Looks like a live comic book to me. All it needs it the big pow, poof word effects (what you call those?).
The wording on the thread title suggests you’re asking for an objective, definite answer to something that’s completely up to opinion
The most we can do is post our very own thoughts on it but rest assured SRK will try to “argue” about it
Anyways, to me it looks gross, maybe if they did it like Battle Fantasia it’d look a bit better
I’m not biased against 3D, I just think SF4 looks ghetto. The art direction for the menus and the UI also doesn’t help (half-assed logo made in half a hour in photoshop, “ink splatter” in horrid taste, health overlays with blur and smudge tool usages completely apparent, shitty-ass stock PS brushes used in almost every artwork, which btw are hi-poly renders [before they’re normal mapped for the ingame models] with “brush strokes” thrown on top of them to make them look hand-drawn, they couldn’t even draw the fucking off-game artwork by hand, etc. etc.)
The promo art crew Capcom got for SF4 sucks massive amount of ass
Most people would just argue it’s fine. I feel like personally if you’re looking purely at art direction, some characters just don’t transfer as well as others. I honestly feel like a lot of the moves (normals/specials/supers/ultras) lack either imagination or they just don’t live up to their 2D counter-part.
Take Blanka Ball for instance, you have this weirdly shaped ball of polygons spinning at an odd pace straight across the screen. The shorter the distance the weirder it looks. After ST when he stopped looking like an egg, Blanka started to actually silhouette a more ball like shape. It’s gotten smoother and nicer to look at until it returned to this ball of polygonal limbs defying gravity here. It’s essentially the same move and concept, but it doesn’t look right in 3D.
The other thing that bothers me are the “oh shit” faces when you activate an Ultra. Some concepts are silly and fit, others don’t. It never felt right with me and I thought it’s just bad silly rather than anything. I’m not against silly stuff in SF, Hakan to me is perfectly fine, but there’s just other stuff that makes itself a presence that hurts the overall presentation for me.
Lastly, while technically not graphics, animations are a key component that I find painfully bad. You have a rhythm that’s been built up with the animation like old Vega’s bounce when he does his Rolling Crystal Flash (rolling attack). It’s supposed to have that nice timing of hitting on a certain beat from the first hit to the last claw poke, why was it even removed? To make space for people to Focus out? I don’t even think people do that to begin with so the little space makes little sense to me and it destroys a bit of the character for me. It’s not just single moves like this, but a large range of moves across many characters where it makes little sense why it was changed. If we were to look at the newest character cast, I could easily point out Ibuki and her Hien (reverse dp + K). The whole animation of it is awkward and the EX version makes little sense as to how it could possibly be effective. The move to begin with tracked before and it would cover any amount of distance. Now it doesn’t, it’s incredibly slow and it has a huge hitbox so it can hit once and then she just floats and kicks the air before jumping backwards. If she misses completely, she just floats there for a second before gravity makes any sort of sense again. The move doesn’t look or play right and stuff like that, Capcom should have just took the initiative to remove if they were going to spend so little time on it.
Of course this is supposed to be about graphics and not gameplay, but you have to take into account both in this case. We have to accept that Capcom is taking liberties with changing some characters and so their animation will have to reflect that. It rather upsets me that I can still find useless moves with ugly animations in the game. People would probably just say well who cares, it’s ugly and you shouldn’t use the move anyways so who cares if it’s there, but if you look at it from a design perspective, I have trouble swallowing that pill and trying to be sympathetic or understanding of the reasoning behind such decisions.
tl;dr In conclusion, basically there’s nothing wrong with the graphics, just in my personal opinion, the problem lies with how Capcom made use of them. The game could look better if they held back in some places and polished up others and there’s no real limitation to making anything good on a console like PS3/360, the only limitation are made by decisions from people working on the overall vision of the project.
Personally I think the game looks like something that could have done last generation. Noone’s actually wearings clothes, all the outfits are actually just ‘pasted’ onto each of the characters. I would have hoped we were pasted the point of not making models look like they were dolls where you can tell where the joints come together and things just don’t look right, but shit like Cody’s prison wear looks like total shit in SFIV. Ibuki’s hair looks like trash, DeeJay’s pigtails will literally freeze in place at certain points, and almost all the males look like they were put together with the Ken (of Barbie and Ken) figure in mind.
This is just nitpicking mind you, but so many people like to say it’s stylized, but I don’t think there’s a speck of style here to begin with.
People are just butthurt over the fact that Capcom didn’t make the game in 2D despite the fact that Capcom has a severe lack of spriters at the company.
They see that the game is in 3D and cry and moan about it because it doesn’t have pixels. Instead it’s in “TEH EV0L THREEDEE!!!1111” so they feel the need to talk down on it. Just my opinion. And it’s actually sadly backed up by fact too.
If you have legit complaints like the two people above me though it’s fine.
For what it’s worth, the game really doesn’t look bad.
It has plenty of pixels considering it’s a video game and all
Nothing.
Learn to not get trolled and/or ignore stupids.
The art direction for SFIV has always been a tad bit jarring for my tastes. It doesn’t mean that this game does not have style or is lacking originality, but the overall presentation isn’t exactly pretty. The whole vanilla SFIV cast share similar primate-esque features that somewhat characterize Udon Studios past work, and share similar characteristics new only to SFIV and never seemed to be in such vast abundance in previous installments ie. Weird muscle structure & bizarre proportions.
Perhaps a lot of us were spoiled by Alpha, SFIII & CVS and really expected something if this nature to continue in the SF series. Regardless if it happens to be 3D or 2D.
Bottom line is you like it or you hate it! Personally it’s grown on me, but compared to what we have and what we are about to have (KOFXIII & MVC3) it doesn’t really cut the mustard.
I don’t find the addition of clipping a terribly positive one. They’re often pretty low detail considering how little is on the screen usually as well-wasted way too man polys and such on backdrops people never noticed before lobbies and replays I’d say, but then again it also looks like Ibuki’s model has about 3x as many polygons as Blanka’s.
Overall the graphics are good. Fireballs\Burn\Elec and other effects are top notch imo, some of the arenas are great too
Problem is with some of the models, some of them are just overbuffed\retarded faces\retarded faces at some occasions. The new cast got much better models, though. Too bad they didn’t do the same treatment to the vanilla cast
OP is a troll. close & infract.
game looks fucking goofy
There’s a dedicated SFIV forum: moved this thread there from FGD.
Well, since this thread was moved here I guess it should be closed. This section will obviously be bias.
There’s no accounting for taste.
For me SF4 has it’s unique style and i like it:
Everyone is too bulky. And something looks just…wrong…about Chun Li’s boobs.
Rose’s buttons are too big. Abel’s pectorals are too big. Cammy is too muscular-EVERYONE is too muscular…
Too bulky/big for you (your taste)? Or being anatomically correct dolls?
Then Blanka must be too green and has strange hair…
And Dhalsim… 
SF Series (and a lot of other bemus, too) have always been exaggerated in a certain way (think of it’s comic series as a background). But still every char can be clearly identified upon first sight. There never has been an intention to make them more serious or look like real people.
So I don’t get you why sth should be “wrong”.
“Too muscular” (for a fighting game) is good, too.
Wanna see some chars instead with slim bodies like a pencil pusher? Sth like Office Fighter 4?
Would be funny but way more unsuitable, I guess. 
Akuma’s and Abel’s biceps are like way too big.
Also Sagat has a vagina, I didn’t know Capcom wanted to retcon Poison.
Cody has a vagina, Abel,too. Every man in SF has vaginas, need I post the naked Akuma picture in the SF4 files?
Seems like they have an anti penis brigade going on. And no nipples, either…
well…except Abel.
they look like SOTA toys. honestly, they are pieced together like toys (GI Joes) and don’t have realistic clothing, just little parts that flap in the wind like ryu’s pants. aside from that, i like the direction they took. doesn’t look like a comicbook style at all to me and best of all, it doesn’t look like tekken or doa or final fantasy or any of that anime/realistic look a lot of games are going for.