The Wheel Of Fate Is oh nevermind.

BlazBlue's logo, in which all the letters are trying to desperately get away from each other as quickly as possible.

I'm not really here to fault BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger's recycling of characters from the Guilty Gear series. Arc System works is small and not all that wealthy and making detailed, high-res sprites is pretty costly, so I can understand if at some point they sat around the table, grabbed a general sketch of Potemkin, and thought, "Well, how can we re-use most of this and still make a pretty different character? You see, Guilty Gear 2 didn't work out so great, and..."

Iron Tager--Potemkin after Science!

What I really don't want to forgive BlazBlue for is its horrible, horrible character designs. I cannot stress this enough. They are bad. They manage to be both repulsive and utterly forgettable at the same time. Say what you will about their personalities, the storyline, the actual battle system and the quality of the sprites, but strictly speaking in terms of character designs, I want to headbutt Toshimichi Mori and/or Yuuki Katou, whoever is the most responsible for this mess.

Maybe we should start with how every single character in BlazBlue seems to have been dreamed up by a man who was holding a What's Hot & What's Not chart of stylistic anime trends in his other hand, and following it to the letter. Exhibit A: Ragna the Bloodedge, a name not quite as embarrassing as "Edge Maverick" but still pretty up there.

Ragna the Bloodedge, also featured: his inner .::*Darkness*::.

Ragna is kind of an amalgam of various things that I am tired of seeing in anime: swooshy-spiky hair of a color that doesn't really exist (there's gray, there's platinum blonde and then there's sterling silver) coupled with a twenty-third century samurai getup, with additional belt buckles for good measure. When I saw the animated opening to the game as Ragna displayed his Suiseiseki eyes to music that could well be featured in a Rozen Maiden spin-off, I just wanted to think "No, this isn't serious, the eyes are just a parody by the designers, who are of course self-aware of how wall-punchingly generic this guy is", but no, the opening continues, Ragna gets into a dramatic sword fight with Jin Kisaragi (read: Ky plus Ice), and the drama unfolds. That's Ragna for you: a Sol Badguy tweaked for modern sensibilities.

Noel Vermillion sports the world's shortest tie

A side-effect of trying to cater endlessly to the contemporary anime crowd is the attempt to cram way too many things into one design. I can only imagine that Noel is the result of Mori and Katou making a bet on who could come up with a character who featured as many fetish evokers as possible. Her infuriatingly useless ribbons and Apple-designed handguns are one thing; her detached sleeves, bare back and absolute territory are another. (Even sadder is the story of Litchi, a vaguely oriental chick and also the vehicle for more boobs.) BlazBlue's character designers enjoy the technology to reproduce all their zippers and straps in-game with some degree of fidelity, and this doesn't seem have done any good for their judgment of when a design is way too goddamn busy. Echoing on my post regarding the character designs of Rival Schools, I'd like to put these guys in the PS1 era and see what they did with themselves.

I guess the amateurish quality of the art is not doing them any favors either. Character portraits for BlazBlue: Continuum Shift are at least a step up in this regard, with the fighters in more interesting and dynamic poses.

You know, the Guilty Gear games also had some pretty crazy character designs, but they existed in this magical midnight metal carnival sort of atmosphere that characters like I-No embodied so well. The cast of BlazBlue is given a bland synthpop world in which they can just exist while looking pretty and lending themselves to endless badly-drawn fan art. It's not even elegant, it's just... boring, and you know people will lap it up but that will not make it any less boring.

Thanks to Creative Uncut for images.

And yet it floats.

Sol Ciel, from Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia [PS2].

I like floating islands; they're nice and romantic for the most part. If the JRPG is all about high-flying adventure with a rag-tag bunch of loveable cartoons, I can't think of a whole lot of better settings. It's unfortunate, then, that it's so commonly wasted.

Logic tells us that whoever or whatever takes residence on a piece of land that happens to be drifting in the sky has a powerful reason. Either they want to keep everyone else out or desperately want to keep something in. The first option doesn't appeal to me much; "lost tribes" in JRPG's often consist of hermetic, three hundred-year old douchebags in robes who hide the secret to the world's salvation but won't share it with you, because they keep their scepters rammed up their sphincters when they're not using them.

On the other hand, the idea of travelling to some forgotten prison or mausoleum that sits solemn in the upper stratosphere is worthy of pants-creaming. Scenario: You have to retrieve the sacred heirloom of the ancient royal family, who, as undead ghouls, riot within their stately palace-tomb. Another: You have to put down an unfathomable evil, shackled within a God-forsaken fortress and magically lifted to the skies so no foolhardy adventurer would ever try. Imagine the dread.

But for the most part, floating islands seem tacked-on, like afterthoughts. It's like the scenario writer and the concept artist just finished designing all the endless deserts and twinkling crystal castles and sleepy villages, but now they feel the world they've concieved isn't fantasy enough. Okay, make it float!

Eden, from Atelier Iris II: The Azoth of Destiny [PS2].

I guess all these people went to sleep one night, woke up, looked around, and thought "Oh, we're sky people now I guess that's nice".

Maybe I wouldn't be so displeased with this trend if a little originality was injected into the process. Most floating islands float due to a.) a reason that is not immediately obvious but certainly magical, or b.) a reason that is immediately obvious and certainly magical. (Read: giant chunks of crystal sticking out of its underside. I've had it with crystals.)

Perhaps they need to stop being so utopian and start being a little menacing. What about applying the island-turtle concept? The difference would be that, while the unassuming party may not be aware that they've set up camp on a gargantuan sea-monster's back, the denizens of the sky would have to be fully aware that they're riding on a gentle gas giant, wrapped in clouds and thin air. Whoever is willing to live somewhere like that is cool with me.

Thanks to Creative Uncut for pictures.

Ryuusei KIIIIIICK!!

I've always been partial to many of Capcom's in-house artists for many different reasons. A big reason is their healthy emphasis on functionality.

Given how Capcom invented the modern fighter, I imagine that many of their founding character designers must have sat down and looked at this new breed of video game and realized that characters had to be explosively appealing. There's a flimsy vestige of a storyline and a few win/lose quotes, but most if not all 'character development' is going to take place on a two-dimensional battlefield, with fluidly-animated sprites to answer any questions. Not the sillier questions like "Why is he fighting?", which would only spring forth from someone with a well-cemented interest in the game, but more immediate questions like "What does this guy do? Is he awesome?"

Edayan is in the high tier of Capcom artists, and has contributed to the Street Fighter series countless times. He was also responsible for designing the cast of the sadly forgotten tag-team fighter Rival Schools: United By Fate, a game about dueling high school students where every other character profile includes the term "hot-blooded". It looks, plays and inspires like a passionately-drawn shounen manga does.

Batsu Ichimonji, P.E. enthusiast and protagonist of the two-game series, exudes the raw, youthful, organic drive that The King of Fighters' sleeker Kyo Kusanagi, who also started off as a uniformed schoolboy, doesn't really capture. If he calls out the names of his attacks, which are things like "Justice Kick", and suddenly scarlet flames envelop his leg as he dropkicks you into the Moon, you will understand that this is what Batsu does. Even though Rival Schools for the PS1 was a bit of a graphical mess (moreso for some characters than others), his defining features, the way in which every part of his outfit, appearance and personal style cooperate to form a coherent portrait, shine through the limited technology.

Long before Persona 3 capitalized on Westerners' fervent desire to play as a Japanese high school student, Rival Schools included a day-by-day, life-simulation side-game where you got to know the characters better. [It was left out of the NA release.] This was the kind of thing that senior artists like Akiman and CRMK perhaps didn't anticipate when Street Fighter II was still in the works, but instead of promoting looser design, Rival Schools continues to tell the majority of its story with pictures. The exclamation mark-laden dialogue, full of earnest promises and friends cheering friends on, is almost an accessory to the many visual clues that, for example, visiting the characters at the pool or the beach would provide.

Roberto Miura plays soccer. We know that much from his outfit, and it makes sense when he lobs soccer balls at opponents in battle. The fact that he wears his face-covering visor even to the school pool adds another layer of teasing interest to him; are we ever going to see his eyes? Is he like one of those characters from some TV shows that is never shown from the neck up? The fact that Edge, a purple-clad punk who looks like the lovechild of Benimaru Nikaido and Ryuji Yamazaki, lets his unicorn-hair down in the pool says just about as much on him. Why does Gan, whose bulging muscles can barely be contained by an XXL uniform, wear a full bathing suit? What the crap is he afraid of?

When the studio behind Street Fighter II decided to invite a cast of warriors from around the world into the ring, this concept of characters wearing their nationalities, hobbies and personalities on their sleeves must have weighed heavy on the designers' minds. It's a philosophy that was carried on marvelously to Rival Schools, where Justice High School (for full effect, say that out loud and say it intensely) is alive with little everyday scenes. You can imagine spectacular martial arts showdowns taking place over lunch, in the showers, during the last inning of a baseball game. This is the kind of memorable design that I greatly respect most Capcom fighters for; it's coherent, unified and masterfully executed, and it's more than I can say for many contemporary games in the genre. Maybe that makes the characters cartoons--it almost certainly makes the whole game a cartoon--and I personally love that.

Thanks to The Fighters Generation and Creative Uncut for images.

Game Typography

Shin Megami Tensei:Persona has to be one of my favourite games on the market. Being a graphic design student, I can't help but notice some of the design choices made by game developers to their series. Especially typography. While admiring the various items that came with the game Persona, I got down to thinking: When old games are updated, how do we go from things like the image on the left to the image on the right?

It's easiest to analyze the typographical scemes of games based on the time period they were created in. The first Persona, released in 1996, features an occult, mystical, 'dark' typographic form. Compare this to its modern remake on the PSP, which features a streamlined, techno-inspired  type, carrying on a design asthetic seen in later Persona titles (IE Persona 3 and 4, released in 2006 and 2008, respectively.) Over the course of ten years, we go from a highly decorate form that carries a personality all its own to a streamlined sans-serif font. Original games were fighting to prove themselves as 'different' amongst a sea of titles vying for attention. Now that games have given themselves a solid base, they're leaning towards legibility as opposed to creativity. 

   

Now, although the new texts in many games are far more 'streamlined', the text is working just as hard. Doesn't a streamlined text give its own connotations? You can't just take away the garishness of old texts and leave a blank slate for yourself to look at. Compare this change to another medium, for example, advertising. Think of the change from pre-WWII ads to the helvetica-infused ads of today. It's like Sans-Serif is taking over the universe! 

With the rapid consumption of any sort of information nowadays, legibility is considered far more important than display value. If you're flicking your eyes across a wall of games, you need to be able to read it instantaneously lest it be passed over. Unfortunate, but true.

To end; I like the new persona logo better, but I hate the little 'shin megami tensei' bit all shoved into the corner there. Looks like an ugly afterthought.