i've seen a decent amount of criticism of the writing in sea of stars, but everyone always praises the pixel art as like The Best Pixel Art Ever. but honestly something about the art in that game bothers me. i can tell a lot of care and skill went into making it, it's extremely polished, but i just don't like how it looks. something about its mix of dark outlines and soft shading with too many colors and not enough contrast. it's like an uncomfortable middle ground between 16-bit and 32-bit aesthetics
there are definitely bosses that look much better than this, but this one from the official promo screenshots is one of the best illustrations of what i mean
the outlines are left to do most of the work here because of how poor the contrast is on a lot of the shading - particularly on the spiky bright blue godzilla spines that draw the eye, where the differences in brightness are barely perceptible to the point that they might as well just be one flat color
there's also a lot of gradient lighting added on top of it, and i'm definitely no stickler for pixel art purity (i use gradient lighting in places myself), but here it feels like it's compensating for how poor the lighting and shading are on the sprites and tiles themselves. you can also see this in a lot of the environments
now, you look at this zoomed out and, like, it definitely doesn't look bad. this is not an ugly game! but when you zoom in on the rocky cliffs here you notice something
the contrast is better here, but the shading is overall still very flat. it's mostly all the same shade of medium tan with a tiny bit of darker brown around the edges of every chunk of rock, and highlights at the top. once again, they rely on an added layer of gradient lighting on top of the pixel art to add depth. it really muddies the crispness of the pixel art and makes everything look all soft and smudgy
