Theory

[icycalm]

Yes, that seems to be at the heart of the matter. But I can only accept it as an argument within the videogame industry. Western artists, as a whole, are no less competent than Japanese ones, and the West has an art tradition as long and accomplished as Japan, if not longer and more accomplished. The question is: why don't Western developers hire decent artists to work on their games? In the Western comics industry, for example, there are exceptional artists working, artists whose work I'd take anyday over many a manga. I just don't understand why this is not also the case with videogames.

Actually, this applies also to Western animation... But, like I said, not to comics!

How weird.

http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?p=7463#7463

This thread is for people to try and bring up examples of Western games which undermine the above position. I.e. are you aware of any Western games as stylish as Killer 7, Okami, No More Heroes, Madworld, etc.? If you are, let me know here. Chances are I won't agree with you, but I still would like to know what people think about this, if only to be able to better refute them in an upcoming article.

For the record, I do think that Gears of War has a certain strong aesthetic vision. Out of all the current gen Western games I've so far played, this has been the most coherent in terms of style. Still, overall, it's not as coherent, or as pleasing to my eyes, as the Japanese stuff. Same applies to Blizzard's games, especially the newer, post-WarCraft III ones. While there's some good stuff in there occasionally, there's also a lot that just doesn't fit, and even elements that to me are downright revolting.

[Vert1]

Retro Studios's Metroid Prime. lol

P.S. The game is called killer7.

[zinger]

As for newer games, I have no idea.

[icycalm]

Retro Studios's Metroid Prime. lol

I was only impressed by the start screen of the first game. The game itself... hmmm. I only played a couple hours of it a long time ago. I'll keep it in mind.

P.S.

P.S. The game is called killer7.

It's not "called" killer7, it's written killer7, dumbo. And Existenz is written "eXistenZ", and my name is written aLeX kIeRkeGAArd. Et cetera, et cetera.

...

And zinger! Yes on Monkey Island. And Loom and several other LucasArts games. How could I have overlooked them!

[Recap]

Oh, didn't know you're counting games of the past. There're some Western games with 2D graphics here and there which have a quite unique and/or stellar look, where you can clearly see the hand of good illustrators. Shadow of the Beast, Wrath of the Demon and Ocean's Ivanhoe for the A500, every early Bitmap Brothers game for the ST and the A500 or Cinemaware's titles. Nieborg's work is particularly pretty (when dsplayed at its actual resolution, that is), especially what he did for Psygnosis' Lomax.

A good question indeed is what happened to all those talented sprite artists from Europe.

[icycalm]

From Cinemaware, I especially loved Lords of the Rising Sun. But yeah, I guess there's lots of great-looking game if we go that far back.

[Afterburn]

I thought Deus Ex had good art design. No One Lives Forever, too.

[Crazy Man]

[RemyC]

I believe, The Prince of Persia Sands of Time trilogy always had some nice landscapes, such as 'the hanging gardens' in Warrior Within. In-game the characters look decent, but when a cinematic is playing everything is beautiful.

[zinger]

Well I don't know. Most of the visually stylized and unique Western games look flawed and inconsistent in many places (I was especially reminded of that as Psygnosis and Bitmap Brothers crossed my mind), with weird proportions and layout or simply technically disappointing. Not including Nieborg ofcourse, but I could never stand the cheeziness of his designs.

Heart of the Alien's vector magic is another example.

I guess they qualify for the thread as "stylish" though, and sure they as hell look a lot better than the Japanese titles mentioned already.

But yeah, Rayman and the Lucas Arts games are the only ones I really feel are comparable to the best of the best in Japan. At least that I can think of at the moment.

[JoshF]

The first Earthworm Jim and The Neverhood.

[Recap]

Many Western games are visually flawed just for very particular aspects, I believe. Look at this very recent attempt, for instance:



http://moremonkeyisland-archivos.es.tl/ ... at-8-1.htm

Deep, suggesting background work totally ruined by dumbass character design.

Never thought of stuff like Speedball 2 or Cadaver as visually "inconsistent", either in design or technically. Beast was inconsistent because of the enemies, which had like zero animation. You needed to sacrifice something when you worked for a 500 kB-RAM system. Wrath of the Demon improved that aspect slightly. But yeah, nor these nor Nieborg's art are actually comparable with the best the Japanese offered those years, of course. That's the very virtue of them -- their pieces are not flawed by particular aspects since they put too much care in all of them, which directly relates to what I said earlier:

In the end, it's a matter of respect, dedication and professionalism combined with a culture where aesthetics is extremely important. There you also have book covers, ads, envelops... A Japanese will always care about the design of "lesser" stuff, while a Westerner won't.

Always found Earth Worm Jim terribly uninspired, but that happens to me with every American cartoon, on the other hand (not counting Bluth's stuff and some Disney there).

[Volteccer_Jack]

If you go way back into old games, there's some decent stuff by westerners. Nowadays, it seems to have vanished.

The best looking modern games in my opinion would be Metroid Prime, Gears of War, and possibly Bioshock (the only redeeming quality of Bioshock). Gears of War comes closest, but I agree that it's not quite up there with an Okami, Ico, or Killer 7.

The new Prince of Persia looks promising in this respect, but I've only seen stills and one Youtube-quality video.

[zinger]

This!?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vd2D0MlzAA

It's what instantly came to my memory after reading Recap's Linkin Park generation quote (which made me laugh out loud by the way, partly because I've used the exact same words to describe the phenomena myself).

[RemyC]

Most of the stuff from Rare has a unique look.

Conker: Live and Reloaded stands out.

http://www.rare.co.uk/

[Worm]

A couple promo shots from the latest Prince of Persia:



EDIT: And here's two from Mirror's Edge. Although firmly on the side of "realistic," it's certainly not gritty--the use of solid color throughout the levels gives it a distinctive look.

[icycalm]

I will return later with more comments, but in the meantime let me clear something up. The concepts of STYLE and REALISM in a game are DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED. To suggest stuff like Mirror's Edge as stylish is to miss the entire point of the concept 'style'. Now of course videogames are inherently unrealistic, so, in a sense, they must also be inherently stylish. So what we have here is a sliding scale, with realism/lack of style on the one end and lack of realism/style on the other, and all games fall somewhere between. Games like Mirror's Edge, however, as well as most 3D Western games, fall so close to the realism end that it's almost pointless to talk about their style. They do have a little bit, and that can sometimes make a great difference (compare Tomb Raider to Mirror's Edge, for example -- the latter is a hell of a lot more stylish than the former), but in this thread we are not concerned with a "little bit" of style, but with its most extreme expressions -- note the Japanese examples I gave in the beginning: Killer 7, No More Heroes, Madworld, Okami, etc.

Compare those games with that first screenshot from Mirror's Edge for example: it looks like a photograph from a real city, and not even an artsy photograph taken from a weird angle with an expensive camera equipped with 3,000-dollar lenses/filters -- it's just a straightfoward, banal photograph. I mean where's the style in that?

(Note that, in all the above, when I talk about 'realism' I of course mean realism in the visuals, in art design, not in how the game plays.)

[icycalm]

What's funny about my last post is that, while rereading it, I realized that it explains why Recap is correct in finding 2D games inherently more stylish than 3D ones. 2D games are, by definition, far more unrealistic than 3D ones, because reality is not two-dimensional. Therefore they are also inherently more stylish.

Now I am off to watch some more Oboro Muramasa videos.

[icycalm]

It also explains why true 2D stuff is inherently more stylish than 2.5D stuff. I never saw this as clearly as I do now. My eyes were seeing it, but now so does my brain.

[raphael]

You can say style is originality, and thus it is easy to measure: how many split seconds did you need to see a screenshot to recognize the game or its author (without need of interface elements or known character and without the game being Super Mario) ? The shorter the more style.

As of 2D having often more style than 3D, it's no big surprise since 2D computer art comes from drawing and painting, while 3D computer art comes from photography and cinema (and well, sculpture too). Of course it is easier to show style with painting than photography.

A few examples of old western games with style I remember (as it is from memories some of them could maybe use a verification, I'll edit if needed):
- head over heels
- Crafton & Xunk
- Captain Blood
- The Sacred Armor of Antiriad
- Cauldron 2
- Another World
- Flashback
- Heart of Darkness
- Alone in the Dark
- Settlers
- Doom (maybe the closest an fps goes to having actual style, low-rez and 2D sprites helped)
- Little Big Adventure

More recently, don't you think Michel Ancel's 'Beyond Good and Evil' qualifies ?

P.S.: By the way, if for some reason cell-shading equals style, then Ubisoft's XIII is a stylish fps based on a comic (not my cup of tea though).

[Recap]

Mirror's Edge has indeed quite an unrealistic use of the colors for the backgrounds, even if somewhat subtle (the crane, the beams, the awning... all the same hot red --in contrast with the cold white/blue of the whole scene--, the hoarding's plain white color --mimicking the building's front as if it was a extension to it--, the orange elements and how they're placed...). So I think we could talk about "style" to some extent there, as Worm says. (Character design totally ruins once again this game's visuals, anyhow.)

In fact, I find that ME scene more "stylish" than the Prince of Persia pictures, despite the fantasy theme, but maybe that's because I tend to associate "style" (not to mention "stylish") with "good, coherent style". It's a bit of a vague term, so maybe it's not a good idea theorizing much with it.

More later too.

[icycalm]

You can say style is originality

Nope, you can't say that. These are two entirely different concepts.

As of 2D having often more style than 3D

That's not what I said. I said it's inherently more stylish. It's a subtle distinction. But you got it right here:

Of course it is easier to show style with painting than photography.

As for this:

P.S.: By the way, if for some reason cell-shading equals style, then Ubisoft's XIII is a stylish fps based on a comic (not my cup of tea though).

You need to be more careful when using words. "Cell-shading equals style" is a clearly a false proposition. Cell-shading, as a representation technique, is more stylish than realistic rendering, but it does not equal the concept of style.

So I think we could talk about "style" to some extent there, as Worm says.

I agree, but like I said, the extent is tiny. Even if you mess with the color of a couple of buildings, that screenshot still looks like a photograph of a bunch of buildings.

[raphael]

P.S.: By the way, if for some reason cell-shading equals style, then Ubisoft's XIII is a stylish fps based on a comic (not my cup of tea though).

You need to be more careful when using words. "Cell-shading equals style" is a non-sensical proposition. Cell-shading is more stylish than a photograph, but it does not equal the concept of style.

Of course it doesn't.

Come on, this was a joke ! Couldn't you tell ?

Too much people's idea of stylization is limited to the use of cell-shading (or any other overused gimmick).

[Worm]

What I don't understand is why Gears of War was even mentioned. The setting may be unrealistic, but everything is rendered in a fairly photorealistic way. Thus my confusion with Mirror's Edge--thinking "realism" is only a matter of "photorealism" (EDIT: I should have said "realistic rendering"). Can we say that the more fantastic the setting/theme, the more inherently stylish as well?

[icycalm]

If we take the term 'photorealism' literally then there is very little in Gears apart from people's faces that is photorealistic.

But, can we say that the more fantastic the setting/theme, the more inherently stylish as well?

Yes, but let me make something clear, just in case it isn't (though it really should be). There is good style and bad style. When someone looks at something and exclaims "Stylish!" what he means is that the something which he looked at has good style. It's just that in everyday conversation the word "stylish" is meant to imply "good style".

But that's not how we use the word here. We use it here in its original, neutral sense. When we call something stylish here we mean it is "stylized".

stylize |ˈstīˌlīz|
verb [ trans. ] [usu. as adj. ] ( stylized)
depict or treat in a mannered and nonrealistic style: gracefully shaped vases decorated with stylized but recognizable white lilies.