Tails Of Azure came out today, and while I am happy that we finally have the gap in games filled in the series, I immediately noticed something weird when loading the game. Looking at the Crossbell on the title screen, it looked as if the city was melting!
Now before I go deep into this, I do want to say I think this game is more than worth playing on the PC even with this weird issue, and this weirdness mostly just applies to mostly minor details.
That being said, the reason this has happened is obvious, the new PC port of this game features AI upscaling to "improve" the game. In fact, this feature caused a huge hubub when Trails From Zero was released. How, gamers demanded, could they be releasing an "inferior" version of this game on PS4/5 compared to the other two? (That version was made by Falcom, and did not include the PC "upgrades")
Meanwhile, looking at this, I can't help but feel it looks like garbage! I wish I could fucking turn this shit off.
It sucks in all the ways that so much ai adjacent art/upscaling sucks. it misinterprets/predicts what should be where making odd impossible objects (pay attention to the brick pattern in front of the main building), and even in the areas where its relatively "correct" it still has all the telltale signs of being ai generated. Things that once were simple straight objects/lines in the original art are now impressionist versions of themselves that look like the paint has been smudged on a painting (see the handrails in front of the building).
Even if you want to argue that this title screen in particular was in need of an upscale, there are plenty of other places this shit has been applied that clearly did not need it.
Take this image from very early on in the game:
Click here to reveal, as it is a minor spoiler from the first game
Nothing too crazy, a simple portrait done in a very stylized manner to show the user that this was a darker moment that is being remembered and maybe one that is a bit fuzzy as well.
Here it is in the "improved" version:
You may notice, as I did, that this didn't actually improve anything in the image qualitatively. The original image was actually quite clear already, and it's not clear why this image was upscaled at all.
Yet it was, and in doing so, the originally tone and feeling of the image has been pretty heavily altered. With the detail of the texture of the image being smoothed out by the algorithm and leaving a clean babyfaced image in its stead.
There was another place that I thought was pretty funny when I started comparing these things, and it was the title of the game itself. Check them out, the first image is the non-NISA title screen, the second is the new improved version:
You may notice that the original screen looks a hell of a lot better than the original one. Now obviously that is because they've gone an applied a heavy blur filter on the new screen, but why? Perhaps they decided they needed to blur out the new image because it got smooshed by the AI. Look closely at the leaves in the new image even without the blurring they would be completely unreadable as leaves!
Ah but you may argue, I'm only cherry picking the places where the uprezzing looks bad. Surely, in the more boring and regular cases it improves the look of the game. Surely on things like enemy sprites or ground textures it must be worth the occasional bad upscale.
Well lets examine those cases, first lets look at enemies in a battle. Something you will see for most of the game. Once again, top image is from the non-NISA PC version.
Now, I don't know about you, but I don't even notice a difference there. Perhaps the textures of things in battles just felt like they didn't need to be touched, clearly the other version of the files were already quite detailed.
Ok ok, but how about the dungeons, well heres a screen of the very first dungeon in the game.
Once again, almost no difference here, except that the new version has lost detail again.
In the original we see a sort of sand brick pattern on the floor, and in the upressed version its been magically changed to a generic desert floor. In addition to the symbol on the floor feeling more "smudgy" in that way ai stuff often does.
Anyways, I just wanted to vent about this because its one of the things that frustrates me about a lot of AI upres stuff.
Even if you get past the ethical issues around what data ML is trained on, you run into issues like these where people just sort of apply it because its either cheap to do or because its the cool new technology and it lets them slap it on the box to sell to people as an upgrade. Even when the results of applying it make it look worse in a lot of cases.
It's especially frustrating when this was one of the "improvements" that sparked a lot of backlash and hate against the versions of this game that do not have these changes.
I don't think its any reason to not play the game. The changes here are mostly on the outer edge that only an obsessive person like me is likely to notice, and the main draw of these games is the writing anyways.
I just think it feels a little shoddy in a game that is so hyper focused on the small details.