Sumez wrote:
I feel like if said trio got to work on a smaller production with a simpler game engine, and fewer people involved in the actual game creation, we could have gotten a tighter product that was closer to their original titles, and hopefully with a much less clumsy overall feel.
I doubt we can realistically ask for something even
closer. I guess my positive attitude stems from a concern that was similar to yours; that is, that the choice of Unreal Engine truly carried the risk to totally ruin the outcome. instead, what we got is something that works as the previous titles
despite Unreal.
Sure, a tighter project, a smaller team, a more focused approach: all this sounds good, but also sounds like the indie scene. Iga might have come up with a Fez or a Cave Story, or an Iconoclasts under those premises... That's certainly a possibility. However, we shouldn't let the nostalgia goggles cloud our view, and remember that despite being largely sprite-based, Symphony of the Night
wasn't the result of an indie session of garage coding. There was corporate Konami behind, meaning
money, sufficient for a series of remarkable features like: inclusion of FMVs; Rika Muranaka's managing the use of a singer abroad for the shocking ending vocal theme; animators and coders getting time to try polygons and any special effect they could think of; hiring famous seiyuu from the anime world for full voice dubbing; money for English dub and localization; contracting illustrator Ayami Kojima not just for cover purpose but for the intruductory manga as well; and so on.
Sure, thirty years later you can boot up SotN on the Psone and be fooled it's a nice little indie gem, "it looks just like Axiom Verge or so"; but hear the sound carefully, and pay attention to the visuals and you'll see nothing could be farther from the truth.
Besides, I'm not sure it's a budget issue: with a smaller budget Inti nailed an homage to Dracula's Curse like we had never experienced before (and it's completely legitimate to prefer CotM on purely gameplay terms to RotN, exactly like going back to Dracula's Curse and Symphony and discovering the the first has a dose of challenge still unmatched by the latter). Thing is: CotM required
that level of presentation (sufficient enough to focus on pure action, let's say), while RotN requires an aural and visual oomph to truly feel like a successor the costly game it descends from.
I also have a fair share of criticism in regards to RotN... Mostly on the backgrounds rendering and lighting. I suppose a more mature use of textures and art direction could bring some crucial improvements in this field. But for now I'm just too happy to enjoy the fact that the game basics haven't been crippled by Unreal.
