Sylistics: Titles.

OK. Welcome once again to 3-6-9, and today we’ll dive into Stylistics. 
Today I’ll talk about titles in videogames. And I don’t mean titles as in franchises, but as in their names and their style.

Now I won’t go into this really deep and all this is just an observation and not an serious science study.
But how did titles look in the 80s and 90s? They were big and artsy, always trying to invent some new font and be all individual.

Examples?






And it wasn’t limited only to the western market.
Take a look at this.


What is that, you ask? It’s final fantasy. They’re usual FFy font wasn’t there yet.
And FFII was



It carried on into the 2000s with things many thing, like Halo for example.


But that’s oldschool now. The new trends are attacking. Watch out for the ‘plain fonts’ and ink attacks.

What are those? I’ll illustrate with Metal Gear Solid series. Cause Kojima always knew and followed style.

MGS1.



The first logo was on all the rules of it’s time. Those lines and the “M” and “R” stretching downward to the “solid”.

But as times changed the logo became…


No stylizations. Just Helvetica Ultra Compressed. A ‘plain font’. 
The ultimate principle that’s ‘Less is more’. It became more popular and subsequent MGS games all used it in one way or another.
The cause for this is also probably oversatisfaction and saturation with previous styles.

And this trend touched lots of other franchises.

Of course FF.



DMC3’s oldshool griny text.


To the simpler


And I’m sure many others.

Now let’s get to MGS4.
It had… this.



The old text, but with some added tricks. And it’s also pretty common. Again you can dilute plain fonts with symbols or artwork, like the FF began to…





Also there’s a tendency to make your plain text either beat up and falling apart 

But that’s the artwork of MGS4 cover, in game the title was different, and sadly I don’t have a pic of it. But here are the same pics of the same font.


It’s painted in ink, Japanese style.
That was possibly started or spearheaded by Okami (at least in videogames).


This is a game that was very unique in style and inspired tons of things to the ‘ink’ style, street fighter IV, prince of Persia and others. 

I guess it’s main characteristics would be flowing, blur, gritty and ext. (gone pretty far from Okami). The main idea is, that the title is not that easy to read. It’ a bit obscured by some style decision…

It’s influence in titles right now is minor, but I predict that it’ll go far.
It’s not limited to Japanese brush black ink (example Muramasa)



But also to just sloppy, hard to define or blurred text. I also put fragmented text here.



And there’s also a mix of both. Plain text with some minor obscurity.
As in



And this isn’t only limited to games.
Plain text.





Ink-blood obscurity


Plain text + obscurity (of the symbol being beat up or showed on the building not directly, but through flames.



So I see “Simplicity” and “Obscurity” as the the biggest trend in visual style nowadays. And I think there’ll be more obscurity…

See you later.
Signing off, Sieg.