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in reply to @ticky's post:

I think the only texture pack that I've heard about that even sounds like it was done "well" was majora's mask, and that's a game I'm so familiar with as it was that changing any textures is just going to look kind of wrong.

Actually, that's probably a great example. The 3DS ports look different, but they're willing to take on a slightly different art style and it still looks ok. Different, but ok. The texture packs just look fucked even if it's literally "We found every stock texture that was used to create the in game textures and undid the compression so this is exactly how it would have looked if the n64 had unlimited texture memory" or whatever.

Ultimately the problem here is people thinking number bigger = gooder, and being completely incapable of accepting that maybe a thing can still be good even if it's 320x240 and thrown through the N64's blur blender. On composite.

Or to put it another way: texture packs often have no actual creative input and thus look like shit, whereas MOST remasters did have creative input and thus look different, but will always look better than something created with no... creativity. There's no creativity in upscaling, even if you're sourcing the original images used for textures. Any creative work without creativity will look like ass.

I think my favorite version of this are prerendered images that have been upscaled by AI sharpening tools, because those regularly fail to preserve the texture of the original images even if they're better than most attempts at increasing detail. It just fuckin looks noisy.

It's especially awful when applied to early stuff like FF7, where everything ends up clashing completely, especially when they also try to produce more 'realistic' models to the characters over those screens; those look absolutely terrible when zoomed out; there's no thought given to why the original super-deformed model styles were used in the first place. Strongly dislike.

Even wanting to upscale textures on a PS1 game feels like missing the point entirely. Like smoothing filters on SNES games.

At least the N64 you can say "But they're blurry and ugly!" which, isn't entirely accurate but I at least understand where it's coming from.