RUMOR: Vanillaware Games Getting HD Ports

According to 1up, the developers of Odin Sphere and Muramasa: the Demon Blade have reported that those games may get high definition ports sometime in the future. This makes sense given the nature of both games and comments that their director made last year.

The only source for this report is 1up’s own unspecified contacts within Vanillaware – more than one, so this information is still unconfirmed. The main detail is that the HD ports will be downloadable, but 1up’s sources didn’t specify any platform. HD ports however probably mean the PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Arcade.

Vanillaware’s games with their detailed, high resolution 2D graphics are ripe for a release in high definition in an era where games like King of Fighters XII, BlazBlue, and a heap of downloadable sidescrollers exist on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Vanillaware itself has already implied that this might not even be very difficult or expensive.

Odin Sphere and Muramasa director George Kamitani commented on the resolution of his art assets when Gamasutra asked him in August 2009 about the possibility of making an Xbox 360 or PS3 game. “Well, the original art we draw is all done in double-size — in the case of Muramasa, the animation frames then get compressed down to the Wii’s native resolution,” he said. “As a result, producing a fully HD title would not be a great deal of extra work for us; it would just mean our original art is displayed in higher resolution.”

Another advantage of porting the games to the more powerful consoles would be the opportunity to fix Odin Sphere’s rampant framerate issues.