This is primarily a game review site, but I get burned out by that pretty much every December and start wanting to do something else. Then someone sends me a nice email or something and I end up back in the swing of things. This December, however, my traffic doubled for no obvious reason and people started buying things from my Amazon affiliate links. Not enough for me to afford a Batcave or anything fancy, but very possibly enough to pay for hosting if that momentum continues. And since most of those sales come from a page where I compare different gaming products and not the half-thousand reviews I’ve written, I suppose it can’t hurt to lean into that and continue talking about gaming-tangential products.
That brings us to the Mclassic. The successor to the mCable that antialiases and upscales HDMI signals, this thing upscales, antialiases, and sharpens the image of anything fed through it. I’ve seen an enormous amount of mixed information on this thing. The marketing blurb on the back of the box claims that it’s like giving your console a new “graphics card” (and yes, it’s in quotes). That’s stupid marketing nonsense. More importantly, some Youtubers swear up and down that it makes a huge difference, while others have struggled to see any improvement whatsoever. Does this thing benefit a Switch? Let’s find out.
First, an ad for mClassic so that I can test out more gadgets
How these videos were captured, uploaded (and why)
All of these videos were made by capturing video from my Nintendo Switch running at 1920x1080 using an Elgato HD60 with all the settings cranked to their maximum values. Since I only have the one HD60, I captured the before and after video separately, manually crawling through animations in both videos to find identical or near-identical frames that could be compared, which I then exported as lossless PNGs and added to the 3840x2160 timeline for direct comparisons. All of the videos were exported to 4K without any additional processing to provide the highest-quality video for the sake of these comparisons. Each video begins with a video of the unprocessed signal, and then a video of me trying to do all of the same things with the mClassic enabled. At the very end of each video, there are screenshots that should help you to notice the small differences that get lost in the motion. Taking stills was a surprising amount of work.
Anyway, the mClassic can technically upscale to 1440p, but mClassic creator Marseille Inc’s video of Fire Emblem: Three Houses running at 1440 looks similar to mine (possibly worse, even), proving that the additional upscale either doesn’t do any extra processing or isn’t worth the effort if it does. I’ve also seen some people claim that the mClassic excels when your switch is set to 720p because some games render at, say, 900p, but you’ll see that the antialiasing excels at eliminating small jaggies while leaving bigger ones intact. Lowering the resolution increases the size of the jaggies. Besides which, 900p upscaled to 1080p will always look better than 900p downscaled to 720p and then upscaled to 1080p. A 900p signal has more detail in it than a 720p signal does, and no tool could ever bring that detail back. Period.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (verdict: it’s okay)
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is the first game up, and it’s a game that suffers from some pretty serious aliasing issues. Many of its jaggies are handled admirably by the mClassic, most noticeably those on the characters, but the grass suffers from so many jaggies that having them all fixed gives the screen a kind of mushy look from the amount of stuff being fixed. Overall, it aids the look (and the mClassic’s sharpening adds a little bit of clarity that I found pleasing on menus), but I don’t love the way it looks on the grass, and there’s a lot of grass in this game. It looks fine, but I’m not crazy about it either way.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (verdict: pass)
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a very stylized game, and I really thought that having its sharp edges smoothed out would result in a better look, but I have to be honest: I hated the mClassic on this game. The effect is subtle a lot of the time, but I think that the crispiness of the aliasing is an important part of Breath of the Wild‘s visual identity. I preferred the look of the loading menus with the mClassic on, but it robbed the visual style of that certain je ne sais quoi everywhere else. Some people may disagree.
Super Mario Odyssey (verdict: nice to have)
Unlike Breath of the Wild, the aliasing in Super Mario Odyssey never struck me as being an important part of its visual style. Instead, it (and the dithered transparency effect) was a constant irritation, so I’m glad that the mClassic smoothed out those rough edges. This game’s visual style can be busy enough that it becomes difficult to see the effect, especially if you’re not watching the video at 4K, but it mainly smooths out the tiny jaggies on things like Mario’s clothing and Bowser’s jaw. The sharpening also increases the clarity of objects in the distance slightly, which is another thing that I ended up liking. We’re talking about a very subtle effect on this one, but I prefer the look of Super Mario Odyssey with the mClassic enabled.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses (verdict: essential)
The excellent Fire Emblem: Three Houses is where the mClassic truly shines. Basically, this game is made of tiny jaggies thanks to it having no in-game antialiasing whatsoever, and having these smoothed out while the sharpening increases the contrast between colors (which aids the cel-shaded art style in a big way) makes for such a dramatic difference that it’ll be incredibly apparent even at 1080p. Even if you’re not in full-screen, even. Portrait art and 3D models all benefit from the processing. The only thing I don’t like is that the rare pixel art (mostly seen on loading screens, but also used to represent unit classes) gets processed and starts to look smudged. But that’s a small price to pay for such a massive improvement.
Fire Emblem Warriors (verdict: could take it or leave it)
I always feel stupid whenever I load up Fire Emblem Warriors, only for the opening video to show off characters from the abysmal garbage fire that is Fire Emblem Fates like they weren’t a massive mistake that veered way too far into anime stupidity, but that’s a rant for another time. Like March 2016. Never forget.
My unending hatred of the apocalyptically bad Fates aside, however, Fire Emblem Warriors benefits from the mClassic in some scenes while it looks a little weird in others. I mainly like the mClassic’s processing during gameplay. The camera zooms during cutscenes can cause some shimmers, though, and these arguably look weirder when they’re being smoothed over than they do normally. Compare 4:12 to 12:57 for an example of this. I also think that the antialiasing goes a little too far during cutscenes, making in-engine things look pre-rendered (and therefore slightly less impressive). Chalk that up to personal taste.
Trials of Mana (verdict: nice bit of polish)
The mClassic’s processing in Trials of Mana isn’t the kind of thing you’ll ooh and ahh over, but it does an admirable job of smoothing out jaggies that the art style already does a decent job of hiding. And the more cartoony art style benefits from the bump in sharpness, too. I wouldn’t call the mClassic essential or anything in this one, but it does a great job of fixing some rough edges and making the image look better whenever you pause the video or capture a screenshot from the HDMI feed, even if Trials of Mana‘s fuzzy edges make it hard to notice the improvements when everything is moving around on screen.
Mega Man 11 (verdict: smooths out everything nicely)
“Mega Man” seems to be the accepted spelling, but I’ll never truly accept that it’s two words. Bite me, Capcom and canonical sources. MegaMan Legends spelled it “MegaMan,” and everyone else is wrong. Period. I should probably mention at this point that I’m terrible at Megaman games. I don’t know why. I’m incapable of getting better at them. It’s embarrassing. Luckily, the mClassic does wonders in Megaman 11 because everything has a small amount of jagginess or blurriness that the combination of sharpness and antialiasing fix. The improvement isn’t so significant that I’d call it essential, but it’s definitely very close.
Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia (verdict: very nice)
Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia may not look like its art style has a lot of jaggies on the Nintendo Switch, but it really does. They may not be noticeable if you’re watching the video at 1920x1080, but beyond that, it should be a night-and-day difference. This is another game where the portraits and jaggy character models all benefit from the antialiasing and bump in sharpness. And another one where some players may not even notice the difference, depending on resolution and how deeply they’re looking into the details. Brigandine‘s a pretty game, but the mClassic helps its visuals to come into their own.
Aokana – Four Rhythms Across the Blue (verdict: bad)
At first, I saw the change in clarity that the mClassic was providing and thought that it was a nice effect. Once I was editing the video, however, I noticed halos (which appear when oversharpening an image) in certain areas, with one of the first I found being on the title screen. Rika (purple hair, first from the right) gets a big white line along her calf that wasn’t there before, and it makes me wish that the mClassic made it possible to fine-tune the processing. This sharpening also changes the color of the text to a darker blue color while degrading it ever so slightly, and I don’t like it. The mClassic over-processes Aokana big time.
Tactics V: “Obsidian Brigade” (verdict: not bad)
Tactics V: “Obsidian Brigade” has a weird art style to match its weird name in which 3D models are rendered into 2D sprites in realtime. Or something to that effect. Point is, there’s a lot of checkerboard dithering to create shadows and transparency, and I wasn’t expecting the mClassic to do very well at interpreting what to affect and what to leave alone. Color me surprised, then, that it didn’t try to smooth everything over. Instead, the sharpening effect helped to separate the characters from the background ever so slightly. This definitely isn’t a crucial effect, but I was happy to see the mClassic’s restraint.
Skellboy (verdict: barely noticeable)
Skellboy uses voxel art (at least, I think that’s what it’s called), so the jaggies are largely part of the presentation. This is another game that I included solely to test the mClassic’s restraint, and it showed admirable restraint yet again. The image wasn’t entirely untouched by antialiasing, but the only edges that were softened were those that weren’t razor-sharp to begin with. The sharpness also helped some of the UI elements to stand out. Mostly, though, the mClassic does a whole lot of nothing here, and that’s exactly what I was looking for. Whoever designed the mClassic’s antialiasing thresholds did an excellent job.
So is the mClassic worth it? Depends on your needs
If you buy an mClassic for your Nintendo Switch expecting it to suddenly look like a more capable console, then you’re going to be disappointed. That’s not what this is. That technology doesn’t exist yet. If, however, you have a specific game full of small jaggies that you’d like smoothed out, the mClassic can be a miracle worker. And if, like me, you mostly want to prepare a signal for post-processing to squeeze every last ounce of clarity from it, then you’re going to be very happy. I’ve been experimenting with sharpening and upscaling techniques and have recently settled on switching to a Lab color space, keying out shadow areas (which turn a bluish tint otherwise), and then applying a tiny bit of sharpening to the red channel in two sharpening nodes—which results in fewer halos and a more natural look than one node. The video above shows off some Fire Emblem: Three Houses video processed this way, and then a how-to video.
Aliased edges were the biggest problem for me when upscaling since those jaggies would be blown up into more noticeable blocks, and the mClassic does a great job preparing video for being upscaled and sharpened the way I do it. For me, that was definitely worth the 99 bucks that this thing cost, though not everyone has that specific a use for it, and those looking for more general improvements could be disappointed by how subtle it tends to be on Switch games. This isn’t a Switch-exclusive device, though, and it could potentially be useful for DVDs and other upscale jobs. I also noticed that it spits out a constant signal, which is how I fixed a longstanding issue when recording Switch gameplay where my screen would turn black and keep me from being able to see what I was doing. It’s possible that the mClassic could resolve this issue. Actually, you know what? Screw assuming. I’m going to check.
The mClassic fixes my Switch’s blanking issue when recording
Okay, this right here? This alone makes the mClassic worth it in my book. I spent years inserting devices between my Switch and Elgato recording device in a vain attempt to find the magical combination that lets me record gameplay and see what I was doing. I recorded all of the 1920x1080 video for my Breath of the Wild review while playing mostly blind because of how often the screen was going black. Seriously. It was a nightmare, and I wasn’t in love with the fact that an expensive audio unit that I lucked into obtaining (and that isn’t even sold anymore) ended up being the solution since that doesn’t exactly help anyone else.
Boom. Even with the mClassic’s processing turned off, just having it in the chain fixes the screen blanking problem. You know what’s even better than finally having a fix I can recommend? I’ve never been able to use my audio system with Switch games because it can’t pass through HDMI video and audio while playing audio from another source (and I have it set to play everything that goes through my TV). It also doesn’t pass the audio along if I use it to play the HDMI audio. Basically, I’ve been forced to listen to Switch games through my TV’s speakers because I kept forgetting to change the settings back and ending up with unusable videos without audio. Now I can just throw the mClassic in the chain and use the speakers for everything. Finally! Subwoofer Switch soundtracks! That’ll make judging audio so much easier.
(You can kind of see my reflection when the screen turns black. To save you time, there are also two dressers, two stuffed llamas, one stuffed octopus, a camera bag, camera stuff, vanilla mints, noise-dampening headphones, and an ever-dwindling bottle of Courvoisier. 2020 was a super weird year.)
(Oh, and a Nintendo Wii, though it might not be visible. I might test that console out with the mClassic at some point. Same with the Playstation 2 and other retro consoles. Suggestions? Hit up my email.)
Is the mClassic worth it for Nintendo Switch games? 11 games tested, oodles of video first appeared on Killa Penguin
