SNES games with good graphics

Apparently, you guys think SMW has lousy graphics.

I'm starting a new thread, cause it's kind of a separate topic...

What SNES games do you think has 'good graphics' or good use of the hardware advantages... bit shading, use of color, quality artistry, etc. ?

Myself, I'm fond of Chrono Trigger and FF3.

Aw jeez. There's honestly like a million, but here are some standouts for me:

Super Metroid
Terranigma
Yoshi's Island (FX2)
Donkey Kong Country 1-3
Seiken Densetsu 3
Tactics Ogre
Kirby's Super Star
Front Mission Gun Hazard

These all happen to be pretty amazing games, too. Sigh, what a console...

I'll add one more...
Seiken Densetsu 3 (sequel to Secret of Mana never released in US). Oh, you beat me to it, AdamSmasher

I thought it was kind of given...

Anyway, here's another one:

Super Mario World.

You guys are too used to it, in the context of awesome mid-'90s games and bad hacks. When I first saw it, I had been playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for a year and a half, and other NES games as well, some for even longer. Even though it was on a blurry TV (unfortunate, that; there were three TVs at that party, and the Super Famicom just had to be hooked up to the one that didn't work properly), it looked genuinely, breathtakingly beautiful in a way NES games simply couldn't. A lot of this was due not only to the sudden freedom of the SNES colour palette but to the heavily stylized parallax backgrounds - a blue sky with the odd bush is all very well, but take a look at the background of Yoshi's Island 1, or a cave level, or a mountain level, and really try to see it for the first time... The sheer scope implicit in those simple backgrounds is almost unmatched in my experience. (The underground bits are helped further by one of the best uses of reverb I've heard on the system.)

The use or otherwise of black outlines seems to have a sort of artistic logic to it; look at the Koopa Troopas. Blargg is a good example; he doesn't just appear against black backgrounds, but did you really think it was a good idea to outline a lava monster in black? Dude's glowing. Same goes for Spark and Podoboo. Bowser and the Koopalings do tend to show up against mostly black backgrounds, and the ones that don't have black outlines...

The pale colours are a result of the 'pastel' craze that was going on at the time. I think it looks fine; it's part of the style. (Also, Luigi has purple overalls...) The graphics are a bit simplistic, and it's clearly a fairly early game, but it is not ugly. Quite the opposite. I've seen ugly graphics, and these are not that.

Okay, Mario's sprite is drawn a little weirdly...

But other than that, considering the development situation, I think they used the resources they knew they could count on quite well. Technically, it's enough of a step up to show the power of the new system, but not so much as to leave no room for improvement, or waste development time (and ROM) trying to reach DKC2 levels of graphical mojo in one giant leap. Artistically, it seems to have a sort of magic that a more literal-minded attempt would have lost - even Yoshi's Island, while it is definitely more sophisticated, seems a bit hamfistedly cartoonish compared to it. Maybe I'm just nostalgic... it was my first SNES experience, after all, even before F-Zero...

Also, Super R-Type looks at least as good as R-Type III (in screenshots)...

Well, I mean, we're judging how it looks given the hardware, not at the time, unless the hardware actually changed.


I mean, it's good for the style to be consistent, but only if the style was good in the first place. I'm not saying that this style was bad, although I'm not to big a fan of it.


They couldn't have outlined the teeth?

I just outlined it now, and I already think it looks better. I'd do more stuff to it though.




Speaking about consistency though, it's often wrong even here, because some objects are outlined in their darkest shade, while others are just solid black, and the objects really aren't different in terms of lighting.


That's probably a good part of it.

I take it you're a pretty big F-Zero fan?


I'd say more like at most. It doesn't have as much going on in a good part of it and mostly, the artwork isn't quite as good in my opinion. I don't know why both games are so adverse from using BG 3, unless they're trying to recapture the M72 "feel". (Although there wouldn't be have the stuff there is then in R-Type III.)

The mega wavebeam looks awesome to me.

Adding to the list, in my opinion, these games all had great artwork:

Megaman 7
Megaman & Bass (Rockman & Forte)
Kirby's Dream Land 3
Super Mario RPG

Hong Kong 97.

Demon's Crest / Demon's Blazon:



Wild Guns:



Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts:



Dracula XX:


Operation Logic Bomb:



Some other mentions: Final Fantasy VI, Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse, Rendering Ranger R2, Yoshi's Island, Hagane.

I'm serious. Super Mario World may not have the technical virtuosity and detail level of later (and larger) games, but it has its own artistic style that I find quite appealing. And the OP does mention "artistry". While the graphics are often simple, they are almost never bad, the feel is consistent (except maybe with Dino-Rhino) and the whole thing hangs together to create the impression of an expansive world populated with diverse enemies.

In some ways it works better than more detailed graphics might have. For instance, with super high detail and smooth animation like in DKC, palette swaps stick out like sore thumbs. And SMW's caves are easily the largest, most airy caverns I've ever played in, not because of the level design but because of the graphics (and that epic reverb) - it lets me actually believe in the scale of the inside of Vanilla Dome. (The shiny bits are also something missing from DKC's fancy but painfully static (and obviously mirrored) cave backgrounds.) It's a bit like how Super Mario 64 somehow seems more present and real than many later and technically superior games...

Compare any environment in SMW with a similar one in FFIV (if you can manage to straddle that artistic chasm; the styles are very different) and tell me seriously that SMW has bad graphics. Stylized, yes. Artificially limited, even. But not bad.

I was a bit disappointed with Super Mario All-Stars, because of the sometimes tone-deaf graphical conversion. (And because they botched the Goomba stomp sound, not to mention the awful bonus round music... The buzzy small-room reverb in caves is kinda acceptable, because caves on the NES tended to feel quite cozy, but it's still not great...)


It did, and not just during the development of the actual game (which I think might have started when the system still had 8 KB of WRAM). SMW is 4 Mbit SlowROM. DKC is 32 Mbit FastROM. Yoshi's Island is 16 Mbit SlowROM with a Super FX chip.


I don't actually like what you've done there. Not really sure why, but it seems to clash with the feel of a SMW lava cave... now that I think about it, the Piranha plants also kinda seem to clash with that feel, though the Chucks don't (both are outlined in black)...


It's not lighting; it's stuff like hard/soft, serious/cartoony, what exactly happens when you jump on it, that sort of thing. It may not be perfectly consistent, but it's not totally random. I maintain that the Koopa Troopa is a great example of both outlining techniques used in a consistent and artistic fashion in a single sprite.


Yep. I was really good at the original (2nd on Death Wind I/Golden Fox/Master), and pretty good at X, Maximum Velocity, and GX. (Maximum Velocity is a lot like the original, but you can use the shoulder buttons in new ways. I learned how to drag a vehicle around a tight curve with them without noticing what I was doing, and when I figured out how it worked, I couldn't do it any more. I had to learn it all over again before I could get the Jet Vermilion around a hairpin like I'd used to...) GP Legend was a bit disappointing; it felt too loose and easy, like it was rewarding me for just playing...

I understand the desire to make back a game's development budget and all, but I really wish Nintendo would make a new F-Zero. It's been too long.

Then again, I haven't wholeheartedly loved a new Mario Kart since Super Circuit... the only thing worse than not getting a new F-Zero would be getting a bad F-Zero...

Maybe I'll start another argument, but...I've never liked Mario64. (To be fair, I didn't own an N64, and I've only played it a few times). But gameplay is slow and awkward, and at times confusing. It tries to say "ooh, look, I'm in 3D"... but when it takes you 10 minutes to climb a hill or swim around in a circle, I get bored.

Plus, it's got alot of technical flaws/glitches.
https://youtu.be/5YbtkoOgmcs

Give me an SNES with SMW any day, and I'll have fun. That and Link to the Past are 2 of my favorite games of all time.

Tales of Phantasia is gorgeous.

I want to make the point, that the SNES in GENERAL looks goods. The system has a very appealing aesthetic and had a very high quality of art. Even when I think of games that I didn't like, they still look good. In fact, one of the worst examples graphic-wise I can think of happens to be my favorite title for the system, Earthbound. And it's aesthetic, I feel, is perfect for what it is, as it's unassuming nature disarms the player and ultimately delivers, in my opinion, a more personal emotional journey than other RPGs for the system, which I also love.

The SNES has a look that holds up graphically in a way that arguably no other console does. Later consoles from the 3d era date quickly, and earlier console graphics are too primitive abstractions for a lot of gamers who didn't grow up with them. NES, SMS, TG16, SNES, and Genesis all straddle this line, but I feel that the SNES stands on top visually, by a pretty decent margin. Neo Geo, I'm not even considering as a home console.

The point, in context of game library, that it's hard to pick out a truly BAD looking game on the console, and that's amazing. Super Mario World looks great, and it may be on the lower end of the spectrum. I'll admit in contrast to some better looking games for the console it may be repetitive and simple, and I do honestly prefer SMB3, however, it looks good. Bright, colorful, and fun.

I give you Barbie Super Model:

Hmm... That appears to be a high quality rendering of Barbie driving in front of a Hollywood set of a city. No other console could render buildings with so much flatness. Looks great!

For real though, it's colorful. Okay, it's god awful. You really have to see it in motion to see how great that car looks. The body says in a straight horizontal line while the front and back turn independently. I'm not sure who the manufacturer was, but I think it came out of the same assembly plant as this one:



So now that we've seen this, how's Super Mario World lookin' now?

Oooh, Star Ocean, too.

Although Rendering Ranger R2 and Space Megaforce are both SlowROM...


I could do better, but I'm lazy and I'd be changing it a bunch. Plus, I don't know the palette situation. I just always got the feeling that that thing was flat because of the fact the edges of it aren't darkened. I'm not really a huge fan of straight up black outlines. I like it more when it's the color of what's being outlined, except a lot darker.


I'm not sure I've ever seen a cave move. I guess they could have implemented water dripping animation though. I kind of like it how the brightness changes throughout the level for whatever reason though, but I will agree the mirroring is kind of ugly, mainly because it's supposed to look more realistic and the mirroring isn't even that seemless. I feel this effect looks better when it's a less realistic art style, possibly because shading doesn't matter as much and it generally looks more smoother:



Does the SNES even support flipping the BG like that, or does the tilemap just like that?

Also, this is just my opinion, but I think the cave archetype in DKC3 looks more convincing. (As in I've actually been in a cavern before and it looks more like this, except not brightly lit.)




I do too, both gameplay wise and graphically. I always found it kind of funny how there are shadows on the sky from the level, like even the developers are acknowledging that the game is flat because of the hardware.


There are a good bit of Neo Geo games that don't look too amazing. I think the thing is that Metal Slug is probably the most iconic game on the system, and it's also one of the best, if not the best, looking. Nearly equivalent graphics are possible on the SNES though, just with a bunch of memory and a good vram system for sprites. I don't think of it as putting tractor tires on a sports car, I think of it as putting a v8 in a Camry. It's ridiculous, but it's still an improvement even if the rest of the hardware can't quite compare, although the same can kind of be said about the Neo Geo even considering the absurd amount of CHRROM it can address when the system isn't even really equivalent to two SNES's. (Except also color, even though this wasn't really taken advantage of that much.)


I kind of find they have a special charm, but maybe that's just me. The uncanny valley is the PS2 era, although some games from it actually still hold up. Super Monkey Ball (to me) still holds up because more processing power was spent on the small stuff because there wasn't that much going on (just compare the stage models. They stand up to anything today because there isn't much more that could be done to them) and the game isn't perfectly targeting realism so they can get away with more. Rouge squadron II and III also look pretty good, but can still tell it's not a modern video game, although they beat out many early Xbox 360 games like Oblivion. I want to see something as basic as Super Monkey Ball with a game engine as impressive as Rogue Squadron II or III. That would actually probably look good today if it weren't 480p.


N64 is actually my second favorite system (behind the SNES) and I've never really liked it either. I'm not big on collect a thon games, but if I ever get the urge for whatever reason, I'll play Banjo Kazooie instead. For the longest time, I never actually had Super Mario 64. In fact, the first time I ever played it was on the DS.


What's really annoying to me is how the way the car is supposed to be portrayed as having depth is going against the road right there. I mean, it's difficult to deal with this on a 2D system and the DKC games will look kind of awkward sometimes in the more "solid-edged" levels (like the factory levels) but it's really odd here. Maybe I'm just being nit picky, as that's not even half the problem with that picture.

They were also both developed after the hardware was finalized, and both used significantly larger ROMs for significantly shorter games. (They were probably coded better too; I am given to understand that SMW's engine is kind of a mess. My main point was the ROM size.)


Maybe I'm coming down on it a little hard, but when there's that much realism and three-dimensionality in the image, and it looks like it should have a significant amount of specular reflection going on, you kinda expect it to not stay exactly the same as it scrolls past. It's a little too obvious that it's a high-detail picture pasted onto a flat plane. The SMW cave is much softer and more stylized; the only part you'd expect any changes on are the sparkly bits (and indeed, the ice caves in DKC benefit greatly from a heavy-duty sparkle effect). It's something of an uncanny valley thing; digitized and prerendered graphics tend to suffer from it more than hand-drawn graphics.

Which means Hong Kong 97 and Donkey Kong Country share a graphical issue that Super Mario World doesn't have. Neat. (They also share a name element, but that's of course a coincidence - Mortal Kongbat, anyone?)

...I probably shouldn't have made such a fuss about this, since it's so subjective, but honestly it's kinda refreshing to get into such a pointless friendly argument...


You can flip individual tiles both horizontally and vertically in the tilemap. Vertical flipping could be faked with HDMA if you really needed the bottom half of the tilemap for something else, but outside Mode 7 (which doesn't support tile flipping anyway) I think tile flipping is about the only way to do horizontal mirroring without duplicating the tiles themselves.

I'm obviously with the minority (here), but SMW is to me one of the best looking SNES games. Wonderfully clean and consistent style. DKC is the antithesis of that and has aged horribly bad.

I disagree. Some things are flat and catoony, which is nice, but once in a while you'll find a dull gradient that looks completely out of place.


Yeah, I wouldn't place it in the list of games with good graphics. It looked awesome at the time because of the novelty of pre-rendered graphics, but it didn't age well at all. Kinda like most N64 games.

Yup. I'm really nitpicky, but one thing that always freaked me out in SMW is the levels with moving water at the bottom of the screen, like the one with the jumping dolphin things. The thing that annoys me about it is that it's a checkerboard patter, which really isn't convincing for transparency even if it's moving. The worst part though is that there is transparency on the SNES, and the game even takes advantage of it in other areas. Large areas of checkerboard always annoy me because they aren't convincing on anything that isn't a 13" CRT TV. Make it one color or the other, but not like that.


I kind of have to disagree. The models look like bad today, (although they got better with every game. Look at DK's "hair" on the DKC box and compare it with Kiddy Kong's on the DKC3 box) but they're so small in game that it doesn't really matter. I feel the biggest problems are the breakups in the tiles, the lack of shadows for sprites, and the fact that some of the edging on the sprites is really bad, because there's no antialiasing or anything like that (many of the edges kind of turn to gray when it would honestly look better if they stayed the same color)

What I mean by "breakups in the tiles" is this, although like the models, they got better with each game.



The lack of shadows for sprites is still kind of bad (although understandable), but maybe I'm crazy, but I feel the antialiasing problem was handled better as the games went on (as in the new objects looked better). I kind of like pre rendered graphics when they are good, which I feel these are.

One thing that I think still looks really good about the DKC games are the "special effects" that are in many of the levels:



Really, even though pre rendered graphics demand a lot of color to look good, the DKC games handle BG3 better than most. This is really only using 3 colors per tile which is pretty crazy:



One really intelligent thing I can think of that Rare did is on the DKC tree level archetype, there are actually solid window layers where the tree bodies are. If you notice, everything that could potentially get in front of you in this picture has black at the border of it, which looks good because it works as a shadow:

It seems like water was originally going to use blending, so dunno why it was removed (though that there seemed to be the wrong kind of blending).

I agree, the water in SMW always drew my attention for looking so bad, even back in the 90's when I played the game at my friend's house (I didn't own a NES or a SNES until I was an adult - the only Nintendo hardware I had as a teenager was a Game Boy Pocket).

Yeah, maybe that's why a lot of my opinions are different than other peoples. I actually got my SNES and N64 (from my cousin) when I was about four (so about 2003) so maybe I'm kind of nostalgic for it, but I never actually owned Super Mario World or Super Mario 64 by some chance. I did own the DKC games though (excluding the first one, I got that on Gameboy Advance a few years later) so maybe I'm kind of bias for it and not Super Mario World. (I got my video game systems from my cousin. The first video game system I got new was the Gameboy Advance SP, (frontlit) and if you're not including portables, it would be the Gamecube.

Well, I've gotta disagree with that too. There are indeed issues specific to the use of prerendered graphics, and the sequels handled it better IMO, but overall I think it's artistically handled even in DKC1 and for the most part looks good to my eye (some of the maps are a bit dubious...). The smooth animations are noteworthy; prerendered sprites often look messy in a screenshot or sprite rip, but in motion they can show subpixel detail without sacrificing realism, which is something hand spriting techniques have a lot of trouble with.

I don't think the DKC games look bad, I just don't think they are examples of the best graphics the platform can deliver. I think they look fine, and they're actually among my favorites on the SNES, but honestly speaking, those graphics are essentially a hack. 16-bit systems aren't capable of producing decent looking 3D graphics, and don't have the resolution or per pixel transparency necessary for properly displaying imported graphics generated by another computer, but they still crammed all those pre-rendered 3D graphics in there. Detailed textures such as dirt are completely mangled, and the edges of the object's are weird as fuck, due to the lack of proper anti-aliasing. That's not the kind of graphics the hardware was made to display, and it shows. For this reason, even though those games look good for what they are, I can't list them as examples of good use of the video hardware on the console. That would be like saying Doom is a great looking game on the SNES. It looks fine, the illusion works so the graphics get the job done, but there's a lot of things wrong with them we can easily point out.

What games can you think off look significantly better? Even if you don't like the artwork, you got to admit the use of the BG layers was pretty cool.

The lights shining down in Ghostly Grove are awesome, if you haven't seen it already:




The dirt doesn't look any different than what you'd see if a pixel artist made it... We might as well be talking about fur now. It's just a random placement of pixels that vary in color slightly.


I wouldn't go that far... For example, look at Dixie Kong in the screenshot above. Diddy doesn't look quite as hot because his sprites were carried over from the first game and I feel they didn't quite get it down, but it still doesn't look that bad, certainly not "weird as fuck".


Is there a law that says the graphics can't be pre rendered? I don't think it ever fooled anyone into thinking it was 3D because of perspective issues, it just looks good on it's own. The only thing that looks "3D" is this, but it's just line scrolling like SF2's floor except that this also works vertically



I feel like (good) pre rendered graphics have a charm to them, much like pixel art, but I guess you just don't share that opinion.