discussion What's everyone's opinion on reskinning VNs.

[bfster]

There are a lot of high quality VNs with pretty shitty art (or at least an art style that doesn't match my aesthetic).

With the advent of self-hosted diffusion models it's now possible to automatically reskin these VNs. Now obviously I'm not talking about reskinning someone else's work and trying to make a profit off of it but what do people think about this generally?

 

[Schizo169]

Depends mostly on what you lose. I wouldn't mind, in some cases I'd probably find it a good thing; however there have been very controversial cases (Roundscape: Adorevia comes to mind, even though most people think quality dropped in that case).

 

[AlBetGam]

There are some games with art so bad it seriously degrades what could otherwise be a great game. I don't really have an objection to those getting a reskin.

Then there's others where the art isn't great but it's good enough for the game to work, and I think redoing those with AI would be godawful- at this point there's so much AI imagery and so much of it looks so identical that imperfect but manually rendered stuff is far more exciting.

 

[GustavoGustavo]

I think shitty renders should be left alone cause honestly it's a good indicator of quality

 

[kc4sk4yk2]

Im getting pretty tired of seeing the generic AI images that most games end up using. I know AI can be used to augment already rendered scenes and I think Im fine with that

 

[gganderson]

There are some games with art so bad it seriously degrades what could otherwise be a great game. I don't really have an objection to those getting a reskin.

Then there's others where the art isn't great but it's good enough for the game to work, and I think redoing those with AI would be godawful- at this point there's so much AI imagery and so much of it looks so identical that imperfect but manually rendered stuff is far more exciting.

Do you have an example of good games ruined by bad art? Ive only found bad/boring games, saved by great art.

 

[AlBetGam]

Do you have an example of good games ruined by bad art? Ive only found bad/boring games, saved by great art.

I wouldn't say ruined exactly- a good game can often do well in spite of subpar art, and most bad games have deeper problems than the art- but held back at least.

Off the top of my head, I think of Kingmaker. It's not the worst art out there but it's pretty weak, and I do think it hurt the chances of a game that otherwise had a lot going for it (desite some other flaws).

Way back when Harem Collector was one of the first H-games I played; I remember the initial art was pretty awful until they switched styles and/or artists later. I remember enjoying it a lot because the context and writing made the scenes enjoyable but I do think better art from the start would have been a huge boon.

Once upon a time I liked Starship Inanna; good example of "much deeper problems" but I also remember thinking even at the time that the characters looked stiff and inorganic.

Corrupted Love is another example, the game has other problems but looking back a lot of those early renders especially are pretty rough.

Etc.