#my generic shitty “anime” artstyle is going to be the death of me

[mxventastic]

THE TOWNIES!! DROPOUTS!!!! PUNKS OR WHATEVER!!!!!

some doodles i made that ive never felt confident to release in the internet....................

ALSO MY SHIP..... its otto x edgar.... hehe.... if u see the difference between the designs im still working on that..

i gave the townies scars cause i think theyre the one clique that fights with HEAVY weapons (looking over at edgar with his goddamn pipe) also cause they do drugs!!!

ALSO IF UR WONDERING WHAT DUNCAN IS HOLDINg, its a grottos and gremlin board game! well my interpretation of what it may look like (its ass)

[rojaceartandgaming]

BIG DISCLAIMER, please don't yell at me in the comments and the reblogs. this is just my opinion as a fan of square enix's games, an enjoyer of video games in general, and a character/game designer who is going to college for game art and design.

look what they did to sephiroth. for comparison i'm including his og model and character art, his appearance in advent children, his smash bros look, and finally his remake model. also this is gonna be long so i'm putting it under a read more.

straight up, i think that remake sephiroth looks worse then some earlier renders thanks to this loss of stylization even though he's more stylized. I think Cloud is much in the same boat as is Zack, I've seen plenty of people talk about how Zack isn't as pointy anymore and... honestly I think that's a legitimate problem? yes, modern games look incredible visual wise... but in the process of having a million and one polygons and being able to see every pore in a character's face, these games lose their stylization and just... straight up, the vibes? and doesn't push the imagination anymore? we just... have the vibes of "vaguely anime-esque". which is kinda disappointing?

then we turn to Kingdom Hearts, and honestly I miss how 1, 2, and BBS looked. Kingdom Hearts 3 and 4 have the same vibes of modern disney films - in a bad way, with semi-cookie cutter appearances in the eyes and the like and the same uncanniness that came with wreck-it ralph breaks the internet's princesses. in the past, KH's unique cartoony artstyle felt like it had more whimsy and wonder that a game as strange as square enix's intense plots meets mickey mouse NEEDS

Sora looks like... an offbrand Noctis in KH4, honestly. Sure, more recent games are pretty... if you don't miss the original artstyles and have a high-end computer. I couldn't even properly boot up and play both ff16 and ff7 rebirth on my pc, and the only tip i saw online was "oh upgrade your PC" which feels... scummy. Yeah, I ended up getting a steam deck but... it feels bad that I even had to. Games nowadays (especially AAA titles) are becoming more and more inaccessable to the general public as both game prices and console prices go up, and as things require more and more graphical fidelity people are required to buy higher and higher tier graphics cards and consoles. on top of that, with the death of physical media in the gaming industry and the near-requirement of internet to get a day-one patch, things almost feel... classist? maybe?

in the past five years, the only expensive games that felt legitimately worth it for me to play and pay full price for (and DIDN'T NEED DAY 1 PATCHES) have been Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, Final Fantasy 15, and actually Baldur's Gate 3. All games with incredible stories and glorious stylization that even lower end pcs can actually run (I use a LAPTOP! and BG3 works well! alas, Vulkan has broken there but... I don't need super smooth framerate in BG3).

which... brings me back to the topic of ff7 rebirth. yes, it's a somewhat good game in some places. specifically some of the new plot points concerning Sephiroth and Zack fair but... with how intense the graphics requirements are, even though I got this game on sale for 40 bucks (I am not going into the ethics of ff7 now being broken into 3 parts that cost upwards of 60 dollars each, i'll be here all day), I had to end up buying either a whole new console or PC to actually play this damn game (and it doesn't even run well on steam deck sometimes).

so what's my point? i've been rambly, i know i have. i'm sorry, i do prefer being positive most of the time on my blog but... here I am. as someone who's so jaded with the game industry i've turned to recruiting as my main career to support my indie projects, i can't help but find modern game companies' focus on making nearly hyper-realistic games that aren't accessible to a lot of gamers thanks to hardware requirements kind of shitty. and because of this focus on hyper-realism or near-realism, many games are falling into an uncanny-valley-esque type of territory and simply don't look unique anymore. Old Kingdom Hearts, Legend of Zelda, and Final Fantasy games (amongst others) stood out because despite their graphical limitations, they looked incredible and more artsy! they had unique artstyles! and in the movie scene nowadays, we see similar things in animated movies and shows like Nimona, K-Pop Demon Hunters, The Wild Robot, Arcane, and the Spider-verse movies.

audiences don't want the same vaguely realistic, incredibly demanding vibes in both movies and video games anymore. i mean, some might, but... focusing on trying to achieve 120 fps whilst seeing every pore on a character's face just feels... uncreative. isn't it better for more games to be more accessible to more people? so people can have similar experiences with games instead of some people having great fun as others scroll a search engine trying to figure out why their 70 dollar game didn't boot up? and isn't it good for a video game's graphics to be eye-catching and unique?

i don't know. i'm biased to say yes, honestly. this was meant to be a short comparison post and this got away from me. i have rambled and i don't want to edit this post. sorry.

Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts have both kind of lost the incredible stylization that made them stand out and it makes me so sad