Uh, ok? I could say that you don't know what the technical restrictions are and chalking the fish face up to being technical restrictions is being complacent with a lower standard and equally assumptive.
And please, it's not "disrespectful," don't turn this into an appeal to pity for the developers. It would be disrespectful if I assumed that they were lazy (which I did not, though it is a possibility, I also said that it could be due to time constraints). If it actually turned out that they were due to technical limitations, so be it.
If we were to assume something was always due to graphical limitations in order not to be "disrespectful" then we would not even be able to be critical of the game.
...wait, you think I'm
defending the fishface? Hahahano, fishface is the single worst thing about this series, full stop.
What I'm saying is this: we're not dealing with some B-tier developer here. This is Square-Enix, the company who -- if you'll read the links I provided -- designed their entire graphical engine around cutscenes, facial animation in particular.
Sticking KH with awful PSOne-esque graphical tricks due to "time constraints" while FFXIII-2 is built from the ground up in two years in HD quality with nary a fishface in sight is simply out of character for them. Using models with painted on mouths and eyes when they could simply reuse a simplified speech animation with a higher-quality model whenever they don't have enough time to keyframe the whole scene can't save much time, and it's a terrible tradeoff in terms of time efficiency considering how
bad it looks.
The only time constraint that could feasibly get in their way is an optimization one (ie. the scene slows down when they use the HQ model and they don't have time to fix it), and in that case, the constraint is largely technical in nature anyway.
And this is entirely irrelevant. My point was that there is an example of a place where they used fish face where there were no graphical limitations barring them from being able to use HQ models, regardless of whether or not those HQ models had been in the game prior (on a side note: that you acknowledge the developers did not have HQ models for SRK at all still shows that they were working under a time constraint or that they were lazy).
It's an example where fish face was replaced with HQ face. No graphical limitations.
It's still a terrible example.
SRK were each in only a few scenes in the entire game, so it makes sense that they might not be worth making HQ models for (until they were given plenty of time to add on extra stuff before the US release).
But, say, Terra's initial reaction to shooting Braig's eye out. Why is that
not something they would find worth spending the extra time on animating a HQ model for? Why ruin an emotionally-charged scene with lousy animation, when you already
have the HQ model and use it liberally throughout the rest of the scene?
How can you possibly think those two considerations are comparable?
Uh, no it's not easier. If they animated some cutscenes completely in fishface and others completely in HQ models, that still amounts to the same work in the end as having cutscenes with mixed fishface/HQ models.
The character is not animated in one stretch from start to finish in a KH cutscene (unless they're exceptionally short cutscenes), there are actually multiple animations at work. A transition between fish face and HQ models does not require any more work, it simply means they moved to a new animation (which is usually covered up by camera changes/angles). As for the choice of when to use the HQ models, obviously that's at the developers' discretion and I can't say their process of deciding when to use it, but you do usually find HQ models more in important scenes/lines. What YOU say would look "far better" in terms of their use is a matter of opinion.
No, I'm pretty sure it
is more work.
First off, if they only used one model or the other in a cutscene, that would lower the memory requirements and make it easier for them to fit everything else in the scene into memory.
Secondly, I'm almost positive that they need to do something to ensure that the unused model is taken out of the scene after its animation is complete when they use two different models, because
they accidentally left both in the scene at least once.
Thirdly, I'm not so sure that the cutscene animations actually work that way. From what I know, cutscene animations are stored inside of the room rather than inside the model itself, which is rather different from how the other animations in the game work (...well, apart from Reaction Commands, which are stored inside the enemy's model). It seems likely that there's something more complicated about the way their cutscene engine works because of that.
Re: the choice of when to use HQ models, there are a lot of important lines that they're not used for and a lot of less important lines that they are. There are a lot of scenes that are
entirely important but the models switch back and forth like a toddler with a light switch. The only kind of logic that would explain the pattern shown throughout all PS2-level KH and FF games is the sort of logic that relies on something other than a rational human to determine when to use each.
Also, it's far less "absurd"? I have absolutely no clue how. Why would it be any more "absurd" to think they didn't have the time (or were lazy) to HQ animate every cutscene/animation more so than saying it was a graphical limitation? Saying it's "absurd" means nothing.
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Because if time constraints were the problem, a developer investing in KH level production values would pay more attention to consistency within those constraints -- or, more likely, find a work-around that didn't look terrible.
Allowing fishface models and HQ models to exist in the same scene two lines apart when there's no need for two models in the scene at all is bad design. Since Squenix, generally speaking, is not a bad designer (at least graphically), has a convenient workaround for the time requirements of full keyframed animation, and has never used fishface models in games made for a higher technical specification, technical limitations are simply a
better explanation for the fishface.
That's not what I meant, there's a different ethos and different priorities for both series, and sometimes the ethos/priorities change even between the games of one series. So when I say that FF has more and better CGI, I was saying that it prioritizes CGI higher than KH does, which is in itself not a good or bad thing, it's just a different approach.
Fair enough, but that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the production values for realtime animation. =P Kingdom Hearts clearly values realtime animation just as highly as Final Fantasy does --
the Cinematic Movie Director for KH, KH2, and BbS is the same guy who held that position for FFX, FFXIII, and Versus III, as well as co-directing Advent Children, and KH2 is quite possibly the single most cutscene-heavy game Squenix has ever made.
The reason why a game like Dissidia, in my opinion, can get away with more fish face is not because of technical limitations but because it's a different genre of game- a fighter game. While not always the case, fighter games aren't usually as rich in story (let's be honest here- who takes Dissidia's story seriously?), thus there's less of an imperative to make great cinematics, and less of a need to make HQ faces to express emotion.
Yeah, Dissidia basically just chose a lower level of graphical quality, period. =/ Which is disappointing, but at least somewhat more understandable than inconsistency within single scenes.
I think there is, actually, because each time a character uses a stock animation, I believe it's used from the same folder. ie, every time Sora crosses his arm or Donald taps his foot, I don't think there are like a hundred files for each time they do this, there's only one (I could be wrong on this, not sure).
Either way, there is, however, a benefit in regards to time efficiency and productivity which the fishface shares in common.
The only technical benefit there would be storage space, though, and I don't think storage space was ever really a limitation for KH due to its lack of CG.
Like I said, though, stock animations make sense because they don't actually affect the apparent graphical quality of a scene, and they're usually only used in less-emotionally-charged scenes anyway where a stock "annoyed" reaction actually makes sense. They're not nearly as massively immersion-breaking as Sora fishlipping at Kairi for most (but not all) lines in their big Wayfinder-giving scene is.