Do you know what soul is?

Left: Old-Com
Right: NuCom

>Soulful bad game.
Quest 64
>Soulless good game.
The entire new super mario bros series.

>The entire new super mario bros series.

Excellent choice for soulless good game.

Quest 64 is pure soul.

You mean Downpour, surely?

this thread = soulless

It is now since you posted in it.

Zig Forums is a Zig Forumshristian board.

I thought this was Solidus Snake, from the thumbnail, in some kind of fantasy setting.

>Soulful bad game.
evergrace
>Soulless good game.
demon's souls remastered

>Soulful Bad Game
Hollow Knight

>Soulless Good Game
Phantasy Star Online 2

Winner

Kinda feels weird that going for more realistic anatomy is considered an improvement. The one on the left is a more solid piece in everything but the background. The right one doesnt even look like its wearing a metal armor, those reflections are mor similar to some rough plastic

>Soulful bad game
Most of Suda's catalog.
>Soulless good game
Someone already mentioned the later NSMB entries, and that is the best example.

he got better at the fundies but used his improved technique to do absolutely nothing
somehow the 2002 drawing has more detail

Deadly Premonition
MK11

Soulfulness is a matter of art direction, and theme and a whole.
Being good or bad is a matter on whether the game functions mechanically or not.

Most Indie games (emphasis on most) could classify as a Soulful bad game, because they are not made for money, but because of passion, they don't care about being "good", they want to at the very least be interesting.

Triple A titles, however, want to make money, they don't really care about being original or pushing the medium foward, they want to sell, usually to the lowest common denominator, though sometimes you find a gem of a game.

That's why most old games have "soul", because most of them were made from a bunch of guys in a shitty office, just wanting to make something cool. Now everything just has to sell, and be "modern" and fit in with the rest so that it doesn't get weird looks.

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>The generic How to Draw Manga book art style that plagued early 00's Deviantart is now considered unique and soulful
This was as embarassing at the time as the right art is now, I can't believe we've circled back around to liking that shit again.

You're looking at it the wrong way. Very few games are done purely for artistic purposes, indie or otherwise. Few people can spend two or three years of their life working on a piece of software without worrying about monetizing it.

AAA makes money by casting the broadest net possible. They have to play down anything that might alienate a certain player base, which is why they have homogenized controls, art styles, character designs, and constantly share features like skill trees and open world maps. It's the business model, you can't make an anime girl dungeon crawler with a budget in the millions because you have a team of hundreds of people who'd be taking a hit.
Indies are the opposite, they need to attract a cult-like audience or they become lost in the endless sea of shovelware because their marketing comes from word of mouth. You need the roguelike fandom, the 8-bit nostalgia chasing audience, whatever group you end up targeting. You have more visibility in a small pool and it takes something like a strong art style or good music to stand out against the more amateurish projects. Their "soul" is a necessity.

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>Their "soul" is a necessity
Damn, i actually was looking at it kinda wrong, it makes sense that they HAVE to stand out, i guess my feeling could have come from survivorship bias, there really are a shit ton of indie shovelware.

It also kind of surprises me how a game like Death Stranding, for example, even made it out of the drawing board considering how weird it was for a AAA title.

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>Soulful bad game.
UNLOVED
>Soulless good game.
Path of Exile

>Soulful bad game
Dragon's Dogma
>Soulless good game
Dark Souls 3

>This was as embarassing at the time as the right art is now, I can't believe we've circled back around to liking that shit again.
It was a more innocent time. I genuinely long for the days where some weeb with an idea would just make a comic about the stuff he liked without shame, instead of all the corporate-owned overproduced stuff we have now. I'll take low quality genuine heart over twitter/CEO-approved stuff any day.

To be fair I didn't mean that no games are done with passion or artistic intent.
In both the AAA and indie space you can find so many people that genuinely care about games and I think most teams are honestly trying to do their best with what they got, even something like the Crash and Spyro remasters that Zig Forums cries about you can see how attached to these games and worlds the art directors on the project were. It's why Soul tends to be a bad word to describe things. Assassin's Creed has members of the team trying to reconstruct Ancient Egypt as faithfully as possible who're doing insane amounts of research, which shows a real dedication to their work and a level of care despite being an annual blockbuster series. Vib-Ribbon is weird and niche as fuck but started out development as a commissioned car advertisement.

It's just that you gotta balance out your own creative ambitions with the needs of the game as a product. Not everything can be a little personal project like Yume Nikki or Dwarf Fortress that happens to find an audience through a stroke of luck.