fight mooks, and the camera behaves like an actual helicopter camera from a news program. It makes the whole encounter look like a cutscene you're controlling.
• Splatoon has one of the best color palettes out of any video game series right now, which is impressive by itself, but even moreso for a shooter and a post-apocalyptic one at that. Everything moves smoothly and quickly and is just darn fun to watch, and the characters have a distinct 90s-esque style to them.
• Assassin's Creed Syndicate: The Aegis Minerva's, and later Evie's, battle armor. It's pure white, flickers like a hologram and distorts Evie the slightest bit, almost like oil in a puddle. Not to mention that it glows like an Apple of Eden.
• Super Monkey Ball fits this trope to a T. the character designs are cute and well-polished, and the backgrounds of the various worlds are sometimes downright incredible, especially in 2 and Banana Splitz.
• Fallout 4: In the Institute, you get to see the process they use for creating Synths. You would think that this would just be a factory line that staples metal limbs together and puts fake flesh on top of the skin, but no. You get to see a detailed process of them being put together, from their skeleton (which appears to be made of actual bones), to their flesh being woven on and their systems being kick-started by electrical shock, ending with them being dipped into a pool in which cultures form the skin on their bodies instantly.
• Driveclub, a racing game for PlayStation 4, has awe-inspiring visuals. From the distant landscapes to the cars to the water effects in rain, the game is highly praised for being an absolute pinnacle of console video game graphics.
• Slime Rancher, a indie game that is still in early access, is definitely going into this trope. The water looks amazing as of version 0.2.5. Not to mention the (Currently Upcoming) Indigo Quarry update, which makes the freaking monitors look amazing, just◊ look at◊it!◊
• Ratchet & Clank (2016): The game is a PS4 exclusive, and is easily the best looking game in the series. It says a lot that the in-game graphics are almost as slick looking as the cinematic cutscenes.
• Proving how far mobile gaming has come from its early years is Asphalt 8: Airborne from Gameloft, looking far closer to a home console game than a mobile title. Dozens of real-life cars are recreated in the game with highly-detailed models, tracks range from city streets to snowy tundras, and boast a variety of high-quality environmental and visual effects. Special mention goes to the Tokyo track's rain-dampened roads, showing off real-time distorted reflections of the cars and streetlights, as well as the sheer scope of tracks such as Buddha's Teachings and the Alps.
• Alone in the Dark: Say what you will about the gameplay of the 2008 reboot, but sequences like climbing around on the crumbling building and the mad drive through New York are absolutely spectacular to watch.
• Panzer Dragoon Orta was released for the Xbox back in 2002, but it somehow managed to look just as good as games released for the Xbox 360, released three years later. Scenery Porn galore, realistic body and facial animations for heroine Orta in cutscenes, and all at a rock-solid 60 frames per second.
• One of the most critically acclaimed aspects of Ristar was its graphics, with great sprite art and gorgeous and colorful sceneries.
• One android game called Raft Survival simulator. While the wood, scrap and other things look anormal, the hammer looks realistic despite being a mobile game. And the water. Oh my god, THE WATER.
• The graphics of Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time has been favorably compared to Guilty Gear Xrd, using cel-shaded 3D graphics animated without tweening so as to emulate the animation from the anime series.
• RayForce, a 1993 sprite-based game, makes use of sprite scaling and rotating to offer some of the best quasi-3D effects of its time. Notable examples of these special effects include stage 2, where you whiz past a space outpost and then venture below the surface of the moon, and the end of stage 4 where the earth below you cracks open and you descend past the layers of bedrock into the underground city.
• Pick just about any song in Groove Coaster and be prepared for a treat of trippy wireframe animations. Here are a couple of examples.
• The Xbox 360 version of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter was often hailed as the first game for the system to feel like a true generational leap and won a BAFTA award for Technical Achievement, for good reason. If the tutorial didn't impress players with its advanced heat haze effecs, lightning and detailled, well-animated models, the game's opening sequence, which had the player fly over a faithful creation of Mexico City with an huge draw distance and nary a framerate drop in sight, certainly did.
• All ships in Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 are incredibly detailed in an impressive display of just how much the devs love the Warhammer 40,000 'verse. The game also has damn good lighting that it uses to awesome effect in any pre-battle cutscene when the camera showcases the largest ships in your fleet from various angles. Seeing the light of distant suns gleaming on the gilded prow, hand-wrought armor plating and gigantic cannons of an Imperial battleship that's thundering into battle, with thrusters blazing plasma fire and planetary nebulae, titanic space stations and shattered worlds forming the backdrop, it's pretty much impossible to not feel a surge of righteous fury at the foul xenos you're about to smite. Of course, if you favor one or more of the other eleven factions, the same goes for them, too, each in their own unique, lovingly detailed visual styles. And that's not even getting into the sheer spectacle of watching kilometers-long warships blow up in enormous balls of nuclear fire.
• Namco's Quick & Crash arcade game is best known for its final shot, where you shoot at a coffee mug prop — not a mug on a screen, but an actual, physical cup — and it appears to explode before your very eyes!^{How the illusion works}When you hit the cup, the machine quickly withdraws the cup and shoots out a burst of pre-broken shards. At no point is anything actually broken.
• The Luigi's Mansion games feature absolutely beautiful lighting and shading with dynamic shadows to the point that the original game released on the GameCube as a launch title in 2001 still holds up incredibly well. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon continues the trend on the Nintendo 3DS with its gorgeous animation style and varied environments but Luigi's Mansion 3 absolutely smashes it with Luigi being extremely well-detailed from the polyester of his shirt to the stitches in his hat. The crowning achievement is just how fluid the animation is and Luigi's overall expressiveness, with many claiming it to be one of the best-looking games on the Nintendo Switch, with its animation in particular being on par with a Pixar film.
• Honkai Impact 3rd's character models, animations, and particle effects stand out as being particularly top-notch, especially considering it's originally made for mobile phones and tablets and only received a PC port in late 2019. Then there's the short animation sequences that are sporadically released online, made in full-blown CGI and surpassing the fluidity of even some of the best actual anime studios!
• Sdorica is ridiculously pretty and only gotten more so over the years. The character art is good per genre standard, and the backgrounds are spectacular, but the game shines in motion, particularly in battle. This compilation shows off the characters and the story at its best.
• Octopath Traveler: The combination of SNES-style sprites and textures with 3D environments and modern visual effects creates a very striking result.
• snkplSNK really deserve a section all to themselves. With them commonly being declared as the kings of sprite based games before the age of fighting games such as Guilty Gear or BlazBlue, is it any surprise that Arc System Works was first formed from former SNK employees?
  • Fatal Fury is often forgotten to the depths of gaming history be it due to its characters finding more a home in The King of Fighters or otherwise lacking as much recognition in the USA - a shame considering Real Bout Fatal Fury Special and Garou: Mark of the Wolves are easily among the most beautifully animated sprite based games even now, with parallax scrolling and highly detailed models that move and flow with an excellent range. One could very easily consider Real Bout Special the grandfather of the modern anime fighter between its stunning visuals and fast, intense gameplay allowing for incredibly powerful and extensive combos.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code. The parts of the game set in the real world of Kanai Ward already have fluid animation for each character, and stunning environment designs and atmospheres. However, the Mystery Labyrinth is an absolutely crazy burst of colors and unique animations to accompany the Eldritch Location aesthetic, with the Mystery Phantoms and RDM sequences, as well as the various locations in general, having a psychedelic effect applied to them that encompasses the overall surreality of the Labyrinth and its mysterious, distorted abnormality.
• Spider-Man (Insomniac):
  • Spider-Man (PS4):
    • Even before release, the E3 2016 trailer showed off awe-inspiring shots of Spider-Man web-swinging through the city, which were taken from actual gameplay, not pre-rendered cutscenes. And the final game itself, as evidenced by Photo Mode, features the same quality. One particular screenshot showed just how much detail there is on the Scarlet Spider suit mask alone!
    • Even the rooms through windows on buildings are detailed and visible through them. Everything about the game is just beautiful.
  • Spider-Man: Miles Morales:
    • Going into the next generation, many gamers were under the impression that games were going to offer the choice between ray-tracing and 60 FPS gameplay but not both at the same time. While this was initially the case with Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Spider Man Remastered Insomniac later updated both games to feature a "Performance RT" mode, that offers both ray-tracing and 60 FPS. Both the quality of the ray-tracing and the overall rendering resolution take a hit compared to the 30 FPS mode, though it still looks great and many would see this as an acceptable trade off for increased performance.
    • Not only did Insomniac Games include Miles's suit from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but they also went the extra mile of including with it a suit mod that lowers the framerate of his animation so he would be running, jumping, fighting, and swinging around at twelve frames per second just like in the movie. And it looks amazing.
  • Marvel's Spider-Man 2:
    • Insomniac refined their raytracing such that Spider-Man 2 doesn't feature the "Performance RT" mode from Remastered and Miles Morales, because raytracing is now the active regular Performance mode (just to a lesser degree than the Fidelity mode). This is especially impressive considering the use of raytracing on the rivers and oceans, which is never seen in the console space.
    • Like Insomniac's past few titles, this game includes a 40fps fidelity option on 120hz compatible displays; while this affects the overall resolution^note especially on devices capped to HDMI 2.0, as only 2.1 can transfer 120hz content above 1080p, it essentially combines both fidelity and performance modes together, resulting in the framerate feeling a lot smoother than 30fps does^note it's a bit complicated to explain fully, but with a 120hz cap, 40fps is exactly between 30 and 60fps, but also doesn't compromise any visual effects (including full ray-tracing).
    • While the SSD load times were impressive in the last two games on PlayStation 5, it's taken to a whole new level here with how the fast-travel works. Pick any position on the map screen, hold Triangle, and in the space of a second the camera swoops down onto the street (fading from the 3D map to the real New York) and Spider-Man swings / glides into frame for you to take control. A truly jaw-dropping feat of technical expertise and quite possibly the best fast travel system ever made (were it not for the fact that you need to do side-quests in that district to unlock it there first).
    • Speaking of, the devs also used raytracing on the windows to pull off 3D-modelled rooms behind the glass of every window of every building!
    • Insomniac also uses the portal window technology from Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart to pull off a fully convincing view through the Mysterium portals, with proper depth on the green smoke tunnel. This and the SSD load times are used to great effect in the Black Cat mission, where Miles chases her across various sections of New York and for a brief moment, Antarctica, thanks to a portal-making artifact.

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