A list of everything in the image above:
a cat
an umbrella bucket with many umbrellas
a box
three unique handwoven rugs
a large chest
a large clock
a fireplace
a minature hanging lamp
a sled with a chair/platform on top? I really have no idea what that black mage is sitting on
a ladder
a smaller clock
(And there might be more things I am missing!!)
After working on comics for a bit, I realized something about my own art that could be improved:
Set design and drawing interior spaces.
I’m good at drawing people and ideas, and okay at nature, but not.. indoor things.
Chairs? Wtf. Tables? Uhhh…. (draws a blank). Lamps…(not my forte).
I would stare at an empty room I had drawn, and wasn’t sure how to make the room seem ‘lived in’ or ‘believable.’ At first, I couldn’t figure out how to improve this.
To tackle the problem, I thought about art that I had seen where there were believable sets or interiors that I could study for a long time. It turned out that of all the places I looked, Final Fantasy IX has heartbreakingly good and detailed interior sets.
The hotel in Lindblum has a lot to learn from.
Let me just dive in to everything happening here:
The wallpaper is green and diamond-patterened. Each floorboard seems to be unique, not a pattern. Paintings in the hallway of the hotel are a bit crooked. The wallpaper in the hallway seems to be dusky rose. Columns that support the structure are made of stone piled stone and mortar. A lantern juts out from one of these columns in the hallway. The beds in the room seem to have pink silk coverlets, and plaid pillows with handmade wooden headboards. Each room has a different handwoven rug. One room has two twin beds, the other has a queen. The room with the queen bed has a lantern, and a table with a cup on top of the table. The windows in each room are curved at the top and touch the floor. They, too, are a bit lopsided, but I don’t get the idea of poor craftsmanship. I get a ‘handmade’ feeling. Outside, the world looks green and bright, you can see the streets of Lindblum.
I’m sure even after writing the above paragraph and reading it a few times and rechecking the image, there are still a few details that I missed.
This set defines how I feel overall about Final Fantasy 9 - there is an amount of care that went into it that convinces me, despite a slightly cartoony feel, that the whole thing is very, absolutely real. In the same way that there’s a bunch of junk lying around in sets for Howl’s Moving Castle, I believe in the reality that these sets are casting because there is just so very much thought in each one.
There are also metaphorical sets in Final Fantasy 9, like this staircase into a burning red eye, probably the most metal/emo thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
Or this interdimensional twisting bridge and castle, a presage to the folding, twisting landscapes of Inception and later, Dr. Strange.
Let me make a list again for the image above:
grass
cobblestones
stained glass with a mountain motif
stained glass with a fish motif
stained glass with a sun motif
green painting on the center column
ladder
carefully laid radial cobbelestones
(Why is the church actually just a circle with a center column in it?)
Until I started working on this blog, I never took notice of the windows in this chapel in the opening of the game. I tend to focus on the characters when playing, I think a lot of us might. But even after playing this game for years, on Playstation, on my iPad - I never noticed that there was a fish or monsterlike fish in the stained glass of the window.
I made another list for every item I could see in the set below:
Wheel barrow with goods and small signs sticking out of it
a treasure chest
a potted cactus
a large hookah-like bottle.
an anchor
Several other bottles and jars
a canister of some kind
a clock
a massive chest of drawers
a cash register
wall flags with bottles on them (potions?)
posters, fliers, calendars on the wall
a few lanterns on the wall
a large mage hat and cloak on the wall
buckets
hints of an upstairs suite with books, pillows, a bed
Many of the scenes I am detailing in this blog are shops, like the one above in Treno and the image below from the Black Mage Village.
I think the Black Mage Village shop may have even more surprising, random items in it than the one in Alexandria.
I never noticed the dinosaur figurine on the top shelf of this scene until now.
All of these details probably don’t seem to be important, but they matter for the believability factor.
I thought about games where I didn’t really believe in the characters or their world, and this did come up for me often in Final Fantasy 13.
Look at Lightning’s kitchen here -
I don’t get a good sense of who Lightning is as a person from this scene.
I see a lot of repeating patterns in the bottom right, vague apparatuses on the left, and repeat bottles of wine or olive oil, I guess, near a stove, which looks upscale and nice. She seems to have two boxes of the same cereal, perfectly symmetrically together in the cupboard above the stove. And maybe some jars of protein powder.
I want to know who Lightning is, I want to care about her and believe in her, but given this scene of her home, I just don’t understand her. I don’t learn anything special about her.
Maybe the point of the game, for many, isn’t to care about these things, but if FF13 came off as a bit cold and blah at some moments, I think this is why.
Final Fantasy 9 casts a spell of lived-in spaces from the very beginning to the very end. Like this image of the Tantalus crew in the opening scene. There’s a couple’s portrait on the wall framed in twisted cold, a few Shakespearean-romance-play-acting costumes on hangers, and an entire custom rug. There’s a back room with folios hanging off of shelves, an ominous hook, a plant in the lower right corner, and chests abounding.
And then there’s this moment near the end of the game, a clocklike structure with horned creatures peering out at you from each interval.
What are the symbols on the clock? They have a quasi-horoscope feel, and there are also a ton of different spires emerging from it. Zidane seems to be able to traverse the entire space due to the clock falling apart. In the game, the player probably spends all of 5 seconds getting through this screen.
That’s art too - it must take hours and hours to paint each of these backgrounds and consider them and make them interesting, all for a couple seconds for one person to traverse. Art distributed or seen at scale works a kind of time magic, where if millions of people traverse the same clock scene and it takes them five seconds, it ends up being more time than the artist ever spent painting the scene.
In a way, taking five seconds to paint just one more oblong jar into a scene, just one more random potted cactus, goes further than even artists could possibly imagine.
Related blogs:
Shameless Fanart I made: Final Fantasy Weapons
Persona 5’s perfect summation of the art world
Who wrote this:
I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!
- Becky Jewell