That makes perfect sense, but I feel like it would have been that way anyway, if such an image-by-image breakdown were to be implemented. The choices, at present, are already binary, it's just that they apply to the portfolio at large instead of addressing each image individually.
Yeah...or, in other words, what I said to HC from word go, before you responded.
I said "Cameo Characters" because that's the terminology that we used back on BaneWolfSC3/Another Stage of History, if you were aware of those sites. I felt like it fit the idea well enough, because "Guest Characters" is already pretty much understood and firm as the coined term. "Bonus Characters" was used previously by the games themselves, to refer to the Tales of Souls and Chronicles of the Swords folks in SoulCalibur III and the five girls from SoulCalibur IV. I think it works, but other possibilities would be "Non-SoulCalibur Characters" or "Other Franchise Characters", nothing else really encapsulates the idea in simpler terms, I don't think.
Well, nothing else we've thought of so far. But English has, you know, a lot of words, and I'm confident there is a handle we have not hit upon yet that would suit quite well, or at least better than the options proposed thus far.
I can see where you're coming from with your reasoning, but I think the only one that really sticks for me is moveset aesthetic and/or the character themselves inspiring the design.
Well, you're wrong.
I personally feel like the main cast are just... the main cast, for lack of a better way to put it. It's like, when you're using main cast parts in a custom character, when it's so obviously the main cast character's parts being used, I can't help but think of whichever character the parts come from, because they're so uniquely qualified for use for the main cast character, most often all of the time. The exceptions to this are when some interaction of parts covers up the original form of the part itself, or otherwise extra equipment, patterns, stickers, something advanced is being used to "hide" the fact that you're using a main cast character's parts . . . I guess what I'm getting at here is that, for me personally, for someone who does play with their custom characters quite often, is that unless the design is specifically meant for the character in question, it just feels wrong to me to use a main cast character as a base for a creation, in mostly every case.
Seriously, Dante, I hope your OCD is at least fully diagnosed: you don't have to live this way. This is art, homes, at least as most of us approach it. Maybe not the most elevated form of art ever, but art nonetheless, and created with a very limited technical palette. For those of us with ambitions beyond just rotely re-creating background Libra/Soul Chronicle characters exactly as they appear in those modes, we sometimes need to leverage additional tricks, or feel inspired in certain directions that aren't going to be beholden to the kind of arbitrary self-restrictions you are suggesting value to here. If a base character's model has the right face and muscle tone to emulate someone else (vastly better than those available under the custom list) then a CaSer using them is an innovative design choice, not some unpermitable transgression which offends the soul of the base character. Likewise, if a look just works (for whatever aesthetic reason), there is no purpose in handicapping yourself because you've put some models in a certain mental category that you can't bring yourself to vio9late, for reason that have nothing to do with how well they would actually function in a given role.
For SoulCalibur VI, aside from the obligatory "put the character in their unofficial 2p" creations, I've made one original costume for Talim and my two Shenmue custom creations for Ryo and Shenhua on Kilik and Xianghua, and since I've been replaying Shenmue I-II, especially II, I'm likely to make a creation soon for Ren on Maxi, but that's only because those three characters fit the three SoulCalibur characters so well, it's almost like they're using just about the same archetypes or something...
Well, it's a start: hopefully it breaks you out of this stagnate, rigid thinking you imprison yourself with and guides you towards greener pastures of more creative and impressive fair.
...but back to my thing about voices, when a SoulCalibur character does have a voice actor (English, because I play with English dub) that shares a voice with the character I'm creating for a cosplay/cameo creation, which did happen with some frequency in SoulCalibur V, I loved using the voice of a character to add that much more legitimacy to the overall character, even if the personality and dialogue wasn't quite right, it's still just nice to be able to do so.
Well, clearly this is a "your mileage will vary" kind of thing, but for my money, you almost never get a voice that is tonally consistent (in either the literal or figurative sense) from that extremely limited, extremely goofy, and extremely hammy set of voice tracks, for a target character. I mean, I guess there may be a marginal improvement by virtue of the fact that some of the main cast get better known voice actors. But I challenge you to find me twenty lines in that entire pile of voice work that aren't campy as f***, even with the "higher" quality of the talent for main roster characters vs. the generic ones they've been recycling for custom CaS characters for more than a decade now.
I don't know these voice actors well enough, on the level some here seem to, to know whether Soulcalibur's wonky English performances are more down to their own talent/approach or the direction they are getting in the booth (I suspect the latter), but let's just put it this way: I don't see a storm of BAFTAs coming Soulcalibur's direction for vocal performances any time soon. So voices have become a non-issue for me, and I don't think they factor heavily in most CaSers' design strategies, because we know the options are never going to be great, and there are no practical work-arounds in this area (other than theoretically some very laborious and technically involved modding that couldn't possibly ever be worth the time investment) so why agonize over it?
If I make a couple hundred creations for a given game, then I get maybe one where I feel the voice lines and/or timbre of the voice fit a reference character extremely well. In this game, it was (quite oddly) my very first creation: take 'Femme Fatale' and tinker with the pitch a little and you end up with something that works beautifully well with
this reference design. I mean, maybe I am overselling things a little: you sometimes get lucky and finagle something that kinda-sorta works. But in my opinion, expecting to eek out aesthetic fidelity with a broad selection of designs from from those very limited (and more often than not, very cheesy) assets is mostly a fools errand.
But a problem you run into when you're using a main cast character for a base when making a cosplay, is that you can't make changes to the proportions of the body, that's my biggest problem doing it, with a lot less freedom for the facial options (eye color!) as well.
Yeah, but you're missing the point: even the sliders on the custom models provide only very basic parameters, which often cannot replicate the models of the base roster characters. Neither can their faces be trasnposed on to other models (short of modding, I suppose, theoretically). So when one of them has a particular morphology in either area that can be leveraged into a design, there's no good reason not to do it. And the fact that the main cast character may at times seem to "peek out" at you from under that "costume" isn't really a big problem for me: it just creates a distinct new class of hybridization.
So unless the face and body for the SoulCalibur character lines up almost perfectly with who you're trying to make, I just don't feel like it's worth doing.
But don't you see why that is irrational in this context? If you were starting from a place where you need a reference CaS to look perfectly like their original design, then its good that you mostly avoid these types of designs, because you are never going to get there, really. Of course, the artistry of this category of design (mostly) is to do your best to get there, despite the limited assets and many technical hurdles. But this is a problem reagrdless of whether you are using a custom base or a main roster base, and where the main roster base offers advantages, I have no problem leveraging them, and it doesn't cause my mind to go into a compulsive tailspin if one element isn't quite right: so long as the target is reached better (on the whole) by using that particular model, then that's the right call, as far as I am concerned, regardless of what technical category the model comes from.
You've pointed out some cases where it works, and that's fine when it does, but unless that, and also the voice, worked just so, my feeling on the creation as a whole would just be that it's <main cast character> wearing a silly costume
I got news for you, homes: these guys are always wearing silly costumes. Clothing doesn't get much sillier than it does for the normal wardrobe of a Soulcalibur character, in general. I'm pretty sure the Soulcalibur chareacter designers get 90% of their designs from trawling dumpsters outside of Milan Fashion Week, looking for shit that got thrown out by
Gareth Pugh because, "Nah, it's too much." And then, these days, they ask themselves "how can I make this more like a Bleach character?" Then they take the product of those first two steps to a supervisor, who invariably says "50% more anime! 90% more emo!" An voila, Groh is born.
