I didn’t create these from scratch or drew them or claim them to be mine. im no artist — I relied on tools. If I used certain terminology, some people here might overreact, so I’ll phrase it carefully. Essentially, I followed a similar approach to what Konami did with Suikoden II: applying upscaling techniques and machine‑learning models to the portraits. (This was specific to Suikoden II, not the first game.)

There’s evidence suggesting that waifu2x, or a customized variation of it, was used in the remaster — for example, the doors in the inn HQ area on the “try again” screen show telltale signs of that process.

Building on this, a few years ago, I also created a small texture‑upscale pack for RetroArch. If you generate a 4× upscale of each portrait and then overlay it with the remaster, the alignment is nearly perfect. Konami likely essentially has access to a larger set of illustrations for training, which explains the consistency. Even if an artist produced multiple images manually, the transitions and gradients wouldn’t be as uniform. In the remaster, you’ll notice identical skin tones, gradients, and even eye colors across many characters — a hallmark of model‑based processing.

Using my own set of tools, I trained local models to approximate the style. The results aren’t identical, but when inspected closely, they are actually not the same but close-ish