it’s always been kind of a weird feeling for me around mech games where there’s a very fine line between feeling like you’re piloting/controlling actual mechs and realizing that it’s basically just a standard player pawn or controller that they skinned up to look like a robot and they just modeled small trees and buildings
so the tradeoff for strategy and tactics stuff has always been to make everything animate. so. slowly to compensate for the fact that you’re “piloting” these big enormous things but also you’re zoomed way out so they might as well be anything
battletech stuff seems especially bad considering into the breach came out this year and regardless of what you think of the actual tactical design, it definitely succeeds on the “make robots feel big and heavy but also don’t make it take forever” front because pixel art allows them to abstract that heaviness away visually from big long 3D animations to some nice big VFX that take like 15 frames
I know this would completely change the tactics design but I think battletech probably should have done a frozen synapse thing where turns are planned simultaneously for pacing’s sake because once all of that is done you get to watch this cool robot battle for like 30 seconds before going back into tactics mode
The main reason I threw money their way during the Kickstarter was that this is the actual Descent dev team. Seeing as how the shambling corpse of Interplay is holding on to the Descent IP seemingly out of spite at this point, a new property was the best we could’ve hoped for.
i like her head and hair
i’m assuming the crown is non-negotiable
i like to imagine the armour is the result of the encumbrance rules in the rpg system she is designed in.
EDIT: also that using plate armour in those particular locations makes the character immune to 70% of the results on the overly complicated homebrew critical hit table that the DM uses.
also also the overblown sword is pretty amazing, like a powerful magic item that is totally tasteless. it even has an hourglass in it!
i’m not trolling, i mean it’s sort of a joke response in that i am imagining the d&d game which produced this character, and i hoped it would make someone smile but … the design is at least interesting in that it made me wonder about things. like “why is this princess not wearing any clothes?”, and “i really like the little flowers in her hair”.
so yes, i think there are worse character designs. for a close comparison, see the main character from x-blades.
(to be clear i am considering the design from the cover of the 3ds game, after rewatching the videos above the Blade Strangers design looks a bit different.)
