The Bounce in Bouncer

Gameplay in Bouncer seemed to resemble a ‘Final Fight’-style beat ‘em up with Tobal-looking combos. Of course, the thing to note are the amazing graphics and the way the in-game sequences meld seamlessly with the cinematic storytelling ones. The method is similar to the way Final Fantasy VIII blends its pre-rendered scenes with real-time ones, but the main difference in Bouncer is that everything is rendered real-time. Imagine this:

Two rival gangs chase each other onto the top of a moving subway train. Before the gangs engage in fisticuffs, a massive explosion derails the train and results in a water-main break. Water gushes out from the break and floods the stage ankle-high. The gangs compose themselves after the crash and begin to fight each other (my guess is this is when the player resumes control). Furious punches, vicious combos, and flying kicks (complete with Matrix-style frozen camera work) send opponents flying all around the stage and into debris scattered about. Sparks fly from the wreckage and water splashes with each footstep of the characters. Flames continue to burn and water continuously floods into the scenery.

Final Fantasy: The Movie

After Sakaguchi captured everyone’s attention with the jaw-dropping Bouncer, he quickly moved on to what I considered the high point of the night. Briefly mentioning its origins from Squaresoft USA based out in Honolulu, Hawaii, Sakaguchi introduced a two-minute clip (never before seen by the general public) of the upcoming Final Fantasy movie. What followed was an unpolished trailer showing magnificent 3D imagery from the still in-development movie. The quality of modeling was simply surreal and surpassed any 3D works to date. The animation seemed life-like and projected a sense of hyper-reality.

Not much could be deciphered from the intentionally ambiguous edit, but some story elements were apparent. The protagonist appeared to be a typically beautiful blonde-haired female among a rag-tag group of scientists or astronaut types. The plot seemed to involve the discovery of or aggression against some sort of alien or virus-like race. The overall direction seemed somber and cerebral like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey rather than like summer blockbuster crap like Independence Day. All of the spoken dialogue was in English and the character designs were also far more realistic than the typical big-eyed anime-look found in Final Fantasy (possibly to appeal more to mainstream America).

In fact, everything seemed so realistic that I started to contemplate the overall direction of computer imagery. Is the point of 3D graphics and animation to duplicate and simulate the real world? After all, what’s more realistic than reality? Is a virtual world and virtual actors more exciting to watch than a live one? Jackie Chan proves regular humans can still physically excite us with his daring theatrics and another Hong Kong film export, Storm Riders, and Disney’s Toy Story showed that 3D special effects can be effectively used not specifically to simulate reality, but to encourage fantasy. Traditional cell animation never really had the opportunity to create photo-realistic montages due to human limitation and cost/time constraints. So cartoon animation became a vast medium for dreaming up imaginative worlds and creating conceptually exciting images not possible through a camera lens. CG, on the other hand, has proven to be more versatile and is capable of entertaining flights of fantasy as well as masking reality. But determining which one is a better use of CG is a topic certainly worthy of discussion.