The kind of graphics you see mostly in mid-90s point-and-click adventure games and platformers is my favorite. If you were born in the 21st century, you don't remember the good old days I'm nostalgic about. When someone tells you an old game has "soul", they probably mean something like that. Below I'm posting picks from my big collection of screenshots I got mostly from Moby Games. The whole collection is just 50MB and you can grab it here.
I didn't want to resize them, so be advised - yes, they are that tiny. If you want to resize them yourself, remember to use nearest neighbor resampling method or they'll get blurry. I wanted to post maybe 30 screens, but there's just too many.
My all time favorites are Legend Of Kyrandia 2: Hand Of Fate, Lands Of Lore 2, and Perihelion, which is a true work of art. I looked into obscure Japanese games for the PC-98, X68000, FM Towns etc. and I can say with a certain dose of certainty there's only a handful of good looking games for those platforms. The vast majority of those are really damn ugly hentai visual novels full of blue-haired women with eyes on their ears.
This is delightful!!! I absolutely have come to love pixel art since getting into wplace and i have a ton of silly pixel goobers, unsure if its exactly what you are after but hey! figured id tax my appreciative post with something
PC-98 dominates in pixel art, especially if you're into 90's anime visuals. SNK and ArcSys have a history of beautiful pixel work. Might as well get it out of the way and post Metal Slug ones people have usually seen. Guilty Gear also has some nice pixel work, but I think a lot of it is just the art style.
Seems to be pixel art in general. In the Hunt and Ninja spirit appear in the collage and they're both arcade games. Speaking of IREM, undercover cop has some good pixel art.