TGS 2010 Fan Art (The games that caught my eye so far)

Tokyo Game Show 2010 is finally upon us and with it comes a ton of announcements on new games and more footage on others we already know about. Two of the trailers on the first day were so good (well... to me anyway... lol) that I was inspired to draw fan art for them so here we go!

Starting with the trailer for Asura’s Wrath published by Capcom and developed by cyberconnect2. Wow… That’s all I can say… Wow… This looks amazing, from the character design to the graphics to the animation, it’s just firing on all cylinders. People are billing it as Japan’s God of War and it’s easy to see why here. It definitely has the epic turned up to eleven. I was so taken with it that I just had to draw the main character… the paper… it was caaalling meee!!! If you haven’t seen the trailer, you can check it out here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGw3hKkDmD8 Seems to be a mix of cutscenes, quicktime events and actual gameplay (Like where he rips the pillar out of the ground and starts plowing through enemies with it.) But I’m just making educated guesses here.

Now that I think about it, this game seems like Capcom’s “apology” for the next game that caught my eye when it was announced.

DmC: Devil May Cry; The re-imagining of the Devil May Cry series by Ninja Theory which caused quite the uproar among the fans. I’m a huge fan of the series too, I love Devil May Cry 3! I think it’s a masterpiece of game design and to this day has one of the best told stories in gaming, but I have to admit, the series lost it’s way. I won’t go on a fanboy rant here about why and how Devil May Cry 4 broke my heart… But you can tell Capcom didn’t know where to go with this series. Every game after the abysmal Devil May Cry 2 was a prequel because quite frankly… they had no idea how to continue the story after that mess.

So a reboot is fine with me, it’s not like any huge questions (that I cared about anyway) were left hanging in the original series, so I can let it go and move onto something new. Now when I saw the screenshots I was like everyone else, “Who the hell? That’s not Dante!!!” and so forth, but when I saw the actual trailer I have to say, it blew me away. Just well animated, well choreographed, fluid action and I’m pretty interested to see what their version of the story will be. Knowing that it’s Ninja Theory behind it, I also know it will most likely have excellent acting (and Andy Serkis will probably play someone… lol). But I’ll admit, being one of the four people who bought and adored Heavenly Sword, (and will buy Enslaved on day one) I’m probably a tad biased. As I watched the trailer the character design really grew on me too, so I just had to take a stab at drawing it myself. Would I have redesigned Dante like this? No… not at all… I probably at the very least would have kept his hair silver as that’s quite a defining part of his character, but I want them to stick to their guns (no pun intended). As good as Heavenly Sword was, it definitely wasn’t a masterpiece in terms of its combat, so that’s something of a legitimate worry here for sure. In any case, time will tell. If you’ve been living under a rock today, the trailer is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGqhNZkoh9Q

Finally a new post!!!

So I caved into the peer pressure, getting this blog set up and all that... and then I never used it... NO MORE!!! Now I will blog and blog and blog till my fingers explode from all the mindless blogging! Stand back world! Here comes more ART OF THE JONSTER.....STER............STER..............STer................................ster..........................................ster......

I was playing through Final Fantasy VI again and I was just getting super-nostalgic about how good this game was and still is. It got me thinking that I’d like to try animating some parts of it in my free time when I’m not animating for school. I’ve never actually been one to do fan art/animation, but I love that story so much, I think it’d be fun, so I started drawing the characters to see how they’d look in my style starting with Terra.

I tried to incorporate a mixture of Amano’s original design along with Tetsuya Nomura’s design from Dissidia. In Amano’s original artwork Terra is blonde and they keep it that way in the CGI cutscenes they made for Final Fantasy Anthology and Tetsuya Nomura also made her blonde for Dissidia, but I decided to keep the Super Nintendo sprite’s green hair for a few reasons. Besides it just being pretty unique it also differentiates her from the other main female character in the game, Celes Chere who’s also blonde and looks pretty similar facially. Also when I draw her full body later the green compliments her red clothes extremely well.

In Amano’s illustrations he doesn’t color Terra’s skin, so she appears pale almost giving her a goth-like feel which I like, so I made her (and subsequently the other characters) paler than I usually would with Caucasians… but I was a little too pussy to go all the way lol.

Next up is everyone’s favorite lunatic, clown…. well after the Joker… and maybe It… Kefka! I once again merged Amano and Nomura’s designs and added a bit of the design from the Final Fantasy Anthology cutscene. One thing about Nomura’s design that I didn’t decide to use, is the purple lips. I think the red just works better… can’t really say why… but now that I think about it, I may use purple in the future just to differentiate him from the other clown prince of crime.