John Zeitler

Player V: Wanna play Tales?
Player J: No, man, I don’t play 3D.
Player V: What, you casual?
Player J: No, I ain’t casual, I just don’t dig on polygons, that’s all.
Player V: Why not?
Player J: Polygons are blocky and live in the uncanny valley. I stay out of the uncanny valley.
Player V: But Legendia is goooood. Skies of Arcadia is goooood.
Player J: Yeah, and Haze might be Game of the Year, but I wouldn’t know because I ain’t playin’ the #$@#$er. Polygons are crude and unnatural. That makes them ugly. I won’t play anything that don’t have enough sense to look right.
Player V: How about Final Fantasy? Final Fantasy’s got polygons.
Player J: I won’t play Final Fantasy either.
Player V: Yeah, but do you consider Final Fantasy an ugly game?
Player J: I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ugly, but there’s room for improvement. But Final Fantasy’s got a history. A legacy goes a long way.
Player V: Ah, so by that rationale, if Tales had a better history in the West, it would cease to be an ugly game.
Player J: Well, we’d have to be talking about one long #%#$ing history. I mean, it’d have to have a legacy ten times longer than that Pong on Atari, you know what I’m sayin’?

Well, all right, so maybe I’m not nearly as good a screenwriter as Tarantino. But the point is still in there, a little. I don’t really consider myself a graphics whore by any stretch of the imagination, but from what I recall, I was underwhelmed by Tales of Legendia’s graphics when I first put it into the PS2 some months ago. Now, granted, the game is old, and I have been very spoiled… witness Eternal Sonata, Tales of Vesperia, hell, even Tales of Symphonia. Legendia was in that weird transitional period between the PS1 and the PS2, when developers were coming to grips with the fact that they didn’t have to have blocky, chunky models anymore. Also, as a reference, I put in Grandia around New Year’s. The graphics were crude even by the PS1′s standards, but writ large on an LCD widescreen, the 3D segments looked positively abysmal. Contrast that to the recent spat of remakes and rereleases. Chrono Trigger is largely unchanged on the DS, and yet its graphics look no better or worse than they did thirteen years ago. They’ve been outpaced greatly in terms of animation, to be sure, but even that’s forgiveable as very few purely 2D games of late get it right, to say nothing of being made (Castle Crashers is almost good enough, but not quite– it’s still largely Flash).

I suppose it’s just me, but maybe I am really spoiled by all the more recent games, to the point where I don’t think I could manage to go through Tales of Legendia, Grandia II, or even any of the old Breath of Fire games without the graphics irritating me. I don’t hold that to be a good thing. What might happen is that once I get through Tales of Vesperia, I may have to go all the way back to the PS1 for my next game just so I’m not used to such a high bar.

Vesperia, in fact, got me thinking about this. I remember looking at the graphics for Final Fantasy X way back in the day and saying, “OK, that has to be pre-rendered.” Nowadays even the pre-rendered scenes from FFX are being outpaced by what’s being generated in real-time. I started wondering if there really was an upper limit to how realistic the visuals could get or how smooth the animation and motion-acting could appear so as to elicit the same kind of reaction to Vesperia a few years down the line. Of course, the answer is semi-obvious: some games look good no matter how old they are because they’re styled to maximize the strengths of the hardware they’re on. That’s a fancy way of saying Vesperia is too stylized to be considered ‘photorealistic’, and therefore it’s most likely immune to this sort of retroactive obsolescence.

Boiled down even further, and to make this even more apropos: personality, it seems, really does go a long way.