That does look very competitive. But it also looks a little silly and dumb by today’s standards, IMO.
I think that for a new KI game to succeed it’d need to keep the flavor of old-school KI but with a presentation that looks a little more like scrubby KI, with big combos and some sense of controlling space, instead of what high level KI1 play really looks like. Mashing the shit out of moves in footsies and jumping back and forth over for cross-ups may be what high level KI1 is about, but to a layman that will look and feel kinda dumb.
I don’t think so. If you’ve seen the more violent animes out there then you’d know that they’d probably make Fulgore far deadlier-looking than just this slab of metal wtih a ponytail. They’d probably elongate his blades and draw on a motif of death for his face in addition to making his body seem more mechanical with chrome wiring and stuff.
On top of that, as I said earlier, they’d make the girls way hotter. If NR gets this they’ll just make the girls look like dudes with boobs, giving them disgusting manlike jawlines and no hips whatsoever. This may come off as a bit weeaboo of me to say but I think the Japanese are at the peak of their craft when it comes to aesthetic. They always seem to know exactly what kind of coloring, lighting, mood and sound should accompany something. They’re artisans.
And please don’t give me Blazblue as a counter-example because that game is exactly the way they wanted it to be. Obviously if they got ahold of KI they wouldn’t try to make it like Blazblue. They’d try to make it like KI and push deadlier, sexier designs than ever.
It’s not violence that’s at issue, I’m aware that there’s plenty of intensely violent stuff out of japan (as a total aside, didn’t the gore get taken out of a lot of the fighters after the “Nevada-chan” thing?). At issue is ‘look and feel’. I don’t think the Japanese company’s style is bad, its just ill-fitted to KI.
Honestly, the style NRS has shown would be closer, they just would need to substantially ‘brighten’ things up as compared to MK. Both Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct are intensely trashy games, that’s kind of their nature. I don’t think a company like Arcsys (say) can do western trash, its a specific thing.
… Also, have you seen how hideous and Mannish Black Orchid is already? She actually has a bizarrely square Jaw and very little in the way of hips.
Borchid being ugly
Spoiler
[media=youtube]bk1rfCH2E_I[/media]
The game currently out with the look most suited to KI in my opinion is honestly SF4, the weird distorted models are perfect for it. It would just need entirley different design, though. Capcom couldn’t do it ‘justice’ either.
I sort of understand but why do these games HAVE to be trashy? Why can’t KI set its aspirations a bit higher? I like the variety of character designs and the crazy combos and breakers. I feel it has potential to be a intense action-packed fighter with lots of depth, it would be nice if the characters had sleek designs that reflected that. In actual fact, looking back at the finishers in KI, many of them can easily be reworked into crazy supers. Fulgore turning his head into a badass machine gun, Tusk summoning asteroids, Sabrewulf summoning bats to swarm and devour you? I feel those are too great to be wasted as fatalities, they’d be far more epic to pull out during a match instead of after. I say just ditch the cheesy fatalities altogether and instead have “bloody KOs” (which are basically just finishing a match with a super but with clearly fatal consequences for the opponent). You please everyone in that way.
Yeah well it goes without saying that the characters will get a major overhaul. The last game was in 1996 for God’s sake.
Orchid looks better in the second one, though not by much.
Not entirely sure what you mean by distorted models. Do you mean to say that they’re ugly? Or just that they don’t follow realistic anatomy? I’m pretty sure that’s just a stylistic choice. Everyone in SF world has muscles, and I personally adore they way they did Chun-Li. Enormous and luscious thighs, a muscular yet feminine body and a cute face. I think all the characters look great in SF4, especially the girls. I don’t see how it’d suit KI though, that style is way too cartoony.
If someone does make a new Killer Instinct game all I have to say is DO JUSTICE TO THE ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK!!!
[spoiler=Radness]
[media=youtube]aUaNHjB1hy0[/media] MEEETTTAAALLL!!!
@PsychoJosh, you display a case of the foreign anime fan filter. Japan, and Anime especially are in an absolute design ghetto right now, and pretty much everyone in the industry agrees that its in a terrible state. Essentially most monetarily successful Anime is produced for children or a very small audience of obsessive fans who will buy anything with a Madoka character stamped onto it. This has lead to most animation companies producing lineup after lineup of extremely generic shows that fit into rigidly tested formulas in order to sell to the previously mentioned markets. In rare cases companies with a lot of commercial success behind them can produce quality work, especially with funding from major outside sources (BONES is a good example, with a partnership with Sony and Square-Enix) or in some cases because a director/writer has enough clout to get his stuff made regardless (Panty and Stocking, Earthsea). It may seem like Japan is doing a lot of creative stuff, but that’s almost entirely because only that stuff is ever good enough to get watched outside of Japan proper. When it comes to the entertainment industry in general its awful Moe/Loli anime (why every game series keeps getting Token Loli’s to merchandise!), a lot of really bad work/school sitcom/slice of life dramas and a side of very generic Bleach rip offs. Its why I loathe to tell people that I’m very into Japanese pop culture and history because to most people that equals Anime and the current state of Anime is so damn embarrassing right now that I don’t want to be associated in any way with the people who made Usagi Drop and Jikan best sellers.
KI is also a game that doesn’t fit mainstream Japanese design philosophy in a number of ways. Very few people beyond the DoA guys are at all interested in non-standard move/combo systems of any variety and DoA has a pretty rocky track record with being a quality fighter in many peoples opinion. The art style in general is extremely western in all aspects (especially its bordering-on-racist asian character) and I just don’t know how a Japanese company could capture that. KI is so wrapped up in that 90’s Xtreme without an E, Mountain Dew drinking, X-Games watching, JNCO Jeans wearing pop culture that its almost impossible to divorce one from the other. It would be like handing a Rival Schools game to a US developer. Where would they even begin? How could a bunch of American guys make a game based on an entire segment of Japanese pop culture (the whole Yankee/Bancho/Young Yakuza genre) that’s been an established part of their media since the 80’s? Sure you can give them copies of Worst and make them watch Godspeed You Black Emperor and Battlefield Stadium, but there’s a huge difference between acquired knowledge of the source material and legitimate cultural exposure. And if you were going to make them do all that work, why wouldn’t you just have a Japanese studio do the job in the first place? You’d have to practically teach a small Anthropology course to the Japanese devs to acclimate them for the task of making a KI game. It would be smarter to hand it to people who lived through the 90’s era of pop culture and can approach the design from that standpoint (or just get Brazilians, since from what I can tell their culture is like a bizzaro world where its still 1996). Obviously what matters is the core game design, but one of the things I really like about the new MK is how it both faithfully captures the Xtreme Kornyness of the original games while simultaneously also using more modern game techniques and aesthetics. That kind of aesthetic touch is a big deal when reviving old properties like KI, a smarter man than me said in a review of the most current Star Trek flick that the characters weren’t so much new versions of the characters as much as they were all of the essential elements distilled and amplified to just what people remember and love. Mortal Kombat is a highly successful execution of that idea and I think Netherrealm would do a solid job of faithfully continuing the KI franchise.
And while you make some good points, you’re really hurting any argument you make by needlessly espousing your hatred of MK’s character design because it doesn’t fit your narrow definition of beauty.
The content of this thread is exactly what I expected from people who are willing to seriously discuss KI3. Keep it classy.
I don’t think I’d buy a new Killer Instinct game. I always thought it looked cheesy, like it’s just trying way too hard. What does KI do that other series don’t? Besides C-C-C-COMBO BREAKERS?!?
So the classic Anime vs. “Western” art “debate” has manifested in this thread.
While I think most anime, art/story/whatever, is overrated garbage, and most anime lovers couldn’t defend why anime apparently “looks so good” if their lives depended on it, I’ve never hated something good by virtue of it being/not being anime. Just throwing that out there for the people going “LOL animu rooks so badu they is no rearistic” and/or “Western art is ugly I love big soulless eyes because it’s kawaii desu.”
