Fuck it I am posting these anyway.

>2D animation >posts tweening or is this puppeting? I always confuse the two Granted it looks better than most, but this isn't exactly a high bar for 2D animation. A famous, borderline stereotypical example is Cuphead. One may not like boss rush games, but it genuinely is an impressive piece of animation work.

>>1078031 I personally do not mind tweening. I would rather have 2d games with tweening than no 2d games. I don't even think the tweening is that bad in UC. If I wanted to post bad examples of tweening I would just post some mobile games with fat tits and a lot of tweening. I know /v/ used to love Wakfu and that show is mostly tweening. I would post more examples but all of the examples are from the show and not the games.

>>1078027 Not sure I like this animation style, it looks like that one famous Princess Peach flash eroge.

I'll tell you a game I do like the animation of, motherfucking METAL SLUG. Some of the best pixel art to ever grace this world.

>>1078034 This is reminding you of peachs untold tale? what the fuck? >>1078035 I said no pixel art. Dont get me wrong I like metal slug I am just sick of pixels.

>>1078036 I apologize I can't read There's an upcoming Kyatto Ninden Teyandee (Samurai Pizza Cats) game that uses traditional 2D animation. It looks shockingly well done, like a playable anime.

As a side note, the game is a Dutch-Japanese production. That's not something you see a lot of. Tons of the original people from Kyatto Ninden Teyandee are returning, like writer Satoru Akahori and almost all voice actors, the English dub also features the original Samurai Pizza Cats cast. I just hope you can enable Japanese, because I do not want to wade through that cheesy early 90s bullshit the American localization was turned into.

>>1078039 That does look pretty cool. Reminds me of the wonder boy remakes.

>>1078025 >one of few metroidvanias that isn't fucking pixels You can add Nine Sols, ENDER LILES (and the sequel), DOOMBLADE, Ghost Parade, Ghost 1.0, Unepic, Super Daryl Deluxe, Eden Genesis, Aeterna Noctis (and the sequel), Cookie Cutter gay lefty writing though, Pronty, Aquaria, Bô: Path of the Teal Lotus, 8doors, Imp of the Sun, Roah, Ghost Song, Greak, Guacamelee (and sequel), LOST EPIC, Touhou: Double Focus, Exorcist Fairy, Treasure of the Aegean, Fearmonium, Bloodrayne Betrayal, DEAD OR SCHOOL (technically sprites over 3D but there's 2D animation for said sprites), Heroine Anthem Zero (and sequel), Under Party, GIGA WRECKER, Apotheon, Wonder Boy: the Dragon's Trap (and sequel), Pankapu, Hell Yeah!, Outland, Dust furshit and probably more > The rayman games sold great They sold okay, not enough to warrant making more sadly or not I don't want any reason to give Ubisoft money.

>>1078046 I had no idea how many animated metroidvanias there were. Goddamn now I just feel stupid. I have played Apotheon before though and that game was fantastic.

>>1078040 >I do not want to wade through that cheesy early 90s bullshit the American localization was turned into. Are you serious?

>>1078046 >Hell Yeah! Now that's a game I haven't heard in years. It feels like it was trying to be an indie darling, but it doesn't play great and repeats way too many bosses. The game's gimmick is that it has 101 bosses, but if you've ever played a game that markets itself on that you know they always suffer from a lot of repeats, palette swaps and the bosses are generally not interesting. Even Shadow of the Colossus, a game with only 16 bosses, had to cut that number back from 24 because it was too difficult to make that many unique colossi. Great art design and the main character is adorable, but I recommend watching a playthrough instead of playing it yourself. >>1078049 Anon, there are so fucking metroidvanias period. And a lot of them are really good, it's kind of an overwhelming genre.

>>1078027 >dub

>>1078061 I didn't record these. I would have recorded them in nihongo if I could but I cannot. I am not even sure how to record on the switch.

>>1078049 Among all of those not all are good, nor do all of them look good (even if 2d animation), a few I've not even played quite yet but I do know they're 2D animation. Would absolutely recommend you play ENDER LILIES (don't get fooled by the tards spouting soulslike it ain't, I've not played the sequel but I'm fairly sure it's not far behind in terms of being a great game) and Nine Sols; I have a soft spot for Super Daryl Deluxe, DEAD or SCHOOL, Fearmonium and Ghost 1.0 but those have some issues that prevent them from being truly great.

This is more of a /site/ matter, but if this site could transition to AVIF for low quality compressed static images and soundless animated content, WEBM for animated content with sound, and JXL for high quality compressed static images it'll be in a good place. AVIF is perfect for stuff like this and can supersede cuckchan's stupidass soundless webm restriction. In regards to why big companies don't pursue 2D animated games in the modern age: >2D games are infinitely easier to run than 3D games, which seems like an advantage now, but back then consumers, aka the brainless retards who defend Njudea, wanted number to go up and 2D just didn't trigger that part of their monkey shitflinger brains. >Flash games heavily relied on 2D art. Over time a stigma grew due to plain scarcity and abundance economics, 2D = "free, casual, disposable," 3D = "premium." Now that Flash games have largely become deprecated, of course now what was taken for granted is appreciated, but back then nobody knew Steve Jobs would chimp out over Flash dominating his precious App Store. It didn't help that 2D artists have largely migrated over to mobile to survive, increasing said stigma until 3D games once more were supported on smartphones. >As games increasingly shunned vector formats in favor of rasterized graphics, it became much harder to rerelease 2D games. With pixelated graphics, at least you could use linear or integer scaling. Same with 3D graphics. 2D? AI reconstruction. >As recapped with The King of Fighters XII and XIII, the art team made a huge effort to commit to 2D in a time where more series were jumping to 3D, to the point that characters were taking over a year to finish frame by frame. The results ultimately didn't yield a return on investment. Logistically, if you're a public company with shareholders to answer to, you cannot say, "hey, we're still waiting on our artists to finish so-and-so character." Even some of the best 2D games today have migrated to tweening for the sake of productivity and efficiency. Cuphead stuck to FBF and The Delicious Last Course took what, four years to come out? The fact is 2D games tend to be extremely labor intensive and 3D is often selected as a matter of production convenience, especially with Guilty Gay and NPR 3D reasonably catching up to provide similar visuals indistinguishable to normalfags. >It's not mentioned a lot but 2D art takes up a LOT of storage space as well. Most 2D games these days rely on programs like Spine that draw upon sprite/textures atlases with alpha transparency, often PNGs, notoriously infamous for poor compression. (This is one reason why I'm so anal about promoting the use of AVIF and JXL these days because they are superior formats with the same alpha channel support that bypass this old limitation.) Third image is a PNG asset from the mobile gacha game Brown Dust 2 that is used as an atlas for one in-game cutscene. Not only is it 2K reference resolution, the ACTUAL file is 3.7 MB for ONE asset, not counting the other files outside this atlas that is not referenced, I just compressed it to demonstrate that often 2D games are big because "compression bad." There's a very interesting readup published by Crapcom on the recent Ace Attorney Investigations remaster that provides some sage insight into how big AAA devs handle 2D game development. https://archive.fo/Zduq2 >But since we were re-releasing the games, we knew we couldn’t just leave them be – we had to do something to spruce them up! We first looked into how we could use the pixel art sprites as a base and work on upgrading them from there. It would be so much work to re-draw everything from scratch, after all, so of course we couldn’t choose to do that right off the bat... >We tried out a bunch of different options such as doubling the pixel density and applying a filter to smooth things out, but nothing good came of these experiments. We also looked into making everyone into 3D models, but to make over 100 models within the timeframe we were given and recreate the look and refined movements of the pixel art sprites in 3D – it was simply unrealistic from a workload and stylistic point of view. What’s more, even though we were going to upgrade all the backgrounds into full HD, they were still going to be in 2D, so we felt it would be hard to achieve a sense of cohesion between the 2D backgrounds and 3D models. >We tried everything we could think of, but in the end, there was only one thing we could do: steel ourselves for the pain and tears that were sure to come as we walked down the simplest, yet hardest road. We would redraw everything from scratch. It was the only way to ensure that the sprites and backgrounds wouldn’t clash with one other. To everyone who worked on these sprites, please forgive me... Essentially, modern game artists and producers instinctively do everything they can to avoid having to produce 2D animation. >Referencing the original pixel art sprites, we drew each animation to have the same number of frames and colored the line art in. At this point, the sprites would have moved exactly like their pixel art counterparts, but there were a few animations where we used a 2D animation tool to help add a few frames in between to make things look extra smooth. >Initially, we had considered using the animation tool’s auto-fill feature to fully create the animations, but when we actually tried it out, the animations it produced didn’t look right at all and felt really off. After a lot of trial and error, we eventually settled on the process we did. In the end, I think our final animations have the same slightly imperfect, human touch that regular hand-drawn animation tends to have. >However, looming overhead was our final deadline, and had we wanted until we finished designing all of the characters before getting started on their animations, we would have never made it. So we decided to start creating each character’s animations as soon as their design had been finalized instead. >And then, as we fell further and further behind schedule, and it became harder and harder for us to complete more than a handful of the line art drawings, I began to wonder if we had any hope of finishing on time... But everyone on the team fought hard, and we pulled through in the end somehow. And the team also tried to algorithmically automate the animation by computer instead of doing everything manually. When they did settle on doing everything manually, they nearly ran out of time before the deadline. While we're on the topic of 2D animated games, may I bring your attention to Toki Tori/Time and Eternity, a low budget JRPG on the Playstation 3 that sought to animate the characters in the game with digital cel and paint animation. Once shat on for being "weebshit shovelware," I find it wryly ironic to look up gameplay vids and see them inundated with comments gushing about how they saw footage on Xitter and how it was a hidden gem unappreciated in its own time. >>1078049 >>1078068 >>1078058 It's supremely embarrassing to admit, but I wanted to start a metroidvania general for months after Ender Magnolia came out but never got around to it.

>>1078074 >Time and eternity What the fuck? I remember seeing that game on store shelves and vaguely recalling someone saying it was one of the worst JRPGs. I had no idea it looked like this. Now I wish I had gotten it when it was new. I mean sure the 3d backgrounds makes it all look kinda weird but this is very unique. >>1078068 I am going to try ender lilies as soon as I can.

>>1078075 >I am going to try ender lilies as soon as I can. pic rel

>>1078025 Funny enough I know a friend in game dev who made such a game. Didn't do to well though.

>>1078074 >Once shat on for being "weebshit shovelware," I find it wryly ironic to look up gameplay vids and see them inundated with comments gushing about how they saw footage on Xitter and how it was a hidden gem unappreciated in its own time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_Eternity <The Digital Fix gave it a score of four out of ten, saying, "Rather than the suave, impressive chat-up line it could so easily have been, Time and Eternity instead sashays up to feminism and blurts 'I like your boobs' like Seth Rogen's menacing delivery in Donnie Darko. It could be a misjudged line but it's not attractive and it's not funny. It's just plain creepy."[35] Slant Magazine gave it a score of one star out of five, saying, "This clumsy attempt at RPG matchmaking throws together a super-casual dating simulation with a sluggish battle system, framing the whole thing with a story that never stops wobbling between the serious and lecherous."[34] Anime News Network gave it a D−, saying, "Time and Eternity's attempt at playing anime falls to ruin at every possible juncture. Hoping to fuse games and animation into a revolutionary RPG, it instead picks terrible ingredients from both worlds. It adopts the random-battle drudgery and routine questing of a mediocre RPG, plus the juvenile storyline from a low-budget TV series that only the most ardent fans would watch beyond the first commercial jump. It's anime, sure enough, but in the worst way."[33] You don't hate journos enough.

>>1078046 I liked the look of Ender Lilies, but it was too stiff for me to really get into.

>>1078033 I hate tweening and rigging. For the most part they look terrible.

what about rayman origins/rayman legends?

>>1078123 oh wait that's ubisoft

>>1078062 >I am not even sure how to record on the switch. long-pressing the screenshot button on the left side of the controller or left joycon.

>>1078197 You are clearly on panel 3

>>1078124 doesn't stop it from being a decent platformer

>>1078025 Tales of Destiny Director Cut had some nice sprite work >>1078076 >>1078075 Maybe i should give a try despite disliking playing as a girl

Also, I know its recent drama has made it less attractive, but (pirated) (old) Skullgirls honestly has pretty great 2d animations

>>1078209 It still has I just wish it wasn't censored. Skullgirls is exactly what I want more of in the industry but the idiots decided to censor themselves.

>>1078217 The original creator was kicked out unless he also self-censor himself and i don't remember

>>1078209 This IP was to powerful and a threat to the powers that be. Same with Senran Kagura or DoA.

>>1078224 So powerfull they are still trying to kill them even further like with removing fan content of DoA

>>1078025 Old SCUMMVM point and click games are woth a look for you perhaps.

There's also an old animated adventure game called Another world that has highly animated scenes. I unfortunately haven't gotten around to playing it more than a few scenes after the intro. I'm mentioning these in particular because the pixelation was more of a limitation for the developers rather than an artistic choice. If they had the possibility of doing higher resolutions than this, they would have. Case in point: Putt-Putt and Spy Fox yeah i know they're babby games

>>1078245 >>1078244 I wish I had the brains to play point n click games. Everytime I have attempted I get stuck and can't figure out where to go.

>>1078244 >>1078245 I'm not sure you actually red OP's post. >No pixel art. I am sick of it. I want 2d animation

*read

Do games like this count?

>>1078250 Is this HMOFA? Either way, Yes this counts.

As for modern games, well... I recently found this western porno VN called "Life in Woodchester". The art and animations are a bit iffy at times, especially at some bits at the start but its a much better experience than most of the other wester H-games out there. The scenes have quite a bit of movement to them and the humor/writing is not bad either. And all of the main stories are fucking complete, which is a miracle in itself Do note that I didn't enable sound or music, so I don't know if that ruins the experience or not. It's out of habit. Feel free to get rid of this or move it if it doesn't fit the thread theme.

>>1078247 I gave my reasons in >>1078245 .

>>1078247 Another world and monkey island are pixel art. Putt-putt though is weird. Like it is slightly pixelated but my brain doesn't register it as pixel art. I am not sure why.

I know it's MMO shit but i really like stuff from Dungeon and Fighter

There's also Mad Rat Dead.

>>1078255 Another World had a remaster that isn't pixel art, if OP wants it. Cinematic platformers are kind of outdated though, they were the 80s/90s equivalent of games like Uncharted and a lot of the same criticisms can be applied.

>>1078217 >It still has I just wish it wasn't censored https://moddinghaven.com/mediawiki/index.php/Skullgirls_mods

>>1078357 I am looking at a longplay of it and it looks really weird. I am kinda liking it.

>>1078260 This is a game I can easily recommend. Same for the Yomawari titles from the same publisher

For being a glorified series of quicktime events, Brain Dead 13 is a fitting tribute to Dragon's Lair/Space Ace.

>>1078123 origins is much better than legends.

>>1078258 me too

>>1078082 The only vaguely positive review is Famitsu and 32/40 from Famitsu is their version of American 7.5/10 "this is certainly one of the games of all time", so I will just go by the definitely objective and totally universal opinions of the 2ch games board and game catalog wiki ranking it as one of the most kusoge of 2012. Basically if you just look at 10 seconds twitter clips it might look okay (you still need pretty fucking low standards given the animation looks like a random throwaway episode of some low budget LN adaption) but if you actually played the game you'd realize it's super cheap with far too few frames of animation so that all kinds of shit just isn't even animated and it has barely any different enemies. Those reviews aren't even just Americans getting mad at anime, the Japanese script is the kind of insincere ecchi schlock that people think Nep games are but really aren't and even they generally consider it unfunny and vulgar. Of course the actual game part fucking blows too.

>>1078025 Play Reverse Collapse

>>1078025 There's also Astlibra, though you can tell that the dev used a lot of free assets. Some of the art, like the character portraits, are good since one of the Vanillaware artists helped him out.

Apotheon had a pretty neat 2D style, being based off of Greek pottery, but the combat gets pretty tedious since it feels like it wants to be M&B on a 2D plane

>>1159404 I love this game unironically. Very colorful and bouncy animation. Felt really good to play too. Too bad the devs gave up and left the story mode unfinished then shat out a half-assed DLC pack full of broken characters. It's also impossible to discuss this game because /v/ rejects it for being ponies and /mlp/ rejects it for not being ponies and everywhere else rejects it for being a furry fighting game.

>>1078260 Love this game too. Great music. Controls are hard to get used to but once you get into the rhythm it becomes a lot of fun. The story is a bit basic but nearly had me in tears at the end. The switch version emulates very well.

>never ever It hurts.

>>1161060 >OP asks for non-pixelshit >posts pixelshit

>>1161105 Apologies, anon. I saw Metal Slug and I thought it was ok. >pixel shit Unironically kill yourself, though.

>>1161663 All Lauren did was design the character and write the lore and story. Then the devs retconned the lore and threw out the story and postponed development for a year due to covid (while still paying themselves). The animator quit after their publisher fired everyone else, leaving Baihe's animations unfinished.

>>1161829 >Then the devs retconned the lore and threw out the story Wait really? What happened? Also, is that why the story mode is a never-ever?

>>1163108 I don't remember the specifics but there used to be a page on their site with the lore Lauren cooked up that they noted was no longer canon. The story mode got cancelled because the devs were lazy and incompetent.

>>1158283 >the character portraits, are good since one of the Vanillaware artists helped him out. Interesting. >>1159404 I thought that was just fans, not an actual animator for the show.

>>1078036 Is Metal Slug really pixel art? Like, the actual sprites looked fine on actual low res CRTs aren't you basically asking for high res 2D spriteS? Like from Blazblue

Anyone else interested in extracting the sprites from Unicorn Overlord I love the sprites, it's a real damn shame they're stuck on a game with no replayability

>>1078082 I admit this looks boring as sin. The bosses seem like punch out style fights with a wierd angle but the moment to moment gameplay looks very unsatisfying outside of that. Knowing the slop i touch though id probably still play it

>>1174747 Fans made a pony fighting game. Then hasbro cancelled it. Then the devs paid lauren to make new characters.

>>1157718 I love it. The missions were so long.

>>1175622 Are prerendered low-res sprites pixelshit if they were originally meant to look higher res through the magick of CRTs? Asking for a friend.

>>1078025 normies think 2d is easier and cheaper looking than 3d so it will never happen.

>>1254343 Shovel knight's sprites weren't made CRTs in mind.

>>1078025 I think the issue is that 2d is seen as more "primitive" and lower quality than 3d, so big companies view 2d games like a 30 year old car. As for why 2d games have pixels, pixels are easier to make than drawing, and you can also apply to nostalgia by going "see??? this is like the NES games!!"

>>1078025 there are some ones I remember having good 2d art top of my head 1. PVZ: you raise sunflowers so you can "water" them, and stop zombies sometimes. 2 and 3. forgotten anne: trully forgotten, a nothing burger game that had cartoony artstyle that looked really nice. 4. cuphead: fun relaxing easy game with disney artstyle. also check out its sequel, cockhead. 5. nearly every game by daedlic entertainment's main team. my recommendation is the breakout.

it doesnt help that when 3d came out, for a few years 2d was relegated to really shitty shovelware category

>>1078247 >>No pixel art. I am sick of it. I want 2d animation I mean, those old point and click adventure games CAN still apply... but... I don't think he's going to like it. How the fuck do you come off of King's Quest VI, one of the greatest adventure games of all time - then look at the Zelda CD-I games and say THIS IS THE FUTURE OF VIDEO GAMES! I get that CD technology was all the rage, believe me, but holy shit what were you thinking? Roberta Williams was a hack who always got the bulk of the marketing and budget because she was sleeping around with the CEO of the company to be fair, they were married. KQVI only ended up being as good as it was because Jane Jensen co-designed it before going on to create Gabriel Knight. Roberta then decided to show up Jane by completely imploding the KQ franchise with VII and the disastrous not-even-King's Quest "Mask of Eternity" because "muh Tomb Raider". Meanwhile her husband was busy getting literally CUC'd out of his own company.

>>1078025 The big issue is that pixel are is really good for player, NPC, and enemy sprites. If animated sprites are as high resolution as cartoon cells then you need 24 frames for every second of animation. Compare that to lower resolution sprites which might have between 2 and 5 frames per action. And depending on how "sprites" (actually usually compound sprites) are stored in the actual code different pieces of each frame might be able to be reused for different actions. Basically it's not a money issue, it's a time and effort issue. Really high res 2D sprites look nice but for a lot less effort and much the same effect you can make a 3D model with a shader that makes it look like cell animation. Unless you're doing something special like what Cuphead was doing mimicking golden age cartoon animation, it's kind of redundant. It's like movies where the director brags about them being done in only 5 continuous takes. It's impressive but they could have accomplished the same thing with normal film making. It's basically a parlor trick. >>1078027 Like this is really nice but if it had been a 3D model it would have ended up basically the same with hardly a noticeable difference.

That being said 2D painted backgrounds can look amazing with both pixel art or 3D models provided they share the same art style and you match the resolution.

>>1157718 I was 100% sure they used Spine like they did for Girls Frontline, but can you actually do animations like in the 2nd webm with just spine? Wouldn't you be practically doing character rotations frame-by-frame?