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The story
A thread on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (Geha) board asked how far game graphics should go in chasing realism. It kicked off with a thread title mocking the current obsession with rendering every single strand of hair and every ripple of water reflection. The thread split into two camps: one arguing that the more photorealistic a game gets, the more jarring it becomes when the game still can’t do things real life can — killing immersion rather than building it — and the other arguing that realistic textures are exactly what deepens immersion. The debate went on citing examples like the visual gap between Monster Hunter World and Rise, and between the old Resident Evil games and the new ones.
What people said
That's rough.
Seriously rough.
Ah, so that's why.
Space baldy 👈 (an old meme about sci-fi game characters being rendered bald to save on hair-modeling budget)
So the reason for the 'space baldy' look was to save on polygons lol
That stuff matters even in anime-style graphics, you know.
They're literally saying they hand-planted the arm hair strand by strand.
Has it really come to that even for anime-style games?
Both Re: #1 and Re: #11 are talking about hair — nobody was talking about arm hair to begin with. What are you even saying?
"Basically photorealistic!"
Old-school otaku used to say real women feel too 'raw' and 2D is better — but times really do change, huh.
Or maybe it's less otaku wanting realism in anime characters, and more the cosplay-photographer crowd (カメコ, guys who shoot cosplayers)?
That's not hair though.
So modern anime-style game development spends more effort on arm hair than head hair?
I genuinely can't understand that priority list, or whatever values produced it.
Exactly this.
Once the graphics alone go photoreal, you just get more and more moments of disappointment over things you can't do that you could in real life.
Even while you're fully immersed playing with photorealistic graphics, the instant you hit a "wait, I can't do that?" moment, you get yanked straight back to reality.
If that's how it's going to be, you're better off starting with decent-but-not-photoreal graphics and just filling the gaps with your imagination — you can accept it as "well, that's just how this world works."
Game development really needs to confront the photorealism problem head-on.
The whole appeal of games is being able to do things you can't do in the real world.
And realistic graphics — realistic-looking people and objects — only deepen that immersion further.
Go ahead, rebut me.
This exactly.
I started Monster Hunter with World, cleared all the way through beating Fatalis, and that's exactly why I dropped Rise partway through.
After World, playing something with Switch-level graphics just killed the immersion completely for me.
Rise's sound effects were also weak, and the combat had zero sense of impact.
Really drove home how much graphics and sound design matter in a game.
You should actually play the PS5 Patlabor game before cracking jokes like that.
Only a tiny fraction of the character models are real 3D polygons — most characters are just cel-shaded standing portraits.
All the Labors have identical stats, so the battles are monotonous as anything.
It's supposed to be a nostalgia trip reliving the anime, aimed squarely at middle-aged fans, and this is the state it's in.
You gonna keep calling that a 'kids' game' too?
Though honestly, this is coming from someone who's probably never bought a single full-price game in his life, so who knows how much it's worth.
So you're saying PlayStation is nothing but old folks? Guess that just means no new users are coming in — that's the current reality, huh…
Garbage graphics:
Girls'-anime art style:
Down the line, DLSS5 will probably be able to do the reverse too — make current games look like Virtua Fighter 1's low-poly models or Virtua Fighter 2-level polygons.
Video generation itself is already possible now, so it'll definitely be usable for that eventually — probably via a mod, though.
That's just a holdover from the era when games sold purely on graphics — nobody actually wants it anymore.
These days there's no game where great graphics (visual fidelity, not art design) erase a bad reputation for the actual content.
That side's just as trapped by sunk cost — it'll end up exactly like MMOs in the end.
It's not just the modeling — the visual direction, the UI, everything about it together just feels generic and interchangeable now.
The PS1-PS2 Resident Evil games had real personality, even down to the menu screens.
Resident Evil 1-3 had fixed camera angles too — partly a technical limitation back then, but it gave the games real flavor.
I think it's less about graphics per se and more about the creators' sense of style.
Same studio, Capcom, put out a new Onimusha too, and it's completely lost everything that made the original Onimusha good.
AI video generation has come a long way. You can already generate high-quality anime purely with AI without breaking Akira Toriyama's character designs, and reproducing an 'in the style of ___' look is easy now.
Background and key points of this debate
Console 3D graphics have advanced year after year, and there was once a time when polygon counts and texture memory limits made it standard to skip rendering hair altogether (the thread’s “space baldy” reference is a relic of that era). Now, real-time ray tracing and improved shader technology can reproduce individual strands of hair and reflections on water, but that comes with rising development costs and more visible “seams” in the illusion. The thread split between those who see photorealism as boosting immersion, and those who argue that the more realistic a game looks, the more its limitations — like not being able to climb a fence, or not bleeding when hit — stand out as unnatural. That commenters brought up the visual gap between Monster Hunter World and Rise, or the old Resident Evil games versus the newer ones, shows that graphical direction isn’t just a matter of raw technical superiority — it’s tied directly to how a game’s overall experience is designed. A point readers often miss is that “better graphics” doesn’t equal “sells better”: anime-style and low-poly games still have a devoted following, and photorealism is just one of many possible artistic approaches.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “The hair! The water reflections! So realistic! ← Just stop playing games and go look at reality lol.”
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