We hate to disappoint you, but if you were desperately holding on to some insane hope that the blocky, sub-Final Fantasy VII look of Away's characters was somehow an artifact of a poor scan, these new direct-feed screens will disabuse you of that notion. The flat faces and blank, circular eyes continue to look really damn creepy, in character art and in gameplay. Luckily, the game is Away: Shuffle Dungeon, and not Away: Hanging Out With 1996-Era Character Art. Meaning that the majority of your game time should be spent focusing on dungeon crawling, and not face-to-face chatting with the polygon-economical cast.
In fact, the actual dungeon part is 2D, character art and all. And it looks really nice. For some reason, Mistwalker and AQ Interactive have decided that the only time the characters should look embarrassingly ridiculous is when you're talking to them. Why didn't they just stick with 2D for the whole game?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-17-2007 @ 12:52PM
manaman said...
Yeah,
I dunno--I actually LIKE the look of them from what I've seen. Well, at least the in-game stuff. The person who came up with the concept art is . . . creative, anyway. It seems to play off well, though.
Peace,
manaman
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12-17-2007 @ 8:42PM
EDW said...
hey now..i actually think the game looks pretty good graphically.
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12-18-2007 @ 10:10AM
ssuk said...
At least they don't look so stretched. Wind Waker's models stretched flat images so much it looked like crap. Alas, this is the main draw back of the DS, it's image wrapping/real-time anti-alias is poor... Better than the N64's, granted, however if Nintendo had used a 100Mhz ARM9 processor instead of a 75Mhz ARM9 processor, things may have been a bit different. Oh well, hopefully Nintendo will solve with with whatever comes to take over the DS...
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12-18-2007 @ 2:47PM
troy said...
I like it too. I think its sad how mean you guys can be when it comes to matters of taste: very often you act as though it is a given that something is atrocious when really you just don't like it. I have no problem with you not liking it, just remember that it might look really cool to someone else. It makes me glad I'm not a game designer, it seems like doing unique things can get your feelings hurt in the press.
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12-20-2007 @ 7:04PM
Cory said...
I like the game's look.
If flat faces and circular eyes are such a problem, how come nobody was complaining about MySims? Its a far cry from some of the more recent trends in videogame artwork design. At least none of the characters look like a gender ambiguous Meg Ryan...
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