People that hate the chibiness yet were fine with Gen 4/5 OW sprites are hypocritical
Granted I like none of those, nor the chibi styles this and Lets Go did, but when it's noticeably built the same....
Personally if I were remaking 4 I'd base models on art for everything. Including not being tile based for map design glances at ORAS and LetsGo
but I'm no game designer, so meh
I'm pretty sure people in the industry have a fancy term for this, but I don't know it. Anyway, I think the Chibi style of character design is the sort of "shortcut" you can take when the game is limited in fidelity. You don't have enough pixels to draw a proper character, so you scale up the head because humans generally focus on the face when recognising other people. The end result looks a little unrealistic, but if the entire art style of the game is similarly unrealistic, it passes just fine. The character looks weird, but it's placed in a weird world, so it all matches. The player's imagination complements the graphics to give an impression of what it would look like in real life.
But when the style of the world is made more realistic, the chibi design starts to clash with the rest of the graphics. It becomes much more apparent that the character has such a large head, because everything else looks much more realistic. It probably has something to do with the "uncanny valley" phenomenon: the closer something is to realistic, the more you start to notice when something is "off". The design becomes out of context with the surroundings.
I also made
an earlier post describing an issue faced by 3D characters that sprites get away with: Sprites tend to be drawn to look good from the perspective of the game's static camera. When a character in DP is walking across the screen, you see them directly from the side, even though the camera is angled. Take
this screenshot of Snowpoint City, for instance. See the lady standing next to the crane? We're looking down on her from an angle, yet we can see her face and her chin. The sprite is angled to be parallel to the camera, rather than standing upright on the ground. The same lady appears in one of the BDSP trailers, in
this screenshot here. Most of what we see of her is her hair. The 3D model isn't angled, but placed properly on the ground, so when we see her in the bird's eye view, we see the top of her head and very little else. Likewise with the Sailor to the bottom left. The original design showed his entire back. Now we only see his feet and a hand poking out underneath his hat.
The same issue applies for the main character. Instead of seeing their face and body, all we can see is the top of their head. Dawn is basically a hat with some hair dangling underneath. Same for Lucas.
Here is his original sprite, walking towards the camera. You can see his face and most of his body.
Here is his appearance in BDSP, with legs barely poking out underneath the head, of which you can only see the hat and the eyes. Check out the comparison:
DP Lucas also had a big hat, but the overall design seems to be balanced much better between head and body. DP Lucas looks into the camera when he's walking down. BDSP Lucas looks straight ahead, that is, to a point
below the camera. That means we can't see his mouth or his body.
They're obviously trying to recreate the proportions of the original sprites, but without the overall graphical context in which the sprites looked good, and without being able to use the perspective tricks the sprites used to show off more of the character's body, it comes across as rather uncanny. And keep in mind, "character walking down" is the
best case situation we get for seeing what the character looks like. This is the most we're going to see of their face, maybe except when they're standing still.
It's all just a fancy way of saying "what worked on the small DS screen in 2006 doesn't necessarily work in 720p on a TV screen in 2021."
Isn't it just standing straight in the originals? Why did they bother with whatever this is? It just makes it look worse IMO.
It looks like they are basing it off its design in the manga: