Mark “The Regressor” Jenkins has rebuilt the protagonists of Final Fantasy XV in the polygonal style of Final Fantasy VII.
For more than a few JRPG fans, Final Fantasy VII is the absolute pinnacle of its genre. The story, the gameplay, the music; there are gamers out their who love them wholly and unconditionally. The game’s visuals, meanwhile, tend not to get that sort of adoration. Revolutionary as they were for their time, the lo-res polygons that made up the game’s Popeye-style character models are generally regarded as relics of a bygone era that we’ve happily outgrown. This isn’t to say that no one still likes the game’s visuals. In fact, there are some who would happily revisit it.
Take, for instance, artist Mark “The Regressor” Jenkins. A freelance digital artist, he creates custom made models and visuals aimed at replicating the visual style of the original PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast. Most recently, this has meant remaking the principle revealed cast of Final Fantasy XV as polygonal character models in the vein of FFVII.
Using the trailer Square Enix released during TGS 2014 as a reference, Jenkins rebuilt Noctis, Ignis, Cor, Prompto, Gladiolus and their car and then used the resultant models to create several gifs and some mock box art. The project overall took less than a day overall to finish. “Each character took about 2-3 hours with most of that time spent on making sure the pixels line up correctly on the small 64×64 texture files,” said Jenkins, speaking to The Escapist. “It was pretty easy and took about 15 hours total from start of Noctis to finished animations.”
We feel safe saying that the end results are well worth the work. Mind you, we’re still glad that the early days of bad PS1 polygons are behind us. That said, we’d be remiss if we didn’t admit that there’s a special sort of charm to that style that’s made all the more powerful when it’s coupled with characters devised for the high definition screens of today.
Source: The Regressor
