Unsung Story
A few years ago a Kickstarter disaster happened called Unsung Story, a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics that had managed to gather over $600,000. After a lot of inactivity from the devs, development on the game discontinued (it still baffles me how these cases don’t end up with someone in jail). I only heard about the whole thing half a year ago when a new developer, who until then had only dealt in licensed games, took over the project to try and save it despite receiving none of the kickstarted money, even promising to deliver the backer rewards. Unlike the previous developer, they've been very active and open with the backers from the start. It’s hard not to root for a small studio trying to save a serious project like this so I’ve been checking up on them here and there, but recent artistic developments have left me very disappointed.
The project initially had Akihiko Yoshida on board, the original artist for FF Tactics, with a fairly recognisable style as far as JRPGs go:
Of course, after the project's initial failure, he wasn't available anymore, but instead of hiring someone who uses a similar style, they chose to go with the most generic option possible, what I call the moba style (alternate names include “Blizzard style” and “mobile game style”):
I was hoping the small studio maybe had big ideas on where to take the game, but this just makes me wonder if the rest of the game is going to opt for such easy, uncreative solutions.
One of the reasons given for the change was that they were unable to copy Yoshida's style. Really? There's a huge leap between being unable to copy the style of one specific jrpg artist and doing a 180 and switching to a completely different Western style that has no resemblance whatsoever to the original one. Even if no-one on the team was capable of drawing anything similar, you can still find a ton of artists online drawing in similar styles. And even if hiring new artists wasn't an option, a more realistic style with more muted colours still would've been better than this. But hey, concept artists can only possibly work in one toony style and that's this one. Guess all of their “style practice” exercises were for nought.
Other reasons given for the change were that they are a small studio, they are running out of time and money and they need to play up their strengths for this undertaking. I suppose they’re at least honest about it, but man, what a way to alienate your audience. I wonder if they’re also hoping to attract new audiences with this style. I doubt that’s gonna work out for them since the people who love this style aren’t exactly fans of tactical RPGs.
On the plus side, at least most of the backers criticised the style and (unexpected from anime fans) the stupid sexualization.