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The thing is, what MVC is doing is not an art style, it's a rendering style. Yes, it creates a specific artistic DIRECTION. But there are only so many rendering syles one could have without completely chugging the system.
My point is, that you don't need to change a rendering style to have an art style.
Like, look at Tomb Raide and Uncharted. Technically, they're both stylized in their own ways, so both of them would be considered different art styles. It's the way you go about creating the characters, and the features you want to accent.

Like, I always say that Remake is one of the most photorealistic games I've ever played. And it's true, more so than most of the games that are out on the current gen consoles.
Even if you look at games like God of War, or Army of Two, and Dragon Age Origins, for example... You cannot just splice all those character models into one game and pretend like they belong there. Not because of their clothes, but because of the art style.

Going back to Remake, you can't even put characters from Remake and characters from RE0 together. Even though they clearly used the same rendering ENGINE, their artistic styles are far too different. RE0 is very stylized.

Silent Hill is another amazing example. Look at the way the characters from Silent Hill 1 and Silent Hill 2. They're consistent. Sure, they look 'real' in a sense, but there is still something about the way they're made that makes it look just so incredibly unique, that specific art style. And it's a little less present in SH3 and 4. And since Origins was made by a completely different company, that artistic style isn't there at all. Same with Homecoming and Shattered Memories. I mean, especially Shattered Memories. Look at the characters. Sure, they're 'real' in a sense. But you put one of them among the SH2 characters, and they'll stand out. And you'll say, "That one doesn't belong there." Because it's a different art style. There's virtually as many styles as there are franchises. So to say that there aren't enough different art styles is a little unfair.

Now, that's my problem with games like Soul Calibur 2. I mean, Link somehow worked well with that semi-anime art style they had. And Heihachi on the PS2 version. But putting Spawn into the Xbox version, awesome as Spawn is, he clashes. Unless they made SPAWN himself semi-anime, then it would work. Same with things like The Apprentice in SC4. Now, that's another problem I've always had with MvC. The art styles clash. They do. You have Street Fighter anime, Mega Man anime, Marvel comics, and now Resident Evil to boot.
Now, in MvC2, it was different, because the sprites for Jill were drawn from scratch, and yes, they made them anime, which was more consistent with the Street Fighter style.
With MvC3 though, Christ looks the same. Christ actually looks more consistent with the Marvel characters, and still, completely clashes with the SF characters. And just because he's in the same kind of semi-comic, semi-real rendering style as everyone else, doesn't make him the same art style.

And then you go and list the 3 biggest poroblems with the whole game.

The plot wasn't solid. It was one dimensional, with horrible choices for the settings. I mean, Rescue President's Daughter, go from a village, to a castle with lava pits, to an island with giant, walking statues. You spend the whole game trying to protect the one character you'd like to see dead. There are no surprising allies or bad guys. Right away, you know who's good and who's bad. I don't know where you saw solid plot, but you really should be a little more picky about your storylines.

Who? They were TERRIBLE. I mean, the characters themselves were annoying at best. Salazar was one of the worst characters, period. Their transformations were stupid as well. I mean, Saddler turns from a 180 pound man into a 400 pound spider in a matter of seconds? Yeah, that's fantastic. :eyeroll:

Parasites are little bugs, they're not a virus. So no, no virus in this one. And I wouldn't care so much about them, if the enemy designs were actually good and the premise was half decent. I can't remember a single enemy that was good. The worst of it was El Gigante and Saddler. The least worst I'd say would be maybe the dogs, but even they had those tentacles flailing around way too much.
The worst of it was the whole premise for it. "Oh, Las Plagas is just this thing that has been buried in the ground for hundreds of years, and now they resurfaced. But it's actually naturally occuring." You know, the cool thing about T-Virus and G-Virus, and whatever other kind of virus that Umbrella had was that it was DEVELOPED in a laboratory. It wasn't like, "Oh, here's this new virus that's always existed, nearly impossible to cure, affects EVERYTHING, but that nobody in the world has ever heard of." No, it wasn't like that. It was a conspiracy of a friendly company working in bioweapons. Not a CULT of miners possessed by parasites they accidentally discovered after those parasites have been buried beneath ground for hundreds of years. Dumbest premise ever.


I mean, if you were gonna list good things about RE4, you could've said gameplay mechanics, graphics, maybe even atmosphere here and there. But you just listed practically the three worst things about it.



Yeah, but it doesn't always have to be in a mansion. Have you played RE: Dead Aim? It starts out on a big tanker. Which is a completely new location for Resident Evil. Now, if Capcom took a setting like that and made it into RE4, for example, actually spent some effort and created a big, 7 - 10 hour Survival Horror game out of it rather than the way Dead Aim actually turned out, 1.5 hours worth, they would've done so much more with it. The point is, there are plenty of locations that could be explored that aren't castles and villages.

And it's not all about location, either. Like you mentioned, take Silent Hill. What if they took Silent Hill and changed it from Survival Horror to an action shooter? What if every Silent Hill game from here on out played like the Arcade. Or if you took Homecoming and loaded Alex up with tons of ammo and gave him backflips and a smartass mouth? It would completely ruin the experience, don't you think?

It's one thing to switch a genre temporarily, just for a spinoff, and it's another to completely change a game's genre. Let alone STILL try and call yourself "Survival Horror."

Mortal Kombat is a great example. Yes, it made quite a few Adventure games, Sub Zero, Shaolin Monks, even the Konquest modes in the main games. But it always, always comes back to 1 on 1 fighting. Because in spite of all those spinoffs, it's still a fighting game series. And yes, they could easily make MK into an adventure game. Where you don't get to choose your character, where you run around doing puzzles and fighting minnions, then bosses at every level, like Shaolin Monks. But that's not what Mortal Kombat is about. It's about two people choosing Raiden, or Sub-Zero, or Jax, or whoever, and duking it out against one another, one on one.

The same thing with Resident Evil. What it USED to be, it was about viruses, zombies, counting your resources, including bullets AND how many times you could save, or if you even have any ink ribbons at all, or whether you need to go and find one if you're out.

I was watching Spaced the other day, and the main character was playing Resident Evil 2, and when asked what he was playing he said, "It's a mix of lateral thinking and extreme violence." And that's a pretty good description. Well, with RE4, any hopes of lateral thinking went right out the window. It had like 2 puzzles, and there was no thought put into them whatsoever. They just said, "You know how there was that brain teaser you used to play as a kid? Just put something like that into the game." No creativity whatsoever.
My favorite puzzle in the entire RE franchise is that Water Purifier puzzle in RE3. It was challenging, it was cleverly designed, and it was really different from any other puzzles I've dealt with in games.

But Bio that was the point I was trying to get at xD I'm sure you read the rest of my paragraph, but you only responded to the first sentence of it before I completely went on a tangent of how Capcom could have kept going, but still could have kept it survival horror.

You're words aren't going to waste, at least with me because we're already on agreement.

Excellent responses,I feel like I've been knocked on my a** by a Verbal RPG.

Well now.How should I put this?Maybe perhaps I was trying a bit too desperately to get my point across.Evidently it was all for not.

Alright,where should I start?The Plagas.Little bugs,can't argue there.They weren't just dug up and injected though.They were recovered,and studied.The Plagas had to be altered in a Laboratory before it was able to be used the way that God-awful Cult used them.You are correct it isn't necessarily a virus in the least.Although it wasn't dicovered by accident,Salazar knew of it because of something to do with it's occuring history in his family,which is why Saddler selected him as a devoted follower.

Now,siding with you against myself-yes I know I'm a hypocrite at times-the major thing I can see Plagas Lacking is a cure,or some sort of otherwise opposite,and more in-depth desription of the origins,and development.

How about villians now.The best thing the Plagas did in the whole damn game was mutate bosses.The regulars were clunky and cheap,but the bosses were almost the best part,as far as the Parasite goes.The Only let-down boss-wise for me was the fact the Saddler was no harder than the El Gigante.After all that work,there's no challange?I nearly cried.

Merchant-Weapons-Inventory space.Holy hell,there's no way I can win this one,but I'll give it a shot.Lol.

The weapon overflow was added to pretty much keep all the new wave action shooter fans amused,once again adressing that Re4 was trying to bring in new fans.In my honest opinion I agree with the lot of you,and I think that RE4's weapons should have consisted of: The Standard beginning handgun,the standard Shotgun,and at the very most maybe the Bolt Action rifle.There also should have been no upgrades,and the your ammo intake probably should have been lessened by at least half.

The merchant is absolutley ridiculous.Not to mention how ludicrous it is to have an inventory the size of an item Box.In short you win on that.

I don't know what else to add.Really what it comes down to is the key differences in how each of think.What I've been trying to say is,look at RE4's heart and soul,not the raw details.Sometimes to can't judge a book until you fully comprehend the unprinted tale.They may not have made a lot of sense,but it sounded alright in my head.

Otherwise,this whole thing as been enlightening,I won't lie.It would seem I lost,but i'd like to think it was almost a draw.I'm done if you are.

Well, 'talky' isn't a bad thing. I mean, FF7, 8 and 9 had tons of dialogue, and I consider them to be the best of their generation. Heck, FF5 and 6 had lots of dialogue too, and they were the best of the SNES generation, or at least the majority will stand by that statement.
Honestly, I'm not gonna lie, it is hard for me to get into a JRPG with a silent hero, such as Chrono Trigger.
Persona is a major exception much like Fallout 3 is an exception on me not playing first person games.
But aside from that, I do like my RPGs with dialogue.
And even the Cinematic factor. Again, going back to Final Fantasy 7 - 9, they were cinematic as hell, but that did not compromise the integrity of their storylines.
Back then, flashy cinematics were probably expensive and time consuming, so they were only used to spice up the storyline. Like the train sequences, and the Garden battles in FF8. But with the PS2 generation, you could still have great visuals with real time 3D graphics, which meant they could go crazy with the realtime cinematics and more disk space meant the possibility for voice overs.

But that might not even be the problem. It just seemed like with the turn of the century, Japanese pop culture in itself changed, and as a result, it somehow reflected on the character development and storytelling in their writing and cinematography styles. It's part of the reason why I don't like Kingdom Hearts. I hate it that people just assume that it's because I don't like Disney. That's complete bullshit. I love Disney. But you take Disney characters and put them into the kind of narrative that Squenix had in KH, and that's what ruins it.

So I don't know what it is. But frankly, even if you say that FF 7 - 8 were among my first JRPG experiences, and as a result I have a bias, that doesn't change the fact that something WAS different within the next generation, and to put it lightly, I almost gave up on RPGs as a result. But frankly, the simple truth is, vast majority of them sucked.
Other than Persona and Shadow Hearts series, I can't think of a single JRPG worth owning on the PS2. There might be some I'm forgetting, but if they're that forgettable, then they're probably not worth owning anyway.

Well, the other part of it is what kind of a game you're making though. I mean, Metal Gear Solid might have some long, drawn out cinematics, but it was the first game to ever have them that long. And let's face it, nobody complained about it when MGS1 came out. And without them, you'd have like two hours of gameplay.

But when we're talking about an RPG, we're already talking at least 20 hours of sheer gameplay. 60 if you count the level grinding. If you add slow cinematics to that, then yeah, the game can probably drag like hell.
But like I said, to me that's not even the problem. The problem is the actual quality of storytelling. I mean, the weird thing is that the RPGs of the SNES - PS1 Era were LOADED with Cliche's but we still loved them. I mean, in how many of them do you meet the "Princess" who doesn't reveal to you the fact that she is indeed a princess? Etc. Etc. But still, they were charming, and awesome, and the characters were interesting, and even when we hated them (Cough. Irvine.) the games still ended up being very, very fond memories.

But then you take a game like Final Fantasy X... Man, I couldn't even get THROUGH it. Not because it was difficult, or long, but because it was not interesting. The beginning was awesome. The futuristic Zanarkand, and then going into the actual "Future" that looks like the past. That was cool. But as the story went on, it got less and less intriguing. And by the time I reached that big green field, I cared so little that I started letting all of my friends borrow it.
And when my friend brought over Kingdom Hearts... I couldn't even get into it from the beginning.

Suikoden III beginning dragged as well. From all 3 scenarios.
Magna Carta was pretty cool, from what I remember. It didn't drag. But the voice overs were pretty bad, and the storyline just wasn't interesting at all.

Like I said, the only semi-conventional JRPG of the previous generation that I found really interesting was Shadow Hearts 2. That game kicked a**. I so wish I hadn't traded it off.

Well, Double Helix seems to have a reputation for turning awesome franchises into generic 3rd-person shooters. Homecoming, anyone? Homecoming only lucked out with its storyline, if it weren't for that, I'd consider it a failure to the franchise, and probably wouldn't consider it a part of the canon.

Wait, Bethesda acquired his new studio? That's like Square buying Eidos, only good.

Ah yes, Rogue Galaxy. I've heard some really good things, but haven't had the chance. The fact that it had real time battles kind of put me off. Which sucks, because it's probably Kingdom Hearts that made me have a bad preconception (I don't think that's the right word) of real time JRPGs. Maybe if I stumble across it I'll give it a try.

Well, I can't speak for Rogue Galaxy, but by beating the first 3 Jak & Daxter games, I am happy to say that I've possibly beaten some of the most challenging games I've ever played. And I mean genuinely challenging. Not the lazy kind of challenging where it's like, "We'll make it more difficult by increasing Enemy strength and plopping down a whole lot more of them." There are some tough a** missions in Jak games.