Final Fantasy Dev Baffled by Nostalgia for PS1's Low-Poly…

Final Fantasy developer Koji Sugimoto is baffled by the widespread nostalgia for PlayStation 1-era graphics. He said as much in a recent social media post, which saw him recall how his team used to work extensively to minimize various PS1 visual issues that many players seem to miss nowadays.

Sugimoto is a gaming industry veteran with 20 development credits to his name, starting with visual effects programming for the original SNES version of Chrono Trigger from 1995. His portfolio includes work on Final Fantasy 10, Final Fantasy 10-2, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7, and the PSP exclusive The 3rd Birthday. He also contributed to three titles for the original PlayStation console: Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, and Threads of Fate.

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15 PlayStation 1 Games With Graphics That Have Aged The Best

From amazing platformers to scintillating stealth games, there's no denying the library of the PS1 was truly immense. Many still hold up well today.

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By Ritwik Mitra

Chrono Trigger Dev Worked Hard to Minimize PS1 Texture Warping Players Seem to Miss Nowadays

Sugimoto recently revealed he does not understand the nostalgia for PS1-era graphics, characterized by low polygon counts and various visual artifacts. He linked his view to his own industry experience, prompted by a recent Unity Japan tweet about a new engine feature that replicates PS1-style texture warping. Sugimoto recalled that such distortion, caused by hardware limits, was once a constant headache for developers and something his teams actively worked to eliminate or at least minimize. "Back then, we spent so much futile effort trying to avoid distortion, and nowadays people call it 'charming,'" Sugimoto wrote, as first spotted by Automaton West.

Compared to its successors, the original PS1 console had some major hardware limitations that severely impacted its ability to render graphics. Among them is the lack of a depth buffer (sometimes called the Z-buffer), a kind of memory that helps a console determine which surfaces should be visible and which should be hidden behind others. Without it, developers had to manually instruct the console in which order to draw each polygon, the two-dimensional shape that forms 3D objects.

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What Is PS1-Style Texture Warping?

As a result of this GPU design, the PS1 relied on affine texture mapping, a rudimentary method of applying images (textures) to polygons. While fast, the technique does not adjust textures for the distance of each corner from the camera. This limitation was the primary reason why some objects in select PS1 games could appear warped, wobbly, or even “swimming” across surfaces when viewed from certain angles.

Back then, we spent so much futile effort trying to avoid distortion, and nowadays people call it "charming."

Carefully controlling polygon draw order reduced major visual glitches but did little to address texture warping. Developers used several methods to limit the effect, including subdividing polygons, aligning textures to reduce stretching in edge cases, using flat shading, restricting camera movement, and even cleverly pre-distorting textures so that the affine mapping distortion would actually correct them. Most of these techniques were highly time-consuming, which is what Sugimoto was referencing as a "futile effort" when questioning modern nostalgia for PS1-era graphics.

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