FFVI Remake needs to look like Amano’s chibi concept art
11 Likes
is it weird that I actually like the look of (a heavily patched) FFVI on the GBA better than on the SNES
it always feels like it was supposed to be squeezed down like that, on the SNES it’s like… chafing against limitations, but in hindsight, the wrong ones
I’ve been hoping for a remake of FFV that looks like Amano’s scene art for like, 20 years.
like, if el shaddai can look as good as it did, then they can make FFV look like amano’s art.
11 Likes
yes this is weird, you should feel bad about it
3 Likes
It’s weird but I think we agree on what FFVI is; it’s defined by excess straining against an aging system, released only a few years before PSX and CD-ROMs and FMV allowed Square to spend as much money as they wanted creating a moat of production value. On the SNES, on a television as big as you can carry into your place, with external speakers as loud as you’re allowed, Final Fantasy VI is constantly contrasting its ambition against its bit-starved samples, its one-pixel-snap shrug expressions, its suplexed trains. That frustrated ambition is so good!
On the GBA it feels crushed down to reasonable bounds. It’s 2004, it’s just an old pixel game, there’s lots of slightly-compromised SNES ports. If it’s comfortable, well, why aren’t I playing FFV?
11 Likes
i think this makes sense to me for 4 and 5, but i still prefer 6 on snes
1 Like
We need Amano back
1 Like
things i’ve said on dozens of internet forums as a teenager
2 Likes
many of us have wanted this for decades, yes. el shaddai is one cool touchstone for how the visual design could be approached, and plenty of stuff in ffxiv shows how it could be done. (i love its approach to so much clothing and armor design with all those amano-esque touches like stripes, flowing cuts of cloth, random horns and little strings of beads and baubles.) also i’m a broken record but an unreal engine ff which uses dq11 as a sort of blueprint for one last throwback to its aesthetic origins in HI DEF 3D would be kind of a dream come true (and just really unrealistic unless as perhaps a mid budget switch game which gets ported to other systems)
(i don’t even know why i constantly feel the need to be parenthetical)
4 Likes
I feel like this perspective is not complete without considering Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger comes across as masterfully at peace with its technology and achieving its high ambitions without resorting to abstractions, not chomping at the bit to escape its limits. FF6 has player sprites wildly out of scale in the battle scenes and in the overworld, and weird gothic-looking entirely static enemy sprites. Chrono Trigger eliminated battle screens and has fully animated enemies whose size and style is in proportion to the player characters, and it even added special tiny overworld sprites for the party.
FF6 is closer to my heart and it’s a coherent position to call Chrono Trigger inferior because its polish makes it boring (and, unrelatedly, FF6 has better pacing). But why is a 1994 and 1995 game from the same company so different in spirit?
10 Likes
As always, Yuji Horii brings a sense of restraint and an understanding of its own limitations.
Final Fantasy is prog-rock to its core and it’s vital that it neither knows nor cares if it’s in good taste or just a fool. Dragon Quest is Bach and quietly revolutionary and mathematically invested in recombining the parts that are endlessly interesting, looking for something overlooked.
10 Likes
if only they’d had that fourth megabyte a year earlier they’d have achieved total serenity
3 Likes
Final Fantasy is insatiable no matter the budget and tech constraints; that’s its whole ethos. Final Fantasy VI and VII are the most exemplary because the tech is most present in both; it’s fighting against them, they’re reveling in new possibilities, they’re crashing and burning.
Dragon Quest is happy to continue to pretend to be a Famicom game thirty years later because do cell phones and Facebook really connect people, really?
11 Likes
At least nobody came along and stole 99.7% of their megabytes midway through development like Secret of Mana
7 Likes
isn’t this kind of what led to secret of mana and chrono trigger being separate games though?
1 Like
I can’t figure out the narrative from the various interviews, seems like a big ol’ planning mess spiraling in all directions
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/588646-secret-of-mana/67168685
All this reminds me of Blizzard’s failed “Titan” MMO project some of whose assets ended up in Overwatch. That’s probably a massive spaghetti of abandoned directions over the years too. Makes me wish there were more Jodorowsky’s-Dune style documentaries about these things
4 Likes
What I can’t let this pass
FF6 has such awkward stop-start pacing, like its shuddering at the thought of maintaining my interest and is happy to get caught up in totally irrelevant tangents
5 Likes
FF6 has incredible pacing up until the world of ruin where it just hits a wall, a tradition followed by pretty much every final fantasy game since
I played some of chrono trigger not long ago and if anything I feel like the pacing is too fast, like shit just keeps happening and it often feels stitched together in fairly artificial ways. idk.
anyway, I have never once played through any of the first 3 final fantasy games. can someone recommend the best way to play through them? there have been so many ports and rereleases of each it’s kind of overwhelming.
5 Likes
I’d love to see this elaborated as well, where does Chrono Trigger’s pacing falter? I’ve heard arguments against the first time you’re dumped in the future, but I think the drag there is very effective in inspiring the listless depression and empty stomach you’re running on.
1 Like
I really need to play through it again to answer this confidently