I recommend you Dragon´s Crown

[shoju]

Shoju, since you have a background in graphics (so do I by the way, hello fellow brother of the arts). Ever seen\remember the early works of Pablo Picasso?



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Pablo Picasso's earlier work. This guy can handle representational style, at a fairly young age if I remember my art history right.


Now here's one of his later pieces.



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"Girls of Avignon". Same artist. Later period.


There's other examples of artists using\developing different styles. Sometimes it doesn't go from abstracted, to a representational 'realism' as the end goal. To me the path is not a pre-scribed road, where the end goal is a complete replication of our 3d reality in 2d space.

Picasso is a famous example of one, but he wasn't\isnt the only one. It still continues today.

As a viewer, I don't always want artists to be the human equivalent of a camera. I absolutely agree with you that it's very important for artists to study and understand the foundations.

However sometimes I don't want them to give me a trompe l'oeil, with the highest compliment being it looks so 'real', it looks just like a photograph.

Sometimes, I want artists to give me what no camera can. And that can only be done with bending, sometimes breaking certain rules, while keeping other rules intact.


Doing that isn't a 100% hard science, which is why it's art, and requires artists. Artists who understands the foundations so well, they know when and where to break certain rules to get a desired effect, such as caricature or pantomime.

And since this is an art form, I understand there are no guarantees of successful communication, and there is always the subjective element of personal taste etc.

I mean I like Tex Avery cartoons. But there is no real life, 3d wolf that can do wolf whistles while wearing a tuxedo or drive a car, do cartoony wild takes that stretches or even breaks cartoon anatomy.

And that's fine with me. Since I don't want a perfectly rotoscoped, perfectly motion captured, I can't tell if it's a real wolf footage or animation, when I'm watching a Tex Avery 'Red Hot Riding Hood'.

I want to see Tex Avery's imaginative, caricatured ideas and animation and artwork. Not a frame by frame recreation of National Geographic: Wolves of Alaska.

Myself, I usually put aside my requirement for our 3d world logic and rules, when I enter Tex Avery's (or many others, including DCrown) 2d world.

I wont argue too much with your points. There is a lot of merit. I will say this though. If, we are supposed to view this creation in the same manner as Looney Tunes, Tex Avery, Picasso, Rembrandt, Munch, Dali, Etc... Then the failure falls on the presentation.

The presentation of the image I'm talking about, is supposed to evoke a sense of desire, lust, etc... from a male (and homosexual females), and from hetero females, it is presented as a hyper sexualized aspiration. Both in the game footage, and in the stills that I've seen. The presentation falls short for me.

This is further exacerbated by the perspective / proportions / pose of the character. While Jessica Rabbit (another mention in this thread) was an over the top character, created with titillating sex appeal in mind, and her proportions were skewed to the extreme, you never saw her out of whack proportions mixed in with out of whack pose, and perspective.

The same holds true for Picasso, and Dali (to an extent). Some rules are broken, in an effort to make thought provoking ideas spring from their 2d work. But very rarely, do they actively aspire to break "all the rules" so to speak. Even in the picasso piece that you linked, While the figures have changed so dramatically, from his earlier representational piece, the pose, and proportions (to an extent) aren't marred to the point of leaving you scratching your head at just how in the world those people achieved that pose.

And that's really where my problem lies with the piece. It's not that it broke rules, and that it went out of it's way to be hyperstylized. It's that it broke SO MANY rules at the same time, that the piece just ends up falling short in a lot of ways to me. If he would have just broken proportions, yet not strapped some a contorted pose on it, meant to evoke a maximum desire response, it might not be so bad. Or, if he would have used more "normal" proportions, yet worked with the same angling of the pose, it could have been interesting. But it's almost as if it is done in a fisheye, or even a panorama perspective, while also pushing the proportions to the hyper stylized.

For me, it's an abject failure.