13Sep/1121
Chinese MMO rips of Korean artist Hyung Tae Kim
I came across the Chinese MMO Crystal Saga from Facebook when I noticed something familiar about the character art.
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The character art stole the poses from Korean artist Hyung Tae Kim's illustrations from Magna Carta 2 (below the fold)
The Knight (Male) <-- Juto (original)
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The Knight (Female) <-- Melissa (original)
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And the Priest (Female) <-- Zephie (original)
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The other characters might also be rips but Hyung Tae Kim's anatomy is... interesting to say the least so it made these rip that much more noticeable.
September 13th, 2011 - 12:40
Get this fanboy/fan girl otaku/weeaboo bullshit out of here. Do you have ANY idea how long we’d be here if you counted EVERY SINGLE INSTANT a “pose” was lifted for another purpose/design??
This is dumb. His ART wasn’t stolen at all. Poses are pretty much fair game. I can go find photos from the 80s that are those exact poses of HTK’s original art and claim HE is lifter as well.
NOW, show me some IN-GAME art-theft of models and weapons and level design(and maybe sprite animations) that looks exactly like that of Magna Carta THEN we can have a conversation. Until then, this is hardly worth sounding the alarm for. If you head over to Deviant Art, close our eyes and click around… no less than 15mins you’l stumble across someone lifting off of HTK, Falcoon or any of the Capcom artists.
September 13th, 2011 - 18:33
There is nothing stolen here at all. No one gives a shit if the colors were lifted, or the poses.
September 13th, 2011 - 20:44
Totally not a lift – I AM an anime fan girl and those poses are standard hero poses. the faces are different, the costumes are different, the colors are different. you are not a very observant anime/game nerd if you aren’t familiar with the “let’s change that character’s hair color, and oh look – it’s someone new!” phenomena.
September 14th, 2011 - 15:52
Well … Yes and no. Side by side. These two look almost the same. Change the cloths or colors, but it looks the same. On the other hand, if overlap them in photoshop, you can see it was not traces and that there is enough differences. Does that make it any better? Probably not. So it was not traced, but one artist WAS looking at the original when s/he was drawing “their” version. *I would call this close enough to call it a rip.*
The problem is, in the comics world, this happens way too often. Most of it is tribute/homage redrawing an existent cover and then signing your name “After _fill_in_famous_artist_name_”. Other instances are just amateur artists thinking if they can copy off their favorite artist they can learn to be a comic professional. Overall the whole situation is sad.
September 15th, 2011 - 10:17
POSE THEFT? Really? Is this blog really that hard-up for content now that we’re resorting to POSE THEFT?
September 16th, 2011 - 04:14
is it kind of bad they referenced stuff from only one place? yeah? Illegal? no…
September 17th, 2011 - 15:40
WTF? You think people can own poses for drawings of humans?
You can’t.
Nothing but original art here.
September 25th, 2011 - 23:40
I can’t see a ‘contact us’ bit, so I’ll leave a comment here.
90% of the images on this site do not show up for me.. If this is happening to me, It’s most likely happening to other people too.
I like this blog and I’d like to see it continue, but It’s pretty damn difficult to stay interested when you’re staring at big white empty boxes.
Perhaps think about changing hosting?
September 25th, 2011 - 23:42
Okay, Oops on my part – I just found the email address in the about page, but my point still stands.
September 28th, 2011 - 22:56
all manga looks the same to me…
October 4th, 2011 - 22:34
Seriously? This is why no one reads this blog anymore. If you want to point out similarities in any anime/manga illustrations, the entire genre is one rip-off after another. It’s all redundant and generic.
November 4th, 2011 - 06:30
Please…remove this item. What a bullshit. You know: in my town the streetsigns look almost the same as in the next town. Theft? Rip-offs? Get real…….
November 19th, 2011 - 20:01
David – they don’t look remotely the same!? If you think they do, you want shooting!
As for the person who put this up in the first place…. Get a life! You could trawl through millions of images and find likenesses in “pose” it does not mean it was copied, it simply means they used a human pose! Of course there are going to be similarities!
December 12th, 2011 - 05:45
This is truly a lack of innovative process and creative thought. Crystal Saga’s artists seem to be only considering the distribution of the game and not the originality or feel of the game and for someone to even call themselves an artist and publish a piece that is so close to another’s for the sake of distributing a game is shameful. I am not implying that one should not study and copy poses to better understand the figure and develop one’s inner skills as an illustrator, but a finished product should only include original pieces. That said, original pieces may be influenced by other works, even taken as abstract parodies if you will. There are many renditions of famous works and it’s not considered stealing. However taking something to hasten your own production and work to being finished, something that another person sweated and cried for is not worthy of being in any finished product.
December 22nd, 2011 - 16:02
I am really embarrassed for the author of this article. As a golden rule, do not speak on matters that you know nothing about. Stick to this rule and the internet will be filled with much less idiotic articles.
February 6th, 2012 - 00:42
who cares, this is how most artists learn, they “steal poses”, get over it.
February 20th, 2012 - 17:16
I’m guessing most people here are not artists. These are not simply “stolen poses”, these pieces are almost identical on a compositional level. And yes, compositions can be stolen. Why do you think professional artists take their own pictures for photo reference instead of using other peoples’? Also, the character designs are startlingly similar, don’t you think?
Besides, even if it isn’t art THEFT, the lack of creativity is really alarming. The fact that people–who dare call themselves “artists”–are being paid to be this sloppy and uncreative is just insulting to legitimate artists like HTK. Not to mention the fact that the artist ripped all of these compositions from the same place. That’s just lazy.
C’mon now.
March 11th, 2012 - 04:04
It’s not a reference — it’s a trace. When you overlap the female knight with the source, you can see points that match up exactly: hemline of the skirts, the knight’s feet are exactly at the dark edges of the bootstraps of Kim’s figure, two of the points on the knight’s shield match point-and-edge the glove on Kim’s figure’s left arm, the jawlines match (although Crystal Saga’s knight has a much larger skull), breastlines match, white tattoo on the knight’s left leg has the same edges as the top of Kim’s lady’s left boot… I wanted to make sure so I created an [animated gif](http://mlkshk.com/r/DJ45.gif)
If it were a reference, I’d expect to see similar elements. This has not just similar elements, but identical measurements, and more than just two. That’s too many coincidences.
September 15th, 2012 - 22:36
Other than the poses, you should look in the game for stealing monster designs. Making them mounts…
There is a bunny that looks exactly like a monster in Ether Saga and a Carbuncle (From FINAL FANTASY XI) that just had the colors turned to red instead of the green-ish.
I could go on forever, but they already did point it out on FFXIV official forums:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/28744-FFXI-FFXIV-Mobs-in-other-MMORPGs
I’m Sorry, but Crystal Saga IS stealing designs from other games.
December 14th, 2012 - 13:07
Barely. You can’t really copyright a pose. You can’t really steal compositions either. How many artists look to old masters for compositional ideas? There is a percentage of change for allowable appropriation. maybe 30%? I don’t exactly remember.
April 3rd, 2013 - 17:12
There is no such thing as pose theft. There is NOTHING wrong with using another piece of art or photo as reference. Most of the stuff on this site is an overt rip-off but pose stealing isn’t.