The most photo-unrealistic game ever?

What game do you think is the most photo-unrealistic ever? That is, what game looks the most like it was hand-drawn?

Obviously, games that actually were hand-drawn are out, I'm talking about 3D polygonal games that manage to look flat and hand-drawn. While "cel-shading" has been popular for a long time, many of them don't successfully "sell" the effect. You can see blocky edges which would be smooth if they hand-drawn or the shading isn't done the way it would be if a person was doing it.

Personally, I think that making a 3D game that looks 2D is just as big of a challenge of making a photorealistic 3D game. I've seen few cel-shaded games that manage to successfully look 2D. About the only one I can think of is Wind Waker, both the original GameCube version and the HD Wii U version. Especially the HD version, there were a number of times were I felt like I could blink and forget I wasn't looking at something hand-drawn. The new guilty gear game deserves credit for intertionally limiting the FPS to give the game the "choppy" animation of the earlier hand-drawn games.

What do you guys think?

 

I wholly disagree with that, Wind Waker looks 3D to me. I can't think of any 3D games that look 2D though.

 

Zork

 

guilty gear xrd.

 

Pong?

 

Really? You don't think this looks somewhat convincingly flat-looking?

 

Nope!

 

While it's definitely one of the better examples, I still gotta say nope. I actually think the GC version looked a bit more cartoony, but that may be because I've not played that in a long time while I played through the HD one last fall.

 

Well, you got a better example? It looks more convincing than Jet Set Radio anyway:


But that's exactly my point, making 3D games look 2D is really hard. So which game has come the closest?

 

The characters generally pull it off well. It's the backgrounds that always seem to suffer. They always look too "rendered", especially upon rotation. A friend of mine and I were having this conversation a few years ago and while both of us could immediately point out what was killing the effect, neither of us could figure out what needed to be done in order to counteract that. Neither of us are skilled cartoonists so that doesn't help.

 

JSR actually looks pretty 2D to me!

 

You cray cray bro? It's way too blocky and the shading looks weird!

I think it's the opposite! Backgrounds in animation often looks more realistic and less hard-shaded than the characters. You can usually get away with making backgrounds look like hand-drawn animation:

 

The characters pull it off very well in JSR.

 

@FireAza I'm not sure what point you are trying to make with that included image.

 

IMO watching the camera rotate around the character kills all illusion of hand drawing because of the way it is done via algorithmic rendering vs a human drawing. The way depth is conveyed looks far more like a standard CG render than hand drawn cartoons. In the JSR pic, look at the speakers, and look at the car near the IBeams. None of that looks hand drawn, just flat shaded with hard outlines.

 

Okami? That is a 3D/2D mix IIRC

 

DOOM. Or the Jaguar port of Alien vs Predator. 2D sprites in a 3D space.

I mean, it's fairly obvious that the objects have depth, so they don't really look 2D to me.

 

If you look at the textures and lighting, while it doesn't look like traditional cel animation, it does look like the more detailed watercolor drawings that are traditionally used in in backgrounds in 2D animation.

Okami is definitely one of the best examples. Especially the HD version which sharpens up the textures and smooths the jaggies.

Using 2D character sprites is kinda cheating

Objects look like they have depth in 2D drawings too! The key point is does this 3D-rendered image resemble what it actually is (3D-rendered) or does it look more like hand-drawn animation? Like I said, I think making 3D animation look indistinguishable from 2D animation is really challenging. I don't think we've gotten to that level yet, but there are a few games that come close. Like in the early days of CGI when you could almost be fooled into thinking something CG is real.

 

Double post.