Female character design and features

A forum for all general Suikoden related topics.
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BrucePrintscreen
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Re: Female character design and features

Post by BrucePrintscreen »

sticky-runes wrote:
Wolkendrache wrote:What's wrong now? Everyone's talking at cross-purposes?

It's all just a matter of opinion/taste, I find them exaggerated, Bruce finds them attractive, all fine. But why allegations of prejudices all of a sudden? What the heck?!
No one's accusing you of anything, we're just discussing the subject in a broad sense. You don't have to take it to heart.
Yup! Sorry if I looked too opinionated Wolkendrache, that was not my intention to offend you. I was just talking in general. I wouldn't make a fight on a suikoden topic anyway
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Re: Female character design and features

Post by Wolkendrache »

BrucePrintscreen wrote:Yup! Sorry if I looked too opinionated Wolkendrache, that was not my intention to offend you. I was just talking in general. I wouldn't make a fight on a suikoden topic anyway
Wait, I think I misunderstood. There's a "you" meaning "you" and a "you" meaning "anyone", we have different words for them in my language. Sorry, my english is far from perfect.

Back to topic: What about your opinion on their eyes? In Japanese anime style, females or young people in general, mostly have these huge eyes. I guess because it's considered beautiful. When looking at the Suikoden artwork, many characters have smaller eyes (in both 2 and 5). I don't know if Suikoden is unique there, because I don't watch a lot of animes, nor have I played many other JRPGs. If it is, then I'd praise the artwork designer/director, because 1. it brings a lot of diversity and 2. the smaller eyed characters are not less beautiful imo (Frederica in Tactics is one of my favourites).
"Within the four seas, all men are brothers" Shuihu Zhuan
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BrucePrintscreen
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Re: Female character design and features

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Well you actually pointed out something I like a lot about SUikoden: it's not TOO anime style. It looks clearly like a Japanese artwork but it is sufficiently tamed to be appreciated by people who are not into anime.

When I was a kid I lived in France and Japanese cartoons were extremely popular there, I grew up with Cat's Eye and City Hunter. But I still saw it as a very foreign thing sometimes: some of the features were too exagerated for a Western audience. I think this is why anime & manga is seen as a niche thing in the West. Having grown up between English & French culture, I also was under the influence of the HUGE back catalogue of Franco-Belgian bande-dessinée, which is an awesome thing. It has a double effect: on one side, the Francophone world has seen comic books in general as a very important form of culture and is thus very open to other ones, and on the other side you end up being so much under the influence of bande-dessinée that everything else seem weird to you.

I like the character's eyes in Suikoden indeed because they are not too exagerated. Oh my, Rina's gaze...
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sticky-runes
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Re: Female character design and features

Post by sticky-runes »

Wolkendrache wrote: Wait, I think I misunderstood. There's a "you" meaning "you" and a "you" meaning "anyone", we have different words for them in my language. Sorry, my english is far from perfect.
Sometimes people use "you" in a discussion as a means of getting you to consider the possibility of something, so they can get their point across. "If you are that sort of person, then this is my response to you." It's a bit like when somebody provides instructions. "If you find yourself in this situation, then this is what you need to do."
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Neclord X
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Re: Female character design and features

Post by Neclord X »

Wolkendrache wrote:
BrucePrintscreen wrote: Back to topic: What about your opinion on their eyes? In Japanese anime style, females or young people in general, mostly have these huge eyes. I guess because it's considered beautiful. When looking at the Suikoden artwork, many characters have smaller eyes (in both 2 and 5). I don't know if Suikoden is unique there, because I don't watch a lot of animes, nor have I played many other JRPGs. If it is, then I'd praise the artwork designer/director, because 1. it brings a lot of diversity and 2. the smaller eyed characters are not less beautiful imo (Frederica in Tactics is one of my favourites).
Suikoden always had an slight manga-anime influence that was increasing with each title, but never was really "anime-style" like other franchises (like Atelier or Tales of).

It is not unique in this, there were lor of jrpg back then that played with that manga influences without being totally manga style. In fact, is exactly what I miss in jrpg nowdays, jrps were games and had some manga anime influences what made them balanced (from a visual point of view I mean) unlike most jrpgs today that are 100% anime style. And I'm a big anime fan, I've seen a shitload of anime, but still doesn't like very much that kind of visuals in jrpgs, because you feel you are watching something, instead of playing it.
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sticky-runes
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Re: Female character design and features

Post by sticky-runes »

As for the big eyes thing, bigger eyes are normally given to feminine characters or very young male characters. Bigger eyes make characters look more cute and innocent. Whereas masculine characters are more likely to have smaller eyes, so big burly types with a muscular build will have smaller eyes and chiseled facial features, in contrast to feminine or youthful looking characters with smoother features. (Except Dragon Ball Z where they have muscular guys with boyish faces and massive eyes, which looks sh!t.) In Suikoden, characters like Humphrey and Lino and Zegai tend to be more realistically proportioned.
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BrucePrintscreen
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Re: Female character design and features

Post by BrucePrintscreen »

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the very first manga artist was actually inspired by the Disney movie Dumbo. Basically, anime eyes are Dumbo eyes.
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Re: Female character design and features

Post by Wolkendrache »

If you compare the returning characters of S1 and S2, they have much smaller eyes in S2. Sure, they matured, but we're talking about only two years. If they had reappeared in S3, then probably without eyes at all ;-)
I think we're just lucky with the individual artist's style in S2.
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bluemask
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Re: Female character design and features

Post by bluemask »

Wolkendrache wrote:If you compare the returning characters of S1 and S2, they have much smaller eyes in S2. Sure, they matured, but we're talking about only two years. If they had reappeared in S3, then probably without eyes at all ;-)
I think we're just lucky with the individual artist's style in S2.
I think it depends on the artist's style or... they're following a norm like, "no moe-eyes" or something. I think returning characters only seem to have matured because their proportions have been corrected. S1 character art have weird facial structures imho.
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sticky-runes
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Re: Female character design and features

Post by sticky-runes »

BrucePrintscreen wrote:I seem to remember reading somewhere that the very first manga artist was actually inspired by the Disney movie Dumbo. Basically, anime eyes are Dumbo eyes.
A lot of cutesy Japanese anime characters are basically Bambi in humanoid form.
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bluemask
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Re: Female character design and features

Post by bluemask »

sticky-runes wrote:
BrucePrintscreen wrote:I seem to remember reading somewhere that the very first manga artist was actually inspired by the Disney movie Dumbo. Basically, anime eyes are Dumbo eyes.
A lot of cutesy Japanese anime characters are basically Bambi in humanoid form.
LOL. You made me search "Bambi humanized". I wasn't disappointed...... wut. Hahaha. It seems to really hold true.
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