Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

[jenova_9]

mew!

A Conversation With Dragon's Crown Director George Kamitani | Siliconera

really big history!

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

YES.

This totally needed its own separate topic apart from the Dragon's Crown topic you made before.

[Takelli]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

Seen this before....

Still wondering why the hell the women need over large breasts...

-Sighs.- Small breasts and asses are better anyways.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

Its par for course with Vanillaware games, go look at Odin's Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade for reference. The first is on PSN and the second is a common find at Gamestop.

Both are good, if fairly mindless, action games. More important is that they're just freaking gorgeous games once you get past the character design. Muramasa is quite honestly an explosion of color you'd never see on PS3 or 360, really. Well unless you played Child of Eden, I suppose.

[Icemage]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

^ I think Vanillaware's art team went to the Rob Liefield school of anatomical drawing (i.e. they're terrible at drawing human proportions). There's artistic style, but the level of hypersexualization of the characters (male AND female) in Dragon's Crown specifically crosses the line from "artistic license" to "sort of unpleasant to look at" for me.

I do like their use of color, though I challenge the notion that good color isn't available on the HD consoles (even if you make an exception for Child of Eden). Off the top of my head, Trine 1 & 2 have a similar sort of attractive hyper-contrasty art style, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron has its moments of outrageously interesting eye-popping artwork, Outland is full of bright, bloomy, high contrast art, and that's just stuff I've played relatively recently. The games from the now-defunct (sigh) GameRepublic also have brilliant art design (Folklore, Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom).


Icemage

[Raydeus]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

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[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

^ I think Vanillaware's art team went to the Rob Liefield school of anatomical drawing (i.e. they're terrible at drawing human proportions). There's artistic style, but the level of hypersexualization of the characters (male AND female) in Dragon's Crown specifically crosses the line from "artistic license" to "sort of unpleasant to look at" for me.

I do like their use of color, though I challenge the notion that good color isn't available on the HD consoles (even if you make an exception for Child of Eden). Off the top of my head, Trine 1 & 2 have a similar sort of attractive hyper-contrasty art style, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron has its moments of outrageously interesting eye-popping artwork, Outland is full of bright, bloomy, high contrast art, and that's just stuff I've played relatively recently. The games from the now-defunct (sigh) GameRepublic also have brilliant art design (Folklore, Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom).


Icemage

Even so, its very, very rare to see that sort of thing on HD consoles, which is pathetic considering they are more capable. Its true Trine and some rather niche games have those qualities, but I just find it more common for that range of color to happen on Nintendo hardware or a PSP game than anywhere else.

El Shaddai was a nice idea, but its visual style also leads to senseless, unfair pitfall nonsense. Its like they didn't want you to have any sense of depth.

Also, I didn't know Mike Haggar ran a medieval inn.

[Icemage]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

Even so, its very, very rare to see that sort of thing on HD consoles, which is pathetic considering they are more capable. Its true Trine and some rather niche games have those qualities, but I just find it more common for that range of color to happen on Nintendo hardware or a PSP game than anywhere else.

That sounds like a logical fallacy to me. The only reason the lower-resolution platforms have a tendency to have brighter contrast color schemes is out of sheer practicality; you can't make a low res game with low contrast without losing some level of playability - otherwise the player starts complaining about not being able to distinguish important information on-screen. On a higher-resolution display, you can still choose to make stuff really pop out, but it becomes an artistic choice, and not a gameplay necessity.

El Shaddai was a nice idea, but its visual style also leads to senseless, unfair pitfall nonsense. Its like they didn't want you to have any sense of depth.

I didn't have a lot of problems with depth EXCEPT in Chapter 5 in El Shaddai (the one that looks like a Japanese woodcut print). Hated that level with a passion. A more potent criticism is that the jumping has no margin for error; miss a jump by a hair and you'll just fall instead of reaching out and grasping a ledge.


Icemage

[jenova_9]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

YES.

This totally needed its own separate topic apart from the Dragon's Crown topic you made before.

I used search but Dragon's Crown topics wouldn't appear.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

That sounds like a logical fallacy to me. The only reason the lower-resolution platforms have a tendency to have brighter contrast color schemes is out of sheer practicality; you can't make a low res game with low contrast without losing some level of playability - otherwise the player starts complaining about not being able to distinguish important information on-screen. On a higher-resolution display, you can still choose to make stuff really pop out, but it becomes an artistic choice, and not a gameplay necessity.

It has nothing to do with resolution or contrast and everything to do with art direction, the time dedicated to the project and realizing it all in-game.

[Raydeus]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

I used search but Dragon's Crown topics wouldn't appear.

It's ok J9, you are forgiven because your avatar is very kawaii.

Well, at least by me. XD


Also, the Elf girl and the Sorceress are looking pretty good... Although the sorceress is in dire need of a slight reduction surgery, because I doubt her back will be able to take that much weight for long even if it's being reinforced by magic. <_<;

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&amp;D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

Maybe she got tips from Lulu.

[Icemage]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&amp;D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

It has nothing to do with resolution or contrast and everything to do with art direction, the time dedicated to the project and realizing it all in-game.

We'll have to agree to disagree then, because I've actually done some work on lower resolution gaming platforms. While interpretation of good or bad art direction is up to the beholder, it's a simple fact that you need better color contrast on lower resolution games. That and it's easier to do 2D hand-drawn art on lower resolutions - it's notoriously difficult to work with playable HD hand-drawn graphics, and you often have to do some cosmetic clean-up afterwards, which, with a larger canvas, obviously takes more time and effort.

Making something look good at 320x240 resolution is much, much, much easier than making it look good at 1920x1080.

My point is that better quality hand-drawn art is a better fit for lower resolution platforms because it's less work, and the color contrast is another tendency. That doesn't mean that there aren't more good-looking games (relatively speaking) on portable devices than home consoles, but it does mean that the bar is much lower for making a game look good in SD-or-lower resolutions than it does at 720p+ HD, and the amount of effort required for the same "relative" quality is much higher at higher resolutions.

If you want a practical lesson in this, just keep an eye on Nintendo's first-party output for the Wii U over the next couple of years. I guarantee their internal development teams are going to have some growing pains moving into the HD arena, especially with gamers being as discerning as they are these days about visual quality. That doesn't mean the games won't look good; I'm expecting Nintendo to come through, but it will definitely take more time and effort, and as such I expect that their output is going to be even slower in the next generation than it was in this generation (and they haven't exactly set the world on fire with the volume of their game development the past few years).


Icemage

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&amp;D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

Atlus picks up Dragon's Crown publishing, also assisting with development - Joystiq

Turns out Ignition was having some problems. The game is now being co-developed by Vanillaware and Atlus and the games will be released later as a result. US players will be seeing it, but it looks like next year now.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Dragon's Crown director was also involved in D&amp;D Tower of Doom arcade game!!

Semi-related

Muramasa: The Demon Blade on Vita will offer original DLC | Joystiq

I wouldn't mind a portable version of Muramasa, but I don't know if DLC is a good fit for the series just given how much the same three of four screens are repeated per area. They're certainly pretty art assets, but it does wear on you after a bit. Vanillaware is a company I'd love to see do well and thrive and I likely would support a western release, but they need to understand there wasn't a lot of variety to this game to start with and perhaps that's really what needed addressing. Right now it seems like they're just adding more characters to run about and slash things up with.

Its certainly a case where more of the same probably wouldn't be better for the game.