Face, body, detached

Although games now have good enough graphics to get round this, there was a time when some characters would look naff in their realtime graphics but have a nice face picture. I'm not talking FF6 here either; those sprites looked marvellous and really expressive.

I'm thinking about the likes of DOOM and the PSX version of Metal Gear Solid in particular.

In DOOM, your character had a face on the bottom of the screen, yet when you saw his body, it had a helmet so you never saw the face on a body (until a weird pic at the end of episode 4).

Then in MGS (this was the weirdest one for me) you always saw Snake, but the graphics were so bad that you basically couldn't see his face, not because it was concealed but because there were about six different pixels to discern any features, expressions or anything else. Then in the codec menu there was his head, but never attached to the body. And yes, there was the briefing but its graphics weren't any better.

To me, this made me find the character very mysterious and made me feel very detached from said character, just because we could never see all of them (not at once anyway). I actually think that in DOOM it was intentional as you played as an anonymous marine (often referred to as "you") who had no lines or personality to speak of. This got fixed in each of their respective remakes, in which the graphics were far superior (and DOOM 3 he didn't wear a helmet). Hell, in MGS Twin Snakes you could even see the resemblance between the twins.

Anyone else ever noticed this about any games? Face, body, never seen together, character feels really far away or just anonymous?

In more realistic games for the N64 and PSX, when they'd try to convey a realistic character, their face would end up all meshed. So, I guess to not waste the character design, they show it off elsewhere.