As I'm revisiting the game assets across multiple versions for my mod, it's amazing to realize how much Ocean has not only reworked, as we know, but often doctored and, dare I say, butchered, some of his renders for the Season 1 release, by applying some blur effect on Photoshop to hide background elements he wouldn't want to show anymore, for whatever reason, instead of re-rendering the shots. It had happened on a limited number (maybe a dozen) of shots between Chap 4.5 and Chap 5 Beta releases, but the amount has increased dramatically between the latter and the official Season 1.
They may not appear to the untrained eye but side-by-side comparison is cruel. It is also creating many continuity errors as this "doctoring" would not be consistant and some shots would be altered while the next ones would not. Even worse, there's been a couple of re-rendering dones until Ocean realized he had enough of it, and decided to blur subsequent shots instead to accelerate release time...
It happens particularly in ZPR college and the coffee shop, among many random places...
Let me give you a few examples.
Before (Chap5 Beta):
After (Season 1):
Here you might think "ok he erased the intertwined snake and leaf emblem but you wouldn't know, no artifact to be seen". Correct. How about this then ?
Before (Chap5 Beta):
After (Season 1):
Notice the leaf artefact near Nami's hair, or near her left arm?
And this is not, by far, the worst example. All images showing the snake/leaf emblem or the leaf on its own have been altered in a similar way to blur them out...
Talking about continuity errors, how's this? He removed the leaf emblem from the podium in the auditorium, as evidenced here :
Before (Chap5 Beta):
After (Season 1):
But other shots featuring the same podium have been left unaltered !
Here's an example of "let's re-render these shots...oh wait no, takes too much time, let's blur the others"...
Focus on the lettering of the Coffee-shop name...
Before (Chap5 Beta):
After (Season 1) (re-rendering):
Before (Chap5 Beta):
After (Season 1) (blur):
There's even an example of a blurred shot (see below) where MC is even referencing what's written on the banner, while we as a player can't even read it anymore !!
scene c139 with dissolve
d "(ZRP... I wonder what that stands for.)"
Before (Chap5 Beta):
After (Season 1) (blur):
All of this "badly-doctored" artwork is evidence of a final release that was getting on his nerves, he clearly didn't want to spend additional time to get it out there. But as much as I love the game myself, and bought it on Steam on day 1, I feel this is truly a disgrace to what his game stands for in terms of render quality. I'm not questioning how valid these changes may or may not be, it's his game and he must have his reasons, but how poorly it was executed. It's even worse than that: have a look at the lake scene of topless Nami, and focus on the beer cans shots (I won't post these renders, too many already). See how some of those are re-renders where the snake logo has been replaced with the leaf (why?), but in other shots, the snake is still visible but blurred out?
All of these undoctored shots will be restored in the upcoming newer version of my mod, for those who care about such things.