I’m sitting here bored at work and thought I would talk about something that could be considered a small pet peeve of mine; how a lot of fanmade projects replace vanilla animations with new ones sourced off the repo. I am, as many others here no doubt are, a big fan of the gba emblems and I think they have a lot of charm. A lot of the time upon starting a new hackrom, you’ll oft be met with the sight of an early game knight, archer, and paladin. This is good, recognizable, only to enter combat and these familiar characters are totally different, flashy, over the top. I have a lot of love and nostalgia for the vanilla animations, and I think it’s strange that newly made animations are inserted into most everything almost as if they are implied to be straight upgrades.
I really like when differing animations are used for differing character styles, I think Project Ember did a cool thing where both Klein and Igrene are snipers, but Klein uses vanilla sniper animations and Igrene uses newly community made ones.
I realize that custom animations can go a long way towards hack creators feeling that what they put together stands on its own as a unique experience, and I just wanted to say that it can be that way without overhauling everything.
I am by no means trying to discredit the time and effort people have put towards community projects by creating and submitting custom work, and I realize this can differ hack to hack, I just don’t think erasure of base aspects is called for.
I’m posting this just to ramble on, and maybe see if there are any other standard animation sympathizers
Standard animations can be useful for units that you aren’t really doing anything special for. But sometimes you want your unit to use weapon/mount types or combinations that don’t have a standard equivalent. New animations are cool and all, but sometimes it just comes down to what you need for your unit.
For sure, I am a big fan of implemented classes that don’t already exist, like sword/staff armors, this is mainly more of a point in regards to changing archer or swordmaster animations just because.
Yeah, exactly this. It’s a similar situation with character mugs. I love the style of the mainline games, but if you look at something like Dream of Five, they couldn’t use any of the generic mugs purely because their mugs were so stylized they wouldn’t fit anymore. Something a lot of hackers strive for is cohesion in their work, a smoothening of the edges until everything feels not like a hack, but of a proper traditional game. Sometimes these newer, flashier animations just don’t meld with the original style, and if cohesion is a goal, the use of those vanilla animations is called into question.
This community has long held the opinion that anything new or custom is an upgrade to vanilla. Status quos get pushed around between projects and fool people into believing that those changes are purely superior.
Most custom animations have too many frames to fit GBA FE’s aesthetic. Along the way, portraits became more custom, moving away from splices - the faces of typical custom mugs I see now do not match vanilla’s aesthetic either.
It’s not all bad, but it is an all or nothing approach. It is an approach that strives to remove as many traces of vanilla FE from a hack as possible. It becomes very noticeable when super custom work is mixed in with vanilla. The solutions are to make the custom work more closely match vanilla (not likely), or reduce the amount of vanilla aesthetics.
I love the original animations but, my main problem with a bunch, is their palettes weren’t designed around being able to have dark skinned characters, and it gets really annoying when I want to have a black character and it messes with a different random set of pixels lol
I absolutely AGREE with this. I much prefer when animations, if they are new, they are closer to Vanilla. Like Repalettes and such. Because a lot of the time, anims will have white pixels on the face, which makes it harder to make Dark skinned character palettes.
Even if an animation is different. I still want it to be Vanilla style. For example, in my own hack, generic armor knights still wear helmets. But your playable armor knights are without a helmet, to better reflect the portrait, and give them more personality. Same with Berserkers.
A lot of the time upon starting a new hackrom, you’ll oft be met with the sight of an early game knight, archer, and paladin. This is good, recognizable, only to enter combat and these familiar characters are totally different, flashy, over the top.
Something I really like about the repo animations is that they’re often less flashy and over the top than vanilla lol. Perpendicular fighter, shield-breastplate knight and backflip merc are the first on the chopping block
I like the vanilla animations a lot and I like to keep them in my hacks. I will use some custom animations for new classes, of course, but I’m very picky about which ones. All these newer, high-framerate animations just don’t cut it for me because they feel out of place. And I just don’t like some of them, either. Extra frames make them move too slowly. That, or the animators try to make them look more realistic, but that removes the charm. Realism and the cool factor don’t come together in FEGBA, I feel.
As for splices… I’m not a pixel artist, but I can still make the kinds of portraits I want to with splices. And I do feel like I’ve established some kind of style with my portraits, things I don’t often see in other splicework. Maybe it’s just my willingness to make characters with outlandish palettes for their clothes and hair. Changing the armor trim colour works wonders.
The OG armor knight animations are so goddamn badass though I mean cmon he has to get a pass
By flashy and over the top I meant like animation style rather than what the characters are actually doing though, like it’s too smooth with too many frames
I didn’t write about it in the original post, but I love splices a lot too. I appreciate the portrait and mug work going into newer hacks but dammit do I miss playing something and guessing what parts of portraits are from who lol
I almost never use vanilla anims.
Primarily because the casts of hacks I work on are never entirely white, so it’s impractical to keep vanilla anims that don’t work with darker skintones
Vanilla animations are completely fine, though I really like to have custom repalettes for varying skin tones and designs. Vanilla animations love their spaghetti palettes
Though, there are so many custom classes out there that I feel going full vanilla is almost impossible without using some customs.
Nah, the pegasi have it the worst. White is used on the face and the hair. Blues are everywhere, even where they shouldn’t be. Trying to get a pegasus rider palette working is a pain without custom animations.
