Commercial Critique - Star Ocean: Blue Sphere

[robotacon]

I really like the use of different perspective. It shouldn't work but the game doesn't give a damn and it looks great.
Every tile set seems to have different saturation to give some extra distinction.
The tiles, specially the foliage, are amazing. Seamless!

But I don't think they've used the frames in the character animations to its full potential.
The loops with 6 frames look more like they only have 3 frames. I've seen loops with 4 frames that look better.

[Conzeit]

The GIFS I posted here are barely an example of what I mean, if you really want to get an inkling of the animation look at the battle videos in the youtube playlist I linked to.

The saturation thing...I actually started ripping using a different saturation when Ilkke pointed out the gameboy displayed the art less saturated, I wanted to post here what the creators aimed to show....so that might account for some of the saturation differences you spotted

[Ryumaru]

Me and conceit were chatting about star ocean

me: obviously, the tile work is amazing
the economy is unmatched imo, atleast for a gbc game
him: you can try n piece it together...it's not often you get tilesets that clear with maps right there
me: but I think some of the color ramps could have been better
like the green forest
could have had some of the greens go towards blue or yellow, without affecting priority
him: consider the desaturation in GBC
me: true
him: well go and post that
anything is good by this point in time
me: but apparently blues translate similarly well as greens do
can i just copy paste this convo?
sure
yummy: cupcakes

[Scribblette]

This really is fantastically impressive. I'm left wondering how difficult it'd be to achieve the same results with the forests if the tiles were 32x32 instead of 8x8. On magnifying them to try and mimic the style, I get lost in giant blocks >.< some illusions seem more achievable with smaller tiles, let alone time spent drawing.

[Conzeit]

oh yes it would be very hard. I mean unless you upscaled everything and made the trees like the size of a SOCBS screenshot

[Scribblette]

Folk may be excited to hear there's a remake of this happening for the mobile phone. It looks like it has larger tiles - an animated image under the 'world' section shows the forest & crash section remade with a lot more shading. Either 16x16 or something odd.

http://www.square-enix.co.jp/mobile/sem/sobs/ - if the images don't load, switch to another menu option and then return. Many other images of backgrounds available per character clicked on.

[Conzeit]

Cool. thanks for the heads up scribblete  Does it keep the sharp look and timing? always that I've looked at other entries in the series it seems like they waste the extra resources on smoothing the actions too much and making the graphics too photoshoppy....hence my obsession with SoBS

[Scribblette]

All I've seen of it are the screenies at the site. If you click characters and go to individual ones, it shows the animated sprites. *grumbles about them getting away with one idle and one mirrored walk frame as a four frame animation while everyone tells him to actually pay attention to RL*

They're also visible under 'system' and watch for the page 2 tabs.

[happymonster]

This does look great, has anyone also looked in more detail at the sprites? I especially like the way they keep the early Final Fantasy style faces, whilst offering more variety in sizes of character than can be shown in 16 x 16. For example some characters are big and bulky, others are skinny and small, etc.. I think it looks like the maximum vertical size is 32 pixels. Has anyone else seen this style used in other games?