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Awesome breakdown!! It's amazing how much they were able to do so much with so little. This might be a hot take, but FF6 should've gotten a remake before FF7

Gen 5 is incredibly underrated. It was hated when it originally released, but its the best in the series right up there with the Gen 2 Remakes.

I know this was a tough one to make but I so appreciate it!

Love it!

Dan, your videos are a treasure. I've been playing the Pixel Remasters, since it was about time I revisited Final Fantasy, and put on some videos in the background while auto-battling the random encounters, a lot of them about analyzing the early FF games. And it's incredible how succinct your videos are. Some of these videos go for hours, trying to in depth about various things, but the way you dissect the animation and the value it gives to both characters and storytelling really stands out to me.

I’ve been waiting for this episode for so long and it did not disappoint. You’re great. Wonderful insight, well explained.

It's 2024 and people are still raving about and deeply analyzing this title. FFVI is the kind of content that transcends time and grows up to be required reading in high school

"OH YEAH YOU WORK FOR ME NOW!" Sonic To : New Frame Plus

Banger

Wish he covered the amazing sonic advance spirites

I just came from watching a similar video on limited animation called "The Animation of Final Fantasy VI", and combined with this video on efficient pokemon animation, I have a general idea now of how to make characters express themselves without tons of physical animation. I do think the key is pixel art though, as you mentioned the closer to highly detailed the characters are, the more terrible limited animation looks. But the holy grail would be to ultimately create 3-d characters who look and animate 2-d but can still benefit a camera so that characters can reuse frontal and back animations.

Este video trata con más respeto a la franquicia que la mayoría de videos de fans hablando sobre los juegos

"the developers have a game or two under their belts" Megaman:

ive never played another game so overflowing with style and fun and honestly charisma in all its art. persona 5 is sensory overload made spectacularly enjoyable

We all know the real main character of FF VI is Umaro.

I guess it started with Adventure, but seeing it in Sonic 4... The long quills? Why? I feel like it destroyed the iconic silouhette and made it weird. It doesn't work in 2d at all, it looks quite ridiculous.

Good job on this one! The end made me emotional! The term "victory lap" is now echoing inside my head! It makes me want to give it my best! I want to try my hardest!

colors in hd did not come out well

Go back and count all of the different poses now! (kidding)

Calling the FF6 opera scene a flex is the most appropriate description ever. They didn't have to go THAT hard for that scene. It was an important scene, yes, but for TWO characters. Which given the large cast, seems like all that energy would have been better spent else where. I'm glad they did, of course, it's one of those memorable scenes and songs from gaming. And in a way, that scene was so powerful is elevated all the other parts of the game.

I had tears running into my eyes with joy! You built up the narrative so well and when you showed off the results I really felt it. This game is beautiful! Feels like they didn't really win much by jumping to 3D but when the scenes stop being a 2D fighting game and the camera swings around in 3D it's jaw-dropping!

All this time later, Id love for you to talk about Peach in Smash. She's very much not a combatant in her standard form, but her Smash version is rage-inducing ICONIC and yet still feels so prim and proper and princessy. I am so curious how they translated our iconic damsel in distress into one of the most devastating fighters to lose to.

15:40 he snaps to get your attention then points forward

I don't have time to watch this whole video yet, but I kinda hope it addresses how Pixel Remaster cheaped out on animations - most notably (to me) when characters are running (particularly during the train fight), they're missing the frame where their other arm moves, so it looks like they're aggressively fapping instead of running.

5 years later I find myself loving this video

"Don't cry for me - I'm already dead."

I love your analysis of Terra confronting the frozen esper- the portrayal of her as feeling isolated and distant from the rest of the party is something I never thought of before, but it rings as very accurate to me. It's always been claimed that FFVII was when Square tried to take the series in a cinematic direction, but I think it only feels that way because of the move to 3D and the addition of pre-rendered FMVs. FFVI was, to me, the point where those ambitions really began to take shape, it's just that the technology wasn't there yet. No wonder why Square jumped right into 3D once it could and spurned the N64 in order to take advantage of the PS1's disc space.

One of the best parts of the animations is the voice foley that comes with them. The voice actors are incredibly talented, and each little grunt, laugh, and whisper carries the personality perfectly.

Pssst there is at least one more pixel game: Final Fantasy Dimensions

I love this video series very much! Thank you for making it!

Do the animation of Final Fantasy Tactics! Please :)

I love these videos so much. Thank you for putting the time and effort into making them. I can't wait to see what you make next! ♥

Once you talk about sonic. There is no taking it back. How does it feel to have your biggest video on the internet be about a blue hedgehog that's gotta go fast

There were perhaps dozens, if not hundreds of people who could have warned you about the Sonic Quicksand. None of them told you about it, on purpose, because the only way we're ever going to get an unambiguously, inarguably fantastic 10/10 Sonic game ever again is if someone, somewhere, figures out how.

Now we need a Sonic Mobile game thing lol

Surprised you didn't mention the Kirby and the Forgotten Land thing during the section you used Nier: Automata clips for. The little trick in that game where, if it looks like Kirby hit an enemy to the player, that enemy got hit even if, in 3D space, the enemy was definitely out of the way of the attack; seems applicable to Arcs, and in fact, I'm 100% certain it's been used in 3D game animation, because I've seen it. Games will cheat the arc to appear more clear to the camera, or slightly change the camera's position before and after screenshake, or move the attack animation to hit the enemy even when the actual position of the character's body in 3D space wouldn't hit. Player attacks will also just hit further to the background than to the foreground. It's really noticeable when games don't do this, because you constantly feel like you've got to be RIGHT next to an enemy to hit it, even though it looks like you should already be slicing or punching them. I always think about how, in Punch Out for the Wii, Mac's glove never actually intersects or connects with the model of the boxer he's fighting. That's the game using arcs to sell an impact that never actually happened, every time you throw a punch.

I think in sonic 3, he's acknowledging you exist, and doing the thing where you point to fingers at ur eyes and then his own

Speaking of blueprints to follow, the overwhelming majority of FF7's models were just 3D renderings of FF6's sprites. From summons to monsters, anything not unique to 7 was based on the sprite from 6.

This is easily one of the best video series on youtube. So appreciate your effort and expertise, Dan!

I miss the old dan voice. Oh, and good video.

“Unique animation” *Sabin proceeds to suplex a train*

1:12:00 ...no way you're serious. They avoid using the sword specifically BECAUSE it slows you down, not because of the animation. Even if the animation was perfect, so long as it risks losing ANY speed at all, speedrunners will always avoid it.

1:04:44 actual clown behavior.

It's so weird hearing this without the pitched-up voice

18:08 metal sonic jumpscare

I agree with everything you said about character expressiveness, but there's one animation decision about FFVI that I just dislike intensely...switching to Mode 7 when riding an airship or chocobo is more cinematic, but it makes it a lot harder to get around, especially when you get the upgraded airship. I've definitely overshot or entirely missed the location I was flying to, and literally flew entirely around the world multiple times trying to get where I was going. I much prefer the world map from FFIV or V, where the perspective does not shift depending on your mode of transportation.

Given the finger movement he's most likely snapping at us.

Frontiers gameplay: Forces but the squash and stretch on the jump is gone, but the broken non-boost run cycle inflicted on Forces by, ironically, Lost World, has been fixed (Lost World adjusted the animation transition points from Generations, causing Forces to never fully transition to the run animation from the jog unless you boost)

With Adventure: the reason the cutscene animation is like that is because of a few factors Cutscenes are fully running in the game engine, unlike SA2 onwards where they are done like standard 3D animation. Any movement that isn't doing a full pose or sliding a character from one point to another are literally just gameplay inputs inputs being played back in real time (this is why the opening cutscene jank with Sonic's pose happens, as it's cutting from played back game inputs to more standard animation with full posing) The facial animations are done by tweening between one of a small handful of facial poses at set times (each being assigned a letter of the alphabet, though none of the sets use the full alphabet) These poses are also shared with gameplay facial poses, so the already limited set of poses gets limited even more. In addition, you could only start transitioning to different facial poses once the previous one had been fully reached, so you couldn't make more complex facial poses by combining them or starting a transition during another transition. Sonic has a half open eyelid pose specifically because of this limitation. They knew that they wouldn't be able to do good lip syncing with these limitations, so instead of trying to make the poses look stiff and robotic they decided to lean into the cartooniness of Sonic by making the poses extremely exaggerated, which also allowed them to utilize the gameplay facial poses in cutscenes. This does also mean that Sonic yelling in pain from getting hit by an enemy or spikes is also the entire reason his spines and ears do weird stuff in cutscenes though Also these limitations means that every version of SA1 has to switch to 30fps for cutscenes Also I believe that the mascot suit problem in the modern 3D games Is entirely because they aren't using the eyebrows, using eyelids where they would've used the brows prior, and it seems to be due to that one part of the rig being absolutely atrocious Also the center mouth not existing at all isn't great since it limits the angles that look good for dialogue