Cutscenes

[MegaTuga]

welcome to another of tuga's derpthreads

Ever since MML3 was announced I was curious about how does the world reacts to the Legends games.

So I went into those gamer websites, like IGN or Gamereviews and searched about blogs and reviews.

I was surprised that there seems to be a good feedback on the games and that made me happy. But I was astounished as most of the reviews I saw give good quality to the cutscenes, some of the reviewers even went to the extent of saying they were confused if they were playing a game or watching a cartoon.

Since I started playing the series really late (4 years ago) I couldn't see much of that but I was still surprised at that review.


Well, what do you think of the cutscenes? Are they good? Sliggish? Blocky-handed?
And since we are on the same topic what is your favourite cutscene?

[Raijin]

The use of facial textures has a lot to do with what put the MML cutscenes above and beyond what could generally be expected from 3D games in that era. Pretty sure that's where that reviewer got the "watching a cartoon" thing from. It was a pretty clever use of limited graphics capability to give much of the story the feel of watching traditional anime.

Offhand, I'd have to say my favorite cutscene was the Bruno intro. Great amounts of character and humour on top of setting up a major climactic battle. Also love the entire MML2 pre-title scene, long as it is, it must have been doing something right to make me want to watch it nearly every time I start up the game.

[in·clover]

I still find the cutscenes captivating to this day. I think developers making creative use of what little is handed to them is a sign of true talent. It really has nothing to do with block hands, the same way great old movies will always be great despite being in black and white; it's all about the acting and directing. If you can do those two things really well, you've got something timeless. Forget polygon count.

I have to add, even though it's probably off-topic, I really miss the early PS1 days when they'd occasionally have a game that featured celluloid animated cutscenes by third party studios. Ah... those were the days. I'd love to see a return to that trend, particularly with Legends 3.

[Loken]

The cutscenes are great. They still hold up today because of there great animations and cartoon style. The emotions in the characters animations go along way to make the cutscene cute, sad, epic, and goofy. Most of all though the dialog and character interactions make the cutscenes entertaining to watch, and like Raijin said, make you want to watch them.

[Avegodro]

I would have to say my favorite cut-scene is the one where Glyde brings his main airship to attack Nino island and gets hit by the Parabola gun. That thing just addles the minds of whatever it is used against! :06:

The cut-scenes of this series are excellent and hope that MML3 keeps the tradition going.

[Dashe]

I liked the cutscenes in Legends 1 and 2 because they used the models from the game, which allowed for a nice, seamless transition from gameplay to cinematics...and the facial textures did a lot to carry the characters' acting. I hope they do continue in that tradition in Legends 3, just because the team's been able to express a lot using just the in-game models and swapping facial textures in the past, and now they could do so much more with them.

My favorite? It's a toss-up between Teisel's introduction after you beat Bon Bonne, and the one right after you beat the Fokkerwolf. The one right before the Bruno fight was great, too. Legends 1 really had awesome moments.

[Rockman Striker]

The cutscenes were great, I specially like the ones on RMD2 ep. 1 they put a lot of details on facial animations and synchronizing with the sound; that part when Megaman imagines himself running together with Tron in total harmony and then we hear the screams of the people while he fires his buster... a masterpiece.

I´m pretty sure MML3 will have the same type of cutscenes because the models shown at the time have textured faces, I was expecting to view full modeled faces on the game but I´m glad I was wrong.

[pressstart]

They're one of the best parts of the series for sure. And those face animations go a long way in making that happen.

www.sprites-inc.co.uk/files/Legend/Teisel/

I was so impressed looking at this page of sprites the first time I saw it, not only because there was so many animations, but also because of the 3/4 mouth sprites. It helped me realize the cool tricks and hard work put into each cutscene, so that unique angles could be used and the sprites wouldn't look like flat pieces of paper.

When you make a cartoon into CG, especially in a video game, modelers usually don't put the time and effort into making all the exaggerated poses for faces (it'd be a lot of work to have to remodel each one). So usually they either have a very limited amount or just have limited animation, which looks weird when you have a cartoon character just flapping their gums like a fish. A good amount of Portable-cartoon based games actually look better than their High-Def counterparts because developers are willing to use sprite based faces (since they use less polygons).

[Musashi]

I was always amazed with just how cinematic MegaMan Legends 2 in particular is. That opening scene is great, and there's just so much done right with it. One thing that can be kinda annoying though(I'm not sure if this is just my copies) is that the audio can be really desynced(usually just in the first game), or that the volume is really low(which happens in both games). Everything else is pretty fantastic, though.

[Raijin]

Jun 16, 2011 22:54:08 GMT -5 Musashi said:

One thing that can be kinda annoying though(I'm not sure if this is just my copies) is that the audio can be really desynced(usually just in the first game), or that the volume is really low(which happens in both games).

I believe the desynced audio is a known issue with the N64 version, or possibly the PC version. I know that the PSX version has no such issue.

The low volume for certain samples does exist on the Playstation though, like Rock's inner monologue during the Clozer Gate console scene that Snow thought was 30 seconds of silent staring during the Game Club playthrough. For the longest time I also thought Teisel's introduction scene had no music. Then I heard it from the listing on MMLS, and when I got to that scene again on a later playthrough, I cranked up the volume, and there it was, hiding in plain sight sound? all along.

[Musashi]

There are some mild desync in the PSX version too, though. It's just bad editing, really. The N64/PC versions' audio sync is absolutely horrendous, though.

[Raijin]

Do you have an example? I have never noticed any desync at all in my PSX version.

[Musashi]

Not off the top of my head, maybe I should say that's poor 'lip-syncing' than bad audio desync like in the N64/PC ports...

[Raijin]

Oh, you're counting lip syncing? For a Japanese game? The alternatives there would be either redoing the animation for the localized version (typically well beyond the time and budget scope for the localization process) or trying to make the spoken dialogue fit into the original mouth movements (typically resulting in bizarre, stilted dialogue with pauses in all the wrong places). All things considered, I think the foreign film dub approach of just barely trying to make the lips match the words is the best option we could have had.

[Musashi]

No, I definitely understand why, however that problem felt a lot less noticeable in Legends 2.