Lotta bad geometry, weird artefacting, melty Darth Face and fucked up background stuff goin' on.
looks worse in motion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b9TTurkH4c
Like, what's going on with this shoulder?
You know, I would be more inclined to give this the benefit of the doubt prior to a year or two ago, when AI art first became a thing. Saga Frontier Remastered used AI upscaling for its backgrounds well before AI art was a twinkle in anybody's eye, and the reason I don't remember anybody complaining about it at the time is because Square-Enix wasn't using the technology to put artists out of work or profit off art they didn't have any right to use; they were using it because, I'm guessing, they no longer had the original CG assets to work from and throwing a Nearest Neighbor'd background from twenty five years ago onto 4K TVs was never going to be an option.
In this case, though? Not so much. Not only has publishers' quickness to embrace AI art in video game remasters over the past couple of days (even when it doesn't produce satisfactory results) betrayed an intention to generate a quick profit at the expense of artists they could have consulted, it's also betrayed the artisanal logic that video game remasters have spent the past several years justifying themselves with. The promise of all that care and intention the original (presumably human) developers invested into the remaster enabling us to access a truer version of history than what even the original itself could hope to provide is revealed for what it always was: the same technological progressivism, the same empty appeal to higher degrees of visual fidelity that video games have already been offering us for decades. Do we accept that this promise will always be doomed to disappoint us the moment we acquire it for ourselves? Or do we take the Get Out of Direct Artistic and Historic Engagement Free card that the remaster represents despite everything?