The ultimate power of art style and direction

In my continuing effort to post more articles per month, here is my 6th article… not including that one I posted on SMS before… oh and don’t worry, I’ll give SMS a proper announcement on the anniversary post which will most likely be the next entry.

It was quite awhile ago now, but when the first concept art for “Epic Mickey” was revealed, a lot of people got VERY excited. And how could they not? It wasn’t like anything you would associate with Mickey Mouse… at least not the Mickey we know these days. It was dark, foreboding and very well presented. There were those who believed this art style would go far… until they saw the screenshots which weren’t quite as amazing as the concept art…

Of course, we can’t really talk more about a game that hasn’t even come out yet, so onto the games that have already been released…

I’ve talked about immersion in gaming in the past, as well as cinematic video games and the changing looks of certain game characters. This entry will focus more around generally how awesome stuff looks in video games… yeah, I think that’s the best way to put it.

So, here are some of the games that I consider have a very interesting art style and general art direction…

Resident Evil 4

I’d like to start off with a game that, to me, is an enigma in art style… it’s not a game that tries to convey a sense of real world photo-realism. Rather, the kind of art style that drove Resident Evil 4 as well as previous games in the series is a sense of “movie realism”… That sense of “if it looks good on camera and makes the audience believe it’s real, then we’ve done our job”… which is a strange thing to say about a video game.

When it was originally released, Resident Evil 4 was an exceptionally good looking game with excellent environmental and creature designs. While I still find the designs to be pretty damn good nowadays too, the games visuals have obviously aged considerably… for most games this would be a problem… but somehow, with Resident Evil 4, it’s not a bad thing at all. You’re probably asking yourself “why?” right now. The reason is actually very simple…

It’s a game series that takes much of its style from old horror movies. Back when Resident Evil 4 was released, it was a breathtaking game that proved that the GameCube was a power-brick not to be underestimated. Today… thanks to its old horror movie art style, when I play Resident Evil 4, I feel like I’m watching an old horror movie you can only find on VHS… one of those movies that are cult classics but never see the light of day any more. In a strange way, I actually appreciate its roots much more today than I did when I played the game for the first time.

Okami, Valkyria Chronicles and The Wind Waker

In the past, the way to get anything to look cartoonish was to use low resolution, colourful 2D sprites. The move to 3D for mainstream gaming meant that it was harder for developers to recreate that style… until games like The Wind Waker and Okami were released and totally blew us all away.

Okami along with a lot of other games released later on in the PlayStation 2’s lifespan proved that the system could achieve brilliance when the developer knew just what kind of art direction to take with their games. Okami, for me, is the best example of this with its watercolour based animation and excellent rice paper finish… it’s a damn shame more people never played this game.

Valkyria Chronicles continued the tradition on the PlayStation 3, but has set the bar pretty high. Not only does it have wonderful watercolour and paper effects, but it also has some brilliant pencil sketch effects that totally blow my mind every time I see it in action. I feel that Valkyria Chronicles is hands down the best looking game on the PlayStation 3 due to its art style and general awesomeness…

On the Nintendo side of things, The Wind Waker, while shocking to most who saw it for the first time, gave us an extremely beautiful cel-shaded experience that I absolutely love to this day. I can’t see why Nintendo hasn’t re-released it for Wii under their New Play Control! series. There are even some great 1080p screenshots of the game floating around the net which look FUCK YEAH AWESOME!

These kinds of games that are heavily focused on art styles based on animation tend to age extremely well… I can see myself being wowed by these games in another 5-10 years despite what amazing things we may see in the future. In fact, I probably should’ve also mentioned how awesome Mirror’s Edge is as well along with these other games… but I’m sure you already know that for yourself… *looks around*

Dead Space

Creature designs in video games are probably one of the most important aspects of a lot of games. The main reason is because many of these games have you shooting at a lot of these creatures, so they better damn well be designed in such a way that leaves an impression.

The necromorphs from Dead Space sure did leave an impression… some of it had to do with the brilliant use of shadows and sound, but it also had to do with the disgusting nature of the creature designs themselves. Blades ripping through forearms and sticking out of palms, lower jaws missing, dead eyes… the yellowish rotten flesh and meat that seems to be rotting right off the bone… it’s so vivid you can almost smell it… which is something I don’t want to do.

When creature designs go right, gamers know it first hand because they’ll be asking themselves, “what the fuck was that?” and not “oh look, an alien”… I mean, it’s not enough to create a zombie/alien hybrid… you have to make the design make the player question what they’re actually looking at to begin with.

So to make a long story short, great art style helps developers make great looking games despite whatever hardware limitations they may come across. Certain art styles also let a game seem just as beautiful even years down the track… and in the short term, great art style and direction allows a video game to make a hell of an impression on the player.

Wow, I didn’t expect this entry to become as long as it has… I’m sure 99.99% of people who click onto this page will be like “tl;dr” and will skip straight down to the comments… anyway, that’s my last entry for the month, gonna take a bit of a break playing No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle… next blog entry will definitely be the one for our 2 year anniversary, yay!