but also, of course, lots of indie games aren’t really going for retro authenticity at all. sometimes you just like pixel art or low poly 3D and you’re doing your own thing with it without trying to specifically emulate what an old console could do. sometimes you just like that visual language

one of them is an aversion towards mixing pixel art with illustrated character portraits and whatnot. if you look at the 32-bit era tons of devs were eager to start mixing downscaled illustrations with pixel art all over the place. portraits, level art, you name it. this was never a hard rule