/vr/ - Retro Games

Such a unique artstyle too.

>>10769831
He peaked with Angel's Egg. Still love his FF work, though.

Tom DuBois is my favorite, I think.

>>10769849
Who did the art for the original game? Always thought it looked nice

>>10769831
>>10769834
>>10769836
Unlike Dragon Quest where the in-game visuals had Toriyama's fingerprints all over them, FF barely looked like it anything to do with Amano until 6.

>>10769860
I did a little bit of digging and couldn't find anything. They don't even cite the artist on a $440 figure based off the box art lol

>>10769862
It'd be pretty damn hard to express his artstyle in 8 or 16 bit.

His designs for FFV are SHIT

And I still have no fucking idea what the characters are supposedly to look like because there's no official art besides his four or five illustrations

>>10769849
I liked his stuff on Arslan, myself. It honestly depresses me that we never got to see FF come to life in 3d with his style and that once graphics got, for want of term, "good" FF was all in on the k-pop train.

>>10769834
Reminder that all the enemy sprites in Eldorado Gate are just his drawings scanned and inserted.

>>10769831
Well I mean that's like saying Toriyama is half the reason DQ/DB got big

Of course

>>10770161
He also did Kartia. Which nobody really seems t o talk about much.

>>10769831
Without Amano we wouldn't have Vampire Hunter D or Front Mission so i'll gladly like his art :3

>>10769831
>>10769834
I have disliked his art for decades.
It's just not very good. The Final Fantasy IV spriters were wise to reinterpret the characters to be aesthetically pleasing.

>>10769862
Which is funny, since most of that is Nomura.

>>10770208
The 3D art of IV|DS wasn't bad imo..

>>10770208
Amano has good art in my opinion but the main problem I have with it is that if you've seen about 5 of his pieces, you've seen all of them. I can barely distinguish his characters in his art because they arr rook same. They're all the same weirdly androgynous and ethereal Ziggy Stardust looking clones.

>>10770236
And his most enduring designs don't even look like that.

>>10770236
Forest for the trees...

>>10769831
look at that overdesigned armor
they're lucky the sprites didn't translate those carnival clothes

>>10770350
Learn the definition of "overdesigned".

>>10770114
You're allowed a degree of abstraction with work, his art basically serves the same purpose record sleeves used to/should do still.

Reminder that Moorcock said that Amano's interpretation of Elric is the definite one.

MGS had cool and stylish art.

I love Kaneko's 90s art. His more modern stuff is nice too but a little too androgynous at times imo.

Old school Nihon Falcom art is very much overlooked.
It has too much soul.

>>10770382

>>10770387
I still want to play Sorcerian one of my streamer frens played it, looked and sounded awesome. I played through LegendofHeroes on TG16, did 2 out of the 3 in Gadharv-sp trilogy, did estelles story and 3 cold steels but feeling heavy burnout with that Falcom wall of text meowtain.

>>10769891
It's not just that. Half the time the basic look of stuff changes wildly. Terra's hair color doesn't stay consistent and this is what his chocobo looked like, some bald kaiju beast. (They tried to get closer in Legend of the Crystals but its still ugly.) It seems like Amano was consulted for promotional reasons and then everything he did was shitcanned when the actual games were being made. They just cut all pretense when VII rolled around and Nomura started doing the artwork outside the games too.

Gotta go with Katsuya Terada

shinkiro
bengus
ashley wood
moebius

>>10769831
Greg Martin doesn't get enough love.
Even if you dislike the USA Sonic design, when asked to change it to a more traditional look on a couple of covers, his more traditional JP like Sonic also looked quite good.

for me it's giraffes

>>10769862
>>10769891
No? Have you ever played FF6? The game screams Amano.

>>10770693
Getting strong Miss Fuchi vibes from this one

>>10770236
>the main problem I have with it is that if you've seen about 5 of his pieces, you've seen all of them
You're retarded and wrong

Just looking through random thumbnails in my Amano folder and each one is instantly striking and unique
Amano is a compositional genius, if you don't understand composition in art then you can't understand why he's so great

>>10770693
Elegant, regal, Hapsburgian

Gotta big up my man Ken Sugimori. I know he totally aped Toriyamas style, but the cute Kaiju aesthetic he managed to iterate it into for gen 1 and 2 will always impress me.

Death Knight from Krynn passing by!
All Goldbox games have awesome covers.

>>10771367
Haven't seen one I dislike tbdesu ^-^ this whole thread gave me lots of screensavers.

>>10770382
>>10770387
How did we reach this point. How did modern art fall so staggeringly.

>>10771458
>How did modern art fall so staggeringly.
Time and money. Commissioning this >>10771367
costed the price of a house. And the original artwork was sold for a million on a auction. The prices were similar for commissioning Amano. Who was a huge star thanks to his Vampire Hunter D work.

I just don't see how anyone with a working set of eyes can look at the modern stuff and think "Yeah, that looks way better." It's so boring.

>>10771474
I saw this posted but I fear that the modern weeb is too soulless for Urushihara. He's too 80s for the modern consumer.

>>10771474
zoomers just have shit taste

>>10771479
Even Urushihara changed over time. His artwork became something of a caricature of itself. He used to draw actual hair that looked soft and voluminous, for example, instead of this stained glass shit.

Also, and this is kind of funny, but he's like Rob Liefeld and can't draw feet and goes out of his way to avoid doing it.

>>10771530
Seems decently fine

>>10771558
That's better than usual. More often than not he draws these lima bean shaped clown feet. And that's if he's drawing shoes. 99% of the time if he draws naked women he stops short of showing their feet. It's his, excuse the pun, Achilles heel.

>>10770706
>the game occasionally is Amano but is mostly Nomura

https://bogleech.com/halloween/hall14-volfoss
I don't know if this game sucks or not but goddamn if these designs aren't metal as fuck

Luis Royo for Tribes, cool sword that isn't even on the game, would be hard to hit shit in melee at 200 kph tho.

>>10771898
And Juan Gimenez for the Spectrum game Soviet.

How do you guys search for this kind of stuff now? even before all the AI shit flooding it Google had already gimped Image Search.

>>10771903
i'd like to know desu. i hardly ever browse for artwork online anymore thanks to pajeets shitting up searches with their botslop.

>>10770693
That is one goddamned ugly lady, but wow what a beautiful picture of her. As usual with this artist, I am torn.

>>10771903
>How do you guys search for this kind of stuff now?
I don't even know anymore. I swear there used to be way more fan sites and galleries for this kind of thing but servers all went kaput and web searches are useless unless you're looking for trending news.

>>10771367
that's from Dragonlance

>>10772109
What is this from?

>>10773592
Well, yeah Death Knights of Krynn is literally a official Dragonlance story. The box says as much.lol.

>>10771367
This reminds me of this painting

>>10773605
Sorcerian

>>10770161
This is what they should have done with Final Fantasy.

Kind of wish they could reach out to him before he kicks the bucket, and throw him a bunch of money at him to make a watercolor 3d cel shaded style okami'sh style Final Fantasy game. Instead we have to deal with femboy otaku bullshit.

>>10773725
>>10770161
This doesn't look good though. You need consistency of the graphics more than anything else. I wouldn't want Final Fantasy enemies looking like cardboard cutouts like that.

>>10772109
I use

Twitter - Has a bunch of vg fan art pages
Tumblr - Random searches
Pinterest- Random recommendations/searches, Good for fan art as well.
VK.com - Random searches/Artbook scans and pdf links
Internet Archive - For artbook pdf's

Everything else is either here or what i stumble on by mistake while browsing on random sites.

>>10773767
El Shaddai made it work, but i dont expect Square to care or put in the effort.

>>10773821
My initial thought was "this looks cool but that Link looks like shit"
Then I realized this is Faces of Evil fanart and the reason why Link looks like shit is because it's ironic garbage

Literally worthless piece of shit fanart

>>10770116
jpop got so influential in asia that even koreans copied it. nips and gooks love jpop ff but it so thoroughly poisoned any hope of return to form in the west that when we finally got another non-gookslop game after over 20 years nobody cared and as a result the brand is basically dead now.

I miss old shining

>>10771474
You could literally make better a.i. art than that.

>>10770372
Ironic that he got the job by popularising D who is a blatant Elric-but-with-vampires clone. Im surprised he hasn't done any Witcher art at this point.

>>10769831
Uematsu was the biggest factor. The soundtracks do an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting for setting the tone and atmosphere of every moment and location. Any other composer and the series never takes off

>>10773725

>>10769862
Because Amano was the Promo Artist, not the actual visual artist for the games. Like how Sugimori just did the promo art for the original Pokemon games; they were sprites first and then he did promo art to give the game a unified style for the packaging and manuals.

Toriyama was the visual and promo artists for Dragon Quest.

Jun Suemi is good at the old school medieval fantasy aesthetic - while still making it distinctly "Japanese"

>>10771474
I hate this shit. I know that the "point" is to basically "modernize" these characters, but I don't think anyone playing these games WANT them modernized. If I'm playing a game from the 90s, I want the characters to look like they're from the 90s.

I doubly hate it when it stuff like picrel; where they don't even try to make the new portaits look like the originals that the sprites weren't able to full capture NOR do they make new art that looks like the original sprites. It just all new garbage.

>>10769834
It's "unique" sure, but only because no one else does traditional Japanese art with a high fantasy twist. It's not that complicated.

>>10769862
All of the large enemy sprites were from Amano's art. The small character sprites are for the players to use their imagination. It's the same reason FF7 on ps1 has a better tone and more soul than the janky ass remakes.

>>10773802
El Shaddai looked like shit even back when it first came out.

Ragnarok Online had some nice promotional artwork. A lot of times it was used as loading screen backgrounds.

>>10774283

>>10774291

>>10773786
Thanks fren. :3

>>10771362
I feel his watercolor stuff is very overrated but his 90's and early 2000's digital stuff is very kino.

>>10774149
I don't even mind things shifting away from the 90s look on principle by why does "modern" always have to be "bland." I admit I don't know much about art. But I know what I hate. And I hate that. But things always just look so flat or uninteresting colorwise. Characters who are supposed to be heroic and fantastical come off as simple and plain and, for want of a better word, contemporary. Look at the langrisser remake and it feels like with a slight change of wardrobe most of the characters wouldn't be out of place in a modern high school anime. The MC in the "updated" art goes from a striking heroic figure to a dork in a school uniform. It's a tragic cry when the gacha game has more respectful art.

>>10774221
>All of the large enemy sprites were from Amano's art.
Except if they're Nomura's art

>>10773850
>>10773856
>>10773859
I love Kobayashi's art, she's got Amano's ethereal look and fancy patterns with more distinct character design

>>10771362
I came here to post early Pokémon's art, but you beat me to it.

>>10773818
Is Link a twink?

>>10774690
>>10774692
>>10774857
I've really come to appreciate art that comes off more as other worldly. Not alien but just some bizarre fantasy on it's own.

>>10774976
Saw that in a game mag when I was young. Used to drive me wild. Man to think that it used to be all it took.

>>10774865
You see some Renaissance style references mixed with some Chinese in those old Saga designs. This is a bit different from the derivative medieval ones were all used to.

The Phantasy Star ones are a nod to the old psychedelic 70's sci-fi art style. That art piece almost looks like it could be a a old Dune Cover.

>>10774992
I would very much like to see Nagano on game design

>>10774865
Late 70s/early 80s art that was a weird blend of Frank Frazetta, D&D, and Star Wars was some wild shit. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe basically ran on that.

While Tatsuyuki Tanaka is known mostly for anime his work on Linda Cubed and its remake is some of my favorite video game art.

>>10769831
I don't think most people cared about the art outside the game, but the character designs within the game likely contributed. So yes, in a way?
Personally, while I like Amano's art on its own, I often felt it was too different from the way the sprites looked to feel like the same characters. Obviously the sprites are much lower resolution and have different proportions, but there's a bigger mismatch between sprites and art than there is in most games.

>>10774221
>El Shaddai looked like shit even back when it first came out.
tastless cretin

>>10775094
>I often felt it was too different from the way the sprites looked to feel like the same characters
Depends on the game. 6 is a pretty close approximation.

>>10775105
6 was up and down in that regard. Celes was good, the Figaro brothers weren't bad. Locke's art didn't work for me.

>>10770372
*Moorcock was high in 17 different drugs at that time

>>10775094
>I don't think most people cared about the art outside the game

I'm not even sure Amano's art was used at all officialy in the west until FF9

>>10775280
The Amano art actually was used in the western manual for 6. Before that though, yeah it was real crapshow. You had some wildly different takes over in nintendo power which were unflattering at best.

>>10774472
>wouldn't be out of place in a modern high school anime
That's pretty much the nail on the head. These characters used to look like adults. The redone art makes them look like teens because, instead of being stories about inspirational heroes, its wish fulfillment fantasy.

>>10770375
Yoji Shinkawa!!!
Another legend

>>10769831
I love how his art used to be completely untranslatable into in-game graphics and once games finally got to a point where it would have been technically possible other artists took over.

>>10775790
I don't think his art works well if you try too hard to incorporate it. Even Vampire Hunter D doesn't look THAT much like his work in the actual movie. >>10770161 This here has an almost uncanny valley effect.

>>10775501
I feel like that's a big issue in general. I'm not going to sit here and say that wish fulfillment is new. It's older than any of us. Most of the greatest adventure stories and games were all wish fulfillment. We always wanted to imagine ourselves as the big badass hero. But at a certain point heroes stopped being characters we wish we were and instead became about self inserting as is. We don't to become heroic we want the heroic to become us and it's lame.

>>10776270
it was never done though
I think it can work

>>10776459
I think it could but you'd have to make the whole game look very abstract. This is kind of a painful example but you'd need him to do the backgrounds, too. It'd be like playing a game by Van Gogh.

>>10775501
One trend anime in general had fallen victim to is that characters will just be amazing at shit by virtue of being the protagonists. You just put on the right outfit and you're a badass. Characters used to have arcs and shit where you'd see their progress. The first hint this was happening is in FFVIII where Squall is magically awesome to the point where he's basically made the commander-in-chief during wartime despite being a recent graduate and you're told from the start that he's such a super badass he's mastered a weapon that's incredibly hard for anyone to use.

>>10776571
not really, ffiv already did it fairly well, you don't have to get abstract

>>10776656
FFIV doesn't really look like Amano though. Not even the character portraits. The first and arguably only FF that really looked like he had anything to do with it was FFVI.

>>10776702
And that was basically all Nomura and Minaba

>>10776702
Didn't he design the characters? the armor designs in game looks close enough to the art imo

>>10776886
It looks like his designs were HEAVILY filtered through someone else, though. Shit, this is the box art. Even the Famicom games used Amano's work for the boxes.

>>10776459
>>10776571
There exists a game that perfectly translates his character designs but it's not retro

Blessed thread anons, thank you all for induce my mind with this type of imaginery before going to sleep.

>>10769834
The fuck is that Barret?

>>10777282
What the fuck? I didn't even notice. He's literally just an ink blot.

>>10771839
>b*gleech
Fuck off, tranny.

>>10770375

>>10777496
Post somewhere else with all the art then if he makes you that butthurt retard.

>>10773856
It's a beautiful thing when a skilled Japanese manga/anime/game artist deigns to draw an actual human face.

>>10769831

>>10776904
>>10776886

From what I understand Amano did artwork for the games for the developers and other artists to use as inspiration. At least for the older games. Notice how the Warrior of Light doesn't actually appear in FF1.

Not really the best but I just wanted to post some Popolocrois

>>10775064
>He-Man and the Masters of the Universe basically ran on that

I fell into a massive He-man rabbit hole la few months ago. The original lore by the creator of the first characters deserved/deserves to be in a game. Castle Greyskull was supposed to slowly corrupt you over time the more you're inside (hence all the monsters) and had timewarps on every floor. Raiders from different time periods would steal tech and society returned to magic. It was also the result of a lost highly advanced civilization collapsing. That's a perfect dungeon crawler or rpg set up right there and why I love scifi mixed with fantasyso much in rpgs. (Even if it was in other things)

>>10777663

>>10777504
Not retro

>>10770224
6? Definitely not the characters. Did you confuse 6 with 7?

>>10778054
These characters? They were made before Amano redrew them. Credit to them goes to Kazuko Shibuya and Tetsuya Nomura.

>>10778125
Why did Gau have the best orchestrated piece in grand finale when he was a nigger desert boy?

>>10777674
The fact that there was never a He-Man game on the NES is beyond baffling.

>>10778239
It was already dying by time the NES hit its stride. The live action movie being a disaster in 1987 probably didn't help things any either. He-Man was the pioneer of toy cartoons, but that means he just was too soon for the NES to work with.

>>10777932
I have the same artbook scans, postan my favorite pages

>>10773764
>The wires on the planes
Holy shit I never noticed that

I like the manual art from FF Mystic Quest

Be honest. You would.

>>10778668
You have to be gay to fuck a man.

>>10778668
id sooner fuck snake tbph
at least he seems like hed give a good ride

>>10778676
He's quite girly

>>10778128
Because he was actually the lost son of a deranged noble

>>10777705

its stuff like the pics ITT that makes me wish anime wasnt so omnipresent when it comes to art from modern japan
it still has that kind of east asian flare, even in stuff thats clearly intended to look "western". but it actually looks good

instead, everyone just draws shitty copypaste anime trash
i guess i get it. youre more likely to get paid if your art is in a popular style, and its certainly much easier to do. but holy fuck the stagnation is real
its that miyazaki quote not that one. the other one come alive
anime inspired by anime inspired by anime in a closed loop

>>10779194
Weak foundation like you said. How many of these people are even familiar with classical artists and art styles? They just copy whatever they grew up with and call it a day.

>>10769881
>>10769849
I've always enjoyed his art but I never knew his name. Thank anon

>>10770161
His art has been made 3D, just not in games

>>10773850

>>10773878
its a shame too because its actually got a very solid art direction, even though it goes into realism quite a bit. the parts that are stlylised look sick but ofc, kpop will continually ruin Square further. not /vr related but i think xiv does an 'okay-ish' balance but imo its getting worse

>>10769831
He always gave me Moebius of japan vibes, yet not a single one fucking game was made with that art style faithfully.

In a dreamlike landscape.

>>10781828

Forgot to say he reminds as well of gustave druillet.

>>10779194
"Anime" just means "cartoon".

>>10778727
Body of a man, skull of a man, hands of a man, scent of a man. He is a man.

>>10782757
He's right though. What happened in anime is they used to be inspired by outside mediums like mainstream movies. Blade Runner and shit. And they'd add their own stylistic spin to those ideas. But then other anime started using not the original movies as inspiration butt the anime. And then even later anime started using the imitation for influence. So you got a feedback loop where the things that were originally stylish affectations overtook the entire product. "Flanderization" is the TV Tropes terminology but it's the kind of serial escalation that gets you animes where a character will do something "anime-esque" and then comment how "this is like something out of an anime." And then I remember why I stopped watching anime a long time ago.

>>10773764
I'll never understand Shinkiro's popularity.
>static poses
>same face syndrome
If you tell me he just traces half his work I'd believe it with how lifeless he can make everything look. Even with that, half the image is exploding but it still feels devoid of any action.

>>10782835
Not a George Clooney fan, are ya?

>>10778651
Didn’t know Katsuya Terada did artwork for Mystic Quest,

>>10779194

I see some cool, distinctive versions of the basic and standard anime style in various, relatively recent manga series and one-off porn drawings. There's still loads of style and invention in Japanese popular art, somewhere, on some level... but for whatever reason, when I look at the covers of recently published Japanese video games (which I see a lot of because I unfortunately work in an Amazon warehouse), I only see Fire Emblem characters. No matter the game, no matter the developer, it's just those deathly bland, generically pretty, samefaced doll-people. Just those ones you see in the Langrisser remake image above and such. You can barely tell one set of characters from another.

I really don't get it. It's not about companies being super conservative to protect future sales. Everybody knows that a modest amount of variation in art style doesn't turn people off. Maybe it's some kind of collective madness?

>>10782816
yeah but the modern outside mediums are also shit now

>>10782816
Database Animals is a good book precisely about this

>This prominence of derivative works is considered a postmodern characteristic because the high value otaku place on such products is extremely close to the future of the culture industry as envisioned by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard predicts that in postmodern society the distinction between original products and commodities and their copies weakens, while an interim form called the simulacrum, which is neither original nor copy, becomes dominant. The discernment of value by otaku, who consume the original and the parody with equal vigor, certainly seems to move at the level of simulacra where there are no originals and no copies.

>>10783121
There's always the classics. The problem is is it requires more effort to get into them as opposed to the ready made slop we have now and grew up with.

Clock tower snes cover is cool