Because, if you search anime guys you’ll see there are a lot of different styles. But the comparison show the same Hiro 4 with minor tweaks, so I can’t tell if H5 is on the right or left. All I can see is one of them has slightly smaller eyes, rounder face and stuff like that, but not enough to say wich is the newer version.
Just scroll up and down your comparisons and tell me that’s a whole new character worth $40.I showed the Hiro 5 page to an otaku friend, she thought he was horrible (me too, since I always hated H4), then I showed her Hiro 4 and she asked what’s the difference between them. All it came to my mind was, “well, this one seems to have bigger eyes maybe”.
The Hiro 5 Render Thread is 2 pages long and I really never heard of him again, actually, I never heard of him outside DAZ and the initial release. I’m sure we would have seem more of him if he was more than a H4 variant.
Whatever they have planned Aiko to be, I just hope its something new.
Well, I used to be an otaku and I can say, from both in and out of the culture, and the simple fact that I actually have and used both of them, that they look different. And no offense, because not only as a former otaku do I know this first hand, but because I know many other otakus to this day: many of us don’t have very keen tastes or senses of good artistic judgement for that matter. In fact, its a big stereotypical criticism that we get. 
Here’s a little something that helps reflect this:
(Warning: Crude Language)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJbnUoeFywo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpdElySRAoA
But all teasing aside. Yes, there are many various ways to articulate something in an “anime” style, but really, every character has signature features that gives it commonality with others, whether it the big head with the big eyes or something else. That’s why it’s a genre, because it has standardized vision. And like I told you before in the Freak 5 Promo thread, as much as we do expect DAZ to sell us something we don’t already have, the objective of the Iconic Characters is simply to provide us with a base to work off of.
Trust me when I say, I know what you mean. I actually thought that H4 looked a lot like H3 at first, but boy was I wrong. It wasn’t when I tried modeling H4 in the same way as I did H3 was when I immediately noticed how different of a character I was working with. H3, in my opinion, like A3, was cute, warm and toony like an actual anime boy, while H4, on the other hand, felt more posh, cold and princely and just looked, as DaWaterRat put it, like an androgynous alien hybrid. A4 was even worse! As even I explained, DAZ was only trying to blend anime style with a modern J-pop appeal, but the way it just turned out in the form of 3D male and female base figures were just cringe-inducing. And the thought of the two of them with realistic V4 & M4 skins? *Shivers* But Hitomi & Hiro 5? Nothing but positive feedback from this happy customer, which goes to show that both MallenLane and DAZ learned from this “figure faux pas”.
Still, this is why I think this may the reason why we’re getting both Hitomi AND Aiko in the same generational run, one explores each of the two aspects in it’s proper respect instead of just abominating them into one hybrid.
