Thanks for pointing out that Graham's scaling isn't actual scaling - it's an interesting point I hadn't noticed.
Even so, my point still stands: they could have made a character get wet after a swim with a bit of work.
I think this is getting away from the main topic, but I believe the original point was that, in game design, some things get done and some don't due to time restraints and lack of resources. Graham could have been given an "in water" sprite, a "drying off" sprite, a "nearly dry" sprite and the normal Graham sprite. He could have been given a different costume from his adventurer's gear and the cloak for some arbitrary reason. These things didn't happen because they weren't worth the time and effort needed to implement them.
So too with Alexander's hair. I don't want to sound like one of those "Everyone says you're wrong so you're wrong" people - that's terribly flawed logic - but you are the only person to complain about his hair. I'm not going to suggest that he uses hair gel or magic to keep his hair like that - I'm just going to suggest that, for this game, this is what his hair looks like. In the same way that Graham always wore his adventurer's cap, that Gwydion never changed out of his slave's clothes, and that Valanice's and Rosella's hair remained perfect in KQ7, so too does Alexander's hair stay like that in TSL. It's just a part of his character: we all accept that in this game, this is what his hair looks like. I mean, everyone seems to be fine with talking guard dogs, American accents, and the use of the English language in the game, so singling out spiky hair seems odd.
I mean, think about that for a moment. In order for the English language to develop at all, you'd need 1) a race of people speaking Anglo-Saxon 2) an invasion of those people by another society speaking Medieval French and 3) enough time and the right cultural and social conditions for the two to meld in precisely the same way as English has in our timeline plus 4) work to be done on the language by playwrights, writers of dictionaries, poets and other scholars who introduced or invented new words and turns of phrase. (Without Shakespeare you wouldn't say "In my mind's eye", "Into thin air" or "the milk of human kindness", for example.) Realistically speaking, there is no way that the KQ characters could possibly be speaking the English of the late 20th/early 21st century.
My point is, any game which is not a documentary of an actual time and place in (preferably recent) human history will take some things for granted. In most fantasy games, it's that these varied, unearthly people speak English just like us. In TSL, it's that Alexander has spiky hair. Seriously, I don't see why it's such a big deal. I mean, it just seems like the kind of thing that would be done in almost any game without anyone thinking about it, either the developers or audience. It just doesn't seem like a very important thing to me.
