Naah.

I think I’ll show you some comparative screenshots to prove a point that likely doesn’t need a strong argument anyway.

Firstly, let’s start with games from this year. Red Faction: Guerilla, and Borderlands. Borderlands is obviously very cartoony, whereas Red Faction was going for the more common photorealistic look. They both look good. Of course they do. They’re both brand new. But how will they look to us in another five years? Ten?

Let’s look at some older games for perspective.

Both Okami and Tomb Raider: Legend came out for the Playstation 2 in 2006. By this screenshot, they both look pretty good, although I feel that the full-motion cartoon graphics in Okami really would make this example stand out more than it does in a still shot.

Both Psychonauts and Jade Empire came out in 2005. At this point, you can really see that an attempt at photorealism that came only five years ago really looks dated compared to Uncharted 2 or Resident Evil 5. Psychonauts, in contrast, looks like exactly the same cartoony image it always has. It simply holds up better. Click on the image for the big version. You’ll see.

Lastly, let’s go back more than a decade to 1998.

The cartoon images in Grim Fandango sometimes look a big jaggy, but overall they look good. Take a look at poor Eli Vance and Dr. Kleiner in the shot on the right. There was a big leap in graphics between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, wasn’t there?

Yes, my point didn’t really need any proof. But here’s the proof.

Recently, I fired up the copy of Okami that’s been sitting on my shelf for months, gathering dust and cat hair. After the initial half hour of text-reading, when the game actually started, I was completely shocked at how good it looked. This is a Wii game, ported from the original Gamecube version – it’s not running on one of the consoles known to be graphics powerhouses. So why does this game look better than any photorealistic game I’ve ever seen? Because it’s not shooting for photorealism.

Okami looks like a cartoon. Not like a videogame. Somehow, the game manages to look like a really well done hand drawn anime. And whereas achieving true-to-life photorealism is still beyond the grasp of the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, or even high-end PCs, achieving cartoon-realism is doable. It just hasn’t been done in any game other than Okami.

“Cartoon-realism?”, I hear you say, “What the frell is that?” What I’m getting at is that normally you can tell when you’re looking at a video game and when you’re looking at a cartoon. You can tell which is which. But not with Okami. And the notion that a video game that looks like this is not only doable, but is doable on a last-generation console, is very exciting to me. Maybe we’ll see more.

Some of my very favorite games have been games that haven’t even attempted photorealism. Look at Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It’s a Nintendo game, of course, and Zelda’s art style has always been a bit cartoonish. But how about Psychonauts, another of my favorites? Not only is the art style in Psychonauts not photorealistic, I’d actually go so far as to call it anti-realistic. And I’m eagerly awaiting a sequel to Psychonauts at some point in the future.

The announcement of Beyond Good and Evil 2 thrilled me – it’s probably my favorite game of all time. But I feel very conflicted over the decision to make the game photorealistic. When I see Pey’j, I don’t want to see a freaky-looking realistic man-pig. I’d much rather see the friendly lovable cartoonish pig I grew to love, and cuteness somehow eludes a realistic pig-man.

When I played Uncharted, I enjoyed it. But the graphics annoyed me. Even in dark scenes, many characters and terrain elements had hints of shiny white highlighting, a side effect of the engine, I’m sure. And when I played Far Cry on the PC, back when it was considered a graphical masterpiece, the characters’ faces disturbed me. I remember commenting in my review of the game that the female lead had a bad case of TFP – Too Few Polygons – with the result that she looked mannish.

So although video games right now have chosen to take the road to photorealism, passing through uncanny valley and turning left at the corner of 3DEngine and OnlineCoOp, I’ll continue to appreciate those games that eschew photorealism for a style better suited to video gaming.

EDIT: Brandon pointed out to me that the original Okami was not a Gamecube game – it was a PS2 game. Oops!