I wasn't quite sure what the DS was capable of, but in the recent game footage for Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrows, it shows a beautiful anime scene for the start of the game.
So if this is what the DS is capable of... why couldn't they have made such great scenes for Lunar DS? If room was an issue, they could have made it into 2 or more cartidges.
If all of the anime sequences in Lunar DS are all image stills... I won't exactly be a happy camper
I've never really understood why animation was such a tremendous deal. I mean, most of the animations in The Silver Star were crude at best with just the mouths of the characters moving to speech with an upward or downward pan toward the characters' faces, and since there's probably no VA in Dragon Song, the motion of the mouth would be purely gratuitous and totally not necessary. Plus, they'd probably give the text an annoying scrolling sound like in Fire Emblem or Golden Sun so that their mouths could move in tandem. Bleh. I think the stills will be fine, especially since this game is, unlike Legend, being designed with the stills in mind. I'm confident that Kubooka will make them work.
Let those who war with life forfeit their own! -- Mareg, Grandia II
Hmm, well I've always been a fan of cutscenes, anime or CG, either way. It really brings the world of the game to life. At least that's the way they contribute to me.
To me, FMVs sometimes kill the experience unless they're integrated properly. It's like they pull you out of the game graphics and then just throw you back into them again. That's why I'm sort of a fan of games like RE4, Shenmue, and Skies of Arcadia that rely solely on the in-game graphics for cutscenes. It just seems to flow so much more naturally like that.
Let those who war with life forfeit their own! -- Mareg, Grandia II
I'm not disappointed as I wasn't really expecting them in the first place. Now, if they were missing in a future console follow-up (Lunar 3) I'd obviously be upset, but that is unlikely.
The sprites probably won't express as emotion as the ones in LL from what I am seeing so far, but I'm sure they'll get the job done. I really don't think we even need the stills, really.
I wonder if there will be some form of an opening animation, though. Just a one-shot deal to open the game up - Either before the Title Screen or before the actual game opens up. I doubt it, but it would be nice to have something there. Perhaps something akin to the opening of the more recent Zelda GBA game(s).
ACcording to the august issue of Nintendo power there will be cut-scenes. There isn't much of a problem with putting in animated sequences, it's the Voice Acting that takes up a crap load of space.
You know, the GBA is capable of pretty tight movies and such too, maybe not at the same level of quality, but still pretty capable. I personally liked the sprite movies, the stills just gave me good memories of SSSC.
- "Sometimes life smiles when it kicks you down. The trick is to smile back."
Khan wrote:ACcording to the august issue of Nintendo power there will be cut-scenes. There isn't much of a problem with putting in animated sequences, it's the Voice Acting that takes up a crap load of space.
Even if only a piece of the 128MB a DS cart was audio, you can compress a good bit into that. And the DS has a lot more horsepower than the GBA did for this kind of thing.
Are DS games really anywhere near 128MB in size though? Larger cart capacties still cost more to make. I guess 128MB isn't completely unlikely since memory prices are still falling, but some newer GBA releases are still on 4MB carts.
With today's compression technologies it wouldn't be too difficult to stick the whole of Lunar Eternal Blue on a 128MB cart, so there had better be some nice anime cut-scenes in there if it does use one!
Is this megabytes or megabits btw? I'm thinking bytes.
It's bytes. I clarified that above. 1Gb, 128MB. And I'm fairly certain that ALL DS carts are 128MB. GBA had different size carts because of pricing, but Nintendo made the DS carts cheaper than GBA carts to help encourage developers on board.
No you wrong its not bytes. Nintendo has said 1.2 GB not 128MB(1Gb). Proof of this is well above the 128MB limit is the new port of Resident Evil for the DS which is over 256MB.
. . . Probably about as well as they maintained the Lunar atmosphere in TSS in which the cutscenes were practically stills or Legend in which they actually were stills. It doesn't have me concerned in the least.
Let those who war with life forfeit their own! -- Mareg, Grandia II
HuBBsDoctor wrote:No you wrong its not bytes. Nintendo has said 1.2 GB not 128MB(1Gb). Proof of this is well above the 128MB limit is the new port of Resident Evil for the DS which is over 256MB.
Nintendo has said 1Gb and has been saying it for a long time. It is theoretically possible for them to churn out larger carts for the DS but they aren't. I'd like to see a link for your 1.2 GB statement from Nintendo and for the size of Resident Evil for the DS.
Its in one of my GameinFormer issues. I'll have to go throught them (its probably in my e32004 issue or the one after that.) and when i do I';ll scan it.
*EDIT*
No you're right. One wikipedia it says 1 gigabit. But thats about to be expanded with Resident Evil DS. The game itself was over 300MB on CD and since they are also going to include the FMV's in the game its gonna be a costly $40 game.
