Masahiro Sakurai is back with another game development video and today's lesson is all about Manga-like visuals.
The legendary game designer discusses the expressive and unrealistic techniques employed by manga and anime artists to achieve the most expressive result, specifically, how a character's mouth appears in profile and from the front.
Sakurai brings up a handful of examples of where you can see this side-mouth technique in action from Mega Man Legends to Sonic Forces, but, as tends to happen, all roads lead to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
According to Sakurai, he used the unrealistic manga/anime approach to mouths when making changes to Kirby and Jigglypuff's Ultimate character models. In the above video, he showcases what the fighters' mouths initially looked like alongside his requested changes to create "a more expressive visual".
While he concedes that striving for manga-like visuals can sometimes make more work, he still recommends that more devs should give them a try: "We may be better off welcoming the fun kinds of expression these methods can bring about".
Sakurai recently announced that he has finished recording the final video for his Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games YouTube channel. While it looks like it'll be a while before this video sees the light of day, we sure are going to miss getting these little nuggets of information.
What do you make of this manga technique? Are you just pleased to see an appearance from Mega Man Legends? Let us know in the comments.
[source youtube.com]
Comments 8
I saw Kirby on the cover, so I was immediately interested
Kirby sometimes uses anime/unrealistic expressions in his games, so this is interesting to see a bit for Super Smash Bros as well!
I feel like the Mega Man fans are going to take this as a sign that Legends 3 is finally going to come back after Inafune dropped the ban hammer on it years ago.
I, on the other hand, like how Sakurai used manga like visuals for Kirby! Reminds me of how overdue we are for a new Kirby anime.
Never knew Legends did that, that game was clever and ahead of its time in how it used 100% textures for facial expressions, they probably hold up better than the majority of games from that era.
@Ruler-Of-All-Evil
Yeah if they enjoy being disappointed they should totally think everything this guy says is some kind of hint just like the smash community pathetically does. He then goes on to use Sonic Forces as an example the game where Sonic has zero idle animations he doesn’t even blink, I’ll just chalk this one up to his assistant pulling up a random recent Sonic game.
And that's exactly why I've always loved manga and anime visuals also in videogames - not just Japanese manga and anime as Sakurai himself mentioned also Tom and Jerry (speaking of, loved that and all the other references throughout the video)!
I honestly love media that makes its characters very expressive. It really brings out a lot of charm and personality for the characters, though American and Western cartoons and media have pretty good facial expressions like anime and manga do, and a couple of media and video games come to mind for me. I love the way the Donkey Kong characters and Banjo & Kazooie’s faces are animated in the game, since they manage to look cartoony and exaggerated but somewhat anime-ish and still fit the art style of the game, especially the latter because of them both having big eyes, which is pretty common to give characters in a lot of anime and manga.
@Ruler-Of-All-Evil we aren't. We know better.
Is this the first time Sakurai references a western cartoon?
KIRBY IS THE CUTEST THING IN THE GAME!!! JUST LOOK AT THE WHOLE MODEL AND HIS DOWN TAUNT!!! SO CUUUUUUTE!!!
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