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Things that turn me off of bad Final Fantasies and bad JRPGs in general: -Boring intros. Ask most people what their favorite FF games are, and they'll usually say something like 6,7, or 9. Note that those games' openings had you in a fight or established some kind of conflict at some point within the first 15 minutes or so. There's conflict and tension right from the start that not only gets you playing the game, but giving events to help develop characters. -Bad characters. What the hell is anyone's motivation anymore? Everybody's just 20 or younger and mad. In FF6, you had a human-monster hybrid girl on the run from an evil empire, a well-meaning thief rebel whose actions were always being influenced by his crush on said monster lady or his desire to fight against the Empire, and a king who pretended to play ball with the Empire but secretly opposed them on pure moral grounds who gave up security for what he thought was right. I don't feel any sort of humanity in the characters anymore. They're usually just there because the plot says they are. -Tetsuya Nomura's character designs are bad. FF7 gets poo poo on for this, but I think it's one of the best games to show the problems as it has a share of genuinely good designs and bad designs to compare with one another. Everything in Cid's clothing and appearance have him set up as a washed-out pilot who spends all day working on machinery. Nothing in Sephiroth's clothing seems to say anything about him. He doesn't look like a high-ranking soldier turned drifter/cult leader thing. He's just anime, wears a leather trench coat, and holds a giant sword. Never mind the main character who doesn't even look like he could physically lift his own weapon. Here's a lesson in decent character design:  Now there are some things I'd call problems in the designs (mainly with some of the clothes, but that's been FF for the past 8 games or so), but there is a lot of good here. By looking at nearly any character, you can tell they come from a world inspired by different eras of western civilization (most likely a mix of Middle Ages and Renaissance), and that their game features a world of swords, castles, kings/queens, with possible surprises like magic or emerging technology. You can guess that there will be some kind of powerful evil figure and that these people come from different walks of life to defeat that figure. You can tell all of that just by looking at them. Furthermore, you can look at large muscular characters like Steiner and Amarant and tell that they are probably physically strong fighters, or see Zidane's slim yet muscular physique as a roguish type of fighter. These people form a juxtaposition with other characters with less physically strong-looking builds. The audience having expectations built up about a fantasy video game world, as well as characters like Vivi evoking common images of wizards or witches would lead the average person to assume that these characters use magic or some other means of combat. The character designer understands that appearance is influenced by the character and world, and act as their own story-telling mechanism. Now let's take a look at an image I found when I typed "FF15 characters":  All of these characters look like they were converted from common manga/anime tropes into what would pass as "realistic" for high-fidelity 3d graphics. Everybody's got a slim outline, is roughly in their 20s, wears an outfit that would be considered high-fashion to a handful of people in one country in the modern era, and tells us nothing about them. Who here uses magic, weapons, etc.? How would we peg any of them as fighters, and how would they defeat the giant monsters we've seen in previews?
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Nov 21, 2016 11:16
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 06:25 |
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Panic! at Nabisco posted:This isn't what these characters look like anymore, and they haven't looked like this for several years. Prompto (blondie in the back) in particular is completely different. Did you word it like that as a coincidence, or were you being intentionally misleading? I didn't know that, but from what I see the design switch isn't really enough for me to abandon my point. They all just look like bad fashion models.
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Nov 21, 2016 21:18
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