[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

You are on a luxury cruise ship where the famous rock star Nikki will soon be holding a concert.

You walk into a cafe room and there are three NPCs:

On one side of the room is a woman standing and staring at a poster of Nikki so rapturously that unlike most NPCs, she doesn't even turn to face you when you talk to her. If you do, she goes on and on about how gorgeous Nikki is and how she wants him to squeeze her in his arms if she faints in his presence.

Out on the balcony is another young woman, who will tell you excitedly but somewhat more coherently how she's been working overtime and skipping lunch breaks for weeks just to see Nikki in concert.

And then in the corner is an older man, who looks like he might be a fisherman or a crewman on the ship, seated at a table with his lunch in front of him, who grouses about how "that Nikki" is all anyone talks about around here, and all he does anyway is prance around in those ridiculous costumes, and he "even wears makeup", and "men should be men", damn it!


And this is the game everyone gets on for being too ponderous and gloomy.

The thing is, it can do ponderous and gloomy too! But the fact that it has such care and vibrancy put into even the most insignificant of areas and interactions means that whatever it does, it always feels like it's consistently incorporated into a living, breathing world.

Come to think of it, all games written by Masato Kato that I've played (Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Baten Kaitos) tend to have NPC dialogue head-and-shoulders above the robotic exposition dispensers of lesser RPGs. The dude just gets how to make a fantasy world feel alive.
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[TXTSWORD]

Make more Chrono Cross's. (Was playing through this a couple of weeks ago for the 100th time)

I'll just simply say I love everything about this game.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

btw shortly after you go to this area Nikki performs a glamtastic rock opera (during which the game briefly switches from fixed camera angles with prerendered backgrounds to a dynamic camera in a fully polygonal environment, a la Xenogears) that just so happens to echo the game's themes of conflict between man and nature.

This is relevant because his concert is a rock-ified version of the Song of Marbule, which is... man, explaining the significance of the Song of Marbule would take like five paragraphs, but it involves a race of "demi-human" tribes oppressed by "mainland" human settlers in a manner deliberately (on the game's part) reminiscent of European colonialism, family drama between Nikki and his gruff widower seaman father, his deceased demi-human mother and her surviving relatives, a displaced demi-human population serving as cheap labor on the cruise ship because their home island (Marbule) has become uninhabitable, and a slumbering dragon entity that's one of the six ageless guardians of the game's setting and can only be awoken through supernatural means.

And this is all a relatively minor subplot that unravels slightly differently depending on which choices you make and which relevant characters you recruit into your party.
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[Toups]

think I'm gonna move onto this after ffix
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

It's a trip. Just make sure when you play that you're nice and mellow and ready to submit yourself to getting lost in its strange, dreamlike world.

And have patience with some of the boring-ass (but gorgeous!) dungeons.
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[Toups]

always
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Fighting regular enemies in Chrono Cross is not only cumbersome and unchallenging but also literally a complete waste of time, since the game doesn't use EXP, you can heal after every battle and the only incentive for cannon-fodder fights after they stop granting slight stat boosts for your party is to hoard money and materials for selling/trading/forging.

Thankfully some of the boss battles are pretty interesting.
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[DJ]

I'm over here like "Wait don't all RPGs do this?" and I'm remembering back to the little side conversations going on in Fallout 2 with the bickering Mutant couple or the assorted NPCs in New Reno or the skooma pipe under Caius Cosades' house in Morrowind or hell pretty much anything in Mass Effect (which I've been playing a lot of recently) which is just one big self-reinforcing lore dump pretty much any time you're not in combat.

Then I went "Oh right, western RPGs."

I guess I'm spoiled now. I would actually rank that example from Chrono Cross pretty low on the NPC dialogue scale just because it's like well yeah they should be talking like that how is this special but I realize this wasn't the norm back in 1999.

I wonder if this is why I'd basically given up on JRPGs by 2002 or so. I'm even finding it hard to go back and play FFVI and (gasp) Chrono Trigger.

I beat Chrono Cross back when it came out and remember quite enjoying it up until the end when it fell apart pretty spectacularly.
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[diplo]

[DJ]

Yeaaah. It's hard for me to go back and consider that kind of stuff I suppose. Viewing it from a modern lens it's unimpressive but it's been so long since I've played a classic JRPG that I don't have much point of comparison. Again, I'm playing Mass Effect right now and just by random way of example, there's a part where you break into an enemy forward command post and they have dossiers open showing on viewscreens on the wall that show two major NPCs and has their full names, retina scans, front and side profiles, and birth planets listed. And it's kinda just some incidental data that's sitting there but hey someone had to make graphics for this, despite the fact that it only shows up once and it's incredibly easy for the player to miss.

By comparison hearing about some NPCs mentioning a thing that's just about to happen to the player seems pretty basic?

Anyway. Not trying to derail this into a Mass Effect analysis or anything (I've already got one of those going), it's just the easiest point of reference I have on hand.

I still really wanna get back to Chrono Cross again at some point. I have it on my phone...
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[TXTSWORD]

You go back and forth between dimensions recruiting skeletons and mushrooms and dragons and mermaids and the elderly and pirates and cyborg ninjas and plants and Pokemon sheep and rock stars and fairies and surf-bro doctors and all manner of other ally to stop a cat demon who you swap bodies with ahhhhhhh

[DJ]

Cat computer, not cat demon. And it's to stop the race of dragons from resurrecting Lavos by using a city that was stuck in time way back in the past in the original Chrono Trigger that was meant to be a sort of Ark to resurrect Princess McGuffin.

I really liked Chrono Cross but plot coherence is not exactly its strong suit. You can make this argument about most late 90s JRPGs though. The success of Final Fantasy VII essentially meant that every JRPG writer tried wedging Gaia Theory into their games for the next five years.
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I dunno, I guess it's a fairly mundane example but while I was playing last night it just really stood out to me as making the game's world feel alive and populated by characters with their own lives in ways that a lot of lesser RPGs, Western and Eastern, just don't get. Just, little touches that make those collections of pixels feel like people and not flavor text. Maybe it was the way the dialogue was written that stood out to me. I dunno. Somehow a lot of games seem to overlook those simple details, and Chrono Cross's world feels more alive to me than nearly any other RPG I've played.

Also no late-90s JRPG, except maybe Xenogears, takes its insanity in the plot department as far as Chrono Cross. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
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[DJ]

For my money the most "huh?" game to come out of that era was SaGa Frontier, but that kinda doesn't count as its plot incoherence was mostly unintentional. Square (before they performed the fusion dance with Enix) is responsible for most of the really nutso JRPGs from that era. A few of them overreached a little more than was necessary (FFIX's random never-before-mentioned final boss springs to mind, also the entirety of Parasite Eve which I love to death but man someone needed to edit that shit) and some of them overreached a LOT more than was necessary and tried to hide poorly-explained worldbuilding behind made-up words and a lot of intentional obfuscation (Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Final Fantasy VIII, handful of others).

The only one I really regret playing all the way through is FFVIII. I was so pissed when I beat that game. Ugh.
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

What was wrong with the worldbuilding in Chrono Cross and Xenogears? They're convoluted as hell, sure, but ultimately I think their worlds are pretty imaginative and rich - exceptional for JRPGs, certainly.

Agreed thought that FF8 was ultimately the least satisfying of Square's late-90s messes. Although the fact that the ending cutscene is able to hit any notes of grace or catharsis at all after dozens of hours of flaming bullshit is pretty impressive, in a way.
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[Toptube]

I have nothing to say about Chrono Cross, because I never played it. One of the main reveals was spoiled for me, which soured me on playing the game. Too bad, because I spent months drooling over character art.

Squaresoft pretty much had the lock-down on Japanese style RPGs. I personally didn't play many non-squaresoft Japanese style RPGs that had nearly as interesting world building, besides Legend of Legia. Even that, I mostly played just because I was addicted to videogames back then. PSM always stroked Legend of Dragoon, but I never got around to that one.

No way, FF9 is worse off than 8 is.

8 and 9 both have the same fundamental problem (even though I still think pretty highly of 8) in that about 2/3 of the way through, they just blatantly jump shark. All of a sudden, 9 becomes a dime-a-dozen anime. it's really dumb. But it's played up as this big important dramatic thing that you have to take care of. There just wasn't any setup or support work layed for those huge tonal shifts. 8 does something similar. But it is less glaring.
8 actually basically ends about 2/3 of the way through. Things come full circle for the characters. But there's still another act, for some reason. I think more highly of 8, because it doesn't completely shove aside the detailed mythos and non-typical fantasy that is built in the first two thirds of FF8. and that first two thirds feels fresh and original. Whereas FF9 was pretty much founded on hitting tropes and recalling things already done. 9 mostly rides on the richness of Amano's art, but is otherwise only a competent game and does little to be particularly interesting. 8 has straight up better gameplay and better sidequests. It also kinda sorta attempts to setup the new act in a vaguely compelling way, even if it does fail. Whereas 9 felt like more of a jolting transition. I realize that could be more of a personal opinion there.

Being an anime is fine. I mean, you can be an anime the entire time and still be good. 7 is an anime from the beginning and the end game escalation is about as anime as it gets. Xenogears is also an anime (although I feel like Xenogears is more akin to older anime). But they start that way. The tone is set. and if/when they do diverge, it's not resetting the whole game. It's for short segments that are worked into the story and that often actually make the game better/more fun/more interesting/etc. But I still feel that 8 has more and greater successes than 9. So the failures don't seem so damning, even if they aren't actually handled slightly better.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Amano? Huh? I'm not sure what, if anything, his involvement with FF9 was (the character designs were done by Toshiyuki Itahana; can't speak for the background art). I don't think he's made substantial contributions to any of the series' in-game art since the SNES era. (He mostly just does the title logos.) In fact, I think all three PS1 Final Fantasies had the same art director, although his name is escaping me.

I agree with you though about IX suffering from an abrupt shift in tone and setting in the last third that is not adequately set up by the game prior to that point, meaning that even the madness of VIII at least comes out looking better in terms of consistency.

Back to Chrono Cross, though: the game has, like, at least five different massive, game changing plot twists (and that's just the coherent ones); I doubt you could have been spoiled on all of them. Even if you had, a large part of the satisfaction in Cross's narrative is just being able to explore the game's world and find things out for yourself. It's not a super-linear, plot-driven game like Xenogears, even though it shares some key plot elements (some of which Xenogears had already shared with Chrono Trigger).

Also, looking back on it I guess my OP wasn't really such a great example of the strengths of Cross's NPC dialogue, or at least I didn't communicate effectively why it was. It's just a moment that stood out to me when I was playing it the other night, but in retrospect maybe the strength of it has more to do with the way the actual dialogue is written than what it's about.
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[Toptube]

Amano's artwork was basically the only character art I ever saw for the game, aside from CG renders or high res versions of in-game models. I assumed he had designed the characters and I specifically remember him getting street cred for returning to Final Fantasy and designing 9's characters.
I didn't realize square would have one guy design characters and another re-draw them for the character art, and yet more people re-do them as in-game models and CG. I always thought it was just one guy drawing the character art/designing them. and then a team would interpret that into polygonal and CG models.






http://fantasyanime.com/finalfantasy/ff9/ff9art2.htm

[Toptube]

Sorry about derailing your Chrono Cross thread : \

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Hey I don't care, I like talking about all JRPGs and my OP was kinda weak in retrospect anyway.

As far as Amano goes, yeah, I really don't know. I know Itahana was the game's credited character designer but I do vaguely recall hearing something about Amano contributing to the game's art as part of its status as a sort of retro-Final Fantasy tribute. I wouldn't take the existence of Amano versions of the character designs as a sure sign of anything, though; you can find similar stuff he did for FF7, which is of course mainly remembered as Nomura's big game as far as character designs are concerned.

Incidentally, it seems to be a little-known fact that Masato Kato is not just a writer but an artist, and in addition to doing artwork for the NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy he also created early designs for the cast of Chrono Trigger, before Toriyama finalized them. His artwork has this great 80s-manga feel to it and I wish we could've seen more of it in games after NG.

Lovin' that Amano Steiner, by the way. Even if it's a lot harder to imagine him as the comic-relief party member.
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[Toptube]

I did a little research and it seems like Amano was likely commissioned to juice up the retro/revival angle for FFIX. A couple of places give him a character design credit for IX as well. But It seems to me like that's maybe not exactly true, or maybe he designed one or two characters but wasn't the lead character designer. I dunno.

He's also been comissioned to do artwork for other final fantasies like X and VIII, as you said. But I think those were mostly for collectors books and stuff. Not part of the marketing push, like it was with IX. I didn't even know he'd done artwork based on VII and VIII, until like 30 minutes ago. (aside from indirectly figuring that he did the logos).

[TXTSWORD]

[Booter]

thread needs screenshots!

[Talbain]

[DJ]

A lot of it has to do with attention span, too. And I don't mean that in the derogatory way of "Oh noes you have a super short attention span", more like "How much bullshit are you willing to put up with". I'm...Prrreeeeetty good about it. I'm willing to sit through a lot of exposition, way more than anyone else my age I know. Virtually every other gamer friend I have in real life (and given where I work, that's most of my friends) have quite a bit less of an attention span they're willing to devote to a game laboriously setting up its plot.

I hate to keep dragging Mass Effect into this but it's the easiest point of reference I have right now, so: I have a coworker who's a huge scifi buff who actually gave up on Mass Effect 1 because the beginning of that game takes for fucking ever to establish itself, and manages to throw in a crappy tutorial for its crappy combat on top of it, plus it's one of the most hamfisted sections in the entire trilogy and he lasted about 30 minutes before figuring this was just how the entire series was going to be and he didn't want to waste time on it.

It's not so much that attention spans have gotten shorter (despite what pretty much everyone over the age of 30 loves to claim), it's that as technology has gotten better and things like voice acting and cinematic sequences have become standard, there's less incentive to trim the fat. The closest you could get to this long, sweeping opening was something like the intro to Final Fantasy VI, with the magitek armor walking in a Mode 7 snowstorm towards Narche while Terra's theme played and the opening credits rolled. And that was enormously technically expensive for an RPG on the SNES. You had 3.2MB of space to work with. That's it! Think about that: That entire game is smaller than some pictures on Wikipedia now. 3.2MB is nothing. And yet, in 1994, that was a fuckton of space to fit on a cartridge. It was expensive both in the tech sense and in the literal economic sense. And for all that time and money and effort and careful programming and advances in graphics and blah blah blah blah the most you were getting out of it was this.

So yes. There's that.

But, I am one of those people who will pretty furiously dig for worldbuilding. It's my Thing. So as intro scenes or exposition or journal entries or what have you have gotten longer, to me it's like "Oh okay here's all this stuff I've actually wanted to be in there this whole time. Cool!" For a lot of (most?) other people it's like "Hey could you let me play the fucking game now thanks."
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Journal entries >>>>>> long intro cutscenes as a means of world-building, though. The best kind of worldbuilding is based on player initiative and discovery.

c.f. (for the starkest example) Metroid Prime's mastery of worldbuilding and narrative sans a single line of dialogue or cutscene exceeding 30 seconds.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[DJ]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I'm not saying the plot of Xenogears and Chrono Cross aren't raging nonsense but they definitely do at least flirt with some serious ideas, or at least the application of serious ideas to sci-fi/fantasy settings in unique ways, which is more than can be said for most games.

I mean, they're like The Matrix deep, not War and Peace deep.
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[parker]

I bet somebody somewhere on the internet is saying war and peace is just a bunch of highschool intro to bullshit 101
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[DJ]

[parker]

Since random battles in this game aren't necessary is there some gameshark cheat I can use to bypass them and still be able to get by the boss battles and rest of the game. If I could just play these games like adventure games I'd probably go back to them or try them out more often.
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[DJ]

I feel bad picking this stuff apart because man I love Super Metroid so much. But it's like trying to put together the plot of Castlevania (Dracula keeps coming back, go kill him in [insert time period here]) or Doom (Demons from hell are invading!) or Zelda (Save the princess by solving a lot of really complicated dungeons!) or Super Mario Bros. (save the princess by jumping your way through someone's bad mushroom trip also you're a plumber) or Kirby (You're in a dream and King Deedee stole a magic wand that does a thing) or etc. etc. etc.

What plot is there is window dressing. It's like the plot to porn. You expect it to be there but it's not the point, and focusing on it just gets you some weird looks because if you're really trying to focus on the deep plot of Super Metroid then you're doing it wrong[. Atmosphere and thematic consistency and the occasional worldbuilding elemental mystery != well-told, deep narrative. The latter has only even been possible in games for maybe 15 years or so because before that the tech simply wasn't there to allow it.
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Playing Chrono Cross like an adventure game is definitely the right idea, and while you could conceivably beat the game without fighting a single grunt-level battle (which aren't random btw) there are a couple areas where you need to defeat a certain number of cannon-fodder enemies to make the story-progression-mandatory boss appear, so Gamesharking it might not be such a good idea.
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

DJ why are you focusing on Super Metroid at all? I was talking about Prime. And you know "narrative" =/= "plot" right?
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Talbain]

[diplo]

[Talbain]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I think Legend of Dragoon mainly had the good fortune of being a Sony-published JRPG released in close proximity to Final Fantasy VII, and took off from there. I've never played it so I can't really judge, but certainly from what I've seen of it the associated cult of nostalgia stands out a lot more than anything about the game itself.
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[CubaLibre]

Legend of Dragoon is worthless. I think what people liked about it at the time were the graphics (???) and vaguely kung fu-ish fighting system. Like, your guys did COOL MOVES in combat. Cuba spoilers: this exact same thing is like 55% of what I like about Xenogears.

[Toptube]

Man, Xenogears does a pretty good job of infusing gritty religious tones into it's story and doing some good-weird things with it, without actually ramming the religion itself down your throat. It may not have had a really strongly coherent main story arch---but I don't think that's absolutely necessary.


Whereas FFX doesn't ever shut up about Yevon and I wanted to choke everyone. I think somewhere in there might be the difference between old anime and new anime.