Poll of the Day > Lukewarm take: Toriyama's human character designs suck

(+) Yeah! (+)

But his monster designs are amazing.

I like his robots.

I like his robots and vehicles

everything looks the same

More like freezing cold.

And the quality of freezing cold beef stew.

Eh it's not as though I have encyclopedic knowledge of all his art but I'll just say almost all his female characters are unattractive. He does good at making cool looking main characters but almost every other character is going to be, what I presume to be, intentionally goofy looking.

He's fine, not outstanding in any way though.

My main issue with him is that he essentially has one art style and everything he draws is pretty much interchangeable.

i've never really liked his artstyle. it was okay for chrono trigger but that's mostly because i just really liked chrono trigger.

beats the fuck out of one piece's style tho

every girl in one piece either looks the same, or looks the same but ugly

Nade_Duck posted...

beats the fuck out of one piece's style tho

My man

Idk if id agree with the monster part but full agreement on character designs sucking.

I also went through a phase of thinking Toriyama was overrated and that he just recycled the same four or five designs over and over (which is not entirely untrue) but when you see his stuff on paper its really amazing work. Plus, his most famous designs are so iconic and so ubiquitous and we've all been seeing them for the pas 30+ years so it feels like they're overdone because of that. But no, they definitely don't suck.

I've never liked his art style. Though part of that might be that I never grew up with Dragon Ball Z like most of the rest of you did.

A large part of what made the early Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest games palatable to me was the fact that the limitations of the hardware meant his designs really didn't fully translate from the concept art. And that you never really got to see his version of what the main characters looked like except on box art or concept art. You were really only seeing his monster designs. The fact that later games start showing all of the main characters in his obvious style is part of why I never really got interested in any of the later games.

It's a lot like how I'm not a huge fan of Amano's art in and of itself, but it's effect is extremely limited in the first Final Fantasy game, and still a bit muted in the later SNES games. But if he'd stayed on as lead designer into the PS1/PS2 era, I feel like it would have become overwhelming. Whereas Nomura, for all the flack he gets for his weird belt obsession and goth tendencies, felt like a way better fit for the later games.

Toriyama's art is probably also at least partially the reason why I've never really liked Chrono Trigger even remotely as much as other people seem to (and definitely not as much as I like Chrono Cross).

His designs in Dragon Ball were great

Dragonball started in 1984 so it's an older style. Makes sense that something from 40 years ago doesn't appeal to you today

His style changed a lot over the years

Metalsonic66 posted...

changed a lot

Then why does the protagonist of the eleventh Dragon Warrior game look suspiciously like Cyborg 17, if he had brown hair?

He has like 3 different male faces and 2 different female faces and that's it. Every character is a minor variation of them.

EclairReturns posted...

Then why does the protagonist of the eleventh Dragon Warrior game look suspiciously like Cyborg 17, if he had brown hair?

Because both of those characters were designed in the later years? Look at the art style in the Dragon Ball manga vs. mid-to-late DBZ

Metalsonic66 posted...

Because both of those characters were designed in the later years? Look at the art style in the Dragon Ball manga vs. mid-to-late DBZ

Android 17 first appeared in 1991. Dragon Quest 11 came out 2017.

Yeah like I said

Metalsonic66 posted...

Yeah like I said

lol

Zareth posted...

He has like 3 different male faces and 2 different female faces and that's it. Every character is a minor variation of them.

I mean, you've just described like 90% of anime.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlySixFaces

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I feel like it would have become overwhelming.

I kinda feel that way about Nomura's art too. Some fights in FFXIV faithfully recreate his style in 3d, but it would be absolute overkill for the entire game to be designed that way. But for a one-off fight about Omega imitating human forms? Really fucking cool, since Omega's supposed to feel alien.

As much as I am a fan of Dragon Quest, I feel like the series went down-hill for me when the "Americanized" art was phased out. Still like the gameplay, but the art style kind of sucks. If they took the art style of Final Fantasy with the gameplay of Dragon Quest, that would be almost a damn near perfect JRPG for me.

You say Toriyama's characters all look the same, but here's the same character:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/6/62b41b5a.jpg

sabin017 posted...

You say Toriyama's characters all look the same, but here's the same character:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/6/62b41b5a.jpg

Now post a picture of every SSJ3 transformation and tell me they don't look exactly the same.

Who?

Muscles posted...

Who?

what is even the point of saying this on post #28

you got more than enough context clues to figure this one out

Muscles posted...

Who?

Why did you do this? Like I generally don't understand your posts because you have bad political view points, but in a thread full of references to his work why would you ask who he is?