The games here are
Final Fantasy VII (1997) vs Final Fantasy VIII (1999)
Parasite Eve (1998) vs Parasite Eve 2 (1999)
Resident Evil 2 (1998) vs Resident Evil 3 (1999)
(You could place Parasite Eve between FFVII and FFVIII since it came out between the two and was used to prototype some of the tech for FFVIII)
The leap in quality with the human character models is especially impressive. Look at Sephiroth’s beautiful visage here and just think that Square went from that to feeling like their animation was convincing enough to carry an entire sci-fi drama movie with a realistic human cast in less than 5 years
spoiler
Then of course you had Oddworld Inhabitants who came right out the gate with movie quality CGI. Their characters all being fish-faced aliens instead of humans probably helped
I loved the visual style of Final Fantasy 9 and Vagrant Story (both from 2000 iirc). The developers of these games were really making the hardware sing
Vagrant Story is one of the most remarkable games of that generation and I always find it strange to find it missing from retrospectives of that time. It was way ahead of its time in so many aspects it’s insane
I feel like a lot of the non-Final Fantasy SquareSoft games just blurred into obscurity for most people. For the most part, I kinda get it - back in those days I didn’t have access to the sheer amount of games media that exists online today.
Tbh, I believe the late PS1 era CGI were made by proper 3d animation studios, compared to the earlier ps1 where they were usually made by developers.
Yeah, they started using FMVs in 1999 because MPEG-4 came out and they could fit them on a CD.
I believe before that there weren’t that much high quality 3d FMVs. But there were some high quality 2d animation and stuff with real actor, but those were mostly for PC games where they could divide a game in multiple cds.
Sony was getting devs set up for PS2 as well. They were really hyping the emotion engine stuff and probably wanted their main developers to be able to hit the ground running when it came out.
The FMVs made at the end of the PS1 era were supposed to be a teaser for what the PS2 could do real time.
I don’t think any of these were made with the PS1s engine. It’s a CD system so I assume they just made cutscenes on a computer and ported them as video files.
I think it was probably a case of these companies investing more and more money and/or hiring compent CGI studios after realising that these impressive cutscenes (for the time) were a major selling point for the system.
The Tekken games on PS1 are like a self-contained model of this. The first one is like eugh, and the third one is like aw fuck yeah boyee
How could I forget about Tekken, possibly the best example to illustrate the point I was trying to make here
Check out the eldritch horror of Nina’s sexy hair toss in Tekken 2’s intro (around 44 seconds in)
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Sepphy’s beautiful auto-smooth facial geometry
Honestly I can never truly make fun of early 3D graphics because 3D modeling programs are a fucking nightmare even in the 2020s, I can’t even imagine what they went through trying to use them in the 90s without the multiple decades of QOL development.
Same with early 3D game development. I’m always haunted by the knowledge that they didn’t have skeletal animation for the PS1 for a long time and Crash Bandicoot was animated on a per vertex level. Like that is fucked up. I’m a weak, spoiled 3D modeler and trying to do that would straight up kill me. I would not survive the attempt.
