The design of JRPG protagonists has gotten worse over time

>The design of JRPG protagonists has gotten worse over time

Do you agree with this statement? I find it hard to find classical designs these days, unless the game is fairly obscured.
I wonder what caused the shift from elegance to flamboyance.

Silly user, nobody played Phantasia.
Everyone started with Symphonia.

Sad but probably true.

Symphonia was my third Tales game after Eternia and Phantasia, personally.

There's a few newer designs that missed the mark for me like Kor and Velvet, but looking at them all in a group I find that I actually prefer the newer ones for Tales in particular. Ludger is 10/10 to me and many people agree that Yuri is solid.

You know, it's not just JRPG characters.

Take the Castlevania series. You had Richter Belmont, for example, rocking a fairly simplistic design in the original Rondo of Blood. But when they redesigned him for Dracula X Chronicles on the PSP, they decided to give him a look more in line with the type of clothing worn in that era. That's fine and all, but the end result was a much more over-designed outfit.

And I think that's exactly the trend we're dealing with these days. People going crazy with over-designing characters in a lot of things, not just JRPGs.

Thoughts on Legendia? Only one I played when I was a kid. Tried playing Berseria when it got cracked but I couldn't take any more after 2 hours.

Yuri follows the Abyss style, where character clothes look fairly simple, but are decorated with detailed patterns, as opposed to the classical style of clearly medieval inspiration. A cape would be decorative enough for Cless, but for Luke, you get a whole lot of small details that don't make any sense from a utilitarian perspective. It looks nice though.

Luke isn't a utilitarian person, he's a bored spoiled rich kid who knows nothing about anything.

Let's not bring up Castlevania when talking about character design..

Looks like fullmetal alchemist.

I think everyone accepts Judgement is the odd one out

I liked Legendia just fine, but a lot of people didn't care much for it. A good chunk of the developers were comprised of people who typically worked on Soul Calibur and Tekken. It led to a very different kind of Tales game than what a lot of people were used to or expecting, especially when coupled with things like having a soundtrack made entirely by Go Shiina or calling on a different artist than their staples to design the characters.

It's a very divisive game. People either like it or hate it.

Well, yes. It makes sense for the character, but the design trend spills over on character's like Alvin, who wears very elaborate clothes for a sword swinging battle merchant.
Can't say I don't like the way he looks, but it definitely highlights a huge different in design philosophy between the first game.

The fact that Shanoa's terrible Judgment design isn't even one of the absolute worst in the game really says something.

At least Judgment had great music.

It really just depends on the artist or game.

>tfw only like Destiny and Vesperia
>played destiny when it came out and basically stopped caring

>What caused the shift
Anime changed.
Animation studios started using computers.
There was an animation boom.
More quantity, less quality.
Over the course of a decade you go from a total of 39 anime series in 1997 to 129 in 2007.
One day you have Record of Loddoss War, the next day you have god damn Rune Soldier.
Bright colorful garbage now, bright colorful garbage forever!
Character design convention changes to a less detailed format.
Japan starts cracking down on 3DPD CP and suddenly it is like "Oh look, where did all of this moe' come from and why is it in my Japanese animes?".
The "obsessive fan market" takes over and that is why you can no longer have nice things.

That bleeds over into JRPGs.
Ban-ko says
>Nice work on the character designs Kousuke Fujishima but your shit is hard to draw!
>Tokuyuki Matsutake, I need you to take what he drew and make it flat and shitty, really cheap to animate and appealing to a modern trashy anime loving sack of shit.
>You did it, great job.

Dat Cless tho

So the more belts you put in a character, the better the design?

How was Xillia 2? i was pretty content with the first one

I remember the combat was really abusable later in the game because you could create/modify certain attacks, the story is pretty interesting i remember through my first play through.

Characters were kind of lame though. I think it's worth one play through.

Faggotry is popular nowadays.

Way better combat and divisive everything else. Flaws like reused assets and the debt system didn't bother me one bit but they're dealbreaker material to other people. Story's entertaining if you enjoy watching fictional characters suffer. I liked it much more than X1 overall.

Works for nomura.