This has to be a straight downgrade for me in so many aspects...

The hair colour is obviously washed out, horribly so, removing the only red option for elezen other than the wine red one.



The hair itself is also stiffer, less voluminous and has lost its shine, it just looks straight up worse in every aspect but texture... but even that is very much a more detailed texture on flat blobs, now even easier to see.


The face is shiny. Like wax. The eyes have lost their focus, the elezen gaze is important to me and that's entirely gone with these aloof eyes that also look darker.
Free nosejob as well, I didn't want one...
Not pictured, but lipstick light options don't look so light anymore either. Eyebrows have also been softened...

I know softer features were inevitable since they were going to add more polygons, but everything looks too smooth now, and what doesn't is stuff that would have benefitted. This is a huge blow for me, I don't want to change my main much and I can't even get the hair colour alone right because of how limited the palette is.




Benchmark on the left.


Even if I were to use the free fantasia to fix stuff like the eye and skin colour, I don't have the option at all for the hair, nose, eyebrows. That's a lot of the elezen charm gone for me. And on top of that, any change I use the fantasia for would be misleading anyway since the preview spots in character creation all have very different lighting.

There's around two months left before Dawntrail gets finished, there's no way they solve this. There's been feedback about overly glossy/wet skin from the very first Fanfest preview, so clearly it's locked in. I may warm up to it, but my main character looking like that killed any drive I had to also see my alts...