Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, Part Two
Oct. 15th, 2016 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI planned to write more about Kinsglaive yesterday, but I ended up writing more than a thousand words of Wind Waker fic instead. I keep thinking I'll leave Zelda fandom, but then it's like NOPE I still have more things to say. I'm going to quit soon, though... maybe. Anyway.
If nothing else, Kingsglaive is gorgeous. I watched the Blu-ray via my PS4 on the huge HD television I bought specifically to accommodate the PS4 graphics,* and it was like looking into a window of someone's house, if their house was a magnificent city filled with attractive people.
Unfortunately, the named characters are so meticulously detailed and so beautifully animated that the off-model characters really stand out. Because the cast of the film isn't that large, this means you have a handful of characters who look and move like human beings walking around in a herd of digital constructs that radiate circa-2005 Resident Evil 4 uncanniness.
I actually (really) enjoyed the 2001 movie The Spirits Within, where everything was on the same narrow rocky ledge in the uncanny valley. I also enjoyed the visuals of Advent Children, in which the character animations were uniformly unnatural and deliberately gamelike. In Kingsglaive, the disconnect between "strikingly lifelike" and "totally an in-game render" continuously caught my attention, however, especially when it came to Lunafreya. You can tell that animated budgets were limited in several of her action scenes, and it's also weird that her face is perfectly flawless when you can see every pore and blackhead and bead of sweat and ingrown hair on every one of the main male characters.
Basically I'm still butthurt over the female lead, who should be the main character, being treated poorly on both a diegetic and a metadiegetic level.
I'm also so used to seeing CG explosions that I wasn't too terribly impressed by the choreography of the action sequences. I'm given to understand that Kinsglaive has been in production since 2013, and the recent conversations that we've been having in the United States about depictions of destruction in superhero movies seem to have gone over the producers' heads.
But writing about explosions makes me tired, so more on that tomorrow I guess.
* Huge HD tvs are unbelievably cheap these days. I mean, they're scary cheap. They're cheap enough to give me serious anxieties about global capitalism. Where are the materials coming from? Who is manufacturing the parts? Who is assembling the devices? Are there literal braindead human-shaped meat puppets involved? I try not to think about it too much.
If nothing else, Kingsglaive is gorgeous. I watched the Blu-ray via my PS4 on the huge HD television I bought specifically to accommodate the PS4 graphics,* and it was like looking into a window of someone's house, if their house was a magnificent city filled with attractive people.
Unfortunately, the named characters are so meticulously detailed and so beautifully animated that the off-model characters really stand out. Because the cast of the film isn't that large, this means you have a handful of characters who look and move like human beings walking around in a herd of digital constructs that radiate circa-2005 Resident Evil 4 uncanniness.
I actually (really) enjoyed the 2001 movie The Spirits Within, where everything was on the same narrow rocky ledge in the uncanny valley. I also enjoyed the visuals of Advent Children, in which the character animations were uniformly unnatural and deliberately gamelike. In Kingsglaive, the disconnect between "strikingly lifelike" and "totally an in-game render" continuously caught my attention, however, especially when it came to Lunafreya. You can tell that animated budgets were limited in several of her action scenes, and it's also weird that her face is perfectly flawless when you can see every pore and blackhead and bead of sweat and ingrown hair on every one of the main male characters.
Basically I'm still butthurt over the female lead, who should be the main character, being treated poorly on both a diegetic and a metadiegetic level.
I'm also so used to seeing CG explosions that I wasn't too terribly impressed by the choreography of the action sequences. I'm given to understand that Kinsglaive has been in production since 2013, and the recent conversations that we've been having in the United States about depictions of destruction in superhero movies seem to have gone over the producers' heads.
But writing about explosions makes me tired, so more on that tomorrow I guess.
* Huge HD tvs are unbelievably cheap these days. I mean, they're scary cheap. They're cheap enough to give me serious anxieties about global capitalism. Where are the materials coming from? Who is manufacturing the parts? Who is assembling the devices? Are there literal braindead human-shaped meat puppets involved? I try not to think about it too much.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-15 09:03 pm (UTC)