- The art is "Final Fantasy"-ish, which means it has certain merits that only work for Final Fantasy. If you compare it to "american MMO of the week" you'll likely see it not as crisp or stylish, but that's the point. FF is about a certain motif.
- FFIV's character designs are intentionally similar to FFXI, to keep the game familiar to those players. FFXI's "little people" race relies heavily on suspension of disbelief due to their very short size, stubby limbs, unrealistic running (they move at the same speed as the largest PCs in the game) and giant heads.
The art is as bland as it gets. The textures lack any depth and the characters don't breathe any life nor any creativity. There's a pointy eared humanoid with a body too big compared to its head, forming the elven race. The only thing slightly unique is that small race which still reminds me of the magic users from Phantasy Star Online. Granted, they're quite unique, it's as extreme as Square's creativity goes. It doesn't even come close to the world created in Final Fantasy 9 for instance. The best thing it reminded me of was Skies of Arcadia, and even that breathed more atmosphere.
- The game is a multi-port, so I expect it to be designed to lowest common system specs and lowest common design. Even if all of the platforms support feature X, if it requires different techniques to do it, they likely will minimize that so the game engine is kept very similar on all platforms. One of the biggest gripes with FFXI is the PC version is hopelessly dated due to keeping parity with the antiquated PS2 port.
Then what is the excuse to make this game look like a high resolution Playstation 2 game? As said, the textures lack any form of depth (ever heard of normal/bump/parallax mapping?) that is common in Xbox 360 games nowadays. Lowest common is no excuse for making it look terribly dated on the latest system, that's what you have scalable options for.
This game is being marketed to FF players, and especially to FFXI players. Like me. Tho I haven't played much lately.
I think they'd like to attract a new bunch of people as well. The brand name is very strong in the console world, and every single time they have an opportunity to give themselves a stronger position in the PC world, they fail horribly. This case doesn't seem to be an exception at this point.
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