{"id":4953,"date":"2020-05-21T00:53:45","date_gmt":"2020-05-21T06:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=4953"},"modified":"2020-05-21T20:20:58","modified_gmt":"2020-05-22T02:20:58","slug":"my-thoughts-on-ffvii-remake-character-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=4953","title":{"rendered":"My thoughts on FFVII Remake Character Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Besides the fact that it took me 30 hours before I started feeling comfortable with the stressful action based combat (as opposed to the comfy turn based combat I much prefer), I really enjoyed the re-imagining of Final Fantasy VII. I played the original back in the late 90’s and again sometime maybe 10 or so years ago? I can’t remember. Anyway I never beat it. Always got stuck in the last 3rd of the game trying to grind up for more power. As a story, the game is super fun to follow. I love the corny acting, the weird romantic stuff and the esoteric plot ideas. Okay but what happened with the character design? These characters look like ass. I won’t go into the environmental design because it’s way less clear cut for me: Sometimes it looks amazing and other times it seems like really middle of the road execution. But yeah about the character design…<\/p>\n

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The fuck is this ill considered garbage? What are these two characters doing standing next to each other? My friend Jenna commented that these designs remind her of the NPCs in the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game: iconic, appealing design juxtaposed with generic depictions of realism.<\/p>\n

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I’m trying to find the words to communicate this right… hopefully I’ll be able to get across what I’m thinking… In the original FFVII the designers were constrained by the limitations of the Playstation 1. Therefore every shape and color decision of the characters had to count. Lots of Playstation 1 games don’t stand the test of time because the developers didn’t understand this idea of using limitation as an asset. So once we moved on to better technology, the games of the early 3D era fell by the wayside.<\/p>\n

\"\"Games that used the limitation to their aesthetic advantage usually remain re-playable years later. I’m thinking of Crash Bandicoot as an example.<\/p>\n

When I think of Cloud, his original design is unforgettable. \"\"<\/p>\n

His new design looks like an ex-member of Powerman 5000 doing Cloud cosplay.<\/p>\n

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As a slight tangent, when I try to remember what the main guy in Final Fantasy XV looks like… I can’t. I remember he looked like a leather J-Pop star. That’s it. \"\"<\/p>\n

Cool there he is. He looks like a guy who wears Ed Hardy. Anyway…<\/p>\n

I feel weird discussing Tifa’s boobs, but… Tifa’s boobs don’t make sense anymore. This is a character design travesty. \"\"For one, her suspenders don’t make any sense for her shape. Whoever redesigned her must’ve felt obligated to include them, but with her new realism the whole idea falls apart. With her old design I never questioned the suspenders because reality didn’t dominate shape decisions. In the remake her suspenders were totally distracting for me. They bend in a dysfunctional way around her huge tatas. It’s awkward as fuck, a really dumb, costumey wardrobe decision.<\/p>\n

But these characters: Cloud, Tifa Aerith and Barret are born from good design DNA so the ghost of their charm carries through into the Remake despite how much they’ve been messed with. What’s actually<\/strong> bad is the blandly dissonant NPC lineup. How does this:\"\"<\/p>\n

Share a reality with this?<\/p>\n

\"\"What the hell is Chocobo Sam? He wrangles Chocobos… that means he has to look like a Universal Studios cowboy? How does that negotiate with Cloud’s steampunk-y anime reality? None of this works together. It’s like grapes in cereal. It’s like they needed the idea of a cowboy so they rendered a realistic cowboy and that’s it<\/strong>. They didn’t consider if it worked in harmony with the world or the driving aesthetics of the main characters. They just built highly rendered characters that represented their roles in the most unimaginative way possible. And when they tried to generate unique and memorable designs, what they came up with was mostly ugly.\"\"I’ll give them a B+ for effort on the Don Corneo character. At least he was fun to watch, but I’ve seen porn with better costume ideas. This one is equally garish:\"\"Designers need to be more discerning and tasteful about their creations. This shit is hacky as fuck. It reminds me of this from Star Wars:\"\" Okay like what is this terrible outfit? It looks like they raided a sci fi costume closet and threw some fabrics together for an impromptu living room play. They really fucked up with this character’s gear, especially when most everyone else looked really good in that movie.<\/p>\n

So am I just saying that minimal cartoony stuff looks better? Ehhh… for Final Fantasy at least I think yes. Would it have looked good to have cartoony FFVII characters running around in a highly rendered world? I think yes. Did I still develop strong emotions for Wedge despite him looking like a henchman from Time Cop merged with the cast of the Sandlot? Yas!<\/p>\n

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Is there an approach they could have used to build a AAA style rendered as hell\u00a0 JRPG\u00a0 that would’ve hung together more seamlessly? Yeah I think it’s\u00a0 a matter of art over craft. Maybe that’s pretty obvious I don’t know I’m just trying to get this out of my system… The AAA game industry is largely dominated by an emphasis of technical craft over taste. FFVII Remake shows a nearly complete lack of taste, while exhibiting incredible draftsmanship, which I guess is also a characteristic of Hollywood tent pole features like Avengers Endgame etc…\u00a0 I think the argument I’m making is similar to the criticisms people have with the Michael Bay Ninja Turtles movies.<\/p>\n

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FUUUCKKK!<\/p>\n

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NEXT DAY THOUGHTS<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Some aspect of this has to do with the problem of pursuing realism.\u00a0 It acts as a curse of dating games, and special effects for that matter. Going back and playing a mid era Tomb Raider game is going to have a certain bummer quality to it. I notice this even when playing the remastered version of The Last of Us. It has a jankiness to it that didn’t exist until technology surpassed it. Now I’m used to Naughty Dog games being slicker and closer to reality, so The Last of Us feels only half alive, ironically. In ten years the latest Tomb Raider will most likely look like ass and we’ll probably laugh at it. I mean, did we laugh at the Scorpion King when it came out or\u00a0 did we think this shit was cutting edge at the time?<\/p>\n

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I don’t know if game designers will ever achieve full God mode and perfectly capture life… it seems like with each step in technology, designers believe they’ve achieved God mode. So they try to re-create reality. And then their creations end up looking kind of jacked once we get past the latest innovations. It’s kind of similar to the Frankenstein story I guess. Until we truly become design gods, this pursuit ends up being a technical problem rather than artistic. So for these games to last in our memories, it would be good to compensate with really strong art direction, and to admit to ourselves that the technology will never be good enough, at least not for a while… at least not for ten years haha.\u00a0 For example, despite all of their goofy technical problems, the games of Fumito Ueda are still being talked about 14 years later.<\/p>\n

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Besides the fact that it took me 30 hours before I started feeling comfortable with the stressful action based combat (as opposed to the comfy turn based combat I much prefer), I really enjoyed the re-imagining of Final Fantasy VII. I played the original back in the late 90’s and again sometime maybe 10 or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4953"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4953"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4977,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4953\/revisions\/4977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}