Square Enix’s HD-2D style lets classic games be themselves

polygon.com:

Nintendo and Square Enix’s remake of the cult 1994 role-playing game Live A Live is one of the more interesting reissues of the last few years. Mostly, that’s due to the source material itself. Live A Live, which was previously never released outside Japan, is a sort of portmanteau game, a playable Cloud Atlas that spans a number of bite-size scenarios from prehistory to the far future, taking in Imperial China, the American Wild West, and Edo-period Japan along the way.

It’s a fascinating curio that takes the format of 1990s Japanese RPGs to places those games didn’t usually go — not just in terms of the varied and colorfully cliched settings, but in terms of its loose, parallelized, nonlinear structure. It’s not always successful, but it’s clearly readable as a kind of eccentric, experimental rehearsal for director Takashi Tokita’s ensuing masterpiece, Chrono Trigger. That, in addition to its previous inaccessibility to most Western players, makes it a very worthwhile release.

Live A Live is also interesting because of the vehicle Square Enix chose for the remake. The game has been remade in “HD-2D,” a kind of style template within Unreal Engine that Square Enix created, alongside developer Acquire, for 2018’s superb retro RPG Octopath Traveler. Square quickly saw the potential in HD-2D for both new releases and rehashes; it has since been employed for the new tactics RPG Triangle Strategy, while a remake of the venerable 1988 classic Dragon Quest 3 is underway.

Clockwise from top left: Live A Live, Octopath Traveler, Triangle Strategy, Dragon Quest 3

Put simply, HD-2D places 2D, pixel-art sprites within 3D environments that mimic the look and feel of classic, hand-drawn backdrops while allowing for smooth camera moves