this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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I mean... You might not like the art style of nintendo games, that's fair. But to say that psx was superior is simply untrue.
Things like the turok series, jet force gemini, goldeneye, perfect dark, ocarina of time, and even mario 64 were impossible to run for a psx. Sure, psx used some loss cartoonish style for many of their games, but in terms of polygon count, or graphical quality, n64 was far superior even if the graphic style was more cartoonish.
I mean... Ocarina of Time??? It's a great game with great gameplay and Nintendo deserves a ton of credit for it, but it absolutely could have run on the PlayStation. There would be load times of course, but that's a different conversation (I would also expect the audio of a theoretical PlayStation version to be way better). Maybe they would need to put some fog in Hyrule field to account for worse draw distance. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver came out in-between Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask and I would say it looks better than either. I would say Majora's Mask is still, far and away, the best game of those but not because of its graphics.
It's not that I don't like the art styles of Nintendo, it's just that I consider art style and graphics to be seperate. Paper Mario looks great, but not in a technically impressive way. I could bring up games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night which is still one of the best-looking 2D, sprite-based games of all time. It still looks great, but I call that an artistic achievement, not a technical one. I could also bring up Silent Hill, which famously uses the PS1's lower draw distance brilliantly. Once again, that's an artistic achievement, not a technical one.
Medal of Honor is a boring game with a dull art style, but from a technical perspective comes pretty close to those other shooters. I also mentioned Resident Evil 2 where the PS1 version competes with those other shooters quite well, and the contrast against the N64 is quite noticeable.
The arguments for the N64 are all theoretical. Like, if only developers were willing to put in the effort and publishers were willing to have larger, more expensive cartridges then of course it would produce better results. But it didn't. Maybe if the 64DD had taken off they would have used that space for better textures, but it didn't and the few games that did come out for that peripheral didn't take advantage of it.
Technically the Saturn was more powerful than the PS1 as well but barely anyone even remembers that console existed. The graphical results were marginal differences at best going both directions.