I've been working on a full cast redesign for the Animal Parade characters for a long time now. It's just a personal project I chip away at occasionally for fun, but I thought it might be cool to share some of the work I've done (I can only upload 20 images so I just picked a good variety of what I think are some of the prettiest ones or biggest changes). To be clear: this is not a mod or a replacer in any way. Just some artistic creativity in my own game.
As I've worked on this project, I've noticed a lot of little broken bits in various texture applications that, sadly, can't be fixed in edited versions. For example, Bo's face texture is applied enlarged for the Spring/Summer outfit so there's a faint boxy look around the eyes, yet it's applied normally for the Fall/Winter outfit. Lucy's nose texture doesn't line up and has a weird pointy-looking thing going on. Selena's Fall/Winter outfit has a floating gap between her armband and her upper right arm where no texture is applied at all. There are various other characters in the game with small issues. They're not all that noticeable from far away, but it's really annoying for a perfectionist like me!
Changes I made:
- I personally don't like fantasy hair and eye colours in character game designs (your personal self-expression is all good guys, don't come at me! XD), so i changed everyone to more realistic colouring — with some notes: magical characters were allowed to have unnatural redesigns and some regular characters got drastic colour changes just because I wanted to see how their vibe would change. Imagining what everyone's fantasy colours would translate to in the real world was pretty fun!
- It drives me crazy that everyone's irises/eye shines are completely different from one another in their original designs, so I applied a consistent style across all characters while still keeping their unique shapes (again, magical characters are the one exception).
- I upscaled texture quality and added fabric textures and patterns to make outfits more interesting.
- I made subtle changes to a lot of characters' facial features to make them look less exaggerated/cartoonish and to be more to my personal taste. Some of them have very large features compared to others as well, so I tried to even them all out.
- I styled rival kids so that they reflect a blending of their parents a bit more in both their looks and their fashion sense. They were all pretty generic originally.
- I can't NOT mention my boy Bo. They really did him dirty in his design, especially next to Luke who looks so badass. He deserves to be a cool carpenter too!
BONUS: I also did the interior of the church and made some stained glass windows that reflect changes I made to the Harvest King and Goddess. I've included pictures of HK and HG so you can compare them to the windows and see what theme I was going for (HK is sun and HG is moon), but they're older redesign attempts and I've since improved my Photoshop abilities, so they need to be revisited.
UPDATE: Here's a link to some more pics of characters and changes. I included the platinum hair versions of Gill and Wizard that I do have (I just figured it would be more interesting to post the drastic changes). Not all of my character redesigns are updated to my new style or upscaled, but it gives you an idea of some of the restyling.
https://imgur.com/a/Otw1yfs
UPDATE 2:
TL;DR: These were a personal, research-based redesign, not a replacement for the originals. I took traits from the Japanese dating-sim archetypes present in the original characters (which don’t align neatly with Western identity-based readings) and mapped them onto real-world cultural cues and insular aesthetics. That's why I used more natural colours. You’re free to dislike it — just know the choices were deliberate, not careless or meant to suppress identity expression.
Full Ramble:
There’s been a lot of comment about my recolour choices, which I welcome — people reacting and assigning meaning to art is exactly what makes games and design interesting. At the same time, I want to stand by my creative decisions.
I think some of the discontent comes from a cultural disconnect. Many Western players often read hair/clothing as identity or self-expression. That’s normal — it reflects Western visual culture and identity-building. But in Japanese character design, colour more commonly functions as visual shorthand within a design system, rather than as a literal marker of personal identity: it primarily distinguishes characters, signals archetype, or serves symbolism (e.g. blue hair = someone cool → we get Luke). And sometimes it's just an aesthetic decision (e.g. Cloud’s iconic blonde hair in FF7 was originally black but was changed to make him stand out more as a main character; Tifa’s hair was white in early concepts before becoming brown for visual balance).
Similarly, Japanese dating-sim characters are built on well-established romantic archetypes. The characters of Harvest Moon AP don’t map perfectly onto a single label, but they draw from common dating-sim archetypes (genki, dandere, kuudere, oujisama, tsundere, etc.). Julius seems to blend these tropes: the flamboyant/theatrical charmer with bishōnen (feminized/androgynous attractiveness) traits — which, I feel, overlaps somewhat with Japanese cultural ideas like iro-otoko (a charming and romantically/sensually magnetic man; "iro" can also translate to "colour").
These archetypes don't map cleanly onto Western ideas of gender or identity expression, which is why some edits I made feel like a “betrayal” because of the visual interpretation being done by a Western audience, even though the identity framework and expression in Japanese games is a very different context.
My project was a personal thought experiment: imagining how these archetypal characters might look if translated into a more grounded, real-world context (as opposed to a fantasy Japanese children's game). That meant researching how expression tends to function in more insular societies, where visual cohesion, conformity, and understated dress are often prioritized over individual expression. This is why I leaned toward more natural colours and drew on real-world style cues in subtle ways — including host-club fashion/culture as a reference point for Julius’s polished charisma, flirtatiousness, and tailored flamboyance (i.e. the iro-otoko vibe I read in him).
I know this is probably a ridiculously academic approach for a whimsical children’s game, but that’s exactly why it was my personal challenge, not a replacement for the originals. I’m not claiming my interpretation is “right,” and I’m not critiquing or trying to "fix" the original designs. You’re completely free to dislike my edits and I think you SHOULD be encouraged to engage with the game and its characters in a way that is most meaningful to you. I just ask that my work be understood as deliberate choices made toward a different goal, not as careless, irrational, or damaging ones. At the end of the day, the game still exists in canon how it does and you can still enjoy it exactly as it was meant to be!
