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.

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.”

The original HD-2D efforts like Octopath and Triangle Strategy are ironically the least visually expansive, hewing to similar muted color palettes and papercraft diorama-like staging. Colors make or break these games, as overreliance on any one range of shades will threaten to flatten the planes and jeopardize the illusion of depth. These shortcomings are made up for by astounding visual crescendos where light illuminates a scene in a way that feels frankly impossible. The remakes are more colorful. The Dragon Quest games are downright maximalist in a way that barely bothers to evoke pixelated landscapes, leaning more on the “HD” side of “HD-2D” and the strength of Akira Toriyama’s distinctive character and monster designs. They create an opulent backdrop for the simplicity of a master cartoonist’s work, and the result is equally, if not more, affecting.

“Even under the umbrella of HD-2D, none of the five titles released so far look exactly the same,” Hayasaka said. “There are countless ways to broaden the changes made between them, from the color palette to how much of the pixels’ grainy texture you bring out. That’s why I believe it’s an expression method that still has plenty of room to grow.”

“Timeless” is another word that’s used a lot in relation to HD-2D, in a way that speaks to its success and carefully considered deployment. The aesthetic is one born from insecurity — the developers at Acquire initially wanted to make a classic 2D pixel-art game, but were worried that it wouldn’t be seen as sufficiently modern. That conflict is one of the core tensions of video games, the push and pull between artistic expression and technological progress. Art is a moment captured in time, of the time it’s made even if poised to transcend it.

Games, however, are also tied to their technological moment, and technology can be embarrassing. Pixel art smudged to hell by 4K monitors, dialogue rendered oblique or childish because of memory limitations, music made for limited sound chips awkwardly filling 5.1 surround sound speakers. More than most other art forms, the makers of games must decide: Should limitations be preserved, or forgotten? Are compromises made for tech’s sake enduring artistic choices, or temporary acts of pragmatism?

The beautiful delusion of HD-2D is in thinking that there might be a way to craft a perfect version of a game that can survive the ravages of time. A way of rendering a game that is reverent to the past but not embarrassing to the future. Flattering to the history of games but also our modern sensibilities, which prize convenience and ample “quality-of-life” features. There is, however, no escaping these questions. We will age and change, as will technology and our relation to it. It is beautiful to try and transcend this, and it is beautiful to fail, as most of us will. Video games all look the same, until they do not.