Game Art and Design: Observations on shared clothing influences.

In regards to faces and character appearance, many modern Western RPGs are shooting to be as realitic as possible. While many jRPGs seem to take inspiration from anime and manga for character features, art style and traits, wRPGs allow character customization while shooting for facial features and proportions close to real life. wRPGs focus on setting, which are inspired by a number of things. Medieval Fantasy is a good standby for RPGs, and the Fallout series focuses a lot on post-apocalyptic scenarios.

Clothing in any RPG (Japanese & Western) set in a certain time period draws a lot of inspiration from European Medieval dress -- particularly Anglo-Saxon period stuff. Tunics and big leather boots are popular. Most time periods are included in some shape and form, be it in their colours, cloth cut or general look and feel.

Tunics are actually based on Roman and Greek wear, and remained popular through the middle ages. In video games, many different characters wear some kind of tunic. Most famously, perhaps, is Link from the Legend of Zelda franchise. Whether or not LoZ is an RPG series seems to depend on who you ask, but I've included it all the same.

Dragon Quest

Legend of Zelda

LoZ - Young Link

When it comes to armor and clothing from different time periods, there's a lot of crossover between the two sub genres of RPG. This is especially apparent in recent games like Dark Souls, which marries a Western player character and environment aesthetic with Japanese monster designs and game difficulty. This combination, which was done extremely well, won it several awards and unanimous praise.

Armor is generally dark, heavy, and in muted colours. The designs feel like a combination of Western plate amour and Japanese laminar/lamellar armour. Lighter armour classes consist of robes and leather outfits.

Outside of Dark Souls, a lot of jRPGs don't actually change a character's outfit to match what they actually have equipped and their actual equipment isn't always very suitable for combat.

It's actually quite difficult to pinpoint what kinds of armours are based on something from history, and what is based on a popular fantasy standard. Lots of LARPers (live action roleplayers) seem to use leather armour very similar to the kind of stuff that appears in video games, but it's difficult to tell what came first; the LARPers or the games. Are the games basing themselves on what appears in popular LARP/fantasy culture or are those people basing their outfits on video games? The genre seems to influence/inspire itself in Western games at least. In any case, there are lots of similar looks. Visual documentation of leather armor in the middle ages is understandably sparse due to material deterioration.

As stated previously, a lot of RPGs are inspired by high fantasy works like Tolkien's books. The LOTR film adaptation, which came out in 2001, set the tone for a lot of modern fantasy based character armour. The Witcher seems to draw from this style.