How is this not AI?! The redraw absolutely smacks of that style, not to mention the cannon arm is obviously meant to imitate a milk can which the redraw mangles. The rockets are supposed to be udders but the two we can see most clearly don’t match in construction and the other two seems to sprout off of another one. These errors carry over to the full render. The udders are a pixelated mangle of perspective in the original, but this point is absolutely missed.
Above the leg is also a weird split. You can see in the original this is a weird artifact of pixel shading, but it’s been rendered into an actual split in the material in the redraw and renders. This is a valid design choice I guess, but to me it’s an indication of how the AI misinterpreted intent and someone reviewing it didn’t catch or care about it.
The funny thing is that chasing photorealism is expensive and difficult and not always the right solution. A lot of time stylized, cartoony graphics can be a better option, and I’m even willing to buy that it could’ve worked here, too.
But they went with this bland, generic, flavorless toon style. This is “marketable” but clearly lacks any distinct artistic vision that could set it apart from any of the other shovelware slop these days.
I set up a library of dozens of my favorite PSP games in Emulation Station and just scrolling through them you can see how they have all wildly distinct styles but still form this kind of coherent vision of what Sony was like back in the late 00’s, early 10’s. I miss that …