These reasonable expectations are for an updated release of a classic to not go with a certain art style, even if it is inherently better than the original game?
No, these reasonable expectations are for AAA production companies to make products that don't look like "s h i t" (spelled out for you benefit). Saying "well it looks slightly better than a product made 2 or so decades ago" is no an excuse.
Again, why should I care about comparing SE spriters to random unnamed indie spriters? You compare the 'rerelease' to the 'original', everything has been that way. You don't compare the 'rerelease' with 'another game'. When comparing the 'rerelease' to the 'original' in terms of sprites, the sprites are certainly better. Just because 'another game' has better sprites, doesn't mean there was laziness or ineptitude in the equation.
You don't have to care about anything. That's not the argument. I don't give 2 "s h i t s" about your "feelz" on this topic.
And, no, you're just wrong.
If the sprites in a game released by a god damn AAA company like SE looks looks bad compared to sprites made by teens in their mom's basement on their own dime and time, then that barring some serious issues with the company, this does indeed mean either ineptitude or laziness, because there really are no other alternatives. Have about you make an actual argument instead of just asserting the opposite to be true?
Fine. Its extremely tragic to YOU. Not to me though. Again, you're basing your whole criticism on an art style. Art style wise, its great, and much better than the original. Where is the 'tragic' in that, I don't know.
Your reading comprehension and propensity for straw-manning is another thing that's pretty tragic
I'm not arguing for realistic graphics - if I were I wouldn't be playing the original to begin with now would I?
I am not arguing that you need to find it tragic.
I am arguing that this level of sprite and tile design granted the industry at the moment indicative of bad policy at SE, and that is bad by any meaningful definition of the term when SE has produced several other high-quality remakes before shitting out this travesty on the mobile market.
I'm not sure what kind of bad direction is there to be seen in the sprites. We're looking at sprites that actually manage to both balance telling the sprite's features and leaving imagination room open. They didn't kill the possibilities of imagination by making the sprite more detailed, and they didn't decrease the features by putting less details..
That's all in the realm of the subjective though. I think they easily could have had more detail, been in a different size, had a richer and more diverse color-palette, without "killing the possibilities of imagination", although I am not even sure that's a problem anyways.
Really? So just because the sprites turned out to be these, he's either lazy, in-competitive, or the company is idiotic? Sure. I'm an idiot if for example, I prefer my art to look cartoonish over realistic. I'm lazy because I think a noir artstyle is more fitting. I'm incompetent because my artstyle is cutesy looking. Your problem here is not that the art style itself is not good, your problem is that you're comparing random sprites from other unrelated individuals to a set of sprites chosen for the re-release of a classic.
Your inability to read what I am actually saying and respond in a non-retrograde emotional reactionary fashion is quite frustrating.
Again - it's lazy, or inept to use sub-par sprites and tiles for a remake of a game when you have a multi-billion dollar development and publishing company in your back.
This has nothing to do with realism, art-style preferences, or whether or not the sprites are "true to the original" - it has everything to do with the fact that they're low-quality shoddy pieces of work when you consider the standards of the industry.
Again, there are countless sprite-artists out there SE could have hired who could make cartoony, cutesy, true to the original sprites that look better than these ones. That's a fact. They could also have saved money and given a more deserving person a career. That's another fact. If you pay for this s h i t, you're telling SE that's okay, and they should keep on doing that. That's the final fact.
But by all means, keep on rowing that boat.
If its graphically subpar to other games, not my problem, even if it probably isn't. What matters is that it's graphically better compared to the original..
Of course it's not your problem. Stop responding as if this argument is about you and your feelings - it isn't. How old are you 14? I'm not racking on you for liking this game, and you're allowed to like games that other people don't like.
Here's the thing though "well, I'm okay with it" is not a counter-argument to a claim about the quality of a game.
You can love a game that have FPS dropping down into around 10 as much as you want, but that would still be a game with bad FPS - end of story.
You can enjoy those sprites as much as you want, but they're still bad in the context of what sort of sprites are being made out there in the industry.
And again, this is a re-release of a classic game with updated graphics. The graphics of the re-release are better looking than the classic game, therefore the sprites are 'good'. I don't care about indies, aliens, espers, angels, or demons making better sprites than the ones SE made overall, say what you will. What matters is that the sprites are relatively better to the original product. And, even the 'indies' you like to talk about aren't even competing to "FINAL FANTASY V," as that's a game that's been sold since the SNES days in Japan and PSX everywhere else. This re-release is just an extension to that, as is with the other SE ports.
Incoherent ramble. Nice.
I don't approve of comparing an outdated title with outdated standards versus new titles with new standards. You actually want to really evaluate the quality of a 're-release', you'll evaluate it against the old original, as it is then you're comparing the game right by comparing outdated standards in a rerelease with outdated standards in a classic. These re-releases are not meant to compete against the new RPGs of today with whatever advances they brought. Their selling point is more than likely nostalgia..
All games compete mack. Nostalgia might be a selling factor for these games, but it's irrelevant to the point that I'm making.
SE has almost infinite resources to make high-quality ports and remasters of their older games. They can do so with care and effort, or they
can do it with minimal care and effort and just hurl shoddy products out to milk the part of the fan-base that has no standards.
The assertion that I ought to only compare it to the original is ridiculous and vapid - that's not how this works.
This is because as time passes, the situation of the company and the effort and resources going into remastered products change.
If this was a remaster on the PS1 I'd have one set of expectations, if it was on PS2 I'd have another, and if it was on PS3 an entirely different
one again.
You're essentially saying that any remaster as long as it's even 0.000001% better than the original is a warranted product, which is, pardon my french, retarded - and you know this deep down as well, as you'd surely start complaining if SE started to released a new "remaster" of this game only doing marginal sprite improvements.
So no, whether a remaster is good or not is something we judge on how it evolves with the time and how much work is done on it.
I'm not interested in 3D. Whether the game is 2D or 3D is not of any matter to me. Besides that, they're nearly on the same footing as FF5 and FF6 Android with the extras, only with a harder game instead. Oh, I'd like you to bring me a team of dedicated hobby-term devs and designers and make them recreate for me the FFV re-release in RPG Maker, and make it feel like an exact replica if possible. You keep bringing that up, I want you to show me its possible. Actually, there's one thing I didn't mention about the rerelease, also from the FF Wikia as a source: the whole coding was remade from scratch. So if the game can be coded again and be delivered in a better form than SE has to offer, show me and I'm with you. Mind you, I don't want a mod out of it.
I keep on bringing it up because it's the lowest common denominator. Seriously, when you're out-competed in terms of quality from that arena of the industry you need to start readjusting your work.
You don't believe that? Tough for you. I could spend some time going through
http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/ and pick out some of the higher quality products, some screen-shots, scripts or resource threads etc. but you know what? Why should I waste time spoon-feeding you?
Do your own leg-work. Read up on game-development - have a look at deviant art pages of indie-designers etc.
If you're not even willing to do that, you're not capable of forming an educated opinion on this topic, and as such, whatever you feel or think on this issue is utterly worthless.
But hey, yeah,give me the funds to do this (the same amount as SE gave the original team) and I would. The funny part of this is that the leg-work of the game-play of pretty much all the FF games have already been scripted to a "T" in the VX Ace engine. The brunt of the work would be sprite-work, creating the events, and balancing the battles, since the script, the cinematography and music is already done. You wouldn't actually need to do much coding at all - only adjust the scripts already on the engine, and feed the data/resources into it.
You're also welcome to compare 're-releases' of old games to the new games of today and mark them a 'F' for having none of the standards of today, even if that's the case by default. This port is actually better than the FF7 port for mobiles you know. Instead of grasping at the sprites as the clutch of your entire argument, why not grasp at the non-graphical extras instead?
The clutch of an argument isn't a matter of choice, it's a logical inference from facts, so no thank you, I'm too fond of my reasoning to throw it out the window based on wishes and whims.
Also, I would not accept that it is the case by default that remasters will get "F"s in comparison to modern games. That's a dumb sentiment.
Most PS1 era JRPGs, in my opinion, are still better in most ways that matter compared to most modern JRPGs - and indeed titles like FF7-9, MGS1, Suikoden 2, Vagrant Story, and countless others still stand out as games that compete with modern titles in every way except graphically and in
terms of sound-production.
They're graphically outdated, but then again, they're old, so they're excused because they couldn't have had much better graphics when they were first made. However, the moment a team of developers says "let's remaster them/release them" that's the moment the standard changes because guess what? They're no longer faced with the same limitations, and they now have the means to make something better just like everyone else.
I will treat them according.
I am not making the argument that you have to. You're the one making the argument that I shouldn't and then go on to contradicting yourself with this final paragraph. Cheers.