Unlimited Saga

[cigsthecat]

http://www.playonline.com/usaga/flas...a_opening.html

Amazing.



Then check out this bit of character animation.

http://www.playonline.com/usaga/html/graphic/armic.html

[Hero]

*dead*

beyond cel-shading. That's like...paint-shading. I dunno what to call it.

[NeoZeedeater]

That does look nice.

But where's the gameplay footage?

[MechDeus]

I am officially drooling. I was one of the freaks that preferred Saga Frontier to Frontier 2, but I'm wondering how this'll play.

[cigsthecat]

After going through a bit of info on the game, I have no idea whether the game is 3D, or 2D like the last one. The team declined to answer whether or not the game is either. I doubt they'd go to all that trouble just for the cutscenes though.

[Andy]

It looks pretty dang nice, and this coming from someone who hates the series. Saga 2 looked damn good too though.

[Lhadatt]

Cigs: There's numerous mentions of "3D" on the game site. It's all in Japanese though, so I can't tell any more than that.

This was developed with technology from Adobe. They're the Acrobat/PDF people. Ever seen MacOS X? The entire GUI is an implimentation of the PDF format. It's a vector animation format, like Flash. I'm thinking that's what is behind the animation in USaga -- it's a derivative of PDF.

[cigsthecat]

There's also a whole section on the process of creating that look on the Adobe website....in Japanese.

[Bonestorm]

I don't know if these have been posted before, but one of these movies has gameplay footage.
Unlimited Saga Movies

If this is what the final gameplay footage looks like, then I'm disapointed- since they got my hopes up with the stuff that came out earlier. Althought their technique is something different, as far as animation I think they should have stuck to sprite based or cel shading. I like the music in the gameplay footage though...

[Lhadatt]

I'm with the lush. The gameplay movie looks like trash. The animation is the worst I've seen in a long time. The game looks ok in still-shots, but when it moves, it suffers from choppy animation. The characters look like cardboard cutouts with limited animation frames. Disappointed I am.

*watches the promo movie*
I think I see what they're doing now. The promo movie is very nicely done with Adobe's advanced celshading and all that. The problem seems to be they either didn't want to or couldn't impliment it on the PS2 in real-time, so they rendered the characters as sprites for the in-game stuff. The PS2 layers those on top of the 3D engine as seen in many other games.

Nothing to get excited about here folks, move along.