Rusted Blade
[14] Master
For sure, but it's really part and parcel of the overall trend of the series towards a more comprehensively anime fantasy aesthetic. It's evident not just in the newer weapon designs but also the character designs, CaS assets assets, and even (most unfortunately) the stage design: for all of these elements there has been a marked turn towards the fanciful, exaggerated and unfortunately thus often silly designs. I've been uploading large numbers of characters to CaS galleries here this last week, and it's really underscored a few things that I had long observed but which have been hard not to particularly observe during such a process. For one, it becomes immediately obvious when staring at the backdrops that SCIV was the peak of the series trend towards photorealism--staring at a photo of Sailor's Rest right after and before the anime-infused levels and creation screens of SCV and SCVI really drives that point home.
I think in many cases these elements were actually more pronounced in SCV, where the colour palette became more saturated (and focused less on natural tones and more on eye-catching purples and reds) and yet simultaneously more simple in the colour variety of the textures. I've always perceived this to be the fingerprints of Daishi and his team, as there is certainly something very Street Fighter in all of this. In some respects some of these elements have been scaled back as a consequence of the return to the classic narrative forcing many of the character designs and other elements to go retro, but in other respects they have doubled down.
I'm not a huge fan of the trend, if I am honest, and in some respects I think we get a worst of all worlds approach in SCVI--the stages, for example, have more realistic textures than in SCV, but still do not have the sense of depth or clarity (even aside from the blurring) nor the sense of majesty and realistic beauty of SCIV stages--and yet at the very same time, they are also stripped bare of the activity, immersion, and interaction that peaked in SCV as one of its silver linings. The character designs are a more mixed bag. Putting aside the aesthetics of the outright new characters (which could not be more noveau anime if they tried, and to my mind are extremely silly), the legacy characters are actually mostly looking more like their classic selves in the majority of cases--with the same caveat that I am talking about the conceptual look of their designs and recognizing that the textures and visual fidelity are still prone to the same down-scaled detail that has been prevalent post-SCIV. And of course the weapons, as you got the ball rolling with here, tend to be more flimsy/fragile looking for speedier (and female characters in particular), while the bruisers have ever more cumbersome looking options, by and large.
All of this is more than a little nit-picky of course, and some of the trends go back to the earliest games and cannot be leveled solely at the more recent developers, but it's my long-winded way of saying that yes, I recognize what you're talking about, and then some.
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