Sometimes MidJourney is better at some things than others. Anything Japanese-related MidJourney tends to do really well on. Apparently, it does really well with Castlevania screenshots. If you don’t know Castlevania was a game on the Nintendo Entertainment System that was well-made and a classic. Let’s make a few scenes but instead of setting it in the 1700s in Europe, let’s set it in Ancient Greece.

Prompt: clean pixel art, greek temple with statue of zues, style of castlevania 1986

It’s great for concept art, but you can tell that there are a few areas that would need to be ironed out. Let’s try it again add the –quality 5 parameter as well as make the aspect ratio 4:3 like an CRT TV.

Prompt: clean pixel art, greek temple with statue of zues, style of castlevania 1986 –quality 5 –ar 4:3

Version 3 is the best, let’s make some variations.

Version 3 is the best again. Let’s upscale it

The detail of the statue came out quite nicely. Again, this is great concept art. In order to make it game ready some of the colors might have to be changed as well as some of the artifacts would have to be fixed. Either way, it’s a great result.

Let’s make another one. This time we’ll have a shot of the Minotaur in the catacombs. Another classic Greek mythology scenario. It’s also a setting for a Castlevania game set in Ancient Greece.

Prompt: clean pixel art, greek catacombs with the minotaur, style of castlevania 1986 –quality 5 –ar 4:3

Well, not minotaur but version 3 looks awesome. Let’s make variations and upscale it.

Version 1 looks the best. As you can see there are lots of artifacts. While I’m pretty impressed with the result. MidJourney does have a ways to go with pixel art.

When you upscale an image MidJourney spends more time on the details. This looks a lot better. Far better than the 4 variations we had before.

Let’s try one more. What would be a game set in ancient Greece if there wasn’t a trireme (ancient Greek boat)

Prompt: clean pixel art, greek on a trireme, style of castlevania 1986 –quality 5 –ar 4:3.

I think MidJourney doesn’t know what a trireme is. Let’s change the language and see what happens.

Prompt: clean pixel art, greek on an ancient greek boat, style of castlevania 1986 –quality 5 –ar 4:3

Version 2 is the only one that kind of looks like a trireme. Let’s make variations of it. If MidJourney doesn’t have a lot of sample images of triemes, then it doesn’t know how to put them together. Chances are there are a lot more pixel art boats from pre-1900 that MidJourney is taking samples from.

I think version 1 is the best. Let’s upscale it and see what happens.

This is a great upscale. The upscale photos are much better than the variations. I would say that the pixel art rending engine is not as good as it could be and this makes sense because there isn’t enough source material to take from. It has to do a lot of extrapolation to make this image. However, I do find the fina renders to be quite good. I’m looking forward to coming back this style of art at another point in time.