Update 36 - Miriam Turnaround and Donut Aftermath

I said it a while back in the shader thread, but i am still really curious if they went with a light brush stroke texture similar to ukiyo-e or sumi-e if that would eliminate the solidness of her hair but keep all the really nice watercolor splotches and stay within the hand drawn look she has, when i have time i may play around and see what i can come upwith ^_^

I am sorely disappointed in the community's collective preference for character shader 3, but I imagine it's too late for any productive discussion on the matter, and it wouldn't have made a difference anyway. When you're just one out of over 60,000, you're probably going to be at odds with the majority on some things, so I should prepare for more disappointment in the future.

While shader 1 wasn't what I was expecting, and I can see the appeal of the cel-shaded look, I utterly loathe how shader 3 washes out the textures, eliminates most of the details, and distorts the colors. With shader 1, you can tell what each part of her outfit is made of, that some pieces are a rough cloth, some are silky, others are velvet, and then there's leather and metal. With shader 3, it all just looks like shiny plastic. Why bother making detailed textures when the shader is just going to destroy them?

The beauty of good pixel art is that it suggests detail in a limited space, creates the illusion that there's more than you can see, that if you only zoomed in, it'd be there, even though it's actually just a couple pixels. Shader 3 works absolutely against that illusion, taking existing detail and washing it out. This is going backwards rather than forwards. It doesn't look like an illustration, or a painting. It looks generic and bland.

I don't yet have reason to doubt that I'll enjoy Bloodstained, but like Dawn of Sorrow, it will be in spite of the art, rather than because of it.

We will play the game in the zoomed out mode, and will not be seeing Miriam from a close up most of the time, so I would say this is not a determining factor for choosing the shader.  The combination of shader 3/3 looked the best to most of the community, especially taking into consideration the zoomed out screenshot. In my opinion that screenshot was the most important one and there you really cannot see materials of cloth. The overall look which was most liked won and I am happy with the results. It is really exciting that the community`s opinion can guide IGA and the team. Even when everything was done behind the curtains, IGA has never disappointed me. There are also sometimes things I don`t like, but overall, what IGA does makes me happy

I agree completely with you. The shader 3 is really special and closer to the concept art. I like the illustration feel and I hope it will provide that beautiful 2D feel of the gameplay.

I, personally, felt Shader 1 was closer to the concept art, since she was a touch paler in it, which was my primary reason for liking it. I do have to say, though, 3 is slowly growing on me.

The reason I brought up Xrd was that, when you compare it with other 2.5D games, it has probably done the best job of giving the illusion of a 2D sprite-based game rather than a 3D game restricted to a 2D plane of movement.  Since Bloodstained is the successor to a 2D sprite-based game itself, I feel that Xrd makes for a good reference point when judging the effect of Bloodstained's shaders.

It's not that I want Bloodstained to look just like Xrd, as there is a distinct aesthetic difference between Guilty Gear and Castlevania, but rather that I think that Xrd did a better job at what it set out to do than anyone else.  In contrast, the 3D Street Fighter games look more like claymation or animated toys when in movement because although they did go for a stylized look, they also made no efforts to recapture the look and feel of their 2D predecessors.  That doesn't mean that Street Fighter 5 looks bad, but it isn't the kind of approach that I would want Bloodstained to follow.

I brought up Xrd because I have a hard-on for Guilty Gear and it's objectively the best-looking current-gen fighter on the market, and it just happens to use cel-shaded graphics.

Truthfully, after seeing the character model
I now really want a combo system that can fully use the whole character model
Because it's kinda of a waste in my opinion if the model just go for the one-swing sword to hit the enemy

Here's a good video explaining how Arc System Works went about 2.5D for Guilty Gear Xrd, and why some of us think that a similar approach with a Castlevania aesthetic would suit Bloodstained.