How To Capture the Disney Magic

Here is another video I made for my re-envsioning project. I have more videos on the way. This video particularly focuses on executions more than anything. Let me know what you guys and gals think! Have a great day!

 

Your ship has really sailed
You started this project a long time ago and have less than nothing to show for it. Square Enix isn't going to reinvent their franchise, sorry
You've released multiple videos promising clarity in the future while extolling ambiguous virtues like "magic" and "immersion"
You talk about things like the use of speech bubbles and default face with no actual understanding of why it's done. You write off everything lacking in KH as lazy when the real answer is that there's not enough money.
And you can't just add more money, because you're not guaranteed to actually make that money back
and making an account just to advertise your stuff? Pretty lame
(also lol about modern games apparently being on graphical par with animated movies)

 

The position my project has on the series requires patience from people. The exact thing that Kingdom Hearts fans are not known for. It's Disney's franchise, Square Enix develops it. Disney owns the rights and can do what they want with it. You try and formulate videos with even an ounce of the hard work I put into my videos and see how difficult it is. Formulating concepts and talking points to change the minds of many. Making this re-envisinonig was going to be difficult. It was going to take a lot of work which I knew when I started this entire thing but its worth all of that work. . .all of that effort. Square Enix should have fought harder for the money that each game in the franchise needed and deserved/deserves. I look at what was achievable back then and see what Kingdom Hearts brought to the table. Other games were giving perfectly synced 3-dimensional animations throughout the entirety of the game. Some of those games came out before the first Kingdom Hearts like Jak and Daxter which came out a year before the first Kingdom Hearts game. They can make CGI rendered intro's, endings, and secret endings or put money into having those be created and can't put that into, I don't know, scenes and animations in the game we are going to be playing? Thats mismanaging or misuse of your money/budget. I'm not saying I know everything but the same goes for you. You can't add more money? Really? Please read that to yourself again. Its called an investment. Disney acquiring Marvel and Lucas Arts for $8 BILLION together is quite a sum of money. Do you think Disney went into that business deal having the mindset of "you're not guaranteed to actually make that money back. . ." because if you do you need to re-examine it all again until you see what actually happened and what happens with any business deal like that. They dished out that amount of money because they knew they were going to get that money back and then start profiting big time. Its an investment which is exactly what the re-envisioning of the Kingdom Hearts series is. It is an investment that is worth it in every way [money, time, ect.]. "Making an account just to advertise your stuff?" Don't come at me with an idiotic accusation like that. You're not me and you don't know why I made this account. You want to talk about lame look at your own comment. Look at what my actions would accomplish for Kingdom Hearts. What comes from your actions? Nothing. You aren't adding anything relevant to the conversation whatsoever. If you listened to my video you would have heard that I said "Equal the level of quality and beauty of animated movies". Look at Destiny, The Last of Us, Batman Arkham Knight, Far Cry 4, ect. This next generation of gaming is bringing in a whole new experience to gaming.

 

There's no need to take personal shots at one another guys. People are welcome to share their thoughts on the series here, even if in video form -- it's a KH site after all. Critiques are of course expected but please present them constructively and without berating one another.

 

I wasn't taking personal shots when I posted this video. hatok began that himself within this conversation. I'm not looking for trouble. I just want people to have a level headed, mature, and intellectual conversation about the Kingdom Hearts series/franchise.

 

Hello friend.

Very interesting subject here. I really like the topic OP started .

As much as I love this series, it does lack some things, essentially due to budget and technical constraints.

I haven't watched your video completely yet but I'm leaving myself some time today to see the whole thing. However there are some things you points out that is true but also have a backside to it too.


For example, on the music part, your'e saying that it would have been better if the original composers of the disney movies did the score for their respective game worlds. Frankly, it would have really been cool however, have you thought about the COST??

These composers are high budget feature film musicians and now you would want them to compose songs for each world? Dude, maybe they could ''support'' or make critiques on Yoko's work so she could grasp better understanding of the disney feel but there's no way square would spend so much money only for the OST...It's already great they manage to hire most of the original voice actors (though even there, they can't get em all, just take example at the Pirate of carribean worlds, they didnt hire neither johnny depp, keira kngihtley and bloom for the voices probably due to budget constraint).

You know the good thing about having only one musical composer is that even if the disney worlds don't seem as true as the the movies they're from, thw whole thing seems connected!
Shinomura really has this unique style and most the worlds reflects that. In the end, it really blends well with each other, let's add to that that she really does good battle music!! Composers make good epic music also however they aren't meant to be looped and short like in video games.





Visually, I'm gonna say that Square did a really decent job! I mean frankly, for playstation 2 (and psp), this is great! Though some disney characters have weird faces like Tarzan in the first game, most the the disney protgonists are well modeled and rendered! I don't even think Disney could have done a better job themselves, TAKE A LOOK at their own games! Go see gameplay of Brave, 3D Tarzan and Alladin games and you'll notice that visually, these games are really poor compared to the KH representation of them.

My favorites are mulan and Ariel

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-A6NIAGyrekk/UuvxwOJxBPI/AAAAAAAAFX8/7ZVt7rfnB3o/s1600/100px-Mulan_KHII.png

http://images.khinsider.com/Kingdom.../Characters/Atlantica/character01 - ariel.png

On top of that, add amazing particle effect like the smoke in the mulan world and you really get something solid overall.


However there's one main complaint to be made about the visuals on the characters and that's when they have FIXED GIF FACES. This is essentially due to budget constraints. In a games which have about 5 hours of cinematics, you can't expect every dialogues and cutscenes to be animated in HIGH poly (the models with fixed drawn faces are low polygons version of the characters used for gameplay squence and mostly bubble dialogue cutscenes) !
Square Would go bankrupt after developping half of the game...






Now,another thing I'm gonna tlak about is the animation! ANI-****ING-MATION.
Now, for me, that's a big subject!! That's something huge and important I look in my games. That's essetnially because I'm aspiring to work in the industry later as a 3d animator.
Technically, video games today could not have the same visuals as a Pixar or Dreamworks movie due to technical constraints of consoles, HOVWEVER there's nothing that doesn't allow game developpers to have
the same animation quality in games than in films in Cutscenes (except budget).

Take a look at most AAA games today; they have realistic graphics (not as good as in movies of course) and top notch animations and characters motions . Animation wise, today in games due to MOTION CAPTURE, characters in game moves like real life people. Take for example, The last of Us, or Heavy Rain or Beyond, whatever, these games make good use of mo-cap and you get astounding results in the end. However, these are not animated by animators like in Dreamworks, Disney, Pixars and Animated movies. Why? Well, essentially because they aren't cartoonish and mostly because hand-key animation (animation that doesnt use mo-cap) is extremely costy in terms of time and money...

One thing I'm glad with the KH series, is that they haven't used cheap Motion-captures yet. MO-Cap would have really ruined the whole thing for me (though it could be useful in realistic worlds like Pirates of carribean or for Tron characters).

My main complaint about the animation in kingdom hearts is that it tends to be way too anime-ish. In the first game, you somehow could sense square animators were trying to reprodcue the best they could western disney animation style. However, in the second game, there were some really odd moments were the animation was way too anime-ish and somehow, the game lost one of the important disney aspects the first entry had; cartoonish motions...:(

Frankly, I really hope square could put more money on the animation department for the game, especially for cutscenes! I mean look at Ratchet a Crack in Time cutscens, these are really disney style animation I'd like to see in KH.

Combat animation are allright I guess, I do like the reaction commands stuff, it's swift and dynamic, could use some cleaning though.








Last thing, is the background, the disney background.

That's probably the biggest problem of the series. Most of the disney world plot is hardly respected, feels rushed, sometimes cheap, even original protagonists don't blend in and are totally out of characters.

That's probably due to budget and maybe technical constraints. They don't have the time to developp characters properly in the games and to make interesting subplot for each world..I undesertand that, but why do they feel so EMPTY ?

Most world lack NPC and really feels like they were dead, lifeless like if they were ILLUSIONS...Even town for ****s sake's lacks life. I've seen games with cheaper budget have town with way more characters than in KH and developping a tool that could create procedural random characters for square shoudnt be that hard.

I mean, aren't they a big company? Isn't KH a AAA production? Technically, they can't have any excuses this time on PS4..now about budget, well, we are in 2014 and things that costed alot and were hard to do back in the days are now done with a few line of codes and clicks with proper engines...-_-



In the end, I'm still going to applaud square and Nomura for the efforts. My biggest complaint is proably here about Disney themselves.


DISNEY DOESN'T SEEM INTERESTED ONE FUKING BIT ABOUT THE WHOLE KH PROJECT.
I don't sense any support in the series, I don't sense any marketing or budget aid...
They never features KH characters in their product though the KH series have brought back and revived some of their old masterpieces...

That's a big shame from their part...