Ender
12-12-2006, 07:53 PM
It's hard to blame Square for the technology they had available, but in retrospect, is anyone disappointed about the way they handled the characters in FFVII?
To me they came off as straight out of a Playmobil (http://www.playmobil.de/on/demandware.store/Sites-GB-Site) playset. The look definitely, but also the amount of emotion the characters portrayed "on screen" amounted to that of a plastic toy.
In the previous games in the series, despite relying on lower graphical capabilities, the game-controlled actions of the characters in in-game cutscenes contributed to the emotional impact of the scene in addition to the words that were being spoken. They bounced up and down when they got excited, gave a firm head nod to indicate assent and determination, hung their heads in sadness or shame, walked away when they were conflicted, collapsed to their knees in despair, or even turned to the "audience" and gave an exaggerrated laugh.
This sort of character "acting" lent a charm to those characters that gave them a depth they otherwise wouldn't have had from dialogue alone.
Yet FFVII relies (with a few exceptions...ie Aeris in the church, etc.) on dialogue and some waving of the arms in circles for its in-game cutscenes. It makes the characters feel as plastic as they looked IMO. Only during the actual in-game movie sequences were they really consistently able to succeed in conveying more than what they wrote in the dialogue.
It's a beautiful looking game background-wise, with a great story that's far more personal than one normally expects from an epic rpg, this little fault just struck me in the course of playing the series all the way through as making the game feel a little "not right."
To me they came off as straight out of a Playmobil (http://www.playmobil.de/on/demandware.store/Sites-GB-Site) playset. The look definitely, but also the amount of emotion the characters portrayed "on screen" amounted to that of a plastic toy.
In the previous games in the series, despite relying on lower graphical capabilities, the game-controlled actions of the characters in in-game cutscenes contributed to the emotional impact of the scene in addition to the words that were being spoken. They bounced up and down when they got excited, gave a firm head nod to indicate assent and determination, hung their heads in sadness or shame, walked away when they were conflicted, collapsed to their knees in despair, or even turned to the "audience" and gave an exaggerrated laugh.
This sort of character "acting" lent a charm to those characters that gave them a depth they otherwise wouldn't have had from dialogue alone.
Yet FFVII relies (with a few exceptions...ie Aeris in the church, etc.) on dialogue and some waving of the arms in circles for its in-game cutscenes. It makes the characters feel as plastic as they looked IMO. Only during the actual in-game movie sequences were they really consistently able to succeed in conveying more than what they wrote in the dialogue.
It's a beautiful looking game background-wise, with a great story that's far more personal than one normally expects from an epic rpg, this little fault just struck me in the course of playing the series all the way through as making the game feel a little "not right."