From glorious artwork to the woeful grade of a lesser videogame
Just when I had conformed myself with the ubiquitous vulgarity found during my experience with Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, based on the poor impressions initially provided by the demo and later verified with further probing into the game proper, Namco Bandai releases a volume of early artwork, partially designed prior to the actual production of the game. If, in fact, I was more than prepared to give up on the pledge of a game I can’t help but to consider one of the greatest failures of recent history, Namco’s press release of late only confirmed my initial expectation that this project could have risen to a much superior status.
Upon viewing these images and the richness of its contents, I’m more certain than ever that the Game Republic ensemble does possess interesting talents who have initially conceived a higher purpose to this project, later having settled for far less due to reasons that may relate to profitability or commercial appeal: after all, there is little revenue to be made from true inventiveness and experimental exercises in this mind-numbing field. It may indeed be very frequent to find such disparity between the quality of a game’s artwork and the poor results presented once the concept has shifted from the minds of artists to those of coding engineers (the shift from real art to the pitiful state of a common videogame, in short); yet this painful example perfectly illustrates this process of blatant degeneration like few other games in the past. How these exquisite ideas of impossible landscapes and idiosyncratic creatures, so unusual in their characterization, came to be transformed into a tasteless replica of the poorest digital game and animated film references is a riddle whose solution will forever defy my reason and comprehension.
