Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown's anime-inspired art was led by a new generation of animators

rockpapershotgun.com:

When I visited Ubisoft Montpellier to play Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown the other week, the developers spoke extensively how about anime and comic books had been a big inspiration for them in creating the game's visuals. As you'll have seen from my big preview, the game itself is a 2.5D platformer that mixes 3D character models and environments with sidescrolling action and dramatic camera movements as hero Sargon doles out his suite of special attacks. But as I was playing I became curious whether the team had ever experimented with going all-in on the anime visuals to create a more illustrated look akin to their excellent Rayman games. So I put the question to art director Jean-Christophe Alessandri and game director Mounir Radi after my demo session.

"Not flattened, no," Alessandri tells me when I ask if they ever considered using cel-shaded anime visuals at the start of development. "Because it's really important to keep that [sense of] depth. As you've seen, we use a lot of camera movement, and we can do that with 3D," he says, referring to Sargon's special moves and parry attacks that see the camera swoop in close for added dramatic flair.

"In 2D, I think it's more limited in terms of movement and the dynamics of the framing," he continues. "But keeping the overall 3D environment or representation, we thought it was very interesting to put some 2D elements [in], and I think our signature [style] comes from that: mixing the 2D elements and this kind of aesthetic with 3D character art."

Game director Mounir Radi agrees, adding that the decision to double down on its anime-inspired visuals was partly spurred on by his own deep love of Japanese animation (he even mentioned that he gets his children to sing anime