Atmosphere is made by details: for example weather (including fog), time of the day, lighting, ppl mood, depicted actions, music, etc. It should be possible to recreate it in any style.
I partially agree, atmosphere is enhanceable and a good one can be achieved in many styles...
But if you were to reproduce this famous impressionist oil painting:
with photorealism or anime style... setting the same atmosphere, even by controlling the variables you mentioned, would be a horizon more than an attainable goal. Though,
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when IA turns it into photos:
-- Not that bad!
I'm 99% sure that the original author started using paintings not bc he wanted, but bc there wasn't any anime alternative in the same setting.
If you mean the author of JONT, he was indeed using a bit of everything for the background. Sometimes japanese VN styles
, others are western 2DCG
. It's one of the many weird quirks of this game that are endearing, and accidentally fit the "chaotic chaos of the multiverse's crossroad" which is the setting for Eternal Rome. No matter the backgrounds, NPCs like this
or this
never seemed to stick out from the environments to me.
Then for v2.0 I was tasked by Powerairmax to do a complete overhaul of every single background. I wasn't set on a style in particular, but western 2DCG was indeed more available and their concepts looked the most like what the lore was demanding. But I didn't "settle" for western painting compositions, I simply took what we found was best.
About blurry details, it's actually common to every backgrounds and many 2DCG on the internet. In real life, the background can appear blurry too, and so do moving faces in a crowd (if you recognize the same individual's face from the crowd every time you go to a quarter, it's uncanny, as a player; makes the image appear still and dull). That's quite important to the atmosphere. Though I get it's hard to work with if the IA can't make up what it is, still, it's not a lack of quality but an artistic intent, which happens to work well with backgrounds of JONT you end up visiting so often.
Nonetheless, I'm just giving a piece of my mind here, maybe it'll be helpful, maybe not. You retain full artistic autonomy over what you want to do.
Edit: the point I was trying to mean might not be clear. In short: I find your goal commendable (homogenization of art style across the whole game). But you sometimes seem to believe that the content present in the game currently (or before) was selected out of bad tastes or lack of means; I feel the need to try to make you aware of the strengths of what is currently in the game, so that you'll be able to offer strong replacements that tick every boxes of what the previous content conveyed, without the artistic shortcomings which are an inherent threat to remakes/overhauls.