Beautiful, watercolor style art. Everything is wonderfully done. Also, there is a cool option to view all the game models (with plenty of background info to read about). The designs for all the uniforms, weapons, and vehicles are fantastic. The characters themselves are deceptively simple, and surprisingly expressive.
Original Japanese dialogue. It's a shame so many companies leave this out of localized titles... there are many games I've wanted to play, but have not simply for this reason. It's always fun to hear voice actors/actresses from anime lending their voices to games. The subtitles aren't always very accurate, and are tailored for western audiences, but at least it's an option.
Story. It plays like watching an anime television series. Plenty of nicely done cut scenes, and you can tell that a lot of work was done to flesh out the setting and the inhabitants of this fictional world.
Fragile is set in a post-apocalyptic near future world that has lost its light and is covered in a dense fog. Almost all the world's population has vanished, and the cities have been left abandoned. The game places the player in the shoes of Seto, a young boy.
GStar, the largest games trade show in Korea, took place last week. We weren't there, but it's always fun to see what's new. Most of these games we've seen or heard about in some capacity before, but it's a good time to recap:
An offshoot of the Mabinogi MMO, but instead of being cute and friendly, Mabinogi Heroes looks like a serious, action adventure game. It's still online, from what I understand, but perhaps cooperative between a few people rather than massively multiplayer? There are a lot of physics effects and character to environment and character to character interactions. The art, although somewhat rough around the edges, has an interesting darker tone to it. It's more bad ass than beautiful with the characters looking more grounded and minimalist than other contemporary Korean designs. The somewhat jerky animation is my main concern, but it looks like fun.
Action MMORPG. I like the off-center camera and the fast paced combat. The mobs apparently spawn somewhat randomly and it appears to use some instancing. The graphics are nicely stylized and effective. Hard to tell what else there is to the game, but it looks promising.
Continent of the Ninth (Studio Cloud 9/NHN/HanGame) http://c9.hangame.com/ A heavy hitter of a game, C9 looks very impressive and appears to play solidly. Combat seems to be more like what you might expect from an action console game than an MMORPG as it is being billed. There's a clarity to the graphics that I really like about this game. It's realistic, yet not distractingly so. The over the top action looks great.
The cute game of the bunch, Dragonica is a side scrolling online game that appears to be marketed at a more casual audience. There is a level of craftsmanship in the concept art designs that really sell it for me. Looks like there's a focus on microtransactions similar to Maple Story.
These are some of the games that I've been keeping tabs on, but I'm sure there were a lot of other cool games missing from this list at GStar 2008. Hey, that's what future posts are for.
left to right: Chiu, Hai (me), Delly, Danny, Fan, Jason, Donald, Joe, Hyung-Tae Kim (B&S Art Director), Aaron (GW2 Character Art Lead), Xia, Daniel (GW2 Art Director)
I generally don't get excited about meeting anyone, but on Thursday, we got a chance to meet one of my favorite character designers, Hyung-Tae Kim. For those who don't know who he is, I credit him for helping popularize a CG painted look on anime styled game characters, and introducing a unique design sense that's often emulated these days.
Hyung-Tae Kim is the Art Director for the upcoming NCSoft game, Blade & Soul, which also happens to be one of the best looking games I've seen recently. He recently visited our ArenaNet office and the artists here familiar with his work were eager to meet him. He seemed like a nice guy and was cool about signing the artbooks we had of his work.
I'm definitely looking forward to Blade & Soul. I don't know how much appeal it will have in the mass market, but it has so much style that nothing else out there has right now. If you're a fan of Hyung-Tae Kim's work then definitely check this game out.
