What gaming visuals blew you away at the time of their release?

[Lone Wolf Leonhart]

Games like Wind Waker and Okami come to mind. It's like walking through a watercolor dream when you see them.

[Vyk]

The Last of Us is what immediately springs to mind. But I'm currently getting back into Xenoblade Chronicles, and every time I fire this game up after an extended intermission, I'm always surprised at how beautiful it is. And for such a low res/low poly game. And it's draw distances are insane. Like, you can see things, that you won't be able to get to for 10 to 20 hours later. And there will be towns and mountains and forests and oceans in between. It's crazy. And from what I gather, XenoChron X is shaping up to follow in those footsteps. Can't wait to play it

[Bolivar]

Final Fantasy VII and X, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Ground Zeroes, most recently Advanced Warfare.

Last generation was hectic with how it felt like a PS3 game kept raising the bar every six months. MGS4, Killzone, Uncharted 2, God of War 3, Heavy Rain, up through to The Last of Us and Beyond.

[Pheesh]

Final Fantasy X was a big one for me. It was one of the first games I played for PS2 and was definitely the best looking game up to that point, I remember being in awe of how good it looked. God of War 3 was amazing as well, but I was expecting that more I think.

More recently, some of the Skylines in Destiny left me speechless, that game looks absolutely amazing.

[Pumpkin]

Xenoblade and Xenosaga

[krissy]

okami is a good one

last of us

half life 2

[Pike]

Anything on the N64, you can laugh now but it was a big deal at the time

[I Took the Red Pill]

The jumps from PS1 to PS2/Xbox and from PS2/Xbox to PS3/360 were pretty mindblowing. Early PS2 games that look like ballsack now were incredible, though I can't think of any specific examples. For the latter jump, I remember being in a store and seeing someone play the demo of the Call of Duty 2 campaign and being absolutely floored by it.

[Mirage]

Ff8 man. And ff10. And also Battlezone in 1998

[Jinx]

FFX. I was 11 and I remember being, "OH MY GOD IT LOOKS SO REAL."

[Old Manus]

Anything on the N64, you can laugh now but it was a big deal at the time
Word up


I remember thinking the Pokemon Gold and Silver graphics looked ultra sharp. I also remember Holy troutting pretty hard at this:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgYGvjUHKkg

[blackmage_nuke]

Any FMV in FFX with water was amazing.

[Rocket Edge]

FFVIII, FFX, Uncharted 2, FFXIV:ARR on the PS4. :}

[Ergroilnin]

Definitely FFX for me. I was like uhh what... 9 yo at the time (now 21), I still remember how we drove to faraway city just because the person was selling his PS2 really cheap at the time along with some original games, FFX included. The same day I played like an hour or so of the game and I was literally speechless of the graphics, my parents had to force me to shut down the game so I could go to school the next day. Those were the times.

[Mirage]

maybe i'm just weird but i wasn't really impressed the games by anything pre-rendered after I had gotten used to them in FF7. The CG was impressive in itself, but i never considered it to be the game's graphics.

[Wolf Kanno]

I feel Xenoblade is the only right answer here, mainly because the game continued to floor you throughout the game, unlike other visually stunning games where it's obvious all the hard work went into making the first few hours of the game as engrossing as possible and the rest of the game kind of became more muted. Xenoblade though, kept on delivering until the very end, I remember finishing the Guar Plains and thinking the rest of the game would never live up to that point and just being floored time and again by each new location.

I think Ico is the other game that impressed me immensely in terms of visual, largely because it showed how great lighting and camera work can make something visually unimpressive look amazing. Wind Waker is also visually stunning though screenshots don't do it justice, you have to watch it in motion to see the detailed work that went into it.

[Rin Heartilly]

FFVIII
I remember seeing the cutscenes while playing when I was 9yo and my jaw would drop each time. Stunning graphics for the ps1.

FFX and KH 1
Gorgeous graphics, not many other titles could compete with the visuals around it's release

Valkyria chronicles
It looked like a watercolour painting brought to life on the screen.

[Slothy]

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are high on the list. Particularly SotC. Seeing some of those Colossi is awe inspiring. Then you climb them.

[Loony BoB]

Skyrim.

[Jowy]

Super Mario 64 blew my innocent child-like mind out of the water.

[Del Murder]

Anything I've played by Naughty Dog, particularly Last of Us and Uncharted 3. Also MGS4 and FFXIII were my first PS3 games and they blew me away. FFX was the same way on the PS2.

[Tigmafuzz]

I think Black on PS2 was the first time a game's graphics made me say "whoa" out loud. That game really looked insanely realistic at the time.

[proseprincess]

Ookami and El Shaddai were simply gorgeous to look at. And the story for Ookami was pretty amazing. Those two really flawed me when I first played them. Hmm, also, on the 3DS, Bravely Default's hand drawn towns are beautiful too. Especially when they zoomed out. I get a feeling that a lot of love was worked into that scenery considering the hardware.
Another good one would have to be Vagrant Story, for the technology it had to work with, the angles and lighting were like a dream

[Sephex]

Just seeing the Super Nintendo in action for the first time. Yeah, I know I have my nostalgia goggles on, but nothing will ever top that feeling for me.

[Rez09]

I remember . . . having this reaction to Super Mario RPG. I know better now, but at the time I was like, "WOW! It's in 3D! This looks AMAZING!"

I also remember the FMV's from FFVII getting the same reaction from me, though not so much the in game stuff.

[metagloria]

FFX, FFXIII, Xenoblade, and mayyyybe Chrono Cross.

Oh, and freakin' Crisis Core! What a gorgeous game for a handheld system.

[The Man]

I may be weird, but I can't remember being floored by any games at the time of their release, maybe because I didn't get around to playing a lot of the most graphically impressive games until long after they came out. The best looking SNES games (Chrono Trigger, Seiken Densetsu 3, Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario RPG, Super Metroid) I didn't get to play until long after they came out. Same with the best looking PS games (Chrono Cross, FFIX), and in fact I played FFVII so long after it came out that its graphics were no longer impressive to me. Even FFX I played a few years after it came out due to not having a PS2 at the time. Despite that, though, all the games I listed in parentheses did impress me graphically.

Oh. Yoshi's Island! That's a rare example of a gorgeous game that I played when it came out. I'm still amazed that they were able to pull those graphics off on the SNES. Wind Waker, too. I never got to finish it, but I did get to play several hours of it on a friend's GameCube and it was stunning.

Someone buy me Xenoblade so I can marvel at it thanks.

[Bolivar]

Metagloria reminded me - Killzone Mercenary on the Vita. The first thing I did was load up was a bit match on Blood Gracht from Killzone 2. I couldn't believe I was playing a PS3 multiplayer map at seemingly the same fidelity on a handheld, and visceral gameplay to boot.

[Leigh]

The original Metal Gear Solid. The cinematic realism was so unique at the time. =)

[black orb]

>>> FFX had that Wow effect.. If you compare FFIX and FFX graphics it was a giant leap..:luca:

[Ayen]

I remember being blown away by FFVIII's graphics coming out of VII when I was little. I second MGS2. They were smart waiting to put the sequel on next gen, it paid off a lot.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

The first game I can immediately think of is Donkey Kong Country. I'd never really seen anything like that in a game, and I still think it looks pretty snazzy today.

Final Fantasy VIII was probably the biggest wow moment for me. Sure, the characters in game didn't look so great, but that opening cinematic was something else. I also quite liked the background visuals throughout the game.

X-2 was another. I mean, I remember getting excited for X as well, but it didn't have quite the same effect as VIII did. X-2 started out like X for me in that the cinematic that was included with Unlimited SaGa really blew me away. However, the in game stuff really got an improvement in my mind. Characters (particularly Rikku) actually showed emotion on their face even outside of the snazzy cutscenes.

[Loony BoB]

Oh, forgot to say earlier, but the final cutscene in Lightning Returns had me legitimately unsure for a moment if it were just real life video footage or not. It became obvious a bit later but damn, that was jawdroppingly good.

[DrAssenov]

Oblivion - at Camoran's Paradise
Skyrim - at Sovngarde