Of Graphics, marketing and the indie threshold.

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BROS, I was going to write a very short thread about re-playing Dino Crisis, but it exploded into a massive wall of text ranting about games, graphics and marketing. I'm not sea, but I thought it could spark a good debate, so allow me to post it here.

Blocky IMMERSHUM

Thanks to spekkio classics games list, I was playing around with the ePSXe and Pcsx2 emulators, trying some old playstation games I have (I still own a PS2) with the power of emulation, forcing the native resolution up and getting some pretty impressive results btw (especially on Dragon Quest VIII).

On the PS1 I loaded up glorious Dino Crisis 1, a 13 years old game that doesn't even support the analog controller for the PS1. I just wanted to see how improved where the graphics, but the mood of the game is so good that even with the horribad controls that aged a lot I played it for hours, completly immersed in that atmosphere, saving every few bullets and dodging dinossaurs on the hallways:



Anyway, I took some screenshots with fraps of the game, and when I went to the fraps folder, I also found there some Max Payne 3 screenshots I took, a 2012 game with 35GB on ULTRA:



It's the same gameplay logic; go to rooms and shoot stuff. And even though on one I have life-like graphics of a american shooting fellow BRs that speak a hilarious HUEHUEHUE, the blocky hallways of a PS1 game where I shoot dinossaurs with a weird red-haired woman felt much more immersive and interesting.

And is not that Dino Crysis is a fantastic game, or that Max Payne 3 is a shitty one; IMHO both are probably on the same level of "good but not excellent" games.

One explanation I can think is because Dino Crisis graphics are "incomplete", they allow my imagination to fill up the gaps and create a ambient more interesting than the one the designers would have created.

Scott McCloud's fantastic book 'Understanding Comics', among many other good stuff, explains very well how realism affects the readers perception and interpretation of a comic:



Obviously the same can be said for games; even playing with a woman, she's more "my character" than Mr. Payne (that doesn't ever shut up or stoping whinning).

The Vault Dweller from Fallout 1 is probably my best example, he is YOUR character, you imagined him as you wanted, voice, behaviour and all. It's way harder to LARP with Fallout 3 "realistic" characters, in part due Bethesda slinding the uncanny valley... his mouth being weird its enough to make him look VERY wrong, while the F1 model didn't even have a mouth...does he?

The same applies for any graphical aspect of the game; it doesn't bother people that F1 has only 1 model for rifles, but you'll find thousands of modders desperate to fix the horrible gun models of F3 that ruins their immersion.



And Bethesda will never make shades as cool as I imagined the ones in Fallout 2.

Marketing Stuffies

Seeing what years of graphical evolution bought us, one have to ask: does graphics matter so much? Going beyond the mandatory codexian reply, "NO, unless you're a graphic whore or consoletard", how much does it matters?

Since I'm a marketing graduate, let me throw a marketing term: Percieved Value.

In marketing school we learn to hail satan that "Value = Benefits / Cost". Clearly those are completly subjective, since both the perception of benefits and costs vary a lot from person to person. Take Baldur's Gate:EE for instance, they have a forum full of people saying Mr. Trent is the "Saviour of RPGs" for giving them some freely available mods and new romances for a game they already own for just $20, BUT in a handy package.

Or how Skyrim has hours and hours of free content made by modders, yet they can still push Dawnguard for $20 because is "professionaly made content". Even more impressive, Steam can make people buy the exact same games they already own just by providing a nice interface for browsing your games and achievments.

That's marketing at work, making you believe you're unhappy with the shit you have and should definetly buy the New Shit™. Of course, they should also make sure that the product itself is marketable, otherwise it's impossible more expensive to sell them. That's were the dreadfull publishers asking Mr. Fargo to make Wasteland 2 a FPS come into the picture...and it goes without saying that cutting edge graphics that takes full advantage of the 4GB SLI setup they also sold you is a strong selling point.

Take Legend of Grimrock, a modern dungeon crawler, a "Dungeon Master Lite", way shorter and shallow, but still very fun:



On the other hand, Codex (almost) GOTY, Knights of the Chalice:



Both are RPG's throwing back to old classics, and both cost $15. But one makes my GeForce bleed, while the other looks like a Gameboy port of Ultima VII... Even if both should appeal the same player base, LoG was able to go beyond, the fancy graphics atracting even kids who never played an RPG before; sometimes the graphics alone add enough percieved value to justify the purchase by itself! (as happened with Crysis, I believe)

You could say that graphics are what you show to new players while they getting into the story & gameplay, unless you have a really powerfull story intro or intuictive gameplay. Because, unfortunelly, there's some truth behind this guy's words (at least for the mass market):

No matter how good KotC is, it isn't impressive on the first 5 minutes. Games like Call of Duty knows their crowd and always make the first level full of explosions and awesome graphic effects, so the ADD generation won't get up for a mountain dew and leave the game before it actually starts. They don't start AAA games in shooting ranges or killing rats in the cellars anymore.

And graphics are what stand out the most in reviews & trailers, since journalist & developers all sell games as deep and complex; you can't have more hyperboles than Skyrim... Would any "regular" gamer ever pay $15 for Dwarf Fortress based on a IGN video?



Probably not even 1,99 on a Steam Summer Sale, not without first playing for hours (and getting addicted) or seeing half their friends buy it and wanting to join the bandwagon. But by simply adding a nice tileset it could probably hit the same spot as Breath of Death or Cthulhu Saves the World...

Just a back-of-the-box bullet point?

So, is graphic improvment actually just a way to improve the percieved value? There is no escape from the fact that the graphics are how you perceive a game, and the probably first thing you'll ever notice on one....

But do they actually improve the game or just get in the way?

I'm not talking about going back to text-based games, but I do believe we are reaching (or more probably, already broke) the point were's worth to improve the graphics. How much better they need to be anyway?

Let's us forget the trauma of the 2D-to-3D jump that was going from Baldur's Gate II glorious backgrounds to the awfull models of NWN; the gameplay changes the 3D bought in are clear, if not necessarly positive... take Skyrim or The Witcher 2 graphics, do they need to be better? Will that add anything new to the game, would the player overall experience improve from it?

As Skyway loves to recall all the time, consoles are 7-years old hardware that can't render modern graphics unless you narrow the level design to small corridors... clearly that's a point where the need for AAA graphics get in the way of the game. And is the trade-off worthy? If you compare sneaking in Thief 2 and in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, did the graphics really made you more immersed?




As a kid who grew up playing games, I would often imagine how better games would be with the more advanced hardware of the future. Dumb example, but if Dynasty Warriors on the PS2 had like 100 enemies on screen, surely the PS3 would allow for 500! What I didn't expected was that when they finished upgrading the graphics & models, the hardware could handle only 80 now...

It's a step foward for gaming if the PS4 games are exactly like the PS3, but rendered with better shaders in 4K (4096 x 3072)? Would mountain dew gamers accept a PS3 game with PS2 graphics but twice the content?

Where you draw the line?

I was thinking about Swen's recent post about AAA games:

“Why are you still active when there is such competition as Watch Dogs or Farcry 3”, asked the retarded journalist. But I ask: Should you even be competing with Watch Dogs or FarCry 3?

Dragon Knight Saga has nice graphics, that certainly costed a lot of time & money....but they need it? Larian is already a game studio feeding a niche, shoudn't they abandon the aim for AAA graphics all along, or that would automatically make them "indie" and bundle them together with Minecraft or Dungeons of Dredmor? Is there a sweet spot between DKS and Avernum?

Is the graphics the only thing that allows them to sell DKS for $60, and abandoning so would force them to sell for $15? Does the "graphic investment" pays off, or they would actually be better selling low-res games for $15? And most important, would their games be better without the need for AAA graphics?

Brian Fargo's Wasteland 2 walks a narrow line that will perhaps provide all those awnsers; a classic RPG made by pros that without the publishers pressure should favour content over packaging.... will they succeed and pave the way for other games or the audience will just buy it on Steam for 4,99, play for half an hour and go back to poping moles?

DISCUSS!

And sorry for the MASSIVE wall of text.

I'm not sure that the immersion you're talking about and the immersion current game companies are talking about is the same thing anymore.The immersion you're talking about is when art, design, story, character, and gameplay all come together to give a sense of place. The kind of immersion they're talking about is when there's nothing in the way of you living out your super soldier/hero/spartan masturbatory fantasies.

Something like Thief is old-school. You are Garret, a tough, cynical, streetwise thief, and the game does a number of things to give you the sense that you are that character. For instance, if you get into a large scale fight, you get your ass handed to you. Garret is certainly not you. But you can still relate to him. A game does not need to be about you to be immersive.

The more modern games are of the philosophy that the main character should be a cipher so that you can all the more easily picture yourself being that person. Anything that might get in the way of you feeling like a super soldier gets stripped out - personality, difficult lore, gameplay. Anything that the player might not personally identify with might make them think they are not the hero, since it is not longer them. Anything that the player might find difficult to understand might make them think they are not the hero, since the hero is understanding it. Anything actions that the player might find difficult to do gets stripped out, because if they failed then they are not the hero. That's still immersion, just a taking it from a very different side.

As for graphics, no you don't need them for the old school kind of immersion, especially since that kind of immersion is about the whole package. However, you do need fancy graphics for the second kind of immersion, because it's all part of you being AWESHUM! while doing and seeing AWESHUM things! The better the graphics, the more AWESHUM the whole experience is. In fact, graphics are about all that kind of immersion has going for it. Take away the graphics, and a lot of modern games would fall apart to nothing.

If you want to sell that kind of game, and if you want to sell to people that that kind of game appeals to (and there are a lot of them), then you need the graphics. They're not going to spend $60 for bad graphics, because bad graphics to them = non-AWESHUM experience. They're unlikely to even pay for bad graphics at that $15 level. Instead, bad graphics = skip.

High end graphics costs lots of money. Needing lots of money means going to investors. Going to investors means compromise. Compromise means dumbing down even more than you were when concepting a game for that crowd. And considering the large number of people who complain about modern consoles holding back PC graphics, I'd say popamole is still going to be the mainstay for the coming decade.

It looks like the big companies aren't going to have as large a stranglehold on the marketplace, though, so this decade will probably see some variety return to the marketplace at something above the indie level, but not really at the level that would shake the popamole.

It's not about the quality of graphics. It's about whether or not you can portray a compelling in-game 'universe/world' with the graphics you use. And, in fact, I think that can be accomplished with much greater effect using stylized/dated graphics versus ultra-realistic ones.

That's because modern-game level design functions more like set-building for a movie, while older games had level design tailored around suspension, exploration, sense of place, etc.

I am a big, big proponent of the idea that graphics should always feed into gameplay or vice versa. They need to exist in harmony with one another.

It is this very reason, besides the banal mechanics aspect, that I hate cover-shooting. In cover-shooting games, the aesthetics stick out like a sore thumb and the game becomes predictable not on a large scale like, "Oh, I know how this is going to end", but on a small scale like, "Oh, there are rectangles in the map ahead. That is cover. And that means enemies are afoot." It is, in my opinion, the worst game-design in quite a long time. Something that we might look back on with some grimacing in the same way we see the 'brutal' nature of old console games (where Contra was only marginally harder than The Lion King and game designers, generally, were still figuring out what is a good game). I sometimes cannot believe how something so dumb and unnatural can be this pervasive in the market.

Gears of War is the primary reason for cover-shooting's rise to prominence, and it came out two years after Far Cry and Half-Life. In Far Cry, there is cover shooting. It is demanded on higher difficulties -- but the cover-shooting is natural. The jungle flows, it has a consistency to it that makes sense. You run into a tent and there are bunk beds to duck behind. Maybe a few crates here and there. Distance between you and the enemy is, in itself, a form of cover. As is camouflage, not a physical sense of cover, but a... spatial one? Not sure. The point is the game has very natural gameplay. You don't look at the jungle and see, "Rectangles ahead, time to get ready to glue myself to cover!" You just see a jungle and you can decide what to do with it... and so, too, can your enemies. Half-Life was similar, though not so broad, with the inclusion of the gravity gun. Screw sitting behind a concrete block! Why not pick up a dumpster and walk right up to your enemies, and then slam the bin right in their face? Half-Life games are successful because they implement that "cinematic" feel so many AAA-titles seek, but they do not sacrifice gameplay for it.

And it is always good to see games that subvert the genre. Stranglehold kicks Max Payne 3 right in the balls. The John Woo-title says you don't hide behind cover, you literally use it. You take that food cart, kick it, and then jump on it and ride it across the room while you shoot bad guys in the face. That's fun. And it makes sense in the world. Max Payne 3 carries a gritty, super-realism take on things, but you're still ultimately a guy who jumps back and forth in slow motion, killing people by the truckloads in single leaps. There is a fundamental disconnect there. Max can jump clear across a room with his entire body elongated and stretched out, shooting five people in one go, but he still crumples up like a human being when he lands? Again, gameplay and graphics are fighting one another there. This was not an issue in the older titles because they carried a pulp-noir/comic aesthetic. This, to me, is a clear cut case of "graphical realism" screwing up gameplay.

Blah, I could talk about this forever but it's 4am. Basically, in regards to this current generation of games, I think the recent Batman titles are the best example of graphics and gameplay coming together for a perfect relationship. By no means are those games perfect, but the union of gameplay and graphic presentation is fucking seamless to an amazing degree. They are simply ace. Deus Ex: Human Revolution, on the other hand, is a good example of aesthetics and presentation truly messing up gameplay. An incoherent combination of things, too afraid to focus on being open world like its predecessor, too afraid to just stick with the banal like Mass Effect. (Just my opinion, though, many people seemed to enjoy that game.)

Everyone has his or her relationship with graphics.

Some will refuse to play an old game for the same reason very intelligent people will sometimes refuse to see a movie that is in black&white. Everyone take from a game what they want. We look for immersion and depth, others look just for mindless fun. In that respect, Facebook games are okay too.

The biggest problem there is, in my opinion, with graphic evolution is a bit similar to the movie industry. Sound killed the silent movies (don't mention The Artist, 1 in 50 years is not impressive), colors mostly killed b&w except for a few exceptions too. It really doesn't have to be that way. I want low res games. I want low poly games. Both can actually coexist. Heck, since it's backwards compatible, why not release new PS1 standard games for both PS1 & PS3 ? What's the friggin problem when it comes to RPGs or some other games that wouldn't rely on gameplay. I'm sure there'd be a crowd for that.

But yeah, it's not going to happen because : marketing.

I think M&B is actually a good counter-example to todays graphic-fixation. It used 3D and the 3D graphics were amateurish but it didn't matter because you could put several hundreds of enemies and npcs on the screen. But yeah, later they focused more on the graphics with Warband. nothing wrong with this as long as they don't make this a premise for the next installment and focus on the gamemechanics (but I have a bad feeling about this e.g. Total War series went a similar path)

The relation between graphics and gameplay is also clear in case of jRPGs. In the past japanese devs were really creative in gameplay area, since their games could look like this at best:



But the moment they were able to make animu-level graphics... Well - they focused on making animu:



Square is a sad proof of this - company was killed by Final Fantasy - Let's Make Animu! and Enix devoured the leftovers (company name, intellectual rights and some developers).

Mainstream gamers now are a much more passive audience than in the past. The reasons aren't really a result of the games themselves, but society in general, where technology has enabled people to access a wider variety of things or complete a larger amount of tasks without as much difficulty. Games are just mirroring that trend as another "thing" that's easier to access (consoles).

As such, presentation becomes more and more important and that means graphics (alongside linear/confined levels, marketing driven design, etc).

But I honestly see the biggest problem is the rigidity of pricepoints for mainstream games ($60 USD). Because it eliminates all but the most expensive/best looking games at the top end. It's a race to the bottom in trying to justify a $60 purchase. Lots of eyecandy, ease of use, leading the player on by the hand to reduce frustration, etc.

There are exceptions, but it's rare unless there's some gimmick involved, or an established franchise to fall back on. I'm sure there's a large plethora of games that would cost too much to be sold at $15 to be sustainable, or would've sold better had the budget and pricepoint been lower. Amalur a good example.

IMO, a game like Bloodlines (minus the bugs) could be released today, to a pretty good reception, were it $30-$35. Steam sales for it are pretty strong and reception is almost universally positive.

But mainstream audiences see it as $60 = AAA and anything else above $15 = crap. Anything <$15 = Indie crap. Then there's the insidious F2P model that's gaining ground.

It'd honestly take several studios to publish genuine quality AAA games at a lower pricepoint before the mainstream audience could accept a larger variance in game prices. The more you open up variety as to what a game should cost, the less pressure there is on the developer to top up their games with maximum graphics (and decline). Thing is, shit's not going to be done by an EA or an Activision.

It's one of the reasons I'm interested in Kickstarter projects, as many of the projects seem like they would be in the ballpark of $20-$30 on release. Games like Wasteland 2 might not necessarily force the industry to change, but the weight of (hopeful) success stories like Wasteland 2, Shadowrun returns, the BG re-release could convince a Relic Entertainment or a 2K to release popular games (Company of Heroes, Mafia, etc) at a lower price point in order to make the game more accessible financially and to reduce expectations of "AAA production values".

And that might really open doors for mainstream audiences to be exposed to quality games that aren't under the pressure of having to compete with other games in a $60 pricepoint that encourages guided experiences (and a hyper inflated marketing budget) instead of a well crafted game.

Probably won't and the industry will be crushed under the weight of it's own shit. But hey, it might turn out okay.

To be honest, I'm still trying to figure out my own experience of graphics. I know that for me the most effective (beautiful, immersive, etc) graphics are from that roughly 98-02 period; but that's also when I really started to play games, so that's a factor that is hard to ignore. Certainly, some games, like BG2, remain impressive when I see them now; others, like FF7/8, not so much (I think it was more that I'd never seen such production values and such 'epic' scale in games or even movies). I know that often, the graphics in the current generation and even PS2 generation games leave me comparatively cold, but I don't know how much of that is also to do with game design. E.g. Oblivion truly looked beautiful in certain places for me, but lost that graphical allure fairly quickly - would it have if the game wasn't so terribly designed?

There are definitely exceptions where the graphics surprise me and are much more pleasing than they 'should' be; these tend to have a tighter, more cohesive and stylish art design, and also a stylistics that is consistent across writing, UI, graphics, and other elements. E.g. Conquest of the Longbow impresses me although I don't actually think the art is that special, just because the writing in particular works so well with it; Arcanum literally looks better because there is so much excitement and pleasure in the ways in which I can interact with that environment, and of course, the writing here as well. Finally, I think Morrowind's main theme is one of the best examples for music that actually works in this way.

So there are generational considerations, and other factors. But here I'd make a comparison to popular music. E.g. if you argue there is a decline in music, some people will tell you that that's what people used to think 30 years ago, and will think 30 years later, that older generations always miss 'their' time. But actually, it is possible to account for and agree with that argument, and also, simultaneously, show that music has changed measurably in those decades. I think you can do it too, here. Sure, we've all been g raphics whores to a degree, jump from 8-bit to 16-bit was just as transformative, etc., etc. But there is definitely a significant change not only in the ways they're creating the graphics (more designed by committee, more piecemeal concept formulation, built by too many artists...), but also designing the levels and the visual world. Urban geography in the real world is doing interesting studies these days mapping people's walkpaths and other kinds of ways in which urban space is organised in an experiential sense. It would be interesting if someone were to do that with games, especially open world games, and see how the world that designers/artists conceptualise matches with the world players experience. It would be a good use of all that audience research money, for once.

Very true, just look at Lufia II remake:



Is that really an improvement? Weaboos rejoice, but now the western players just look at this and cringe, even those who enjoyed Lufia 2 in the 90's... I never imagines Guy like this, he looks like an asshole! It's just like Zell in FF VIII, the moment I saw him I didn't want him on my party anymore...

Going back to Scott McCloud's "universal art", the more you define something the more you limit it. Western RPG players could imagine anyone while playing those games, but know they can only see animu stuff; it's just like when they take a book you like and make a horrible movie with it, they replaced all you created with some bullshit the marketing department thought it was cool at the time...

Sure, many times they come up with cool character design and visuals that add to the game, and even stuff like "OMG, Cloud has a bigass sword!", if done right, will make the game more memmorable, but, IMHO it's more of a gamble than a necessary thing. Dungeons of Dredmor is a fun roguelike, but the simple fact that it has a "funny" art design is enough to make some of it's potential players completly discard it, since "roguelikes are serious shit".

Yes, BG:EE is solid proof that players would buy that for $20; they could even make BG III on the same engine that would sell like hot bread, no one is demanding better graphics from them, is the content & easy of use that players want.

I'm not saying that we should still be making games that look like FF III or that all use the same engine & graphics; RPG Maker showed us that games would just be put on a bag together and judged by the whole. But why not keep using a estabilished engine to make new games better & cheaper? The Gold Box series spawned 13 games throught 5 years, all using he same engine, why can't RPGs nowadays do the same thing? Half the Codex would pay top dollar for a new, finished game using the ToEE engine...

You should have posted a pic of the remake Maxim for maximum cringe.

This is a good point about the decline in popularity of JRPGs and people don't bring it up often enough.

As a kid, I never even made the connection between FF2/FF3 and anime (or Japanimation as we called it back then).

I never imagined those characters as anime characters. I certainly never had any idea that any of those characters were supposed to be Bishōnen. (Or whatever explanation you want to give for male protagonists in Japanese games looking like homos nowadays.)

I based my ideas about the characters on the in game graphics which were simple, charming and kind of vague. I now know that my interpretation of those characters was incorrect in certain significant ways, but those incorrect interpretations allowed me to fully enjoy the games, in a way that I'll never be able to do again.

When I saw the TV commercial for Final Fantasy 8 and was made aware of what Final Fantasy characters were supposed to look like, I recoiled in shock and horror and left the genre for years. And FF8 was only the tip of the iceberg. [img-tidus]

It didn't bother me as much, they only game him some douchey attitude... the rest is way worse:

Not to mention the MINOR detail that the game is now an Action RPG....

hey any old school castlevania fans here

then you should know about this

http://castlevania.wikia.com/wiki/Castlevania:_Judgment

please enjoy these faithfully adapted classic castlevania character designs:

http://castlevania.wikia.com/wiki/Simon_Belmont/Judgment
http://castlevania.wikia.com/wiki/Trevor_Belmont/Judgment
http://castlevania.wikia.com/wiki/Maria_Renard/Judgment
http://castlevania.wikia.com/wiki/Carmilla/Judgment
http://castlevania.wikia.com/wiki/Death/Judgment

I think enough has been said about how the more detail you act to graphical presentation the less room for interpretation you have, and therefore getting everything closer to perfection requires increasing effort and diminishing returns. I.e., well done game with low-fi 2d sprites in 320x240 screen res versus early psx attempts at realism.
Better to show instead of rendering 3 hours worth of terrible ingame cinematics to tell.

unfortunately most people gravitate to favoring production value as quality, because that is what you notice first
good book with bad cover and strange premise in blurb versus potboiler trailer with attractively bound handsome cover, which one is more marketable no need to discuss

only things like early adopter hype, fiendish|benevolent usage of skinnerbox gameplay mechanics, subsuming popular media styles can get in the way, see: minecraft, runescape, pokemon etc

I had only ever seen the cover of that game, and it was enough for me. Thanks, meltdown.

As mentioned above the Kickstarter surge is going to birth a ton of $20-$30 titles in the next few years that focus more on game play and get by on 'less than cutting edge' graphics. There's definitely a market there to compete with the pretty five hour $60 AAA titles today. I've said it in the past: If PB made a new Gothic game on the same engine as G2 and priced it at $20-$30 (polishing/refining the rough edges on game play aspects they had in the past) I would buy it without hesitation.

not to mention how everyone wants kotc 2 and the graphics don't even need to change for it to be even better
also, illwinter games

it's the difference between a nice adorable girl you want spend decades with or an attractive slut who you can only stand for one night, then you need a different one because you've gotten everything you wanted already

or to put it another way, picture said attractive flapper from afar. Possibly mysterious, alluring. Then you get to talk to her and the looks start losing their worth for you. That is the difference between showing and telling, balanced graphics and gameplay versus everything on production value

now game PR is saying that in those years you wanted to get to know the girls better all along so now here they are up close in HD with too much makeup, era-appropriate fashions and conversational topics, along with everything about what they think about politics, society, science and religion
fuck off PR! Let me enjoy my own image of 90s winona ryder in peace!

And is getting worse! I personally have no problem with FF 8 character designs, but that level isn't enough anymore... character design is getting worse and worse, desperatly trying to stand out among tons ofother over-the-top designs... If japanese games where once made by regular/nerdy japs doing standard stuff, they spawned a generation of otakus that started to work on the gaming industry and now take the stuff to another level, trying to "leave their mark" doing ULTRA-otaku stuff... like equiping your pet monster with a bow tie, or the abominations that sgc_meltdown posted...

The ironic thing is that they try so hard that now a clean & sober design of games like Dark Souls is able to stand out more than rainbow haired, giant sycthe dual-wielding demons...

http://www.ffcompendium.com/h/art.shtml
Here are concepts from the old FF games.

I find the standard demon souls skeletons and undead knights to be far more forbidding and exuding more primal menace than a thousand skyrim dragons/stylistically crested bahamuts wrecking generic destruction

I think it's just that their ideas for character designs are coming heavily from manga, most of which are either fighting cartoons for small boys like American superhero comics used to be, or romance comics for girls with elaborate dresses and so on. Superhero costumes are pretty retarded, too - the costumes have to "read" in tableau and constant action scenes - but mangas also come in giant monthly anthologies with dozens of similar comics that they ALSO have to stand out from on top of that. So everything about their design culture is made to scream LOOK AT ME BRIEFLY PLEASE

Yoshitaka Amano art is incredibly beatifull, it feels fantastic and outworldish, a eastern & exotic Moebius... a shame how his designs were replaced by animu...

And FF XII shitty art is so bland I can't recall any character except Bash, Baltier and the Judges... I didn't even remenber there was a princess and a Tidus clone...