 So in the second instance of Joseph ignores the CCC voting poll, we're going to be looking at Code Vein, because it's got a very interestingly in-depth character creator with some features I think are worth talking about. So Code Vein, as you can already tell, has a very anime aesthetic, and that's going to be up to personal preference whether you like that or not. And as such, you will come to realize that a lot of the options available to you in this character creator reflects that very much rooted in the anime style. When you first begin a new game, there will be a very short intro of a character talking to you and giving you the choice to either choose your name first or appearance first. Then once you're done, you will be given a male or female option and brought here. This menu does work with a mouse and keyboard as well as controller, and you can move the character around, change whether they're looking at the camera or looking straight forward. You can change their facial expression, you can change how they're posed, and even different lighting indicative of certain lighting conditions that will appear in various different parts of the game, which is always nice because sometimes you meticulously choose the perfect color scheme for your character, only for it to look hideous when you're actually in the game and environment, and the lighting makes you look like you're wearing banana shoes. You can also hide the menu if you so wish to take a screenshot of your beautiful anime creation. The first option you're given is a basic appearance, which is a huge selection of presets, all of which look pretty distinct from one another. There's a lot of varying different styles of preset characters here. Then when we go to advanced settings, we have the nitty gritty, including physique, which is essentially muscle mass. We have skin color, hair, face, all that usual stuff you'd find. Interesting note is that certain options that allow you to color have a two tone system, like you can see here with the hair, where you can essentially choose a base color and a highlight color. So if I so wish, I can make the base hair color purple while the highlight color can be something like, I don't know, like a bright highlighter green or something if I so wish. And in addition to that, a slider that allows you to determine how much of either one is dominant over the other. You can do the same for the irises of the character. Speaking of irises, you have the option of heterochromic eyes, if you so wish. We also have a fair bit of face shapes, the usual, you know, various different sizes of eyes, mouths, and noses. Then we also have eyebrows and eyelashes. We also have makeup, which is mostly a varying selection of different eyelashes. You don't really get to choose a lot of the makeup aside from their color. You also have scars, which have the option to flip them horizontally on either side of the face. And three slots for face paint. And when you select them, you have multiple categories. You can see at the top there, we have what's essentially typical makeup. We have sort of like more face paint and kind of like iconic tattoos. All of these, which can be further adjusted with this advanced editing mode, where you can resize, readjust, rotate, you know, things, all that good stuff. Then you also have clothing, which are going to be more or less what you wear for the majority of the game, as a lot of this game's armor doesn't necessarily cover your entire outfit, though some of the time it will. But otherwise, this is mostly what you'll be wearing. If we go into advanced editing, we can actually remove parts of the clothes pieces. If you don't like a particular part, like this huge popped collar, maybe you want it gone, or maybe this glove or this butt cape. And here in the color section, we can actually change the color palette of the clothing, each one individually at that. So you can essentially totally and completely recolor your outfit if you want. Then we have the Purifier Mask, which in the world of Code Vein, there essentially is a miasma that's going around that requires you to wear a mask in certain areas. And it will also appear in some cutscenes and finishing moves. There's also a mask frame for some additional customization of your mask. And finally, we have 10 voice options, and you can preview them saying various things. Your character is mostly a silent protagonist from what I can tell, but this voice does appear when they make attacking grunts and when you emote and such, and they say things. And I wanted to save this thing for last because it's what this game's creator is getting known for the most. And that's the accessory section, which allows you to have up to eight different accessories or however many accessories will fit into the budget that you have down here at the bottom. And some items cost more than others depending on their complexity, as the devs don't want you having a million items on you in the game that will cause slowdown or framerate issues. When we select a slot, we can see that there is a decent amount of categories as well as items in each category. You can see here there's hats, various other wear like glasses, neck wear, extra hair extensions, pouches, gloves, jewelry, and miscellaneous other items. Now you may notice some of these items look a little bit janky in their placement. There's a lot of clipping. And although that seems to be a slight lack of polish that is persistent throughout the game with all of the cloth physics and such, the reason we see it here is because these items also have adjustment sliders that allow you to change not only their general placement, like if I want it on the head or maybe on the chest or waist. But you can also change their size and rotation and additional orientation on the character, which gives you a lot of control. And once you're done with all of that, this creator also allows you to save the character's appearance in case you wish to use it again for another play through as a preset. As you can see here, I've made one in the past of my adorable cat boy. Look at him. He's got a little bow. On top of all of this, as stated by the various tool tips at the top right, most of these options can be changed after you begin the game. There's a wardrobe in the hub area that allows you to basically totally recustomize your character's appearance, albeit with a few limitations. For example, you can't change their gender, physique, voice, or face shape, but pretty much everything else in the game. I'm rerecording this because I recently discovered that you technically can totally readjust your character after the initial creator, not just what they're wearing and all their accessories. You can actually change their face shape and even gender if you make a preset first and if you come here, where the wardrobe is at the hub area, where you change appearance, and then if you go to load appearance, you can actually load any of your presets, including this one that I made for character creator critique you can see here. And if I select this, I can go to end customization and now in the game, I am a totally completely different character and different gender and everything. So yeah, you technically can totally change every part of your character. You just have to save that preset and then you'll be able to load it up after you've initially created your character, which is pretty neat. Well then, a lot of people say this is one of the best new character creators in video games at the moment. And after hearing this, I saw it as a challenge to see if that's really true. So let's see what's bad about it. Well, the most immediate thing I don't like about this character creator is the functionality of the UI, particularly with mouse and keyboard. Of course, the obvious counterpoint is just use a controller to which I say one, not everyone has a controller. Two, not everyone wants to use a controller. Three, the mouse and keyboard should not be ignored just because it's more viable on controller. And four, even the controller doesn't avoid some of the problems the UI has. So the most immediate thing I realize using this character creator that's frustrating is the instant preview, where hovering over a selected object immediately shows it on the character instead of only showing it when you select them. Here's an example of how it can be frustrating. Say I wanted to look at this hairstyle in the middle or like this one over here and I selected it and I wanted to spin my character around. Well, now I've got to move my cursor over here. And then because of the instant preview, it's now showing a different hairstyle, the last hairstyle that I've hovered over instead of the one that I selected. Or if I wanted to check out this hairstyle and I wanted to hover up, well, whoops, can't do that. So in order to actually spin my character around to see their hairstyle, I have to select them, then back out of the menu and then spin them around. And then if I didn't like it and I want to look at another hairstyle, I have to go back into the menu and then scroll and look for another hairstyle again. On controller, it's less of an issue since the two sticks are used to control the orientation of the character and the D-pad is actually used for the menus. But it's still not ideal for comparing different items when they're not exactly next to each other like if I wanted to compare this hairstyle quickly with this hairstyle still need to go through all of them and it still flips through them. The next UI sin this creator commits in my opinion is that scrolling on the mouse. So instead of scrolling down like you would a webpage that causes a scroll bar to go scrolling on the mouse wheel scrolls your selector. See where my mouse is? I'm going to scroll down and then it scrolls the actual selector up and down. I don't like this function at all as I feel what you select should only be where the mouse is unless the arrow keys are selecting it or something. So let's say I wanted to scroll down and it's not scrolling down because I'm moving the mouse and I'm just like it's really frustrating and finicky. So if I wanted to scroll down I have to stop moving the mouse and then scroll down. And the scrolling problem is even worse when you're selecting colors because while using the mouse wheel over these colors the scrolling function does not work unless you are hovering over one of them. So let's say my mouse is over here in a blank space and I'm scrolling nothing's happening. The menu does not move with my scroll. I either have to have the mouse over a color or over here by the scroll bar. And if you try to select something with the mouse that's a little bit too high or too low on the menu it scrolls for you. Don't do that. Don't move the menu when someone's trying to select something. It makes it really really frustrating when I see oh there's that shade of gray that I really want and I oh now I have to move my mouse back down. Here's another thing for adjustment sliders. I can't simply click and hold the bar and kind of move it adjusted up and down or just click one of the buttons and hold. No, I have to repeatedly click them to adjust each and every time or use the arrow keys which involve me going back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard. Or I could rest my left hand on the arrow keys but that's heresy. These small inconveniences are all over the place in these menus and it makes creating the character a little bit more janky than it needs to be especially on mouse and keyboard and definitely cause some confusion on my part because I could have sworn I selected an item when in reality I didn't because the menu didn't function the way I thought it would. So now that I'm done whining about the UI, what else can I whine about? Well, the body options for a start, they aren't great. It's akin to Skyrim's weight slider in that it's mostly muscle mass and doesn't have a huge range of adjustments. So no chubby or bulky characters or short or tall characters. They're all gonna have fairly similar body types. This goes for the face options as well. They're all fairly similar to each other. And I get it's because of the anime style but I think they could have been alleviated if there were any facial adjustment options at all. There are none, not even a little. This is especially frustrating because maybe you like the eyes on one face type but maybe not the mouth or maybe not the head shape. But you're not allowed to really pick and choose whatever set of facial features that the game gives you that's what you're stuck with. This also means no facial hair options at all and although you can manually add hair with the extensions available in the accessory section, that eats into your accessory budget which means there's less things you can put on your character if you would like a bushy beard or even just a five o'clock shadow. It's a shame that you have to sacrifice some extra outfit possibilities if you don't want to be a clean shaven teenage anime boy. Now for some nitpicks. Instead of having every hairstyle twice, one in one direction and a second one flipped, I feel they could have done what they did with the scars and had a horizontal flip option. I think it would cut down on some of the unnecessary bulk in the menus. Same with the eyebrows. You see all of these eyebrows? These aren't all individual different eyebrows. They're mostly the same eyebrows. They're just repeated several times at different locations and orientations which I feel is a real big waste of menu space and I feel should be fixed with proper face options. This is really just messy. I also feel the clothing options are a bit limited. There are only a handful of sets of clothes and although you can fully recolor them and remove certain parts of the clothing, it still retains the general design of the outfit. And if it's not to your personal taste, it can feel like you have to compromise since all of these are full body outfits and the game's equipment doesn't really change how you look all that much, aside from the full body pieces that cover you completely. You can't choose individual shirts and pants or anything like that. Now, although I may have sounded a bit critical going over all this creator's problems and I wouldn't say it's one of the best character creators because of those issues, it still has some amazing things going for it that I can understand where people are coming from when they say that it's a fantastic character creator. So let's go over those now. Most obviously, this character model looks really nice. It's high quality. The textures are a bit hit or miss on some of the clothing, but the design and look of the character is pretty good. One thing that sort of annoys me sometimes with some anime games is that this is subjective, by the way. Whatever shaders they use or shadows that they have seem to be a bit wonky. Like the cell shading is not quite high quality enough to look like proper cell shading, but as you can see here, the rim lighting and cell shading on this model, as well as the quality of the hair and face are really good. And pretty much every character looks fairly attractive in some way, so that's pretty nice. You got to try pretty hard to make your character ugly in this thing, which I guess could be a con for some people. Next, the amount of fine detail options at your disposal here is awesome. You may not be able to change the face, but the additional options that allow you to change your scars, multiple slots for makeup, optional parts of clothing that you can turn on or off, letting you choose your accessories and custom mask, scolera color, eye highlights. This is all extra stuff they really didn't need to give the character creator, but they're there and they are awesome. But it doesn't just stop there. The great thing is how much control those detail options give you, because it's one thing to allow you to mess with plenty of options, but it's another to let you mess with them to this extent. I have not seen an eye option this in depth in a video game for, and that goes for everything else too. You can give your hair highlights, face paint position for multiple slots, multiple clothing and color options for each part of the clothes, and the biggest positive of all, the accessory system that allows you to place whatever the heck else you want on your character with extra options to reorient them. This is the coolest thing ever, and it's super rare to see in character creators. I think the only other creator where something like this is available is Soul Calibur, and it's great there too. My best example is that you can stack hats on top of each other, and I think any game that allows you to do that deserves some kind of reward. Oh my God, the slow reveal. It basically, within reason, allows you to add any other specific item to your character that you want that may not be available through normal customization. This is amazing because sometimes in character customizers, the ideal character you have in mind isn't able to be made because the creator doesn't quite have the specific item you want. Well, with this system, you might not be able to make them perfectly to your specifications, but as far as their accessories go, you can get pretty close. Maybe they have an eye patch or a tail. Again, anime. But maybe that tail isn't on their waist. Maybe it's on their arm for some reason. Conevane says, go nuts. And of course, the amount of options that you're given for all of these different customization thing is great. The quantity of things that you can pick from is massive. Just look at how many hairstyles there are, how many accessories, especially. Now, although some of the options are a bit lacking, like the face shape is limited to how many faces they give you, the hair is a little bit lacking, and the clothing, the amount of accessories that they allow you to play with is massive. The quantity is huge, and that extends to the color too, as you can see. The first instance being the skin color, which is just nuts looking at all the different skin colors at your disposal. It's great. And for clothing, certain materials allow for patterns and special options so you can have a leopard skin or a snake skin or plaid pattern or go something ridiculous like freaking neon pink. I didn't even know I wanted neon pink. And I don't, but I'm sure somebody else does, so this option here is great. So earlier I made that addendum about how you can change your character's appearance even after the initial creator. And I'm going to cite that as another positive. I think it's really cool that even though it's a little finicky that you have to go into the initial character creator to make a new appearance, I still think it's really cool that you're able to pretty much make as many presets and different characters as you want and just change them on the fly. I think that's awesome, and there's absolutely no downside to that. In fact, I think there are only upsides to it. It's great whenever you feel like, you know what, one day I want to play with this save with a totally different character without having to completely start over. I think that's fantastic. Conclusion. The aesthetic is clean, although its UI is a bit finicky. What it lacks in detailed face or body options, it makes up in fine details and a huge list of things to choose from. What you can edit, you can go incredibly in-depth. And the accessory system is something I wish was in every game. This has been Character Creator Critique. Be sure to vote for which character creator you would like me to ignore next. And I'll see you then.