Making the most basic, rudimentary 3D models and calling it Retro PS1/N64 "aesthetic" ain't fooling me.
As someone who started with the NES as their first game console and watched console gaming evolve in real time, THIS. I see so many games that claim they're a "Retro PS1/N64-style game!" and then trot out some PS2 level graphics, or just straight up shitty models. If you're shooting for PS1, I want jaggy polygonal heads with detailed yet crunchy, compressed face textures, chunky movement animations, etc. Same goes for the N64. That shit better look blurry/smudged, but designed to make it look soft and dreamy or colorful and detailed because you took advantage of that to give the model lots of shading. And if I can't *see* the polygons, you did it wrong.
As a bit of an extension to this, I am so fucking sick of "8-bit styled retro games!" that are ridiculously detailed with a million colors. Go play an actual NES game and then come back to me and claim that system could run the 64-bit technicolor light show that is your game. Most of these are at *least* 16/32-bit games that would have needed a Genesis/Megadrive or SNES to run, and the number of games that claim an 8-bit aesthetic that throw it all the way back to the Atari is wild. I've seen only a bare handful of games that managed to capture the NES aesthetic of limited color palettes, with big, detailed sprites and basic movement.
Essentially, a lot of people who are making "retro style" indie games have no idea what the old consoles they're trying to emulate were actually like. They've either gotten their idea from *other* indie games trying to ape the style, or only ever seen pictures of classic games. That or they played a bunch of retro stuff via emulation and swapped around generations too much to the point that it all blended together into an amorphous memory blob consisting of way too many traits from different consoles that their brain just says is "8-bit."
If you really wanna make a retro style game emulating a specific console, I suggest spending a month or two playing a bunch of games *specifically* from that console and taking extensive notes on what they looked like, what kind of limitations they had, how they controlled, etc. I'd also suggest sticking to one visual style to emulate. Gex: Enter the Gecko is a far cry from Resident Evil or Final Fantasy 9/Chrono Cross. Games with super high-res models and detailed textures tended to have pre-rendered backgrounds to allow for more processing power to render them. Horror games with more realistic proportions on their models had to use low-poly models to achieve fully functional limbs and hand animations and such. Mascot platformers used detailed player character models but a lot of simple environments, flat planes, and low-poly enemy models/textures with lots of draw-distance fog to allow for as much colorful, whimsical visuals as possible without killing the console.
Basically, stop saying you're making a retro console style game when you have no idea what those games were actually like and why they were technically impressive. If you're not talented enough to create modern high-res models and fall back on polygonal characters so you can create a fun game, just call it a stylistic choice, but stop saying you're making a PS1 game, and if you tell me your game is 8-bit and I see a rainbow of colors with tons of particle effects I'm going to mock you viciously.
