Thanks for all your time & effort you put into the research for this post

I'm really looking forward to Dawn Trail and find it amazing how much better the world looks! Regarding the WoL updates, me and my friend are quite shocked at how our Midlander WoLs have looked in the benchmark. Also I do not think that your reaction was overly dramatic, I am myself very attached to my WoL and would like to keep her as true to her old self as possible on the next journey. I know that we will get a free Phantasia, but I think that I chose the best presets for my taste and I highly doubt that using Phantasia or adding a few more presets to choose from will do much, unless it's maybe a race change (which I would rather not do). We took pictures from the same appearance data in character creation with the blue & the desert background and compared the two (tried to keep everything as similar as possible). Here are our observations so far:

The quality/resolution has improved significantly, but I wonder if the current modeling could be adjusted to make it look like the original again. The overall look of the face seems somehow different, even if there are only small changes, especially to the eyes, nose and lips. The hair textures are sharper, but now the hairstyles look way too wiry and doesn't reflect light like it should. I'm very happy though, that the eye-colour itself is popping and didn't change much (would love to see that lil white dot reflection back though, even if it makes lighting-wise no sense but that's just one of my pet peeves).

As mentioned above, the lips appear to be wider, but not as plump as before and the pout effect is no longer there. The nose no longer looks as straight and the eyelashes don't look dynamic / naturally placed enough. It would be better if Square Enix could adjust the model based on the "perceived shape" and not the "actual shape". For example, for the eyes the placement & length of the eyelashes, eyeliner and for the mouth the shape of the lipstick (not just the lips) and for the nose the width of the nose bridge and the size, curvature and direction of the tip of the nose. I am aware that a lot of it is lighting, but you can clearly see that some of the differences can't be attributed to lighting only.








I tried to fiddle around with contrast to see if I can make out the shapes of the eyes, nose or lips a little better and tried to highlight them according to my overall perception:







Full album: https://imgur.com/a/ZRuTm5T