So, here's a comparison for the art styles....

[Oguzhan]

Now before I start this I want everyone to know that I love both the sky art style and the cold steel art style and I do get why they changed art styles for CS and onwards, after all, keeping the same style from sky and just updating it like they did for Crossbell would get some flag (which saddens me you know, a forced change that happens because people think its progression).

Both CS games and the sky games (and crossbell) have really nice looking detailed environements that tell you the culture of the town/city that you are at. I could talk about the amazing NPCs too but this is about art styles.

CS, if you like the anime art style, does look pretty good, especially with the flashy S-Crafts and what not. But I do think we have lost something during transition. You see with the art style in sky and crossbell, attacks have more of an impact. Sure the S-Crafts are flashy and I love them but sometimes they feel kinda weak. Its like this guy with tiny arms doing all of that with a huge weapon. Also the sprites in sky had more of an impact to them. Whenever I attack with Loyd, I feel the hit, or better yet, whenever I use Barrage (Estelle's second S-Craft), I can feel the impact and it feels satisfying. I think that is what we have lost during transition. The satisfaction of the impact.

I could also say that we have lost the unique "in front of a fireplace" feeling from the sky games. It might be just me but I have always had this warm feeling from the sky artstyle. It just warms the heart. It was also an art style that was unique to sky (I know Ys games use a similar engine but you get what I am saying). Now while I do think the game looks good, it is just the generic "anime" style and there is nothing wrong with it but I do think that we have lost something.

EDIT-

Another thing that I think we have lost is the cutscene fight quality. You know the moments like Julia vs Cassius. It was really impressive to watch with those sprites but with CS, I don't know it is just not the same. I mean just look at a certain cutscene fight between 2 powerhouses during the final dungeon. They just hit each other with explosions happening...... Not the same just saying....

Like I said though this is not really a problem that I have, I love CS, it is just something that I noticed.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I never thought Crossbell's and 'Sky's fights were in any way impressive; it was just two sprites bouncing around and the camera rotating around them to spruce up the cinematography. I can't set any tactics being employed, and the sprites are too abstract to make out any personal skill in swordsmanship or how they use their limbs. That's one advantage Cold Steel has over the prior games: we can actually see what the characters are doing, anticipate their movements, and watch as the characters try to deal with those movements (Victor raising his sword, Rean dashing away to move behind, Victor predicting his attack and countering, Rean being repelled, or Victor moving deftly aside to dodge McBurn's vertical sword beam).

I doubt JRPG cutscene fights will ever reach Naruto, Ninja Scroll, or Sword of the Stranger, but I'm fine with what we got. Hand animating each individual movement for a shot is incredibly time consuming and expensive (just look at how long it takes Blizzard's animators to pose the characters for a cinematic or how long it takes Pixar/Dream Works to make a feature film), so they'll just have to be economical with reusing stock animations in a cutscene and just make more stock animations that can have a wider range of applications, which to me is more immersive. It's rather jarring to see characters use "game animations" during the game and ingame cutscenes, and then for the game to transition to a pre rendered cinematic or an ingame cutscene where everyone is suddenly using special animations that looks leagues above anything I've seen ingame for the past 90+ hours. It feels disconnected from the rest of the story told "ingame". Imagine if CS1's, CS2's, or Sen 3's finale had a pre-rendered cutscene; it wouldn't have felt like you were "there" with the characters when everything happened. It would've lost its emotionally impact.

CS's artstyle doesn't look "generic" to me; the 2D art is quite lively[imgur.com] and the models are charming to look at. CS1's + 2's models are solid and Sen 3's+4's models are amazing to look at with the ingame lighting applied. I think all three arc's artstyles are great, just different.

[nobody]

realy?

[Dragon]

So I far I just played up to Chapter 3 of Cold Steel 1. I also beat the first two Trails in the Sky games and played up to beating the Abyss in the 3rd (but I didn't beat that whole game yet because I got stuck in the grinding Hell loop and it made me lose interest in going back to it for now).

What I noticed so far in regards to what this thread is talking about: as the OP says, I didn't see any impressive duel scenes in CS like I did in Trails. And there's a lot more of them in Trails than just the one mentioned in the OP with Julia.

I don't agree with the poster who said those duels weren't impressive. I found those to be mighty impressive, and that's just one of many examples of how the Trails engine is super dynamic and shows instead of tells, which is something that the majority of other/non-Falcom games don't do most of the time.

The S-Crafts in Cold Steel feel more artificial because they always pop up a static cartoon image of the character in the middle of and/or at the end of the S-Craft. Why aren't they using the in-game character model itself - like Trails in the Sky does - instead of a static cartoon like in Cold Steel (the latter is much worse)? And that is compounded by the fact that the static image in Cold Steel doesn't match the costume you are wearing if you are wearing anything besides the boring default clothes.

Similarly, I'm not sure why the background goes all black every time you use an Art in Cold Steel. That's very distracting. It seems like they are trying to cover up some weaknesses/design flaws in the CS engine.

One thing CS does better is that it doesn't make some of the characters appear way fatter than they are supposed to be, i.e. Mueller in Trails in the Sky; and possibly Zin who I am not sure if he's supposed to be skinny or fat because he looks skinny in his portrait but fat with his actual in-game model, but Dorothy says he looks like a bear and bears are fat.

[GensokyoKaiser]

Originally posted by Dragon:

So I far I just played up to Chapter 3 of Cold Steel 1. I also beat the first two Trails in the Sky games and played up to beating the Abyss in the 3rd (but I didn't beat that whole game yet because I got stuck in the grinding Hell loop and it made me lose interest in going back to it for now).

What I noticed so far in regards to what this thread is talking about: as the OP says, I didn't see any impressive duel scenes in CS like I did in Trails. And there's a lot more of them in Trails than just the one mentioned in the OP with Julia.

I don't agree with the poster who said those duels weren't impressive. I found those to be mighty impressive, and that's just one of many examples of how the Trails engine is super dynamic and shows instead of tells, which is something that the majority of other/non-Falcom games don't do most of the time.

The S-Crafts in Cold Steel feel more artificial because they always pop up a static cartoon image of the character in the middle of and/or at the end of the S-Craft. Why aren't they using the in-game character model itself - like Trails in the Sky does - instead of a static cartoon like in Cold Steel (the latter is much worse)? And that is compounded by the fact that the static image in Cold Steel doesn't match the costume you are wearing if you are wearing anything besides the boring default clothes.

Similarly, I'm not sure why the background goes all black every time you use an Art in Cold Steel. That's very distracting. It seems like they are trying to cover up some weaknesses/design flaws in the CS engine.

One thing CS does better is that it doesn't make some of the characters appear way fatter than they are supposed to be, i.e. Mueller in Trails in the Sky; and possibly Zin who I am not sure if he's supposed to be skinny or fat because he looks skinny in his portrait but fat with his actual in-game model, but Dorothy says he looks like a bear and bears are fat.

Just for note the S-Craft character cut ins, as well as the screen going dark are both things that started in the Crossbell games. With Zero doing a character cut in of the full character sprite, and Ao starting hte cutin of unique character art. In Zero they started the trend of darkening the screen while an art is being cast. The arts thing is probably just to make it look cooler, and bring your attention to the art animation, and the cut in once again to look cool. I greatly prefer the art to the "eyes" cut in, in Sky, which was more of a meme than anything.

[Alex]

Sen 1/2 were perfectly ok. A bit more FF'ish, especially on the map, but overall not much lost with transition to 3D (imo, of course).

Sen 3, according to the videos I see on youtube, seems like it would be a very unpleasant surprise. Could not make myself feel these overexerted animations/characters are series genuine :(

[Kyle G]

It's weird. Cold Steel has 3-d models, but the animation is so stiff and lacking compared to Sky. They even have very limited default poses. It's hardly noticeable with 2D sprites, but with a 3D game, it is awkward seeing all the characters have the same poses. For instance, the standard for Cold Steel series: The hand on hip while closing eyes pose. It's so overly done and every character does it. I know Falcom's budget is limited, but does it really cost that much to create more varied default poses that reflect each character's different personality?

[D's Journal]

I've come to like the graphics in Sky/Crossbell more than this.
I skip like every skill/artes in this game lol. They aren't that good.

[Oguzhan]

Originally posted by Sandvich of Peace:

It's weird. Cold Steel has 3-d models, but the animation is so stiff and lacking compared to Sky. They even have very limited default poses. It's hardly noticeable with 2D sprites, but with a 3D game, it is awkward seeing all the characters have the same poses. For instance, the standard for Cold Steel series: The hand on hip while closing eyes pose. It's so overly done and every character does it. I know Falcom's budget is limited, but does it really cost that much to create more varied default poses that reflect each character's different personality?

To be fair that is basicaly every 3d anime style RPG. Also lets not underestimate how poor of a company falcom is when it comes to cash. They do lack in graphics sure but at least the world is detailed (buildings etc) and these NPCs sure feel more like a person than any other I have seen.