You guys always know how to pull off these fancy tricks, so perhaps you can help me with this. Nintendo's newest round of games all have this amazing "soft" look to them visually, no more hard light-to-dark gradients. Instead, there's backlighting or that layered skin effect, underlighting, *something*. That's what I'm trying to figure out, and then how to do it.

Examples:

Kirby here, and maybe Pikachu's chest just under his arm.

These two cube men, with some ridiculously soft lighting/shadowing system, although I think it might be different from the others.

The back of this girls head, just under her hairline. It definitely glows, but only at the edge of her head.

Here Pascal, the red otter, has the glow all around his head. The girl also has it, but on her jawline.

So I'm guessing the glow is a reflection, due to what fancy-schmancy art class still life taught me.

^art skewl

Although I'm also inclined to think it's a skin transparency layering mimicking thing, like the PS4 demo by David Cage (only significantly cheaper on the processor, I'm sure).

And I still think that Cube Men one is a different shader/lighting/thing altogether, but I don't know how to describe it compared to the others.

So, thoughts? Directions? Help? I want my game to have friendly, soft, and welcoming visuals. So far, all of the above do an excellent job of that, so I'd like to learn what I can from them. Many thanks!

There's a shader in the Unity docs that simulates rim lighting (it's the 4th example in that page).

Also check wrap diffuse lighting (another shader example in the Unity docs) to fake soft lighting.

You can also fake the effect in the first image by using a bright ambient light so the difference between light and shadow is small.

I don't think the cube men is rendered in real-time, or maybe it uses multiple lights + ambient occlusion, but it was probably made by an artist.

All the examples except the cube men are in my opinion just faked rim lights. The basic idea is to add light in regions where the eye and surface normal are roughly perpendicular. The Unity example posted by TiagoCosta implement this technique. This technique does not simulate some kind of reflection but the effect of the back (or rim) light in the three point lighting system used in traditional art. I suggest learning about it. This kind of lighting is for example used to highlight the actors separating them from the background.

Quite some time ago I wrote such a NPR-shader on request for a fan game:

(Yoshi's design is copyrighted by Nintendo, of course. The model itself was made by a user called Otter over on the GameStudio forums)

It's really just the sum of various effects put together: pure rim lighting, velvet shading (once blended over the underlying albedo color and once multiplied with it), wrap diffuse lighting, blinn-phong + minnaert spec highlights, spherical harmonics for some fake ambient lighting (sampled with a reflection vector to make it a bit more high-freq) and probably some other artistic tricks. But to be honest, when watched directly from the primary light's perspective the shading was quite flat. However, there is a lot of potential for nice artistic NPR-styles. You probably have to find the one which fits best for your situation iteratively, as usual.

Fuzz edge is definitely the effect I was looking for (very similar to velvet though), which looks to be a variant of rim lighting, and the wrap diffuse lighting will help too! Thank you all, this is far more than I could have asked for :)