Touhou Game Graphics

[Failure McFailFace]

So there's quite a few sprites in ZUN's games that are absolutely ancient. Sure, they've been updated since EoSD, but the freaking hitbox and focus sprites are unchanged from PCB. Also, DDC+ has the new HD engine, but in HD, the sprites are just too small for good detail. See Mallet "You Grow Bigger!" in Shinmyoumaru's boss fight, where the player sprite grows to a large size and looks like a pixelly mess.

The current character portraits, when extracted from the game, are huge and have so many details that you can't see because of the limitations from smaller resolutions.

The question here is, should ZUN update his sprites to HD, or at least make them larger and more detailed?

[Chill Observer]

No. I think sprites are fine as is and work well enough.

What you're saying is that ZUN should make different resolution sprites for 720 and 960 respectively, which may or may not mean triple the size. Upscaling works fine as is, I'd say.

[Drake]

The only real case upscaling the smaller sprites actually looks bad is if your graphics card doesn't use a sensible algorithm and just uses nearest neighbour to upscale everything. I had this problem with an older computer and it was really hard to play fullscreen or otherwise upscaled.

I also have my reservations about ZUN's spriting ability at higher scales. ZUN is pretty good at utilizing pixel-thin lines and blending due to the small scales of the sprites, but going bigger requires a significant increase in skill in order to make detail look good.

[Nova234]

The sprites look fine if you ask me. I'd argue that sprites don't need huge resolution to look good, as long as they're competently made - there are plenty of classic games that look gorgeous despite being more pixelated than the modern Touhou games. More importantly, the current sprites do a good job of performing their main role: looking pretty is nice and all, but it's a secondary concern; the sprites' main purpose is to be a source of information. They need to be readable at a glance, and the current sprites for both characters and bullets do a good job of that.

See Mallet "You Grow Bigger!" in Shinmyoumaru's boss fight, where the player sprite grows to a large size and looks like a pixelly mess.

The problem with that spell isn't that it looks bad (though the upscaling used is somewhat less than ideal), but because it's the exception to the above statement - it fails to accurately inform the player. It's fine for Reimu, but the the other characters' hitboxes extend well past the displayed area. Dying to a bullet that looks like it's nowhere near your hitbox is a rather nasty surprise for a newer player. It's not a hugely difficult spell by any means, but it's still a pain in the ass to fight because it's one of the few things in the series that really doesn't feel "fair". Getting killed by bullets is an opportunity to learn, getting killed by a misleading sprite is just annoying.