Topic: Castlevania 3DS: What do you want?

[e105beta]

Where's my big welcome 

anyway...

I'm completely with you and the other guy about Ecclesias style. I loved the environments and the way the towns people looked. But does the character artist change that? I mean SotN and AoS to me were even darker. It wasn't til after those games with DoS and PoR where the artstyle became cartoony. Basically what I'm saying is that if Masaki drew Alucard. He'd still look like Alucard. If Masaki drew Soma he'd still look like Soma. Do the environments and overall game art have anything to do with the character designer? For the record I think Kojima and Masaki are both excellent character artists.

They're not just character designers, they're art designers. They decide how EVERYTHING looks.

[Ahasverus]

I loved Masaki, his style is japanease yet elegant yet digerible. He's my favourite Cv (old saga) artist , yep, I like him more than Kojima (His designs aren auto-plagiarism thanks god)

[Vrakanox]

They're not just character designers, they're art designers. They decide how EVERYTHING looks.

Oh okay, in that case I think I like Kojima marginally better just because of the way the levels and monsters look. Masaki is a close second though.

[Ahasverus]

The problem is that IGA games had no art director. He recycles old sprites so the new artist only has influence over new monsters. That's why Ecclesia's bestiary is completely nonsensical, robots, Undertakers and buddhist gods? at the same time? zOMG

[Kale]

That's pretty sweet. Could be helpful if someone wanted to make fan sprites.

Anyone wanna give that a try?

[thernz]

i honestly think there are different artists for the backgrounds. all the concept art for cod, with the enemies, ids, and backgrounds were distinctly non-kojima in style. besides, knowing the way kojima does horror, the enemies in loi and cod would have been much more gruesome. iga also said he got the enemy designers for silent hill to do cod's enemies (which somehow didn't help at all uh).

also, the trend of using a wide range of mythological creatures has been set since sotn, and even a bit before that with the japanese rabbit demons in cviv and cviii, panzuzu, and etc, ahasverus.

[Ahasverus]

I undersnatdn that and it's one of the things that I like the most of CV, that i's almost universal, however, some later games really have disjointed esthethics between different types of enemies, because you know, 1991 designs are naturally very different to 2008's, an Ecclesia for example has enemies sprites from all that time frame.
Is that expensive to redraw an axe warrior?

[thernz]

that's a completely different complaint from what you said earlier. i actually agree with how the aesthetics are disjointed. the problem is that the newer sprite artists aren't adapting to the preset styles, not that the styles are old. it's more like,
hey bro, maybe you should actually sprite in the same style
rather than
hey bro, you should redraw everything

though, i'd prefer the latter kinda. well kinda not, because the current artists kinda pale to the sotn and rondo sprite artists.

[DragonSlayr81]

i honestly think there are different artists for the backgrounds. all the concept art for cod, with the enemies, ids, and backgrounds were distinctly non-kojima in style. besides, knowing the way kojima does horror, the enemies in loi and cod would have been much more gruesome. iga also said he got the enemy designers for silent hill to do cod's enemies (which somehow didn't help at all uh).

also, the trend of using a wide range of mythological creatures has been set since sotn, and even a bit before that with the japanese rabbit demons in cviv and cviii, panzuzu, and etc, ahasverus.

There ARE different artists. This is a common known thing about video games. Character designers are just that, artists that design the characters. Ayami Kojima has NO part in designing how the backgrounds of IGA's CVs look, just like Tetsuya Nomura isn't responsible for the look of the towns in "his" Final Fantasy games. Hell, Nomura's not even responsible for the NCP art. In Final Fantasy, in particular, a lot of location art, NPC art and promo art(which is actually credited to Nomura) is done by Yusuke Naora. These companies HAVE designers that speicifically work on various aspects of the game. No one artist does EVERYTHING. You have people who design the monsters, people who design the weapons, people who design the look of the various locations, all are different.

[Valtiel]

Ayami's artwork is fine.  I love how the general mood towards IGA changes every time a new game comes out.  I have a blast with any Castlevania game he's made because I don't nitpick the hell out of them.  Just face it: Castlevania is a goofy game series.  Sure there are some serious moments, but for the most part, they are crazy.  I sometimes wonder if we are all playing the same game series!

Anyway, just give me a new IGAvania and I'll be happy.

The perception of IGA is shifting because the confusion surrounding him is so deep. A lot of people deem him responsible for SotN still.

I'm not sure I agree that CV is a goofy game series. I agree that IGA *turned* it into a goofy game series, for the better or the worse. In terms of atmosphere and storyline he did fundamentally two things: he took the goofy looks of the 8/16 bit era (that were probably rooted more in the consoles technical limitations than an actual artistic direction) and made it the canon of the series. He also took the "experimental" approach of Rondo and made CV a full fledged anime game (a dream he only fully realized with the Sorrow games and Judgement).

I think it's easy to see why the fanbase is so polarized about him. For one thing, CV is a fairly "stale" series. It's a good thing in many ways - we like that playstyle, and almost no other game delivers it, and basically no other game delivers it as well as CV does. It's also a playstyle that benefits from every minor upgrade - just look at how few differences Ecclesia introduced and how different it still felt - so for fans it's a more than appreciable situation. We like those games and we keep getting them.
On the other hand, we are constantly aware that we could get much better games. It's not just technical issues, even if seeing the series try to spearhead the 2D technology survivors instead of merely jogging along would be great. The saga rarely sees drastical improvements, and it's rarely evolving - every game is fundamentally the same with a new gimmic tacked on, and such gimmick is discarded in the next game. It's a formula that has little hope of ever growing. On the other hand, it looks like ALL the bad design decisions instead are there to stay, so we're permanently stuck with prehistorical level design and inconsistent design decision like the faulty level up system that removes all challenges from a saga that was historically known for being "hard"; and so on. It would be unfair to fault IGA for all this - expecially since despite all this the saga remained on very good quality levels on almost all installments - but to me the feeling I get when playing a CV is constantly that of not getting the great game I could be playing. The most memorable exception is OoE, but OoE is sort of like LoS - a game with ten thousands layers of awesome that almost make it look like another saga. I'd want something revolutionary yet familiar. LoS is possibly moving in the right direction, but it needs to iron a few things. Story is the first - it can't live on the premise that the story of the other games "suck". We want to be captivated, and LoS was too lightweight on lore and more importantly character building. I said it elsewhere - now we need a cast, recurring villains, legends. Something to fantasize about between a game and the other. A legacy.

But returning to IGA, I think the first reason we're polarized about him is his handling of the CV "lore". Like someone said, it's a goofy saga by now. It's become 3 parts Bleach 4 parts Pokemon with a slice of Gintama and some gothic seasoning on top. I can see why someone can like it, or even love it, but CV didn't start like that. I'll be honest to admit that to me Aria was the game that almost killed the saga. I wasn't against the timeframe (as I'm not against something like the ending of LoS hints at) but to me CV is gothic dark fantasy, not a generic anime show about teenager students awakening the power of evil within themselves. It really felt like throwing away the entire legacy and saying "screw this, let's see if we can make this popular with some anime bs".

So this very long rant (sorry  ) is just to say that I may be alone but while I'm still completely fine about the game part of IGA's entries, I'm firmly convinced he took the saga in a place where I don't really want to follow him. It's just too silly and juvenile now, and not what hooked me to the series in the first place. I'm one of those fans who's been clamoring for the 1999 game for years. After Aria, I don't want to see it anymore. LoS' secret ending gave me the 1999 game vibe IGA took from me, and I hope they'll eventually deliver that. But Judgement was the biggest chance to see the saga and its characters through IGA's eyes, and it definitely made me certain he's on a trail I don't want to follow.

[Ahasverus]

^well said my friend, well said. 

[Vrakanox]

There ARE different artists. This is a common known thing about video games. Character designers are just that, artists that design the characters. Ayami Kojima has NO part in designing how the backgrounds of IGA's CVs look, just like Tetsuya Nomura isn't responsible for the look of the towns in "his" Final Fantasy games. Hell, Nomura's not even responsible for the NCP art. In Final Fantasy, in particular, a lot of location art, NPC art and promo art(which is actually credited to Nomura) is done by Yusuke Naora. These companies HAVE designers that speicifically work on various aspects of the game. No one artist does EVERYTHING. You have people who design the monsters, people who design the weapons, people who design the look of the various locations, all are different.

This is what I thought but I don't really know much about the video game industry and how it works. I know that I loved the way the backgrounds and monsters were done in Ecclesia. As far as character art goes I think Kojima and Masaki are both really talented. I think I'll still give the edge to Kojima though. Didn't she do the art in Harmony of Despair? The characters looked great in that and not overly feminine (See John and especially Julius). To me that's how it should be. Some of the characters should be more elegant (like alucard and soma) but then the Belmonts should always be manly. I liked Leon Belmont's design and Juste too but I don't think that is right for a Belmont.

[Valtiel]

Some of the characters should be more elegant (like alucard and soma) but then the Belmonts should always be manly. I liked Leon Belmont's design and Juste too but I don't think that is right for a Belmont.

I see what you mean but I think there's room for manly Belmonts and then for more "delicate" ones. And female Belmonts and old Belmonts and all that.

It's very hard to actually gauge how much Kojima mattered in the end in the games, tho. I mean, ok, the covers. But look at SotN: does the Richter in the portraits have anything in common with the Richter sprite? Until they stick to handhelds and unless they finally pull out 2D art, the artist's influence is only really gonna show in portraits (as far as characters go). Considering Kojima is more or less fantastic at everything aside from faces, you can see how her talent was more or less wasted on the saga so far.

Either they give her the tools (ie HD) to let her stylistic approach transpire in the actual game (and that CV will look like NOTHING she worked on before) or she'll be stuck doing covers for games that end up being blocky, Genesis-era pixel messes that are full of happy-happy joy-joy colors. I guess it's my biggest beef with her artwork - I could look past the feminine gloss (expecially since she proved she can deliver masculine guys with Hector), but it's so completely disconnected from the actual game that it ends up feeling glued on. If IGA had the guts of letting her draw the characters, and monsters, and environment with a toolset and team that can re-create her style IN THE GAME, I'd be totally up for it.

[crisis]

In Reply To Valtiel,

Wow, I guess you should work for Konami as senior advisor or something since you obviously know what's best for CV more than anyone else. About half your posts here have been nothing but criticizing the series, while saying ambiguous statements like "i think such n such is great but here's why it sucks."

The anime influences have been there since the beginning, while being enhanced in Rondo (It's a JAPANESE game series, after all, which was, uh, influenced by an anime called VAMPIRE HUNTER D). Yes, it was annoying with PoR, but that's about it. Do you see a Saturday-morning cartoon being syndicated on your TV station? It's really not that bad (but it's gotta be, since you're so fixated on it). Konami never whored out CV like Nintendo does with Pokemon. There's nothing really wrong with IGA's games, they are playable from beginning to end. Are there any outstanding glitches that make jumping impossible? Is the button layout "not castlevania enough?" Sure, there could be more platforming & new sprites here 'n there, but other than that they are exceptional games, aesthetics aside.

If you were to make a "this is what's wrong with CV" thread, you wouldn't be able to fit all your complaints in a single post amirite? The series has always been a goofy saga, from the random enemies to the ridiculous platforming (nothing more goofy than flying Medusa Heads in a CLOCK TOWER). I think this was said in the Metroid thread, something like

fan: this is what CASTLEVANIA IS & SHOULD BE!
Konami: lol nah this is what CV actually is.

I'm with you on how Konami should have the balls to launch CV in new areas, but what's the point in pointing out every single flaw the games have to offer? Does anybody here really lose any sleep at night due to these flaws? If so then you shouldn't be here in the first place.


I respect your opinion on CV. Everybody's entitled to one, but if the opinion is nothing but "castlevania isn't what it should be wahhhh" over & over, then.. maybe it's time to move on. and Ahasverus agreeing with you every sentence.

[Profbeanburrito]

I also can't stand the "iga using anime" complaint. I am not really a fan of anime, but I have no problem with it being used in the castlevania series occasionally. Rondo of blood is mostly referenced, but even look at the artwork in the original castlevania and simons quest japanese manual. Every nes game had badass box art but the real art is always in the manuals and the first two cv games both have anime-like art. I have the simon art from cv1 as my icon and if you look at it, he's not some huge babarian guy, he's got a small build.
This goes the same for the Kojima art, they don't look like huge buff warriors, and that's ok, cause the original simon doesn't always look that way either