When I saw there was a PS1 port of an old PC visual novel I was looking into, I thought, "oh, I guess they must have redrawn the art at lower res but with more colours to fit the hardware". I wasn't prepared for them to have kept the high-res 640x400 source art intact?? They even touched it up with some new shading.
Left: PlayStation; right: FM Towns.
The high-res visual novel art you might have seen from 16-bit Japanese computer games usually comes from the PC-981, with the aesthetic heavily influenced by hardware limitations. Many PC-98 models were limited to 16 colours and had no hardware sprites, but it did default to high-resolution graphics - hence the many games with detailed, high-quality 640x400 spritework and the distinctive dithered style that tried to imply many more colours than the system was actually capable of rendering.2
The 32-bit console era, meanwhile, was the first time that detailed 15/24-bit colour artwork became feasible on consoles, and also the first time that consoles had enough RAM to render high-resolution 640x480 artwork... but this tended to be an either/or proposition. 640x480 2D art in high resolution consumes a lot of RAM, especially when there's any animation at all. As a result, the vast majority of games chose to redraw their art at a lower resolution but with much higher-detail colour. If I had to guess, I suppose lower-res art with better colour detail felt more futuristic and advanced in 1994.
Here's a few more representative examples - Saturn on the left, PC-98 on the right. That Silent Möbius game is an incredible outlier by having lower-colour but high-detail art instead of this kind of total redraw.
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The other two popular 16-bit Japanese PCs, FM Towns and X68000, were more niche platforms, but they also had very different hardware. They had much better support for fast-moving action games, so a lot of their exclusive software tended to look more like high-end 16-bit console games.
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What about the western PCs? DOS and Windows PCs were incredibly niche until Windows 95, so the vast majority of Japanese-developed software before that tended to be low-end single developer freeware/shareware stuff. The Mac did have a notable Japanese market, but Mac players enjoyed different kinds of games. It had very little overlap with the PC-98/FM Towns/X68000.
