Update 36 - Miriam Turnaround and Donut Aftermath

You not only clearly demonstrate a more mature artstyle for the characters but you also demonstrate a comparison between a dialogue that fits the atmosphere/time better as well.

"WOAH NO WAY!" There's just a bit of an anime flair to how the dialogue is handled in Portrait and Dawn. SOTN/Order/Lament Of Innocence are things to look at for dialogue tone.

I also hope they stay away from the gameplay within story type dialogue. 

Use your magic seal to defeat the monster in there. Probably why I wasn't a fan of the DS entries as much because it relies on nintendo's 'gameplay features' and a lot of developers made it apart of the story of their games or implemented it in such ways that always felt a bit cheesy to me.

I always assumed the head shots in this concept art were probably being used for the dialogue boxes, and if so they're much more in line with Aria/Sotn/Order than Dawn or Portrait.

I'll never not be astonished at how so many people can be chicken littles about the artstyle of this game. "OMG PLEASE DON'T LET IT LOOK ANYTHING LIKE DOS/POR!!!". Guys, relax. We have a mountain of concept art to work with. The art looks nothing like DoS or PoR. As such, the in-game aesthetics aren't going to look like them either. I don't understand, are you afraid of some sort of bait and switch? Do you think IGA and Natsume are like lying to you? If you liked the art displayed in the campaign and pretty much every update since then, you're going to like the art of the actual game. Stop freaking out about it. Please.

As an aside, I respect all the work it went into creating the artstyle for GGXrd but I find it overrated and I am not as enamored with it as many other people seem to be. I'd argue that the Naruto Ninja Storm games by CC2 are the best looking "anime" games on the market.

I dunno about the younger audience thing, but dos and por had a different artist doing the characters, thats why theyre like that

I watch mostly anime so I'll refer to these things as an anime art style, although I recognize that a manga art style would be a more accurate term.

The issue here isn't that SotN has an anime style, but the particular style that it is, is a more regal and dignified look in terms of the characters. I haven't played any of the Castlevania games past SotN and it has nothing to do with style, just that I didn't have money as a kid and I didn't really know about them until about 5 years ago. But I can draw some comparisons here.


Here we can see a remarkable similarity in character design, and yet a drastic difference in art direction. The art of SotN feels much more heavily inspired by Victorian era art, with a very heavy gothic tone to it. In respect to that, Jonathan here is done in a much more contemporary anime style. Jonathan has a larger emphasis put onto his pupils, so much so that his eyes pop out more. This has some similarity to other SotN characters, but he has much less detail around the eyes to draw away attention to them. Alucard here has much more emphasis on his eyelids instead, and so although both characters have straight lines for eyebrows, his eyeballs attract much less attention to his overall face.

That's just one part of the art. I could draw further comparison in the hair, clothes, neckline, usage of color, and further.

I'm not criticizing the game itself, or even the art. This looks like it was on the Gameboy Advance, and as such had limitations in the graphics. They would not have even created sytlistic art for it if it would be so different from what was within the game itself.

Alucard looks like he's in a high quality dark anime from the late 80's.
Jonathan looks like he's in a low quality light hearted anime aimed towards children from today.

thrashinuva I'm not arguing that. I'm just trying to get everyone on the same page so that we understand what exactly it is that we mean when talk about the art style. When I hear someone say that they want realistic art, the first thing that comes to my mind is the actual art style "realism." There has never been a Castlevania that went for that look. The Oldvanias used a western illustrated look that was fairly common at the time for NES and SNES era covers. Igavanias pretty much exclusively used a manga art style, mostly in a similar style to that used in seinen, with PoR and DoS using one more common to shounen.

To be fair, I did post the concept art and said I'd imagine it'd look like the heads in this pic. My argument was the dialogue ;P

Unless you were referring to the other posters.

thrashinuva definitely hits the nail on the head on why I appreciate the SOTN/Aria and other Kojima art the most in comparison to Dawn and Portrait. Like he said it's not that it's not an anime style of art, it's that it has a heavy gothic look to it, a heavy Victorian art style, it's far more detailed and gothic. Whereas the other feels much more sunday morning cartoon which for me kills the vibe of the game for me.

Yes, the castle matters more, yes the gameplay matters more, but what some people don't realize it's the whole package to a lot of people and the little details can matter. It's like a good album with an absolutely ridiculous cover to the album, you like the music but you keep thinking...wow if only this cover wasn't so bad.


FOR EXAMPLE


i can never take this weezer album seriously because of the cover art they chose.

( Nothing against the artstyles of the two games just trying to explain the argument)

There has been some talk of combos in this thread. During IGA's Reddit AMA this was addressed.

A) I don't think I put that bit about the combo system in the "What We Know - Bloodstained Gameplay Systems & Mechanics" thread. I should update that thread with stuff from the AMA since its all straight from the source. Maybe if that thread gets stuck people can see it better and avoid asking questions that have already been answered?

B) I wasn't speaking to you specifically CastleDan , just in general. I feel we have this artstyle discussion relatively frequently and it confuses me why. I mean if you like it or not that's up to personal preference but I never understood this fear about DOS/POR's artsyle. We KNOW what the artsytle of this game looks like. We KNOW is doesn't look like DOS/POR. There should be no doubt, fear or ambiguity here.