The Real Final Fantasy

[Sin-Ran]

This is a comic I made
When you criticize, only criticize on the quality please.

[phil_]

Originally Posted by Sin-Ran

only criticize on the quality please.

This is something I can not do!

Sinny, that there comic is wicked tiny. Do something about that. I know it means you won't be able to post it as an attachment, but that's what Imageshack, tinypic, or any other free image host is for.

This is all the criticism I can offer from one comic.

Edit: No, no, wait, I actually do want to know this. What other criticisms were you expecting, besides those on the quality of the comic? We don't do the whole "TITS OR GTFO" or "ur gay" thing here, so I'm just curious. Don't let answering this distract you from making another comic, though.

[Token]

In my honest opinion, it seems really incomplete right now. It's tiny, there's no background, and the text boxes are bland. The whole thing just fails to grab my attention, and when I can't be arsed to read three sentences on four tiny panels, something's missing.

[phil_]

I think I'm just biased because the first serial comic I ever did started in a similar manner. Well, except it wasn't tiny and it wasn't done in sprites and it had backgrounds.

[Loyal]

The good news is that you resized the sprites in whole-number intervals, and your grasp of English is competent.

The bad news is... well.

1) You saved it as a .JPG. JPGs introduce "artifacts", randomly-colored pixels, as part of its compression method. Saving any image with large, contiguous blocks of color as a JPG is pretty much a cardinal sin. Save it as a .PNG or a .GIF.
2) The comic on its own tells us very, very little of the plot. A guy gets thrown out by his mom/dad, who wants grandkids. That's it. From the title of your thread I can extrapolate that this is a retelling of Final Fantasy I, and that this is how Fighter gets on the road. But it's a bit of a weak start.
3) The lack of a background doesn't help. One could almost pass this off as a snowy setting, but it's pretty obvious that's not what actually happened here.

Really, above all you just need to put more time and effort into the next comics you make. Just because sprite comics are seen as an acceptable substitute for people who can't draw, doesn't mean you don't still have to put effort into its creation. There is no "Easy" button here.

Some type of header for the comic (A title, etc) would also be of help. After all, if you post it on someplace other than this thread, people are going to see just those four panels and have no idea what's going on.

[rpgdemon]

I actually assumed that it was a snowy setting.

Also, why would you save as a .gif, if you wanted to save from compression artifacts? They're even worse than .jpegs. A high quality .jpeg isn't that bad, but a .gif loses a ton of color information, and artifacts really horribly, if you don't have it exactly on what it wants.

For example: John's shirt is supposed to be green here: (Second panel)

http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=002042

Plus, there are a ton of horribly compression artifactey 8-bit theatres, especially earlier on.

Where you get the most artifacts with .jpegs is if you use a terrible compressor, like mspaint or something, where it doesn't let you choose quality levels to avoid stuff like that.

.pngs are the way to go though, as they're pretty much amazing. Transparencies, and no crappy weird gif color information loss.

[Sin-Ran]

It actually is a snowy setting

[Token]

Okay. So where's the sky?

[Meister]

It's much better to include a background rather than leave it white, even if it is a winter setting. Since white is the default background of MS Paint (which I assume you're using) a blank white background, especially combined with all the other signs of using Paint (jpg fuzziness, boxy speech bubbles etc.) mostly just looks lazy and unfinished.

Also seconding everything regarding panel size, file format and such. Plot concerns too but you should probably try to make your comics more appealing to look at before you tackle that.

e: I should clarify that: it's not that you can't make decent-looking sprite comics in Paint, but other programs (Paint Shop Pro, for example) have functionality built in that makes it a lot easier. And it's not that looks are everything (let's be realistic, we're still talking about sprite comics), but rather that even the best story in the world won't be read a lot if the accompanying visuals are turning readers off.

[Loyal]

A high quality .jpeg isn't that bad, but a .gif loses a ton of color information, and artifacts really horribly, if you don't have it exactly on what it wants.

You're going to get compression artifacts with .gif only if you're letting it choose your colors for you. If you're doing it manually it's actually quite servicable. 256 colors is quite enough for working with sprites if you actually know what you're doing.

Then again, I never use .gif for anything but animations anyway.