A game for 4 year olds

[Cleretic]

And I've said before, I think they really messed up by referencing "modern Earth tech" for Garlemald, especially those ugly boxy cars that look like they've made a 3D model of how a two-year-old draws a car. We've seen Garlean tech before that – the magitek armours and flying juggernauts with their whimsical winged bipedal designs and ornate details. Garlemald citizen tech should be based on those designs, not turning to a different source entirely.

I actually didn't overly mind the cars, because they do look like kinda crappy early twentieth century cars--or, perhaps more pointedly, how anime tends to draw early 20th century cars. Those are some Fullmetal Alchemist or JoJo Part 2-style boltbuckets right there. It's not fancy or particularly interesting, but I feel like if they designed a fully detailed Garlean car then we'd want to see them use it, and they had no intention of it being more than a piece of scenery. One of those funny instances where they're sorta forced to underdesign a new setting element.

And... honestly, I don't think Stormblood was all it could've been, either--it's still pretty good at points (mostly in the back end), but it'd be the hardest one to try to 'fix', and ultimately I think Bozja hit its goals better. But like I said, I'm not really interested in 'Stormblood, Take Three'. I wanted something new from Garlemald, and that's what I got.

[Iscah]

I actually didn't overly mind the cars, because they do look like kinda crappy early twentieth century cars--or, perhaps more pointedly, how anime tends to draw early 20th century cars. Those are some Fullmetal Alchemist or JoJo Part 2-style boltbuckets right there.

I haven't watched JoJo so cant speak for that, but FmA car designs are much more vintage-looking. They're fairly uncommon in the setting anyway but I skimmed through the manga looking for images – the first few pages of chapter 63 is an easy scene to reference – it is quite a boxy shape (and I don't know cars enough to say if it's accurate to anything) but it has the details like old-fashioned headlights and fenders and just generally looks like a car rather than a child's drawing of a car.

[MikkoAkure]

I haven't watched JoJo so cant speak for that, but FmA car designs are much more vintage-looking. They're fairly uncommon in the setting anyway but I skimmed through the manga looking for images – the first few pages of chapter 63 is an easy scene to reference – it is quite a boxy shape (and I don't know cars enough to say if it's accurate to anything) but it has the details like old-fashioned headlights and fenders and just generally looks like a car rather than a child's drawing of a car.

The Garlean cars look very much like they're based on old "people's cars". Basically a boxy, very basic car meant to be affordable and get you around the city, of which the original VW Beetle is a good western example. They're super iconic in Japan and Europe for the time period of the late 50's-early 60's and those plus the architecture we see feel like they're supposed to put our minds in the frame of a successful post-war industrialized nation with tons of resources and the safety of the modern world until they bombed themselves out.

The Garlean examples seem to be closest related to Datsun 110s, Toyota Coronas, and the kei cars that followed. The Soviet ZAZ Zaporozhets is an even boxier version of that same type of idea of a car in that time period, but the Novus D toy minion looks more like the Japanese cars with that front end.

[Cleretic]

The Garlean cars look very much like they're based on old "people's cars". Basically a boxy, very basic car meant to be affordable and get you around the city, of which the original VW Beetle is a good western example. They're super iconic in Japan and Europe for the time period of the late 50's-early 60's and those plus the architecture we see feel like they're supposed to put our minds in the frame of a successful post-war industrialized nation with tons of resources and the safety of the modern world until they bombed themselves out.

The Garlean examples seem to be closest related to Datsun 110s, Toyota Coronas, and the kei cars that followed. The Soviet ZAZ Zaporozhets is an even boxier version of that same type of idea of a car in that time period, but the Novus D toy minion looks more like the Japanese cars with that front end.

Yeah, these are all about right, although I've got very little knowledge of cars to be able to cite all that myself. It's about the right angle for the thing they were addressing by adding the cars: basically, 'we want to communicate that cars exist, but we don't want to make you think the fact cars exist is important'. That actually requires them to go for these sorts of 'aggressively mundane' designs and fairly low polycounts, because you're not supposed to actually care about them.

If they made even ONE of those cars unique and good-looking, people would be looking for it to be somehow relevant to the story, or at least start demanding it as a mount.