Lazyness or not??

It's not lazyness, it's just that the Vita is not as powerful as they would like it to be. Most likely they swapped out the 3D stages in favor of these prerendered backgrounds for performance reasons - if you had a sudden drop from 30 to 15 frames per second in the middle of a level, you will definely notice it. These prerendered sequences might be noticeable if you look closely, but when regularly playing, it's hardly a thing you can notice, at least far less noticeable than a framerate drop.

Also, putting prerendered sequences instead of rendered scenes might actually be even more work, so you REALLY can't call it lazyness. They just have to reach a compromise between how good the graphics look, and how fast the game runs. This is one of the key problems in the development of any video game.

 

Weirdly enough, Fire Flower is still a bit laggy on the Vita.

EDIT: If you balance the video quality between pre-rendered and realtime-rendered images in a game, you'll have one awesome PV.

 

I was about to post exactly what Suyo said. An example of this would be looking at older Playstation games (such as Final Fantasy VII) which makes use of almost entirely pre-rendered backgrounds. Those backgrounds are actually the opposite of laziness, since they actually took more effort to make than simplistic 3D terrain that the PS1 could have handled.

 

Isn't comparing PDf to games out of it's genre rather pointless? I understand your opinion and respect it but i don't feel the average person feels bugged with how they did the game and i felt Freely Tomorrow was very well done PV and would like to see videos that are more across the area like that. And i would like to point out too the project diva side of sega has been doing many projects at once on various platforms so i am shocked with the progress so far compared with sega's normal performance :)

 

Well without prerendered backgrounds, things like The Divine Comedy and Black Rock Shooter wouldn't have looked as amazing as they do with all the special effects. The Vita is more powerful than the PSP, but that doesn't mean it can handle every possible thing. You probably didn't even notice very much that the backgrounds are prerendred in the first place. The PR BGs do take a lot of work as not only does it involve having the 3D models and making a video out of them, it requires many special effects and fantastic edits.

Games have to get technical some times to look fantastic like PDf. Looking at the technical stuff is actually pretty fun and awesome to know about. Have you seen the inner workings of how the modules move in Two Faced Lovers? Tons of stuff happens behind all those fancy shapes.

All in all, prerendered BGs is something that really shouldn't be scolded as it's not even noticeable.