3
« on: April 22, 2015, 10:28:48 PM »
Urgh...Welch. When she was just kind of randomly there (and very easy to skip by accident) in the remakes of 1 and 2, she was fine. She was okay in 3 as well since her shtick was basically "She makes things! And waves around a plastic hand-on-a-stick for some reason, but has little to no impact on anything otherwise." In 4, her design is completely changed to one that doesn't quite work, her motion capture is just weird and jerky, making really strange poses at random when the other characters don't tend to get that bad, and she takes the cloudcuckoolander thing way too far. There's a difference between "interestingly quirky" and "oh my god she's insane get me out of here". It really doesn't help that the game keeps dropping hints that she isn't actually supposed to be the liason for the protagonists.
I think that the motion capture was really one of the things that killed 4 for me. It was really, really bad. Unrefined motion capture is like Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, where the characters kind of jitter around and they over-emote a bit. Essentially, the data wasn't edited enough. (Namco got pretty good at it later). Bad motion capture involves movements that look really alien and uncomfortable without a good reason, and SO4 is full of that. It doesn't help that if there's something on the characters that should move (like the angel girl's wings) but that can't be motion captured just sat there. Resonance of Fate has a few bits like that, but overall it's pretty good. It came out after SO4 though, so I think they learned from it.