At their biggest and most expensive, video games all sort of look the same. The reason often comes down to simple economics: More resources means more costs that need to be recouped, and historically the way publishers have done that is by being comically risk-averse. Hence the glut of semi-realistic rocky wastelands that look like death metal album covers where everyone is some kind of Wild West fetishist, or the hero shooters that all look like Pixar but shredded as hell and ready for fan artists to go places I shall not.
On occasion, however, new visual ground is staked. Octopath Traveler 0 is an example of this. The third game in the Octopath series is a lot of things — a newcomer-friendly prequel, a reconfigured adaptation of a mobile game, a pretty great JRPG — but it’s also the end of a 2025 victory lap for the art style that publisher Square Enix has dubbed “HD-2D.” It’s a bold experiment that is now a fixture of the release calendar — and also highly unusual in how much it communicates. An HD-2D game from Square Enix is a statement about what old games it considers classics worth revisiting, and what new games should be received as such.
“The HD-2D style began with the idea: ‘What if we revived games from the Super Famicom, the golden era of pixel art, using modern technology?’” Masaaki Hayasaka, producer of this year’s Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake, told The Verge via email. First used in 2018’s Octopath Traveler, the art style is meant to evoke the pixelated texture and feel that characterized 16-bit role-playing games like Final Fantasy VI, but with the depth and detail afforded by modern 3D graphics. The developers at Square and Octopath co-developer Acquire cleverly achieved this using Unreal Engine, which allowed them to render — and, crucially, light — Octopath like any modern game, placing 2D characters that looked ripped from a CRT screen in a world designed to look great on a modern screen. The hope was that, as a new role-playing franchise debuting on the then-new Nintendo Switch, Octopath Traveler would immediately be seen as both thoroughly modern in its design, but also classic in a way that courted nostalgia-prone gamers.
It worked. After the sales success of Octopath Traveler, Square Enix trademarked the “HD-2D” name (but not the style), a signal of commitment to its new aesthetic paradigm. Then a funny thing happened: The next two HD-2D games from Square were not Octopath sequels, but the tactics RPG Triangle Strategy and a remake of 1994’s Live a Live, one of the most highly acclaimed Super Famicom RPGs to never get an official English-language release. Both released in 2022, these games are where HD-2D stops becoming a novel quirk and more of a design ethos for the publisher. An HD-2D game either seeks to be the ultimate pastiche via original titles like Octopath, distilling an era’s worth of hits into a crisp new package, or it is a loving re-creation of a game that deserves a new day in the sun.
“There lies an opportunity to create room for the imagination, which is unique to the pixel art style”
The pattern holds: Octopath and its sequels continue to be the only original HD-2D titles in the SNES-era JRPG style, with Triangle Strategy holding down the tactics game end and next year’s The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales seeking to do the same for Zelda-style action RPGs. On the remake front, Square Enix has released Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake with great ceremony, following last year’s take on Dragon Quest III. (The backward release order reflects the order Square prefers players play them in.)
In both contexts, HD-2D has largely been a hit with critics — or at least, critics predisposed to playing the games they all lovingly homage. “It’s a gorgeous style that goes beyond a pure retro look to create something timeless,” writes Polygon’s Oli Welsh in praise of Live a Live’s use of the style, “an extension of a classic ’90s video game aesthetic into the present, which deepens and enriches it whilst staying faithful to its original character.” Many reviews of Octopath Traveler or its sequel call the games “beautiful” or “gorgeous.” Square Enix’s stated goal of pioneering a visual language that does the tricky work of being nostalgic and modern at the same time seems to be a resounding success.
“Perhaps some players may view games with pixel art as something old,” said Octopath Traveler 0 producer Hirohito Suzuki, who also spoke to The Verge via email. “But there lies an opportunity to create room for the imagination, which is unique to the pixel art style — and there are no limits to one’s imagination.”
Of course, there’s a fun little cheat here, one that the Octopath developers noted when describing the development process for a 2019 Unreal Engine promo video. It’s that the HD-2D look owes just as much to PlayStation-era titles like Xenogears and Grandia as it does the Super Nintendo games, making the style a much wider synthesis (and perhaps less novel) than it is frequently billed as. That is, however, no reason to sell it short — Square continues to demonstrate surprising variety with its HD-2D titles. According to Hayasaka, understanding how much leeway the HD-2D approach affords is crucial to its successful implementation.
“The definition of HD-2D is actually very simple, and if you create characters and monsters as pixel art and place them on top of a 3D background, that alone technically works,” Hayasaka said. “Of course, this alone wouldn’t capture the HD-2D-like quality, so from there, you’d sort everything from the color palette, effects, and camera to firmly create that ‘atmosphere that feels right.’ That’s incredibly important and is the crux of HD-2D games. So, I believe the secret to success for any HD-2D project lies in having an art director who could grasp that feeling and sensibility.”
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