It's nice to climb out of the uncanny valley

[Del Murder]

Yesterday Miriel remarked to me on how beautiful the cinematic scenes are in FFT: War of the Lions. Instead of the standard route of trying to make human-looking 3D characters, SE went a different route. Why can't they do an entire game with characters that look like this? I'm sick of the uncanny valley this series approaches.

Discuss the awesome cutscenes in this FFT remake.

[VeloZer0]

I have always been of the opinion cell shading/artistic styling should be the future for video games. Attempting to make something that looks real is a fools errand.

It would have looked utterly ridiculous if they had realistically styled FMVs. IMO the style they picked was absolutely perfect for the title. When it came out for PSP I was leery of purchasing it, as all it was really offering to me was the FMVs. I had been very underwhelmed by the PS1 ports of SNES titles, so I wasn't expecting much. I was very pleasantly surprised.

[Rostum]

None of the characters in the Final Fantasy series approach the uncanny valley, well except for Spirits Within but we try not to talk about that. The uncanny valley refers to hyper-realistic characters, such as what we see in Spirits Within and the movie Beoulve. The series as a hole has always gone towards more stylised anime-influenced characters, rather than hyper-realism, even in Advent Children Complete and Final Fantasy XIII (to give a more present example).

I am of the opinion that hyper-realism in CGI, whilst technologically incredible, is really not that appealing. I'd much prefer more artistic stylised representations of the real world than the real world itself.

[Del Murder]

Yeah nothing was as bad as Spirits. I just needed a title for the thread.

But in games like FFX and XIII the humanoid characters do try to look a little too much like real people to my liking.

[Miriel]

There's a reason why Pixar has never attempted to make super human-y looking humans. Their humans are always very cartoon-ish. Because it's smurfing creepy when they try and make humans look realistic. Final Fantasy may not technically delve into the "hyper" realistic part of uncanny valley, but they do seem to be moving more in that direction than going the opposite way. There were definitely characters in the latest installments that I thought looked creepy. Not the main characters, but a lot of the background ones.

I thought the stuff in War of the Lions was just breathtaking. Gorgeous. I wish they'd do more stuff like that.

[Rantz]

I've never really checked out WotL before, but this made me have a look at some of the cutscenes. Looks sweet.

I do like the awe-inspiring special effects that often come with realistic cutscenes in the later instalments. However, I think it's both braver and more artistically merited (a generalisation, but overall) to go for a stylised interpretation. It also allows for more artistic freedom of expression, which I feel is especially relevant to fantasy titles.

[Jiro]

Cel shading is my absolute favourite thing ever. Wild ARMs 3 could easily be my favourite game purely on the look. It's just so awesome.

However I did like FFXIII's characters. I mean, they looked pretty realistic, and it wasn't that creepy for me. Except Sazh has a stupid face on in one of the menu screens which made me a bit uncomfortable.

[Rostum]

There's a reason why Pixar has never attempted to make super human-y looking humans. Their humans are always very cartoon-ish. Because it's smurfing creepy when they try and make humans look realistic.

Yes, it's something I've studied during my degree. It's because no matter how much attention to detail we put in facial animation, we're always going to be too far off. We're all so used to seeing and looking at faces that any micro muscle expresison that's missed will throw us off completely. That's not to say that we won't ever overcome the uncanny valley. There's some incredible facial rigging technology out there that is looking very nice that was used in the L.A. Noire game (though it didn't translate as well in to the actual game).

Pixar learnt their lesson fairly early from this:

http://doomlaser.com/images/tintoy.png

But on top of that the reason they go for cartoon-styled worlds and characters is because of the very strong poses they can get within the animations that make everything just much more interesting.

The reason background characters generally look worse is because they are done through crowd simulations and because they are not the main focus they don't put as much detail in to them (waste of money and time).

But overall I never actually saw games like FFX or XIII as trying to push the realistic side. It's all still very much anime to me.