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I have nothing to say about Chrono Cross, because I never played it. One of the main reveals was spoiled for me, which soured me on playing the game. Too bad, because I spent months drooling over character art.

Squaresoft pretty much had the lock-down on Japanese style RPGs. I personally didn't play many non-squaresoft Japanese style RPGs that had nearly as interesting world building, besides Legend of Legia. Even that, I mostly played just because I was addicted to videogames back then. PSM always stroked Legend of Dragoon, but I never got around to that one.

No way, FF9 is worse off than 8 is.

8 and 9 both have the same fundamental problem (even though I still think pretty highly of 8) in that about 2/3 of the way through, they just blatantly jump shark. All of a sudden, 9 becomes a dime-a-dozen anime. it's really dumb. But it's played up as this big important dramatic thing that you have to take care of. There just wasn't any setup or support work layed for those huge tonal shifts. 8 does something similar. But it is less glaring.
8 actually basically ends about 2/3 of the way through. Things come full circle for the characters. But there's still another act, for some reason. I think more highly of 8, because it doesn't completely shove aside the detailed mythos and non-typical fantasy that is built in the first two thirds of FF8. and that first two thirds feels fresh and original. Whereas FF9 was pretty much founded on hitting tropes and recalling things already done. 9 mostly rides on the richness of Amano's art, but is otherwise only a competent game and does little to be particularly interesting. 8 has straight up better gameplay and better sidequests. It also kinda sorta attempts to setup the new act in a vaguely compelling way, even if it does fail. Whereas 9 felt like more of a jolting transition. I realize that could be more of a personal opinion there.

Being an anime is fine. I mean, you can be an anime the entire time and still be good. 7 is an anime from the beginning and the end game escalation is about as anime as it gets. Xenogears is also an anime (although I feel like Xenogears is more akin to older anime). But they start that way. The tone is set. and if/when they do diverge, it's not resetting the whole game. It's for short segments that are worked into the story and that often actually make the game better/more fun/more interesting/etc. But I still feel that 8 has more and greater successes than 9. So the failures don't seem so damning, even if they aren't actually handled slightly better.

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Amano's artwork was basically the only character art I ever saw for the game, aside from CG renders or high res versions of in-game models. I assumed he had designed the characters and I specifically remember him getting street cred for returning to Final Fantasy and designing 9's characters.
I didn't realize square would have one guy design characters and another re-draw them for the character art, and yet more people re-do them as in-game models and CG. I always thought it was just one guy drawing the character art/designing them. and then a team would interpret that into polygonal and CG models.






http://fantasyanime.com/finalfantasy/ff9/ff9art2.htm

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Sorry about derailing your Chrono Cross thread : \

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I did a little research and it seems like Amano was likely commissioned to juice up the retro/revival angle for FFIX. A couple of places give him a character design credit for IX as well. But It seems to me like that's maybe not exactly true, or maybe he designed one or two characters but wasn't the lead character designer. I dunno.

He's also been comissioned to do artwork for other final fantasies like X and VIII, as you said. But I think those were mostly for collectors books and stuff. Not part of the marketing push, like it was with IX. I didn't even know he'd done artwork based on VII and VIII, until like 30 minutes ago. (aside from indirectly figuring that he did the logos).

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Man, Xenogears does a pretty good job of infusing gritty religious tones into it's story and doing some good-weird things with it, without actually ramming the religion itself down your throat. It may not have had a really strongly coherent main story arch---but I don't think that's absolutely necessary.


Whereas FFX doesn't ever shut up about Yevon and I wanted to choke everyone. I think somewhere in there might be the difference between old anime and new anime.

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