Reminds me of old visual novels, but back then they used to use a "cartoonizer" filter to make it look kinda drawn even though they were obviously photographs.

Well, it's cheaper I guess. I think when it's done well it looks pretty good. I think you need a degree of direction for it to look like it's something that adds to it instead of a budget thing. As a concept I don't like it since it blurs real life and fantasy, but I guess it's okay if it's stylish enough.
As the other post said it does remind me of VNs, too, although circumstances for those were a bit different.

If you think about it they're kind of time capsules. Imagine watching this show in 30 years and seeing how the areas from the pictures have changed.
I just remembered the endings of Strawberry Panic always had fashionable real girls doing different things in different clothes. It's a bit odd, but as endings for a Yuri show it kinda works.

It was cool when Sarazanmai did it but I've grown a bit tired of it now. It looks better when they place real life objects in 2D instead.

I'd typically take it as a way of adding some realism to the setting, by showing the characters 'existing' in the real world.
Whether or not that is a good thing though depends on the series - with something like Yuru Yuri that plays very fast-and-loose with reality, it does come across as a bit out-of-place to me.

>>132892
>Reminds me of old visual novels, but back then they used to use a "cartoonizer" filter to make it look kinda drawn even though they were obviously photographs.
so it wasnt just higurashi

canNOT believe no one's mentioned karekano although i doubt they were specifically influenced by it rather when doing a hybrid 2/3d vid just moving the camera around is an intuitive way to get some measure of action
>>132897
>Sarazanmai
looking back at this one it's mega barebones, just still copypasted sprites standing in place while funny moving shapes and a bit of swaying do the heavy lifting
>>132901
you could say it was an eyesore

for me, it doesn't really bother me, you can find the same style of "real but with an amine" from jap artists or even russians i came across a thread once, and something like the makeine ed with its godly beginning and then quickened choppitty choppitty footage, they're heavily stylizing the 3d itself rather than just putting stuff on top of it and i think it they pulled it off quite well

>>132901
The VNDB tag for it is 'photographic backgrounds' (g433). There's 1758 of them listed on the site, or 858 if non-Japanese games are excluded. Tsukihime is another notable one.

>>132960
holy flipperoli

>>132891
Looks cool to me. That's probably why

>>132997
lol