Bob Mackey is currently doing an interesting blog series on the problematic nature of sprites representing characters back in the 16 bit days on the Retronauts blog, here. Reading this blog made me think about how video game promotional or conceptual art often does not translate into the video game. A classic example would be the art used in the Metal Gear Series, the sweeping almost gradient style Yoji Shinkawa was often used as promotional material, included in the manuel and often feature prominently on the box art, but his particular style was not transfered to the graphical nature of the games. Yoshitaka Amano's art in the Final Fantasy series used to be the driving force in the design of the enemies and main characters, unfortunatly his beautiful, flowy and complicated style had never really gotten a fair shake on a post 16-bit console. The DS remakes of Final Fantasy III and IV were admirably fateful to his character designs, but the polygon count is so low that the characters are still hard to define and artistically are still very cartoonish and squaty. 

I guess I'm wondering if anyone is interested in a game that had Amano type graphical representation on a current console. My argument is that Vampire Hunter D the movie is very true to Amano's original art and is by my account totally awesome. I don't know, maybe I'm dislussional, perhaps I want video games to be art a little too bad and am reaching at straws. Thoughts?

p.s. I've been harping on old jrpgs a bit too much in the last few days so I think I'll try to take a sabatical from that subject for a little while