list of Western Games with good character designs

[Menegrothx]

I don't follow you here. There is nothing "realistic" about any of the Final Fantasy games other than the fact 8 and on tend to have very high quality visuals. I agree with your general point that context is important, but Final Fantasy was a poor example. Unrealistic character designs feel perfectly fine in a high fantasy setting.

Fantasy (nor scifi, for that matter) isn't just one homogenous group. There are different settings, universes and art styles. A character that fits in the Lord of the Rings-universe might seem totally out of place in Alice in Wonderland or Harry Potter. There is an extremely large and diverse group of characters and monster in World of Warcraft, but yet they all seem to be connected some how, they are part of the same universe and share the cartoony artstyle. If you took a character out of the World of Warcraft universe and put it in Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, Ultima Online or some other similiar fantasy MMORPG you could easily tell that it doesn't belong there.

[Octopod]

Unrealistic character designs feel perfectly fine in a high fantasy setting.

To you and others perhaps but other people find them very off-putting. I tend to avoid games with giant weapons and super spiky armor. I've never played a Monster Hunter game and I kind of wanted to check out the one coming out for Wii U but watching videos had me rolling my eyes. It may be a dumb reason to not play games but I just can't get over how stupid it looks to me.

[brunoafh]

It may be a dumb reason to not play games but I just can't get over how stupid it looks to me.

Says the guy with the goofy avatar.

I get what you're saying though. That's fine. My argument wasn't that you should like something that doesn't appeal to you, it was that it should be expected for games based in a fantasy world to have unrealistic elements, be it spiky hair, giant swords, demons, etc.

[Octopod]

It may be a dumb reason to not play games but I just can't get over how stupid it looks to me.

Says the guy with the goofy avatar.

I get what you're saying though. That's fine. My argument wasn't that you should like something that doesn't appeal to you, it was that it should be expected for games based in a fantasy world to have unrealistic elements, be it spiky hair, giant swords, demons, etc.

My avatar has been made fun of before so it just rolls off my back now.

I get what you are saying and I know that it is a popular opinion among some people. To me it is just not the same thing though...giant swords and demons or dragons that is. I guess I like my fantasy to be based on mythology and folk lore but with still maintaining a sense of realism. I guess I just have to be happy with Skyrim or whatever but really even that has over stylized weapons and armor I don't like. There is just no pleasing me I tell ya!

[JC48573]

I think Japanese games tend to be a little more stylized, while Western/Euro games tend to be a little more realistic. I've noticed that this generation, Western developers have really stepped up their realistic designs where characters don't look as awkward as they used to be. This is one of the reasons why I prefer Japanese games over Western games mainly because they have managed to design their characters to look good and sometimes way over the top. I guess I'm asking which Western developers have improved their realistic designs drastically since the ps2 era. Uncharted just happens to be one of the few Western games I really like mainly for its gameplay and character designs. I wouldn't say the characters in Uncharted were super realistic, but they were interesting to look at due to the great attention to detail they put in. I also liked the characters in Batman Arkham as most characters in the game were well designed. I am not a huge fan of games like Gears of War where characters are packed with way too much mass or stuff.

[o.pwuaioc]

I get what you are saying and I know that it is a popular opinion among some people. To me it is just not the same thing though...giant swords and demons or dragons that is. I guess I like my fantasy to be based on mythology and folk lore but with still maintaining a sense of realism. I guess I just have to be happy with Skyrim or whatever but really even that has over stylized weapons and armor I don't like. There is just no pleasing me I tell ya!

I'm right there with you on that, Octopod. I also found steampunk or robotics in medieval fantasies to be very jarring and off-putting. It's not that they don't belong in a fantasy setting, but rather that it doesn't gibe with known physics and clashes with the setting. There is some wiggle room. I found Zidane's tail to be perfectly normal, but Quina's fork attack made me roll my eyes.

I guess it has more to do with preconceived notions about how a world should look like.

Edit: One last thing. Let's take the teapot monster example. Why is there a teapot monster? Whence it originated? Why is it never explained? I feel like half of the monster designs are classic monsters, and the other half was the artists throwing up their hands and saying, "fuck it, let's draw a teapot." To me, that's not good design, it's sloppy. Even if it is not actually sloppy, it wasn't done like this, it still feels that way.

[Gamerforlife]

Indie games for the win!

Castle Crashers


Dust: An Elysian Tale


Mark of the Ninja


The Dishwasher Vampire Smile

[Gamerforlife]

Mass Effect


Darksiders


Journey


Sly Cooper

[Octopod]

I'm right there with you on that, Octopod. I also found steampunk or robotics in medieval fantasies to be very jarring and off-putting.

And I'm with you on that one too. I'm not a fan of steam punk usually. I do like Victorian sci-fi which is obviously the main influence for steam punk, but steam punk is just too over the top for me.

My perfect game, well non-arcade game, would be an rpg set in a historical time period, say early Anglo-Saxon England around 500 - 600, though later would be ok too. It would adhere to period dress, weaponry and armor, architecture, etc.. but it would include actual Anglo-Saxon mythological elements. People would believe in the gods though they would never appear or anything. Giants, trolls, dragons(limited to one or two in total), wights, nihtgenga etc.. would be found in places throughout the land but no made up beast or beast from other mythologies. No centaur or djinn running around. Rune magic, folk remedies and magics, etc...rather than shooting fireballs out of your hands.

This could take place anywhere though as long as it adhered to an appropriate period and mythology. Greece, Arabia, Korea, whatever. Yeah, I know about Darklands.

I want my character to look like this..


..and not this.


I just woke up and it is 2 in the morning so I am rambling. Sorry.

[o.pwuaioc]

^Not at all! As an historian and a Classicist to boot, I certainly prefer historical time periods, or even those which strongly adhere to these periods. Tolkien is a great example. Final Fantasy IV would have been better to me - personally - without airships, robots, Giant of Babil, Tower of Zot, dwarf tanks, hovercrafts, and lunar whales. I mean, I greatly enjoyed it for what it is, but if I were to, for example, ever novelize it, I'd probably excise those parts.

One thing about mixing mythologies: I always wanted an RPG where you can travel ancient Europe, so you can take a trip from the centaurs in Greece to the wights of England. If there were an MMORPG like that, I'd play it all the time (assuming it was well executed, of course).