Before and after: rain, night and cloth

Before and after. Each shot starts in the PS2 look, at the original 640×448 and 30 fps with hard pixels and no anti-aliasing, then wipes to the enhanced look in 1920×1080 widescreen at 60 fps. Shots: the opening on the bridge, Amakaze by day and at night, rain on the shop eaves, and a Sayo cutscene.

The "PS2 look" here is the demake's own renderer set to the original's resolution and frame rate, not a capture from a PS2 or an emulator. It shows about 7% more width than the original's 4:3 view.

Rain

• Drops are long, thin streaks smeared by their fall, leaning with the wind, and there are nearly twice as many.
• Water runs off the roofs. Streams leave the eaves at fixed places, bunched where the gutters gather it, and break into drips with splashes below. A faint mist falls off the eaves and spray slides down wet roofs. I built it after studying footage of heavy rain on a tin roof.
• Amakaze no longer rains all the time. Its map was stuck on "always rain"; weather rolls per day and time of day again.

Night

Night streets used to go black in the enhanced look. Relit ground now keeps the light the game painted, and the late-night grade no longer crushes the dark. Night Amakaze matches the PS2's brightness, with moonlit clouds and a cooler tone on top.

Cloth

Shop curtains and banners measure the real space in front of and behind them, so they never swing through closed doors or walls. Cloth with no room stays still.

Combat

• Shattered swords throw shards with real thickness.
• Way of the Samurai 1: pushing in a sword lock shoves the opponent back, as in the original, instead of leaving them in a normal guarded swing. The stick reads any lean toward or away, as the original did.
• Way of the Samurai 2's parries and guard breaks checked against the original and working.

Fixes

When you're arrested, you and the jailer no longer spawn inside each other. A script-engine bug made every placed position in a scene share one point. It touched 55 scripts, most of the shops among them.