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Frogger on 05 October 2015
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Hiku said:

Whops. When I said Masayuki Doi, I meant to say Kazuma Kaneko, the original monster designer.
Although I did appreciate Doi's character design in SMT IV as well, and it fit in nicely together with Kaneko's work.
I don't mind if a series changes the art direction, as long as it feels like a nice fit. For example, the Persona series switched from Kaneko to Shigenori Soejima for the character design of Persona 3 and onward, and I thought it was a great fit. (Kaneko was Soejima's mentor.)

But yeah, I hope it's as you say, that they went with Nirasawa again to re-use old assets, and that they'll not use him again for future installments.


The thing is, it didn't change artstyles. It went half way. There's Kaneko's demon's, Doi's characters, and Nirasawa's abominations, and it just comes off as artistically disorganized because none of them look anything alike. What I love about Kaneko's is that his artstyle doesn't look anime. It may as well spin off into its own brand of art work. It sucks that that's only half of any of their games, now. None of the characters in SMT IV look like they belong in the universe those demons inhabit because of this mismatch in art style. I'd honestly rather Doi redesign every demon in his style than play SMTV with another melting pot of conflicting art styles. But obviously, in a perfect world, Kaneko's would do the character designs again like he did in Strange Journey.

Not that I'd do anything about it.