THOUGHTS ABOUT TITLESCREENS

A few thoughts:

- I think that an RM title screen should never include a real picture. It always gets ugly in full screen mode, and it doesn't fit the overall old-school RPG feeling at all. Pixel art is always a good choice because it does fit the overall feeling and it looks much better in the 320*240 full screen resolution (or 640*480). Drawings and stuff are also good, and even pictures from animes and cartoons could work if used correctly.
- The same goes for all kinds of fancy photoshop effects, such as outer glow in text, bevel/emboss, shadows that are not solid (and therefor are just like outer glow but in only one direction), lightnings and all kinds of stuff that don't go well with pixel art.
- There are, of course, exceptions, and sometimes the right picture can work really well and some otherwise lame effect could look really good in the right setting.

In light of all that, I gotta say, kentona, I really didn't like most of your title screens. Some of them are in the right direction, a few are actually quite good, but the rest give me kind of a "cheesiness" feeling looking at them.

Of course, this is just my own opinion, I'm not saying these things as facts or anything.

Here are some title screens that I did like:

The Cartographer - Stand alone it's a very nice graphic work, but it also fits the points I made - it's very simple, it doesn't have any "RL features" (glows, shadows, etc.), and I can definitely see it as a title screen in a 2D RPG game.


Sore Losers - Not as good as the last one IMO, but it works. It's clearly a photoshop work, but the shadow on the letters is solid, there is no glow or anything like that and basically everything is "flat" if you know what I mean.


Ascendence - There's a glow on the text which I usually don't like, but in this case it was done really well. The glow effects connects with the background picture (which looks like a mix of pixel-art and anime style) and the whole thing looks really good together. This title screen has an atmosphere (it makes me think of magic) which is always good. Great work here.

And finally some commercial games' title screens:



Very old school, very good in my opinion. All of them are fully pixel artish and they are all very simple and plain good. "The genius of simplicity" in action.

I really really hate the text on "The Cartographer."

edit: because I dislike that thing with the first and last letters both capitalized.

@Despain:

That first one is still the best title screen ever made for an RPG Maker game, personal bias notwithstanding. :)