What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[CrownySuccubus]

There's a huge gap between pretty male protagonists (Aymeric, Estinien, Elidibus) who lean more towards the Amano style heroes and...whatever it is G'raha and Thancred are supposed to be. Overly animated catboys or colorless blobs of indistinguishable features. In my eyes, they are too different from each other to fit the same category. There's no otherwordly or beautiful look to them, they just look dated and off putting.

"Blobs of indistinguishable features" is certainly how you can describe pretty much every FF main character prior to PS1 hardware. If it weren't for Amano's artwork, or some sort of accessory, you'd have no way of telling Bartz apart from Fighter. Hell, even with Amano's art, Firion from FFII has the same face as the original WOL, Cecil, Edge, Bartz, Locke, and Zidane.

But again, we're talking about your personal preferences here, which don't apply across the overall playerbase. What design is more intriguing to who is purely based on personal or mass appeal.

The pretty boys of older titles also were just nowhere near as annoying. Bartz and Locke were funny (I vaguely to this day remember some argument that Bartz had with Ghido the turtle and Locke saying something about the price is right), Cecil going from Dark Knight to Paladin was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen in a video game when I first played FFIV, and so on.

This really has nothing to do with their designs and, again, comes down to what you personally find appealing, which still varies by mileage.

Overall, the earlier titles just did a better job characterizing the male protagonists. Their looks were varied, but their personalities weren't as bad or stagnant as the current state of the cast.

Agree to disagree. Like I said, no matter if you were talking about Amano's character designs or character sprites, there was definitely a sameness to most of the old protagonists that forced the older games to rely on gaudy accessories and/or different hair colors to make them seem different. Likewise, I don't think I need to keep repeating the whole thing about personal preferences regarding personality.

[Vyrerus]

"Blobs of indistinguishable features" is certainly how you can describe pretty much every FF main character prior to PS1 hardware.

FFVI's cast was all clearly distinguishable from one another on the SNES. In fact, all of the characters in FFs on the SNES are clearly distinguishable from one another. Try again.

[NanaWiloh]

FFVI's cast was all clearly distinguishable from one another on the SNES. In fact, all of the characters in FFs on the SNES are clearly distinguishable from one another. Try again.

Funny you mentioned FF6 as I not long be back picked up a snes copy complete in box. Cost a pretty penny as they would say but I also sold another game I owned for a lot more.

[CrownySuccubus]

FFVI's cast was all clearly distinguishable from one another on the SNES. In fact, all of the characters in FFs on the SNES are clearly distinguishable from one another. Try again.

Once again, people seem incapable of intuiting the appendix "Although, there are some exceptions".

FF6 has such a large cast of characters that, yes, a few break the mold such as Cyan, Shadow, Sabin, Mog, Umaro, etc.

But that doesn't change the fact that it still has a cast full of pretty boys.





'

Clothing, hair style/color and various accessories are the primary way you have to tell the characters apart, unless they aren't human like Mog, old like Strega or have no human features visible like Shadow or Umaro. Cyan, in fact, is the exception because he has a mustache.

will continue bringing this scene up because it is the perfect example of the cringeworthy writing style of Endwalker which feels more like a walking simulator on a college campus at times than an expansion at the end of the world. Shadowbringers was exciting to play for me because there was always some level of tension there, with very little filler on par with the trolley sequence. Endwalker however wastes the player's time with multiple long treks in Sharlayan made even slower with the NPC that has to tag along behind you, and 3/4ths of the moon. So many people defend these out of place scenes as "oh but we need to alleviate the tension!" as if there weren't more logical and thematically on point ways to go about doing this.

You can bring up the problems with the follower mechanic, and the padding that involved walking around Sharlayan, but that really doesn't have anything to do with the Dreaded "Burger Scene".

In Shadowbringers, we would go back to our apartment in the Crystarium and have chats with Ardbert, who provided insightful commentary instead of just vomiting lore in a nonstop stream like the Sharlayans do. In Heavensward and Stormblood, we had our campfire scenes with our party members where we could look up at the sky and reflect on the adventure so far. That is what I expect out of this game - not Uber Eats in a college dorm. I will forever oppose this nonsense because if someone wants those kinds of scenes then they can already go play Persona and have an entire game's worth of them. I feel betrayed after having fallen in love with this game in ARR/Heavensward under the premise that this would be a game with high fantasy and sci-fi elements with a story that takes itself seriously and Endwalker ruined that.

The issue with this argument is that the scene did offer commentary. It's a seven minute cutscene, in which Gr'aha eating a burger takes up like 15 seconds total, while the rest of it is commentary on the events of the story, how the Scions have changed, speculating on what effect Hydaelyn possessing Krile might have, and with the final goal of showing what happens to the Elpis flower when people are happy or whatever.

Granted, I'm never going to call it a pillar of excellent storywriting, but it just feels like focusing on Gr'aha eating a burger to point out everything that's wrong with the story is like pointing at that moment when a Stormtrooper hits his head on the door as everything wrong with the original Star Wars movie.

[Rosenstrauch]

Fair warning, nothing I am about to say has any bearing on any arguments about whether or not characters qualify as "pretty boys", "brats", "masculine", or any other "let's shove a human-shaped body into a tiny box and make it fit" terminology.

FF6 character design

I mean, if we're going to pick nits:

Setzer, Edgar, Cyan, and Locke all have different eyebrow shapes and colors. They also have different nose shapes—Cyan's is an eagle/aquiline nose, Edgar's is hooked/Roman, Setzer's is straight and sharp with a flat glabella, and Locke's is still straight but has a softer tip and concave glabella. Edgar's nose has a reddened tip, while Cyan's nostrils are a deeper shade than the rest of his nose. And lest you somehow mistake Locke and Setzer for the same person, Setzer's face is covered in scars. Their chins are different shapes, too, though this is obscured by clothing and hair in Edgar and Setzer's case.

The point I'm trying to make is that these faces are unique. If you cropped out everything but their faces, it would still be clear that they look like different people, and someone who knew about the cast of FF6 could reasonably identify without having seen Amano's artwork before.

Of course, none of this is relevant to the game itself, which uses 16-bit sprites designed to fit within a 16x24 grid. Notable victims of the process of converting these designs to sprite format are everyone's noses, everyone's eyebrows being distinguishable from their eyelashes, any variation in skin color since they have a limited palette to work with (making everyone vaguely beige), and Sabin's beard.

It shouldn't be surprising that when every defining facial feature except Cyan's moustache is removed, people will tell the characters apart by their clothing.

EDIT: Also, I have no idea why I'm here right now.

[CrownySuccubus]

Fair warning, nothing I am about to say has any bearing on any arguments about whether or not characters qualify as "pretty boys", "brats", "masculine", or any other "let's shove a human-shaped body into a tiny box and make it fit" terminology.



I mean, if we're going to pick nits:

The problem is that the complaint was about there being too many anime-esque bishonen pretty boys compared to "classically handsome" (aka, rugged and tough, from a Western aesthetic) male characters. Technically speaking, each of the Scions also draw from a variety of subtle facial variations as well, but it doesn't change the fact that they are still of the same beautiful bishonen archetype.

[Vyrerus]

intuiting

You could just, you know, admit to being in error.











Anyway, for as long as the series has stuck to having Biseinen and what not, the games that do the best are the ones that feature characters outside of that mold.

IV has Yang
VI has Sabin, Gau, Cyan, Gogo, Umaro, General Leo, Shadow, Mog, Strago, and depending on which Amano art you're looking at, Edgar is also drawn with a wide, dimpled manly chin
VII has Barrett, Red XIII, Cait Sith, and Cid
IX has Steiner, Amarant
X has Wakka and Khimari
XI has Galkas(and Galka Mayo. Don't google that)

Also though, note that official Amano art isn't what sold the early games. We got weird western art portrayals for the earliest Final Fantasies. VI was actually the first one to really openly share the Amano art, having detail character bios in its instruction manual complete with both Amano portrayals of each character.

In the gameplay, of course the graphics at the time limit how the characters look, but they don't call to mind their art. They still all had stand out designs, and were unmistakably different. In the earliest games this took the form of different job designs, rather than characters.

[CrownySuccubus]

IV has Yang

Who I mentioned along with Cid and Tellah.

VI has Sabin, Gau, Cyan, Gogo, Umaro, General Leo, Shadow, Mog, Strago, and depending on which Amano art you're looking at, Edgar is also drawn with a wide, dimpled manly chin

Mentioned all of them except for Gau. Gogo, Umaro, Mog, and Shadow I mentioned as part as having "no human features". Leo is a relatively minor character, so we could technically mention General Ranjit or Rammbroes here if we wanted to be picky. And yes, Edgar's chin depends on the artwork.

I also said that VI has such a HUGE cast that you're bound to find more characters in it that break the mold. However, Amano was specifically instructed to make all of the main male characters that the player would interact with more regularly as "approachable" as possible -- which in Japanese media, meant "pretty". Locke, for instance, was originally designed to be an older rogue with a mustache before Amano was asked to redesign. All of the "unapproachable" features were moved over to Shadow, instead.

Likewise, Galuf and Ricard Highwind are temporary guest characters that get written out of the story or killed off at some point. It's not like FFXIV doesn't have guest party members like Gotetsu or temporary playable characters such as Hien.

VII has Barrett, Red XIII, Cait Sith, and Cid
IX has Steiner, Amarant
X has Wakka and Khimari

I specifically said pre-PS1 era, and I likewise said that Nomura typically has a somewhat more varied diversity.

FFVII is also special, because Nomura was ordered to draw against his normal style for that game. Due to the limitations of early PS1 technical knowledge, they needed the characters to be exaggerated and recognizable by their basic shapes alone.


You could follow the whole conversation rather than call someone else "in error".