Members see less ads - sign up now for free and join the community!
I dont think is spreading misinformation, think its just a funny video he made, but dont think he should have made a new topic for it.
Likes:
Hey Everyone
I wouldn't go as far as to say Nomura had no vision. He is a very creative artist and I would say he is very talented as well. The main issue with Versus was that Nomura was really busy with many other projects. He had to direct like a dozen games until Tabata took over.
What this means is that, he probably had the initial vision for the game. The overall image of the project, but after he came back after completing another project, time had passed and he gained new ideas. Which he would incorporate into the game. However, this happened multiple times, so every time this happened, he would leave and come back with new inspirations.
As an example (I'm an artist), I start to draw something, at first I have a clear image of what I want to draw. But along the way, I may run out of time and I cannot work on it again until a week later. When I come back, I find areas that I couldn't see before of which I can improve it. And I also see parts where it's not exactly what I want.
It's not that there is no vision, it's just that simply people do not walk in straight lines.
What this means is that, he probably had the initial vision for the game. The overall image of the project, but after he came back after completing another project, time had passed and he gained new ideas. Which he would incorporate into the game. However, this happened multiple times, so every time this happened, he would leave and come back with new inspirations.
As an example (I'm an artist), I start to draw something, at first I have a clear image of what I want to draw. But along the way, I may run out of time and I cannot work on it again until a week later. When I come back, I find areas that I couldn't see before of which I can improve it. And I also see parts where it's not exactly what I want.
It's not that there is no vision, it's just that simply people do not walk in straight lines.
I'm also an artist so I know what you mean. However as far as Nomura's capabilities as a director goes people shout him too much praise he does not deserve, Nomura even considers himself to be a poor director and bad at managing others.
As as for me saying he had no vision, he literally came in one day wanting to make XV into a musical on a whim, that isn't changing something slightly or having to change something because of constraints. Hell even him changing the original planned SD world map with a giant Noctis running around it to later having the over the shoulder 1:1 scale map was him changing it just because, not to mention how many times he changed the designs of the characters from 2006 to 2013, and even constant story changes even when he claims there are no story changes. Like in 2013 he said there wasn't any story changes from Versus, which we know is a lie because Roberto Ferrari confirmed that the story was changing every 3 months in 2013 and there was no defined story at that time either. Just like him stating during Versus that Stella and Noctis meet for the first time at the peace treaty party as adults, but then in the 2013 XV trailer we see Noctis as a kid with what we could only guess as being Stella at the time as a kid too. Even just looking at the 2013 trailer shows completely redone CGI scenes too from the trailer just 2 years prior which in the end didn't even make it into the final game anyway. Even his claim that XV when it was Versus would be KH like system, but then in 2013 he said it's not like KH. And even in 2013 in June he said as a story they plan to continue XV further because he considers it to be like a poem and that there are many stories you can tell in it, but then in July 2013 he said they have no plans for an XV sequel.
I like Nomura as an artist but he is not a good director, self admittedly I might add. Nomura is better at making flashy trailers than he is at directing games.
As as for me saying he had no vision, he literally came in one day wanting to make XV into a musical on a whim, that isn't changing something slightly or having to change something because of constraints. Hell even him changing the original planned SD world map with a giant Noctis running around it to later having the over the shoulder 1:1 scale map was him changing it just because, not to mention how many times he changed the designs of the characters from 2006 to 2013, and even constant story changes even when he claims there are no story changes. Like in 2013 he said there wasn't any story changes from Versus, which we know is a lie because Roberto Ferrari confirmed that the story was changing every 3 months in 2013 and there was no defined story at that time either. Just like him stating during Versus that Stella and Noctis meet for the first time at the peace treaty party as adults, but then in the 2013 XV trailer we see Noctis as a kid with what we could only guess as being Stella at the time as a kid too. Even just looking at the 2013 trailer shows completely redone CGI scenes too from the trailer just 2 years prior which in the end didn't even make it into the final game anyway. Even his claim that XV when it was Versus would be KH like system, but then in 2013 he said it's not like KH. And even in 2013 in June he said as a story they plan to continue XV further because he considers it to be like a poem and that there are many stories you can tell in it, but then in July 2013 he said they have no plans for an XV sequel.
I like Nomura as an artist but he is not a good director, self admittedly I might add. Nomura is better at making flashy trailers than he is at directing games.
Likes:
Jenova
I'm not sure it's fair to accuse Nomura of having "no vision" just because he kept suggesting big changes during the spitballing phase of pre-production. Final Fantasy VII had two years of that to its one year of actual development time and went from a 2D direct sequel to FFVI to a game set in New York City starring a hot-blooded Detective Joe who was investigating a group that was taking down Mako Reactors to the final concept that we ended up getting. And according to Nomura, Kitase and Nojima came in one day partway through the project thrilled with the idea they'd come up with where they'd kill every single character who wasn't in the main party near the end of the game and he had to talk them out of it. XD;
Playing around with SD world maps and 1:1 world maps just sounds like standard early concept work. Nothing wrong with that -- FFVII did the same with 2D and 3D.
As for the 2013 changes, I'd bet dollars to donuts that they were trying to execute on their concepts at that time period and had to make changes because of it, which is basically inevitable. >_>; Transforming an outline into a finished product tends to result in a ton of changes even if you're just writing a fic for personal satisfaction, and games can take that up to eleven due to all the moving parts (see The Writer Will Do Something).
Nomura clearly has issues with keeping the scope of his stories in check, as one can plainly see by looking at the KH series, but the changes that Versus XIII/XV went through under his watch don't seem all too unusual apart from the length of time the game remained in pre-production and fact that we got a ton of footage of near-finished quality prototypes before the end of pre-production due to Squenix's bizarre marketing strategy.
Playing around with SD world maps and 1:1 world maps just sounds like standard early concept work. Nothing wrong with that -- FFVII did the same with 2D and 3D.
As for the 2013 changes, I'd bet dollars to donuts that they were trying to execute on their concepts at that time period and had to make changes because of it, which is basically inevitable. >_>; Transforming an outline into a finished product tends to result in a ton of changes even if you're just writing a fic for personal satisfaction, and games can take that up to eleven due to all the moving parts (see The Writer Will Do Something).
Nomura clearly has issues with keeping the scope of his stories in check, as one can plainly see by looking at the KH series, but the changes that Versus XIII/XV went through under his watch don't seem all too unusual apart from the length of time the game remained in pre-production and fact that we got a ton of footage of near-finished quality prototypes before the end of pre-production due to Squenix's bizarre marketing strategy.
Likes:
llazy77
The thing is every single one of these ass blasted Nomura fanboys act like Nomura is some untouchable god that shits gold, these people cling to their precious "nomura's vision" for Versus that was NEVER consistent at any point we saw the game over the years.
And again why even bother rerendered finished CGI we saw in 2011 with the CGI we saw in 2013? Seriously even that Noctis sitting in the car CGI was rerendered with different light posts and blur in the background and new color correction too, even the Regis vs Iedolas scene in 2011 had changed completely from being just Regis vs Iedolas to having Regis and his men vs Iedolas and his men with new color correction and even changing the swords around Regis from the Engine blade to just some other random weapon. The thing is people keep acting as if Nomura's vision is some consistent thing when it never was, he had no clue what the fuck he was doing and it shows. You can act like he was forced to do other games all you want but he could have always said no. Even in that recent FF7 article he says he is at an executive level making decisions, no one forced him to make KH BBS, Days, Coded and DDD. He decided to make all those instead of making Versus. Hell even if you want to blame Crystal Tools not being done until FF13 was done, that was done by December 2009, so he could have started Versus full development then, but no he instead kept making more KH spinoffs no one asked for. What little we did see of Versus in 2010 was the result of people doing things in their spare time, he couldn't even get to full development for Versus even in March of 2011. And the changes of 7 from when it started to the final game were back during script writing stages, not after he had mad a fully CGI prerendered trailer showing characters and elements of the game he wants while he's actively talking about things he's going to do in interviews, then years later, sometimes even weeks later he changes his mind and changes things on a whim.
FF7 going from 2D to 3D is not the same thing as Versus originally poised as being an SD world map with a giant Noctis to them going 1:1 scale map with an over the shoulder camera. FF7s world map works functionally identical to FF6s world map. And again in 2013, a year after Versus had been changed to XV, it has been confirmed that the story was changing every 3 months and that it was not even defined yet, despite what we were being told by Nomura.
Even things like Cloud's character design changes were just on paper, in Versus to XV we had seen them as fully CGI rendered and animated models and they would be changed by the next time we saw them. We saw two different versions of the party scene with Noctis and Stella from 2009 and 2011 respectively, two different versions of the Regis vs Iedolas scene from 2011 and 2013 respectively. Different designs for all of the characters from 2006-2008 compared to their 2011 onward designs, and Stella changed again from 2011 to 2013. At a time where again, Nomura stated that the story for XV was the same as Versus, and he had stated in 2010 that the script for the game was finished. But we know that XV in 2013 was changing every 3 months and was not even defined, so Nomura was talking out his ass. It wasn't even until Tabata took over as the main director that they had a final story, direction and designs set for the game, including whatever necessary changes that were made to accommodate for the new direction of the game.
And again why even bother rerendered finished CGI we saw in 2011 with the CGI we saw in 2013? Seriously even that Noctis sitting in the car CGI was rerendered with different light posts and blur in the background and new color correction too, even the Regis vs Iedolas scene in 2011 had changed completely from being just Regis vs Iedolas to having Regis and his men vs Iedolas and his men with new color correction and even changing the swords around Regis from the Engine blade to just some other random weapon. The thing is people keep acting as if Nomura's vision is some consistent thing when it never was, he had no clue what the fuck he was doing and it shows. You can act like he was forced to do other games all you want but he could have always said no. Even in that recent FF7 article he says he is at an executive level making decisions, no one forced him to make KH BBS, Days, Coded and DDD. He decided to make all those instead of making Versus. Hell even if you want to blame Crystal Tools not being done until FF13 was done, that was done by December 2009, so he could have started Versus full development then, but no he instead kept making more KH spinoffs no one asked for. What little we did see of Versus in 2010 was the result of people doing things in their spare time, he couldn't even get to full development for Versus even in March of 2011. And the changes of 7 from when it started to the final game were back during script writing stages, not after he had mad a fully CGI prerendered trailer showing characters and elements of the game he wants while he's actively talking about things he's going to do in interviews, then years later, sometimes even weeks later he changes his mind and changes things on a whim.
FF7 going from 2D to 3D is not the same thing as Versus originally poised as being an SD world map with a giant Noctis to them going 1:1 scale map with an over the shoulder camera. FF7s world map works functionally identical to FF6s world map. And again in 2013, a year after Versus had been changed to XV, it has been confirmed that the story was changing every 3 months and that it was not even defined yet, despite what we were being told by Nomura.
Even things like Cloud's character design changes were just on paper, in Versus to XV we had seen them as fully CGI rendered and animated models and they would be changed by the next time we saw them. We saw two different versions of the party scene with Noctis and Stella from 2009 and 2011 respectively, two different versions of the Regis vs Iedolas scene from 2011 and 2013 respectively. Different designs for all of the characters from 2006-2008 compared to their 2011 onward designs, and Stella changed again from 2011 to 2013. At a time where again, Nomura stated that the story for XV was the same as Versus, and he had stated in 2010 that the script for the game was finished. But we know that XV in 2013 was changing every 3 months and was not even defined, so Nomura was talking out his ass. It wasn't even until Tabata took over as the main director that they had a final story, direction and designs set for the game, including whatever necessary changes that were made to accommodate for the new direction of the game.
Likes:
Jenova
No, the real problem is that people on the internet seem to tend towards absurd extremes in one direction or the other, when it's far more likely that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Nomura's never been a "knows everything that's going to happen from the outset" sort of guy. Anyone who's followed his work on Kingdom Hearts should know that. He operates in concepts and images and snippets of dialogue, and he builds the rest of his games around that.
Ever seen Another Side Another Story?
That's how Nomura operates -- a few strong visual concepts that carry through to the final product (a dark city lit with neon lights, mysterious characters in black cloaks, evolved Heartless, fighting with two Keyblades), a bunch of lines that show up in the final product but not necessarily with the same impact as one might have assumed, and early character concepts that are close to the final product but are still distinctly different (like Kairi in the ending).
As such, there was never any reasonable expectation that Nomura knew exactly what he wanted the game to be at any given point. The expectation was that, like Kingdom Hearts II and Birth by Sleep, he'd be able to build a game around the super-early concepts he revealed that felt consistent with what he'd showed previously.
Why bother rerendering the CG? That's pretty obvious -- Nomura's a perfectionist who was tasked with making marketing materials for his game and took advantage of the budget he'd been granted to make things more to his liking. That has nothing to do with not knowing what he was doing and everything to do with him simply never being satisfied with a final product.
Remember, we're talking about a guy who made significant story/presentation modifications to a game that had already released (including additions regarding character motivations). Rerendered CG is nothing Nomura fans aren't already familiar with.
Well, even executive-level employees are still subject to the whims of the investors, and it's pretty clear that Disney/Squenix's finance department wanted KH to be a yearly series whether Nomura stayed involved or not. It's not difficult to imagine a situation in which Nomura was given the choice of either working on more KH games or having them done without him, and since he seems to think of the series as his baby... And even if he didn't, he still wouldn't have been able to work on Versus because Squenix's big in-house team was occupied with either XIII or emergency repairs on XIV until 2011.
Well, that mostly comes down to different decisions on the part of marketing -- Nomura was asked to put something together for the FNC presentation when he'd barely even gotten started thinking about Versus, while FFVII held off on showing anything until they actually had a game running.
And, even so, it's ambiguous as to when the kill-em-all thing happened in VII's development, so that could have been after the game had started being shown. =P
It's absolutely the same thing, considering the ridiculous difference in cost between pixel world maps and FFVII's pre-rendered CG backgrounds/3D world map. Actually, the difference in scope for FFVII was probably significantly bigger in that regard.
That's what happens when you try to implement a story in a game. Play the game I linked. Heck, it isn't even unique to games. Rogue One made sweeping changes in reshoots only months before its release.
And, no, Nomura never said the story was finished. He said the scenario was finished, which probably referred to something earlier than even a final script.
Again, a lot of this is a matter of marketing being started far, far earlier in the process than it was for FFVII. Other games with early concept trailers -- like, say, KH, as I mentioned earlier -- show similar design changes.
Here's another fun one... remember black-haired Tidus? =D
As I said above, Nomura said that he had a scenario set, not a script. He just got mistranslated. =/
My guess is that Tabata only finalized the story roughly around the same time as the game was content-complete/"pre-Alpha" back in November of last year, due to the simple fact that the ability to execute a story in a video game depends on the ability to execute the gameplay corresponding to that story. Nomura never had a content-complete/"pre-Alpha" game, and therefore it's perfectly reasonable that he never had a finished story. =P
Nomura's never been a "knows everything that's going to happen from the outset" sort of guy. Anyone who's followed his work on Kingdom Hearts should know that. He operates in concepts and images and snippets of dialogue, and he builds the rest of his games around that.
Ever seen Another Side Another Story?
That's how Nomura operates -- a few strong visual concepts that carry through to the final product (a dark city lit with neon lights, mysterious characters in black cloaks, evolved Heartless, fighting with two Keyblades), a bunch of lines that show up in the final product but not necessarily with the same impact as one might have assumed, and early character concepts that are close to the final product but are still distinctly different (like Kairi in the ending).
As such, there was never any reasonable expectation that Nomura knew exactly what he wanted the game to be at any given point. The expectation was that, like Kingdom Hearts II and Birth by Sleep, he'd be able to build a game around the super-early concepts he revealed that felt consistent with what he'd showed previously.
Why bother rerendering the CG? That's pretty obvious -- Nomura's a perfectionist who was tasked with making marketing materials for his game and took advantage of the budget he'd been granted to make things more to his liking. That has nothing to do with not knowing what he was doing and everything to do with him simply never being satisfied with a final product.
Remember, we're talking about a guy who made significant story/presentation modifications to a game that had already released (including additions regarding character motivations). Rerendered CG is nothing Nomura fans aren't already familiar with.
Well, even executive-level employees are still subject to the whims of the investors, and it's pretty clear that Disney/Squenix's finance department wanted KH to be a yearly series whether Nomura stayed involved or not. It's not difficult to imagine a situation in which Nomura was given the choice of either working on more KH games or having them done without him, and since he seems to think of the series as his baby... And even if he didn't, he still wouldn't have been able to work on Versus because Squenix's big in-house team was occupied with either XIII or emergency repairs on XIV until 2011.
Well, that mostly comes down to different decisions on the part of marketing -- Nomura was asked to put something together for the FNC presentation when he'd barely even gotten started thinking about Versus, while FFVII held off on showing anything until they actually had a game running.
And, even so, it's ambiguous as to when the kill-em-all thing happened in VII's development, so that could have been after the game had started being shown. =P
It's absolutely the same thing, considering the ridiculous difference in cost between pixel world maps and FFVII's pre-rendered CG backgrounds/3D world map. Actually, the difference in scope for FFVII was probably significantly bigger in that regard.
That's what happens when you try to implement a story in a game. Play the game I linked. Heck, it isn't even unique to games. Rogue One made sweeping changes in reshoots only months before its release.
And, no, Nomura never said the story was finished. He said the scenario was finished, which probably referred to something earlier than even a final script.
Again, a lot of this is a matter of marketing being started far, far earlier in the process than it was for FFVII. Other games with early concept trailers -- like, say, KH, as I mentioned earlier -- show similar design changes.
Here's another fun one... remember black-haired Tidus? =D
As I said above, Nomura said that he had a scenario set, not a script. He just got mistranslated. =/
My guess is that Tabata only finalized the story roughly around the same time as the game was content-complete/"pre-Alpha" back in November of last year, due to the simple fact that the ability to execute a story in a video game depends on the ability to execute the gameplay corresponding to that story. Nomura never had a content-complete/"pre-Alpha" game, and therefore it's perfectly reasonable that he never had a finished story. =P
Likes:
Storm and llazy77
No offense but your entire post reads like a Nomura apologist, trying to absolve him of any blame for why Versus ended up such a clusterfuck. Like what the fuck?
>He's a perfectionist so of course he wasted money on rerendering a CGI scene that was already done
You honestly expect me to believe this somehow paints Nomura is a positive light?
Wasting money creating the CGI in the first place when he knows he's going to change it later on just shows how poor at management and directing Nomura truly is.
So many changes costing lots of money just to renreder the CGI that was already finished again, then that CGI wasn't even used in the final game anyway because the game was still undergoing story changes after those redone CGI were shown.
By the way, scenario is story. Ferrari even said himself he read the story script in 2011 and it had changed once it became XV, and yes he did say it was complete, as well as saying that the story of XV was unchaged since Versus, which we know is a lie. ReChain of Memories was a remake of a GBA game, which still has the same story as the GBA game does, only it's a 3D remake of it.
That Tidus thing is him with black hair, it's still the same design and all they'd have to do is have one person spent less than a day doing a blonde hair texture and just overwrite the black hair texture. Nothing about that is as much chance as the XV characters went through from their earliest shown depictions to their redesigns, which again were shown in CGI form, not just in game models that are easily changeable.
Doing a SD world map then changing it to a fully scale 1:1 map with over the should view and seamless transition into battle is absolutely not the same thing as what they did for 2D to 3D, because even though they spent more time and money creating the 3D stuff compared to 2D, the function of how it all worked in the game was still identical between the 2D and 3D games. FF6 and FF7s world map and area maps function exactly the same. The function of the map as it was originally planned to what it became completely changed the scale and scope of the game.
Your Rogue One example is irrelevant as reshoots are extremely common for films as well as pick ups and what not. Not having a defined story in 2013, 8 years after the game was first revealed and 2 years after you said you had a finished scenario is not the same, and lying about the story being the same since Versus is not the same either.
Nomura still had the means to say no to making KH spinoffs. People keep citing "oh he didn't have a team because of XIII/He needed to wait for Crystal Tools to be finished", yet he had the Osaka team ready but instead made BBS over the course of 3-4 years, then went straight to DDD for another 2 years. CT was finished by the end of 2009, BBS was out in 2010, he had a team, he had just wrapped up his at the time main game, yet instead of going to Versus he did DDD. It is such a fucking copout when people say "oh he had to say yes because the higher ups made him do it", like how do you know they made him do it? Nomura can stand up for himself and has shown to do just that in the past like during his KH1 meetings with Disney.
I won't deny Nomura makes some cool concepts, but that's all he's really good for, and that's what his fanboys don't want to admit because they become attached to his concepts. By the way how much of the CGI from that FF7R CGI trailer do you think will make it into the final game?
>He's a perfectionist so of course he wasted money on rerendering a CGI scene that was already done
You honestly expect me to believe this somehow paints Nomura is a positive light?
Wasting money creating the CGI in the first place when he knows he's going to change it later on just shows how poor at management and directing Nomura truly is.
So many changes costing lots of money just to renreder the CGI that was already finished again, then that CGI wasn't even used in the final game anyway because the game was still undergoing story changes after those redone CGI were shown.
By the way, scenario is story. Ferrari even said himself he read the story script in 2011 and it had changed once it became XV, and yes he did say it was complete, as well as saying that the story of XV was unchaged since Versus, which we know is a lie. ReChain of Memories was a remake of a GBA game, which still has the same story as the GBA game does, only it's a 3D remake of it.
That Tidus thing is him with black hair, it's still the same design and all they'd have to do is have one person spent less than a day doing a blonde hair texture and just overwrite the black hair texture. Nothing about that is as much chance as the XV characters went through from their earliest shown depictions to their redesigns, which again were shown in CGI form, not just in game models that are easily changeable.
Doing a SD world map then changing it to a fully scale 1:1 map with over the should view and seamless transition into battle is absolutely not the same thing as what they did for 2D to 3D, because even though they spent more time and money creating the 3D stuff compared to 2D, the function of how it all worked in the game was still identical between the 2D and 3D games. FF6 and FF7s world map and area maps function exactly the same. The function of the map as it was originally planned to what it became completely changed the scale and scope of the game.
Your Rogue One example is irrelevant as reshoots are extremely common for films as well as pick ups and what not. Not having a defined story in 2013, 8 years after the game was first revealed and 2 years after you said you had a finished scenario is not the same, and lying about the story being the same since Versus is not the same either.
Nomura still had the means to say no to making KH spinoffs. People keep citing "oh he didn't have a team because of XIII/He needed to wait for Crystal Tools to be finished", yet he had the Osaka team ready but instead made BBS over the course of 3-4 years, then went straight to DDD for another 2 years. CT was finished by the end of 2009, BBS was out in 2010, he had a team, he had just wrapped up his at the time main game, yet instead of going to Versus he did DDD. It is such a fucking copout when people say "oh he had to say yes because the higher ups made him do it", like how do you know they made him do it? Nomura can stand up for himself and has shown to do just that in the past like during his KH1 meetings with Disney.
I won't deny Nomura makes some cool concepts, but that's all he's really good for, and that's what his fanboys don't want to admit because they become attached to his concepts. By the way how much of the CGI from that FF7R CGI trailer do you think will make it into the final game?
Likes:
Jenova
Well, this topic got quite interesting.
I can accept draft changes within video game development, but when you have a concept that presents a dynamic between two characters (Noct and Stella), have an old Versus XIII interview where you directly mention that "scene is where X and Y met for the first time" as adults, but then fast-forward to E3 2013 showing those same two characters together as children while stating that said-Versus retains its story unchanged, it wouldn't surprise me that one would raise an eyebrow to such a implicable contradiction. Especially when the "X opposes Y" dynamic isn't anywhere near as emphesized in future concept footages compared to Versus 2008. Unless i'm mistaken, thats pretty misleading in it's own right.
For the record, Nomura is one my all time favorite developers put there, but he isn't perfect, as he himself admitted. And it irks me seeing as how many of the hardcore Versus fandom have a firm conviction that the plot itself from the KH/Advent Children director would have been a flawless masterpiece, when AFAIK even back then people wouldn't give Nomura the time of day when it came to the convoluted direction KH's storyline took + the whole "lol zippers & belts" meme.
Its one thing to expect interesting concepts to make it in the game, which is understandable when looking at Nomura's past works. Its another when falling victim to overhype with those same concepts when no one knew whether they'd be well-executed or not.
There is also the "work in progress subject to change" even during early FFXV that should be factored, as well as the other fact the past KH titles never went through a similar development period as Versus XIII/XV did, especially in terms of the difference in scale.
And think the ridiculous forced rivalry between the two director's speaks for itself.
I can accept draft changes within video game development, but when you have a concept that presents a dynamic between two characters (Noct and Stella), have an old Versus XIII interview where you directly mention that "scene is where X and Y met for the first time" as adults, but then fast-forward to E3 2013 showing those same two characters together as children while stating that said-Versus retains its story unchanged, it wouldn't surprise me that one would raise an eyebrow to such a implicable contradiction. Especially when the "X opposes Y" dynamic isn't anywhere near as emphesized in future concept footages compared to Versus 2008. Unless i'm mistaken, thats pretty misleading in it's own right.
For the record, Nomura is one my all time favorite developers put there, but he isn't perfect, as he himself admitted. And it irks me seeing as how many of the hardcore Versus fandom have a firm conviction that the plot itself from the KH/Advent Children director would have been a flawless masterpiece, when AFAIK even back then people wouldn't give Nomura the time of day when it came to the convoluted direction KH's storyline took + the whole "lol zippers & belts" meme.
Its one thing to expect interesting concepts to make it in the game, which is understandable when looking at Nomura's past works. Its another when falling victim to overhype with those same concepts when no one knew whether they'd be well-executed or not.
There is also the "work in progress subject to change" even during early FFXV that should be factored, as well as the other fact the past KH titles never went through a similar development period as Versus XIII/XV did, especially in terms of the difference in scale.
And think the ridiculous forced rivalry between the two director's speaks for itself.
Last edited:
http://www.metacritic.com/game/psp/kingdom-hearts-birth-by-sleep
x
http://www.metacritic.com/game/psp/crisis-core-final-fantasy-vii
http://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/kingdom-hearts-recoded
x
http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/final-fantasy-type-0-hd
problem?
edit:
bonus
http://www.metacritic.com/game/3ds/kingdom-hearts-3d-dream-drop-distance
http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-2/kingdom-hearts-re-chain-of-memories
http://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/kingdom-hearts-3582-days
x
http://www.metacritic.com/game/psp/crisis-core-final-fantasy-vii
http://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/kingdom-hearts-recoded
x
http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/final-fantasy-type-0-hd
problem?
edit:
bonus
http://www.metacritic.com/game/3ds/kingdom-hearts-3d-dream-drop-distance
http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-2/kingdom-hearts-re-chain-of-memories
http://www.metacritic.com/game/ds/kingdom-hearts-3582-days
Kh1 -85
kh2- 87
bbs-82
358/2 -75 (still good)
recoded was a phone game originally and chain of memories used a shitty card system
Crisis Core is just a 83 it didnt reach Nomuras height of 87. Thats one of the only games that tabata made to get into the 80s and again like XV was based on his original work, meanwhile nomura had 3. Tabata also had the ff7 base to work with to help him out.
kh2- 87
bbs-82
358/2 -75 (still good)
recoded was a phone game originally and chain of memories used a shitty card system
Crisis Core is just a 83 it didnt reach Nomuras height of 87. Thats one of the only games that tabata made to get into the 80s and again like XV was based on his original work, meanwhile nomura had 3. Tabata also had the ff7 base to work with to help him out.
I'm not trying to absolve him of all blame. Clearly, something went wrong in the 2011-2013 period that resulted in the team's morale being low prior to the directorial change. I just don't think it's fair to act like he's incompetent and lacking in vision just because stuff changed.
Nice strawman you have there. -_-
Here's the thing -- you're making a couple of assumptions about the budgeting of CG that you have no way of verifying.
1) There's no way to know what the marketing team asked Nomura for when they came asking for trailers. If he was given a certain budget and/or amount of resources to complete each individual trailer, then making changes to the CG would just be acting within the parameters he was given. More importantly...
2) You're assuming that the re-rendering of CG is a big expenditure when it's unclear whether that's actually the case. How many computers were used to render each bit of CG, and for how long? *shrugs* The amount of render time used for a particular bit of CG can vary wildly depending on the parameters used -- maybe the initial renders were always meant to be less expensive mock-ups that could be rendered at higher quality later on. And even if the CG was re-rendered twice at full quality, the cost of the render time is bound to be a pittance in comparison to the cost of creating the assets, and many of those were, in fact, retained and/or repurposed. Like, apart from the fact that both sets of CG use assets that are ~95% identical and in-game Noct is basically 2011/2013 CG Noct cut back to console specs, that mystery sword Regis had in the 2013 trailer seems to have been used as Clarus' sword in Kingsglaive. It's not like the decision not to use specific CG videos means that every bit of work that went into their creation is suddenly worthless.
There's no way to know how much money was actually wasted on CG alterations and CG that went unused. But given what Tabata said about the total budget of the Versus XIII/XV project, I'd bet that it's much lower than you probably think, to the point that if Nomura had remained in charge, the cost of the alterations would have been effectively irrelevant.
You're gonna have to provide actual citations for your claims about Ferrari, because it doesn't mesh with the translations I'd read of Ferrari's comments (which, IIRC, focused mostly on the 2013 end of things when it comes to story stuff). You're also gonna have to find a source that can confirm that Nomura wasn't misquoted in regards to scripts vs. scenarios. Here's my citation showing that Nomura confirmed scenario completion but western news outlets assumed that meant script completion.
Not quite. Larxene's tendency to invade people's personal space is almost entirely an invention of Re:CoM. Vexen disappears after Axel slashes him in CoM; Axel burns him alive in Re:CoM. Zexion never fights in CoM and is killed by Riku Replica off-screen while Axel completely avoids the question of why he pushed Riku Replica to do it; Riku fights Zexion directly in Re:CoM before Riku Replica drains his life on-screen, with Axel actually explaining his motivations. Lexaeus is killed by Riku in CoM; in Re:CoM, he knocks Riku out and is killed by Xehanort's Heartless, who he specifically compares to his Superior. There are a number of dialogue changes that create closer ties between Re:CoM and KHII than CoM had with KHII.
Nomura definitely changed a lot more there than he did in making slight revisions to character designs and cutscenes in Versus XIII. And, heck, Re:CoM had some of those, too -- CoM!Marluxia's hair was much browner than the bright pink used in Re:CoM. XD;
The point is, characters have been shown and then redesigned before. Versus XIII is different primarily because the marketing team was looking for CG stuff before the game's concept had any time to come together -- supposedly, the initial Versus XIII team was two CG guys and one game guy. The difference is fully explainable due to the difference in circumstances. And, again, look at the Kairi model from Another Side Another Story, which is the exact same thing happening under very similar circumstances in the context of a game that was absolutely not considered a waste of resources (i.e. KHII).
FFVI and FFVII's world map and area maps absolutely do not function the same way. FFVI's world map is a scaled 2D plane composed of various types of terrain blocks, which are marked as traversable/non-traversable/links to area maps based on their type. FFVII's world map is made of polygons and therefore needs real 3D collision detection. Meanwhile, FFVI's area maps are non-scaled 2D planes composed of blocks that are either traversable/non-traversable/links to world/sub-area maps, while FFVII's area maps are collision-agnostic image files that require collision maps to be built over the top of them. And the scale and scope of each game is notably different because of these changes, with FFVII needing multiple linked image files for its area maps where FFVI could just scroll over some more.
It's just as common to rework stories for video games as it is to do reshoots for films, though, because video game stories depend on the viability of the action sequences that they facilitate. And it's worth pointing out that Nomura actually had a good reason to be making changes in 2013 even if he did have a complete plan for Versus, given that he wasn't even fully aware of the specs of the consoles the game would release on when he made the E3 trailer.
Even assuming Nomura could personally opt out of KH sequels (and he clearly wanted to make BbS, given that he dedicated KHII's secret movie to it!), I seriously doubt that the bean counters would let him take a whole team with him. And even if he could take the Osaka team, they couldn't have made Versus XIII anyway -- Crystal Tools was completely useless for open-world games (see: the dire graphic quality of Lightning Returns) and Osaka's been struggling to deal with modern console development even with official UE4 support behind them (those skin shaders in II.8, eurgh).
Waiting for a massive AAA team to become available before launching into full production on a massive AAA project makes far more sense then attempting to pull the same off with a portable team, as does using said portable team to make a portable game. What you're suggesting is a far more terrible idea than anything you claim Nomura did. =/
...so do the Kingdom Hearts games just not exist or something? Because those kind of stand as testament to the fact that Nomura can do more than just "make some cool concepts."
As for the CG from the FF7R trailer, I'm going to go with "basically none," because it's a concept trailer and that's how those work. =P They'll probably reuse some of the assets, but beyond that... why would any of it need to be reused?
Nice strawman you have there. -_-
Wasting money creating the CGI in the first place when he knows he's going to change it later on just shows how poor at management and directing Nomura truly is.
So many changes costing lots of money just to renreder the CGI that was already finished again, then that CGI wasn't even used in the final game anyway because the game was still undergoing story changes after those redone CGI were shown.
So many changes costing lots of money just to renreder the CGI that was already finished again, then that CGI wasn't even used in the final game anyway because the game was still undergoing story changes after those redone CGI were shown.
1) There's no way to know what the marketing team asked Nomura for when they came asking for trailers. If he was given a certain budget and/or amount of resources to complete each individual trailer, then making changes to the CG would just be acting within the parameters he was given. More importantly...
2) You're assuming that the re-rendering of CG is a big expenditure when it's unclear whether that's actually the case. How many computers were used to render each bit of CG, and for how long? *shrugs* The amount of render time used for a particular bit of CG can vary wildly depending on the parameters used -- maybe the initial renders were always meant to be less expensive mock-ups that could be rendered at higher quality later on. And even if the CG was re-rendered twice at full quality, the cost of the render time is bound to be a pittance in comparison to the cost of creating the assets, and many of those were, in fact, retained and/or repurposed. Like, apart from the fact that both sets of CG use assets that are ~95% identical and in-game Noct is basically 2011/2013 CG Noct cut back to console specs, that mystery sword Regis had in the 2013 trailer seems to have been used as Clarus' sword in Kingsglaive. It's not like the decision not to use specific CG videos means that every bit of work that went into their creation is suddenly worthless.
There's no way to know how much money was actually wasted on CG alterations and CG that went unused. But given what Tabata said about the total budget of the Versus XIII/XV project, I'd bet that it's much lower than you probably think, to the point that if Nomura had remained in charge, the cost of the alterations would have been effectively irrelevant.
You're gonna have to provide actual citations for your claims about Ferrari, because it doesn't mesh with the translations I'd read of Ferrari's comments (which, IIRC, focused mostly on the 2013 end of things when it comes to story stuff). You're also gonna have to find a source that can confirm that Nomura wasn't misquoted in regards to scripts vs. scenarios. Here's my citation showing that Nomura confirmed scenario completion but western news outlets assumed that meant script completion.
Not quite. Larxene's tendency to invade people's personal space is almost entirely an invention of Re:CoM. Vexen disappears after Axel slashes him in CoM; Axel burns him alive in Re:CoM. Zexion never fights in CoM and is killed by Riku Replica off-screen while Axel completely avoids the question of why he pushed Riku Replica to do it; Riku fights Zexion directly in Re:CoM before Riku Replica drains his life on-screen, with Axel actually explaining his motivations. Lexaeus is killed by Riku in CoM; in Re:CoM, he knocks Riku out and is killed by Xehanort's Heartless, who he specifically compares to his Superior. There are a number of dialogue changes that create closer ties between Re:CoM and KHII than CoM had with KHII.
Nomura definitely changed a lot more there than he did in making slight revisions to character designs and cutscenes in Versus XIII. And, heck, Re:CoM had some of those, too -- CoM!Marluxia's hair was much browner than the bright pink used in Re:CoM. XD;
The point is, characters have been shown and then redesigned before. Versus XIII is different primarily because the marketing team was looking for CG stuff before the game's concept had any time to come together -- supposedly, the initial Versus XIII team was two CG guys and one game guy. The difference is fully explainable due to the difference in circumstances. And, again, look at the Kairi model from Another Side Another Story, which is the exact same thing happening under very similar circumstances in the context of a game that was absolutely not considered a waste of resources (i.e. KHII).
FFVI and FFVII's world map and area maps absolutely do not function the same way. FFVI's world map is a scaled 2D plane composed of various types of terrain blocks, which are marked as traversable/non-traversable/links to area maps based on their type. FFVII's world map is made of polygons and therefore needs real 3D collision detection. Meanwhile, FFVI's area maps are non-scaled 2D planes composed of blocks that are either traversable/non-traversable/links to world/sub-area maps, while FFVII's area maps are collision-agnostic image files that require collision maps to be built over the top of them. And the scale and scope of each game is notably different because of these changes, with FFVII needing multiple linked image files for its area maps where FFVI could just scroll over some more.
It's just as common to rework stories for video games as it is to do reshoots for films, though, because video game stories depend on the viability of the action sequences that they facilitate. And it's worth pointing out that Nomura actually had a good reason to be making changes in 2013 even if he did have a complete plan for Versus, given that he wasn't even fully aware of the specs of the consoles the game would release on when he made the E3 trailer.
Even assuming Nomura could personally opt out of KH sequels (and he clearly wanted to make BbS, given that he dedicated KHII's secret movie to it!), I seriously doubt that the bean counters would let him take a whole team with him. And even if he could take the Osaka team, they couldn't have made Versus XIII anyway -- Crystal Tools was completely useless for open-world games (see: the dire graphic quality of Lightning Returns) and Osaka's been struggling to deal with modern console development even with official UE4 support behind them (those skin shaders in II.8, eurgh).
Waiting for a massive AAA team to become available before launching into full production on a massive AAA project makes far more sense then attempting to pull the same off with a portable team, as does using said portable team to make a portable game. What you're suggesting is a far more terrible idea than anything you claim Nomura did. =/
...so do the Kingdom Hearts games just not exist or something? Because those kind of stand as testament to the fact that Nomura can do more than just "make some cool concepts."
As for the CG from the FF7R trailer, I'm going to go with "basically none," because it's a concept trailer and that's how those work. =P They'll probably reuse some of the assets, but beyond that... why would any of it need to be reused?
Likes:
Hey Everyone