That's what I didn't really like about Vagabond. It felt too polished for its subject matter. I personally think beauty hits harder when you derive it from darkness.

The beauty of life and death. The beauty of love in the midst of that. Shattering time and space to find your soulmate after wandering for several lifetimes.
Fiction allows us to create situations that would not be possible in our reality in order to convey a new level of emotion.
And somehow, we're able to process those unrealistic situations into realistic feelings.
Imagination sure is powerful...
That's why manga can be more effective than anime at conveying beauty, and why older horror games can be so uniquely unnerving.

When you look at a low-res image, you fill in the gaps with whatever your subconscious thinks it should be.
The black and white, the negative space, the heaviness of the shading, all these things can give a dreamlike or unworldly feeling.
But not only that, you have the ability to have multiple shots in the same panel, whereas anime generally goes with separate shots.
And manga ideally draws the key moment of a scene, whereas anime might not focus on it so much.
You can speed up or slow down the scene in your head, translating the panels into various unique executions.
You can also put on whatever music you want while reading to convey all sorts of different moods.

Of course, Ping Pong kinda defeats many of these arguments, but that one is pretty unique.