Chapter XXXIII: Cinematics

I was looking to the game one of these days and thinking...why the heck does FFXI and FFXIV battle animations look so poor IF compared to offline FFs? It’s simple…cinematics!

I talked a bit about this at battle regimen chapter…but I actually think it should be expanded to every single animation! Just compare by yourself…let’s pick one of the greatest hits from online FFs…the new Chaos Thrust animation and the astral flow abilities from FFXI…now just compare this to the offline games…look at FFXIII, with Snow riding Shiva while using the very same action (Diamond Dust) FFXI Shiva uses…now get Shiva from other FFs too…the move is always the same in its core…but even if you get very old FF games, like FFT Shiva, you have a much stronger feeling of that is coming…you KNOW it’s not “just” another action…

Now look at Bahamut, Neo Bahamut and Bahamut Zero from FFVII…those are some extremely extravagant animations…but think with me…if a someone used that spell but you saw nothing…just randomly seeing the giga flare crossing the screen and dealing the damage…even if it was 9999 damage…would you be impressed?

Well, I wouldn’t…IMO a large part of the impact these actions cause is due the cinematics! “But wait!! You want animations like FFVII Bahamut ones in FFXIV?!” you might be asking…of course not! Would be insane locking everyone’s battle due an action cinematics! But at same time we can say…”maybe”!

Let’s get an example…the current Chaos Thrust. It’s indeed an eye candy animation…but at same time it’s just “common”. Now think about the very same Chaos Thrust but with some cinematics included, like having the camera moving and some close-ups…I know it would look much better!

But before you saying “But it would still lock the battle!” I already say that it won’t…because the cinematics would be only seen by those involved in the action…if I use the Chaos Thrust then only I would see the cinematics…I’m action locked during animation anyway…so why not seeing it with cinematics? All others would just see the animation as they do right now, having no impact to other players.

Also, I would want it added as an option, so those that don’t want the camera spinning during signature actions could just turn it off.

This is important to the game even because it was an overall superior graphic quality…but right now they aren’t taking full benefit from it! Think that during cinematics you can, as example, see the facial expression of your character while reading the action or like being able to see some other animations in close-ups (let’s say like having Ninja class doing those chakra hand positions during signature actions…would be awesome having a close on this since it would be a small and very fast animation, also being hardly noticeable as it is now).