In my experience, sprite art is a lot more colorful and whimsical than more 'realistic' depictions of characters, and you lose so much personality when transitioning from the former to the latter
When you're making 3D models of characters, making a whole bunch of distinctive shapes and models is way harder and more expensive than when you're drawing them
(But I cannot compare it to SO2, and the remakes of SO1 and SO2 - I only ever played SO1 as the remake version - without the difference being so painfully obvious)
I agree with FF. 6 was obviously them really mastering the console, same with 9. 7 was a middle child, but it had enough strengths to pull through as a game as a whole
Well, also, even with polygons and character models, they made the characters very distinctive and weren't afraid to get creative with them, no matter how much extra time and money it'd mean
Like, one of the things that made me so critical of SO3 is because, the game before, your party members could consist of:
- a girl wearing half a robotic power loader suit - a guy with a pair of dragon heads fused to his shoulders - three-eyed aliens - a woman wearing one of THE most out-there outfits I've seen in gaming, fully detailed on her sprite
And it was just like...all the fun design elements and visually distinct characters had been priced out of existence just so they could be 3D characters
that's what I always thought when I was that age too, the 64/playstation era. like, the games on the snes look better than this, even though it's a newer system
Just...how 3D realism seems to sacrifice the creativity and fantastical elements of sprite art in general, and I personally don't think it's worth the tradeoff
(Or even Star Ocean: Second Story, which is the original version, but the remake has a lot of nice things added, like character portraits, voice acting, a better script translation...)
- a girl wearing half a robotic power loader suit
- a guy with a pair of dragon heads fused to his shoulders
- three-eyed aliens
- a woman wearing one of THE most out-there outfits I've seen in gaming, fully detailed on her sprite
- some people, some of whom are a little taller or thicker than the others, and some of the muted colors of their clothes are different colors