[diplo]

FFX's people don't shut up about Yevon because the religious narrative is tied to a recurring catastrophe. I don't think you can dismiss the game's presentation of its religion just because of its cultural pervasiveness. There are a lot of other ways to dismiss it, though!

[Levi]

[Toups]

[parker]

[bort]

parker, new game + in chrono cross allows you to frameskip and iirc keep some weapons or levels or characters or something. i'd advise finding a completed-game save somewhere.

[Levi]

re: FFX

I think the problem there is not so much the prevalence of the church making Spira into a Pokemon world but rather the scripts complete failure to develop the oppositional relationships between the church, the player, and the principle characters in a way that wasn't maudlin

(funny aside -- a quarter of the way into Lightning Returns we're led to conclude that the hero just assumed that eventually she'll have to end up killing the god she's working for without actually informing us that she'd already come up with a plan which is at least a...mildy better way to handle this kind of thing. We should probably still take away that Anime Church is never going to be a goldmine unless we're Matsuno)

re: Metroid
What's interesting here is that as these games go on their added adherence to realist narrative casts the previously digestible expressionisms of prior games into weirder and weirder lights until we have to have a controlling ex-boyfriend to explain why Samus loses all her xp and we feel even more confused as to why precisely space station doors use handguns as doorknobs.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say worldbuilding is bad - if you're trying to sell an audience on an imaginary world, it's certainly not a bad thing to envision it with as much richness and detail as possible without getting bogged down - but it certainly isn't a substitution for having a narrative that's actually about sonething. Unless the narrative is about things like history, politics or other subjects that can actually be thematically addressed through world-building (video game example: would Final Fantasy Tactics work as well as it does if not for the rich fictional history and political divisions of Ivalice?)

I mean, I think there's a place in the world for fiction-as-thought-experiment.

Video games are also uniquely well-suited to worldbuilding, because while a novel or TV show has to either take time out of the main story or rely on supplementary materials if it wants to explain the intricacies of its world to the audience, a video game has tons of options at its disposal for incorporating such information into itself in a way that doesn't put it in competition with the actual story being told.

I mean, rereading it I think I get what Harrison is saying though. I think he read Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 novels and discovered how much worse they are than the Kubrick movie, and is venting his frustrations accordingly.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[Levi]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I would say that FF Tactics incorporates world-building by way of things like pub quests and Brave Story entries, but now I'm starting to wonder if we are even thinking of the same specific concept as "world-building". I tend to think of "world-building" as just providing details about a setting for the purpose of making it feel like it exists in three dimensions beyond the (metaphorical or literal) screen, while you and Harrison seem to mean it as "wasting time explaining stuff that doesn't really need to be explained".

I mean, I have no idea what you're referring to with the exploding frog, but would you have a problem with it if the game had like an article under the Brave Story menu explaining what that's about, but doesn't devote any actual in-game scenes to explaining it because it's not really important to the story?

Also the converse of a fantasy/sci-fi story that over-explains everything is one that throws a bunch of arcane in-universe bullshit at the audience and then doesn't bother (or goes out of its way to avoid) explaining any of it, leaving viewers to scratch their heads and feel overwhelmed by how little they understand, under the excuse that they're supposed to "piece it together themselves" - which, in lieu of a compelling dramatic arc or actual mystery, can make a story absolutely insufferable in ways where a story overly committed to explaining itself is merely exasperating. I can think of a lot of sci-fi/fantasy anime that do this - Darker Than Black and Xam'd: Lost Memories being the two most aggravating examples that I can pull from memory.

Also weren't Chrono Cross and FF X and… pretty much every Square game after Final Fantasy IX produced during a period with much less hands-on involvement from Sakaguchi, because he was busy preparing to devastate his career with The Spirits Within?
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[Toups]

I actually think sometimes videogames get way too into worldbuilding at the expense of telling a good story. like there's a point where it just becomes self-indulgent and you do at the expense (or sometimes even in place of) the larger vision that the game is based around. there are some games where it feels fetishistic. I think it's something where you can get away with just enough to support the story you're telling in a way that makes the world more coherent, and prevents further lines of questioning from the player

dark souls actually uses world building techniques almost exclusively to tell its story and I feel like it does so excellently, because every piece of lore does directly relate to the plot of the game, but often in not particularly obvious ways.

unrelated but I haven't touched final fantasy x in years but I remember the entire game having like, the vibe of a sugar ray music video. I kind of feel like that undermined anything else the game had going for it, though I thought the battle system and character development were both quite good.
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[Toups]

also I've revised my opinion of ffix that it sucks because the music sucks. and the game and the story are quite good but the music is just so flat and emotionless and forgettable, and the entire experience loses energy and life as a result

I also feel like it's the aesthetic father of kingdom hearts...
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

But the aesthetic father of Kingdom Hearts is indisputably Final Fantasy VIII

FF9 is the aesthetic father of the Crystal Chronicles subseries, which sadly appears to be dead

Anyway I am seriously considering getting that FF X HD remake that's just around the corner, I remember actually liking it a lot up until some of the really godawful sidequests near the end of the game. That I liked it at all is kinda weird come to think of it, considering that its closest relatives within the FF series are VIII and XIII, both of which I don't like very much at all. All the more reason to replay it and see if my middle/high school memories are lying to me.
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[Toups]

well, it's got easily the most cohesive and well developed plot of any final fantasy games, despite how ugly and garish the whole thing is

like it's the first final fantasy game I've played where I actually cared about the love story

(ffiv doesn't count, because it's ffiv)
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

For as much as I liked it I still didn't care about the love story

I think FF7 was the closest I ever got to caring, possibly because the "love story" is barely even a love story (or… the love story is barely even a "love story". Not sure where to put the scare quotes there.). Same sorta goes for FF6

Xenogears would be better than all of them if Elly weren't such a flat and inconsistent character though
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[Brooks]

[Tulpa]

You know I used to reach for that M John Harrison quote all the time (Used to sounds like I did this in my youth, I'm mostly thinking of myself 1-2 years ago, though), but I've started to avoid doing so. It's just awkward to take a quote out of its original context and use it to decry something completely different.

The way in which M. John Harrison uses 'worldbuilding' is discrete and distinct from the general use of the term. It has more to do with a response/rebellion against the late capitalist infatuation with escapism in all its forms. Worldbuilding is impossible because there is only the world we live in, and to create another one is a fantasy scenario outside of a Borges short story, not something that can be achieved. To try to escape from this world by building a new world is not only impossible but an act of cowardice, a refusal to deal with the problems of modern life. (spoilers: this is what every single one of his books is about yes even the lit fic he wrote about mountain climbing)

Whatever I'm pretty sure I'm like 1 of 3 people here that have actually read his books so this is me saying "that quote has fuck all to do with chrono cross, which is a game I would describe as a triumph of writing over worldbuilding in the harrisonian sense"

radical dreamers sucks because it doesn't have any of what made chrono cross so good (the art, the bizarre characters, the atmosphere, ok I guess there's some overlap between the two games as far as music goes so there's one thing)

Edit: just to specify how I know for certain that Harrison is talking about something completely different from this thread, he has said in comments that he was not talking about people making video games or playing DnD, but about the escapist dimension that can be present in both those activities.
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[Tulpa]

Regarding Final Fantasy X, this is probably a sentiment that's been expressed before, but I found myself having difficulty caring about all of the plot stuff about anime church, and the potential death and doom and gloom given that death means nothing to the people of the setting, that they can literally visit the afterlife whenever they want and see their loved ones, etc. It's a perfect example of the details of the story undermining the actual plot.
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[Talbain]

[Gironika]

[Toptube]

[Levi]

[Toups]

I think worldbuilding serves a different purpose in a videogame than it does in a work of fiction, in addition to working somewhat differently
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I'm generally thumbs-upping that big post of yours Tulpa but I wouldn't go so far as saying Radical Dreamers sucks. It's its own thing... even if that thing sorta unavoidably feels like a prototype for a "real" game (which would still have been a different game than Chrono Cross. (Incidentally, Crimson Shroud is to Matsuno as Radical Dreamers is to Kato.)

But yeah Levi I was a little confused about whether the screenshot with the Chrono Cross NPC telling you about her attempts at writing poetry was meant to be an endorsement or condemnation of the game's approach to world design. For me, that's a perfect example (better than my OP) of the kind of things about it that I loved.
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[allensmithee]

for me, the strange unanswered questions we're discussing in Super Metroid or in Doom for instance, those aren't really questions worth having answers to. the strange alien ship in Super Metroid is a wonderful mystery and a strange foreign element. it's like toups says, about these questions not requiring being addressed. theyre not questions. theyre just there.
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[Gironika]

[Talbain]

[Toptube]

[Gironika]

you are making some good points there, and this might very well have had an impact why I still like the FF6 op as much as I do, if I'm thinking about it.
Otoh, FF7 … yeah. I know I shouldn't, but I am a sucker for "good" graphics, and couldn't get over the looks of FF7. Also the tinny OST. Plot … well. It just never clicked!

But then I am, for whatever that is worth, a fan of the (playable!) intro-part of FF9 where you stage the gotta-get-the-princess heist (in best FF-tradition) while you are doing that very thing. It isn't groundbreaking stuff, yeah, but it was a nice thing to play after 8,10,6 and 7. Casting Faux-spells on foes rarely felt so good as in that bit.

[Tulpa]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Game of Thrones is fun though (yes I know you don't like it Tulpa). Not sure how much chaff they cut from the books in the TV series of course.
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[Glam Grimfire]

his remark about the same bits of stolen cultures to me was really funny, because any western fantasy that doesn't adhere to that is traditionally missed out on or completely ignored by just about every person who would be in a respectable position to critique it

example: people in general for whatever reason tend to gravitate more towards examining an anthology like george r.r. martin (the r.r. stands for Really likes Reddit)'s Dangerous Women instead of something like the brilliant and incredibly imaginative So Long been Dreaming which I guess wouldn't be considered as having as much of an impact because it's not written by A White Dude about cultures that are historically always imagined to be Filled With White People
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##SKELETON PARTY (new article as of 04/26/14)Grim

[Tulpa]

Don't know who you've been reading, most good/respectable fantasy critics pay more attention to works of original fantasy than they do to works of derivative war of the roses with the names changed bullshit.

Strange Horizons review section bears this out: Afrofuturism anthology, Book of the Dead (which to quote: "Many of the best stories in the collection take as their impetus the complex, uncomfortable historical relationship between the west and Egypt."), Lavie Tidhar books, Sofia Samatar books, etc.

granted, the Hugos tend to favor the bland over the interesting, the retreads of western culture over the new, but the Hugo awards are widely considered to be a joke by everyone except the winners.
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[boojiboy7]

[Ratoslov]

[Brooks]

Ordered Book of the Dead thx Tulpa

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[Swimmy]

Heck, FFX leaves no room for ambiguity. Pyreflies appear out of every single thing you kill.
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[mauve]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Certainly sounds like a game I'd like to play at any rate, and the talent behind it (Kenichi Nishi, Yoshiro Kimura, Taro Kudo, Akira Ueda, etc.) has a rock-solid pedigree for imaginative quirkiness.

Pretty sweet OST too.

It's a shame too, since if the game were released here it seems like it would have inevitably reached Earthbound levels of cult classic status.
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[Vikram Ray]

Just started playing FF8 again. Did anyone ever post a quick-and-dirty guide to breaking the game over one's knee?