conchobhar
What's Shenmue?
The mobile graphics have some of the same problems that her newer sprites do but I don't really think they're nearly as awful as their reputation, either. My biggest issue is the way their arms hang in the neutral poses; they're far too long and it make everyone look like they have terrible posture. I've played around with adjusting them before and I think they would actually look pretty good if the arms didn't extend beyond mid-thigh and the palette hewed more closely to the SNES version. Here's an example:
It's amazing what a few small tweaks do. I agree that looks pretty good!
I've always thought the biggest problem with the new sprites is the light blur filter applied to them in-game, which has the effect of making them look disconnected from their environments. An article from several years ago made this same point, so here's their comparison image:
So fix the arms, keep the old palette, present them as raw pixels… and I bet the mobile/steam version would look fine. Not better than the original, but not bad at all.
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