[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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?
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[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?
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[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.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Draw a lot of magic and junction it all to your stats and you're pretty much good to go. There are probably "dirtier" ways to break it too but the Junction system itself is wildly imbalanced for the majority of the game.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Well I know that past a certain point you can get a type of ability that converts cards into magic, which with rare cards will produce extremely high-level/high-yield spells that can buff up your characters stupendously. But I thought this was a GF ability, and couldn't be acquired until some ways into the game.

Disclaimer: I haven't played the game in over two years and don't remember a lot of it very well.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

In fairness to FF8, there are a couple optional side quests right at the end of disc 4 that actually have (some) challenge even if you've broken the rest of the game

But yeah sorry kit, if there's a thing you can do in-game, without having to use glitches or exploits or anything, that totally devastates any semblance of balance or challenge to the point that the game's challenges and mechanics (other than the one that lets you win everything) are rendered, as Talbain says, trivial, that game is broken. Symphony of the Night is absurdly breakable too.

Most FF games let you break them at the end, but that's usually as a reward for progressing through the rest of the game and mastering its growth system(s). VIII is the only one that's so broken you can game it practically the whole way through.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

It took me almost no time on my first proper playthrough to break FF8's systems to the point of robbing it of all challenge. It really isn't some advanced stat-juking trick you learn from playing the game multiple times, it's an imbalance woven into the very fundamentals of the game system.

That said, for as many things as I dislike about FF8, I will say that Squall is actually one of the more interesting and well-written FF protagonists, and Seifer is one of the more interesting antiheroes. Unfortunately all the other characters (with the possible exception of Laguna) are horribly one-dimensional, which is particularly bad in Rinoa's case since she's supposed to carry the most dramatic weight of the plot next to the aforementioned characters (all the other party members the game all but admits are interchangeable pretty faces). The theory that Ultimecia is Rinoa from the future is such an improvement on both characters in the game as-is that it's no wonder fans want it so badly to be true.

Even Seifer eventually gets semi-forgotten by the game after it's introduced so convoluted BS plot threads that it no longer knows what to do with him other than pull him back out for a boss fight once per disc. And Squall falls flat in the end by the simple fact that so much of his development is dependent on a character as flat as Rinoa (also the fact that after the game's infamous Muppet Babies reveal his abandonment issues just look kinda silly).
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I suppose if you're referring to things like dumbed-down versions of Rei and Asuka's characters showing up in other media without any understanding of what made those specific characters compelling and subversive and reduced only to their viewer wish-fulfillment fantasy aspects then yeah, I can agree with you. Though I dunno if it's fair to hold Evangelion responsible for that any moreso than to hold Hayao Miyazaki responsible for kicking off the moe phenomenon with his films' heroines.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Like I said, I literally think FF8's characters were designed to look cool first, and had personality traits (a term I use very loosely here) half-assedly grafted on after the fact. That's in contrast to many older games, where the character outlines came first and the designs followed. I'd be curious to see some early versions of VIII's designs to test this theory.

Also keep in mind that FF7 was at least as colossal a driving force in the video game world as Eva was for anime and Japanese pop culture in general, and VIII unquestionably owes way more to the former than the latter. Not that VII wasn't likely itself inspired by Eva, but the connection seems clearer in that case than in VIII's.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

There are a bunch of JRPGs (e.g. Final Fantasy Tactics) that are pretty explicit about the lethality of your party's methods, but I guess I can't think of any that really depict an opponent defeated in battle as graphically dying. The closest that comes to mind is Shin Megami Tensei IV, which features a variety of different and lovingly detailed defeat animations for enemy sprites based on the type of weapon or special attack used to take them down - defeat them with a gun move, for example, and the sprite bursts full of bloody bullet holes; defeat them with a fire spell, and they char to a crisp; defeat them with a wind spell, and they visibly blow away; defeat them with a needle-based attack, and they bulge and explode in a shower of blood; you get the idea.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Even Kane & Lynch I can only get so immersed in due to the fact that the violence, despite being uncommonly frenetic and visually ugly, is still unmistakably "gamey" in its portrayal (a couple of guys slaughtering literally hundreds of police, mobsters, etc.) and execution (regenerating health, snap-to cover, and other familiar gamey mechanics).

…responding to this caused me to get into an extended rant about my personal feelings on violence, which is kind of a broad topic, but ended up getting personal and unrelated to video games enough that I felt like it was getting out of place for this thread so I posted it on my blog instead.

Anyway, the important part is that you guys are just making me bummed I can't play Moon :(
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

All of Square's games prior to the PS1 era were internally developed, after which they started publishing games from third-party devs with increasing frequency as they got bigger and bigger, until now they're big enough to buy smaller devs (which at this point is most of them).

Sakaguchi left the company around 2002/2003 I believe, and I'm convinced you can trace a direct slide in their creativity after that point. Even the very last games put out during his tenure - Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XI and FF Tactics Advance, I believe - still felt recognizably like Square titles, whatever their faults. It was only after that point that Final Fantasy started to turn increasingly to self-caricature, and the output of original IPs versus FF and KH spinoffs started to dwindle. Their more creative or risky games moved onto the DS and PSP, since those platforms could still be developed for with only moderate budgets and team sizes, while the main development teams notoriously demonstrated their inability to make sense of development for HD consoles.

Also Dissidia must have sold alright considering it got a sequel - and since the whole game is one hugely elaborate exercise in pandering to FF fans, that isn't especially surprising. I'm pretty sure that some powerful people at Square (i.e. Nomura) are at least aware of TWEwY's widespread fan adoration, if not blockbuster commercial success, but as was pointed out above goodwill toward a standalone game can help create a successful franchise in the future. Bravely Default is proving that too, being as far as I know Square's first highly successful original IP in some time, outperforming their expectations both domestically and overseas (despite not even carrying the FF branding) such that they're already eagerly talking about a sequel.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

If interviews and PR are anything to go by, it seems like the single most influential person in the development of Bravely Default would be producer Tomoya Asano, who's a relative newbie to Square. This would make sense, since he was also a producer for FF: 4 Warriors of Light on the DS, to which BD was conceived as a spiritual successor, and that game was directed by true Square veteran Takashi Tokita (who was speculated to be involved with BD after it was first announced, but turned out not to be).

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Bravely Default is interesting though because it doesn't purely lean on the crutch of nostalgia; in fact it only really goes skin-deep, and beneath the surface it's a fairly robust and unmistakably contemporary RPG, for better or worse. If anything the Final Fantasy Dimensions games for iOS more accurately capture the feeling of playing a genuine 16-bit Final Fantasy, while BD mainly just uses it as a wallpaper.

I've heard pretty much the same thing about Lost Odyssey, and it was always in my top 5 games to get if I ever got my hands on a 360. I still haven't, but I might in a year or two if they release some super-cheap gimped yet functional model a la the Wii Mini. Speaking of which, I was thinking with renewed interest the other day about how I still want to get The Last Story. Right now it seems to be going for $30 on Amazon, which for me is just too high for an impulse purchase ($20 or less is my comfort zone; $10 or less pretty much guarantees immediate purchase). Unfortunately I'm not sure whether waiting around will cause the game to drop in price by another $10 or so, or just make it scarcer and therefore more expensive. How limited are XSeed's print runs, usually?
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

Well okay maybe Earthbound's dialogue counts as some sort of more sophisticated absurdism, but playing it when I was younger all I could see was goofy wackiness.
_________________
Just another savage day on Planet Earth.