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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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 Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 7:39 pm |
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| DJ wrote: |
| 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. |
It's actually quite the opposite for me. Whenever I play older games I have a really hard time playing newer games. There are a lot of curious idiosyncrasies that are absent from older games which are seemingly omnipresent in newer ones (the worst I think are long opening cutscenes, which become ever shorter as you go backwards in videogame history - the SNES might be the sweet spot for these not overstaying their welcome). I understand the reasoning behind a lot of the stuff that's added to newer games, but I do get the feeling that some of it is tech fetishization as well as overemphasis, at times, on elements that the game can't actually address despite trying to sell its ability to do so.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 9:23 pm |
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| DJ wrote: |
| 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." |
See for me, it's a question of my wanting to take part in it. I love Dark Souls because you have to do some digging for its lore, but by far the least interesting part of that game is its intro. It gives background that is far more laboriously and lovingly integrated into the game than the intro could ever do and as a result the intro feels stilted, slow and out of place. It's one of those things everyone skips the second time, because digging into the game isn't about that kind of presentation.
I do that in Dark Souls because it's presented in an interesting manner that makes me want to poke around in its history, whereas in something like Bravely Default, where there are journal entries for every little thing and change and instance of anything ever, it just comes across as excess, not addition. I think part of it is also the presentation too though, where there is little mystery to anything you actually have or find, and the mysteries you might actually want to explore are either completely revealed from the get-go or are never explained at all.
Like, if Dark Souls started with a body dropping to the floor, a knight staring at you for a pained amount of time, then leaving, it would have been a far more effective intro than hearing, "a brief history of the world's fall, according to the powerful entities who caused it."
Also, I'm pretty sure most games don't have a formal narrative, and I actually enjoy that. Games trying to do formal narratives tend to fail.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 9:46 pm |
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| diplo wrote: |
| LoD has the significance of being a really really really really boring RPG whose every admirer treats it as god's gift to humankind. Look up almost any unofficial thing about the game and you'll see an unusually high level of fanaticism. I don't get it! |
Yeah, it reminds me a lot of Kartia or Hoshigami in that regard. They are quite ho-hum with regards to gameplay but boy is there a lot of fanaticism surrounding them.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 4:43 pm |
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| Brooks wrote: |
| Levi wrote: |
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. |
Yeah, if Metroid gets a reboot or whatever any time soon I'm really hoping they keep the essential - woman in capable spacesuit explores ruined alien world, finds things, resists angry flora and fauna - and jettisons pretty much every other 'canon' feature of the IP |
Yeah, this is pretty much what makes the Metroid series effective. Everything after Super Metroid contains a lot of added fluff that detracts from the central tenet of what makes Metroid a great game. I'm not actually a fan of the way Metroid Prime handled worldbuilding via scanning providing a text splurge as well as enemy weaknesses, as if the enemies in the game were wholly alien and never encountered before. I actually think it also kills a lot of the mystery surrounding the creatures and detracts from Prime's otherwise excellent atmosphere.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2014 5:11 pm |
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| Gironika wrote: |
| Toptube wrote: |
| What, the intro for FF6 is awesome. and so is the initial battle/story sequence. FF7 was similarly effective. |
Yeah, I'm with you on FF6-side here. On FF7 - not so much, but this might be due to me playing it in 2004ish.
FF6 managed to impress on a technical level (as mentioned above/before) and, at least for me, for being different to what the other FFes do/did. |
The FF6 Brave New World hack over at Insane Difficulty really gives the game's systems a lot more personality. I'd recommend the hack if anyone is looking to replay FF6.
http://www.insanedifficulty.com/board/index.php?/files/file/66-final-fantasy-vi-brave-new-world/
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2014 9:20 am |
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There's an Aura-Draw at the beginning of the game that you can use to effectively break the game in the first fifteen minutes if I recall correctly. It maxes your stats if you get Aura up to 100.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2014 10:28 am |
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I don't remember anything about the Triple Triad System, other than that I spent a lot of time getting all the character cards. FF8 was kind of a wash for me; I remember relatively little of it aside from falling asleep to Fisherman's Horizon on sleepy weekends (and I suppose how easy it is to break, maybe because there were so many guides on how to break the game on GameFAQs at the time). I miss those times every now and again.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2014 6:04 pm |
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I remember that you can do the same thing with Aura but I remember that Aura allows you to simply spam your limit break, making the game both trivial and not requiring a lot of time to perform (the strategy was to spam triangle which switched between your characters until one of them got Limit Break). Didn't know about the level scaling thing though, that's interesting.
kitroebuck, I do think it's very possible to break a game. Making a game trivially easy by some combination of mechanics is a metaphorical break. The more literal ones are typically performed by speedrunners though. Metroid Prime 2 and its copious out of bounds tricks versus Gimmick! and its interesting star jumping mechanics. One is a literal break and the other is metaphorical. You're correct in them both typically being really difficult to perform/figure out in real-time though.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2014 10:14 pm |
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| kitroebuck wrote: |
I... don't disagree. Except for Selphie. Selphie is interesting. If only for the scene at the missile base when, having been locked in with the missiles about to strike, she resigns herself to death and wonders if Squall is going to take over the Garden Festival for her, and then she's like "who am I kidding?" That's cute.
Rinoa is pretty bad, yeah, but Quistis. I don't get Quistis at all. |
You have to get anime (and its associated tropes/inherent sexism/racism/etc.) to get most jRPG characters, especially from the PSX-era onward. Thinking about it, I wonder how much of this can all be traced directly to influence from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2014 3:58 am |
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| Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote: |
I'm plenty into anime and I'm pretty sure FF8's characters just originated from Tetsuya Nomura sketches with vague backstories and then plopped into the game before anyone could remember to give them, like, personalities or anything.
Not sure what Evangelion has to do with anything really, except maybe all of Squall's introspection/antisocial behavior.
Also I dunno if you're implying otherwise, but Evangelion is a shining (and rare) example of well-written female characters in anime, which is just one of many qualities that most of its imitators overlook to this day. |
I am talking mostly about its associative qualities. It was the Dark Souls of its day, with everyone wanting to claim some influence from it, regardless of actually understanding it. Seriously, the PSX era seems to have a ton of angst-ridden characters with none of the actual introspection Evangelion attempts to elicit. Also, the reality of patriarchal (and at times, abusive) tropes in NGE tended to affect treatment of characters in other pop culture. Unfortunately, this largely wasn't for the better.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2014 5:00 am |
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It's not really just that, though it's also exactly that sort of reductive creativity. Still, the similarities FF8 shares are obviously not just Evangelion, but in the same way that no movie steals from just one movie, no videogame steals from just one pop culture piece either. Still, it's glorified in a way that has a lot of people following its mantra even if they misplace its values. FF8 just seems to take what it sees as the foam from those ideas and coalesces them into what I would generously call faceless stereotypes.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2014 5:39 am |
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| Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote: |
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. |
I can pretty much see this. I'd rather not press Evangelion's importance in videogames too much, just that there are shades of it in many games from the PSX era particularly, and as you said, FF7 and FF8 (to a lesser extent) feed off its inspiration. I suppose I simply see the lessons taken from it as not necessarily being hugely positive for the pop culture surrounding videogames as a result.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2014 10:51 am |
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| Ratoslov wrote: |
| I've often wanted to make/see a jRPG that left absolutely no ambiguity here- blood-spurting/twitching/corpses left behind, post-battle looting and taking of trophies in the place of the traditional victory anthem, and the protagonist cohort going from idealistic magical teenagers to psychotic mass-murdering magical teenagers over the course of the game. Mind, it'd probably end up feeling like it was derivative of Cavia... |
In my own mind, this is kind of what Silent Hill 2 reminds me of. But yeah, the jRPG that really kind of tries to explain all the weirdness of the world is Earthbound to me, but it explains it with in-world weirdness, which makes it just seem that much more weird. Still love that it makes the attempt to explain that dissonance as opposed to just casually ignoring it.
Then again, I think that's the problem with most videogames that depict violence. Even Modern Warfare 2's "No Russian" is tame as far as making you feel like a piece of shit for in-game actions (in fact, MW2 seems weirdly comfortable the way the game makes gunning down civilians so casual). The only game where I felt even remotely bad or responsible for the violence depicted was Kane & Lynch 2 Dog Days. That game is still legitimately gross to me and it's not something I want to go back and play. Even so, I would state that it's excellent at purveying the uncomfortable stickiness of violence. Hard to explain accurately, but that's the best concept that comes to my mind.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2014 12:31 pm |
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| Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote: |
| 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). |
It's still all used as a subversive metaphor for what a piece of shit the player is for taking part in it, gamey or not. I'm not actually sure immersion is or should be the goal of all games. I certainly don't feel immersed in The Stanley Parable, but it nevertheless has a message that comes across a lot more strongly than most other games despite its intentional game-like qualities.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2014 7:45 pm |
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Gironika, near as I can tell the reason a game doesn't sell well typically has more to do with marketing than the quality of the game (and the games that don't sell well in Square's repertoire are typically marketed poorly or not at all--they are not a central part of Square's marketing strategy). Dark Souls is a bit of a rare breed with regards to its cult success. Or maybe it's not? It's somewhat hard to tell with games that get ported to PC and find a lot of success there post-console (particularly JP games, as relatively few of them get ported compared to releases from other countries).
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2014 1:15 am |
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| mauve wrote: |
I don't think Dark Souls would have done as well if it just came out of nowhere. Having Demon's Souls beforehand, and the legacy of King's Field before that, was a pretty big deal.
Which, to me, says that if you seriously want to build a franchise, stick with it for the long haul, marketing and all, instead of hoping to strike gold on your first outing. |
Yeah, I completely blanked on that. Thanks for reminding me!
2501, as far as I know they're already working on sequels as well as DLC for Bravely Default. Still, I'm curious as to who the point man is behind that game. Yoshida got a lot of media attention for his art in the game, but I'm not sure who's largely responsible for Bravely Default from a concept perspective. I say this as a result of knowing that Yoshida no longer formally works for Square. I suppose it's another thing that's interesting is how there lately seems to be an exodus of artists, programmers and designers whenever a long-term project is finished at Square. Not sure what's up with their management but I suspect it scares away a lot of talent.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2014 11:02 am |
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| Vikram Ray wrote: |
| man there sure are a lot of sequences in ff8 where you are just standing around in a room |
This remains my biggest gripe about most modern games.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2014 6:54 pm |
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| Gironika wrote: |
| But then there was the massive Code Age Series desaster that flopped on a mighty scale, whereas Bandai made .hack//stick with about the same effort. They had the manga to go with the game, and even a mobile phone game lined up. I was looking forward to this (and still have my PS2-copy, yeah!) and still think that we have missed out on a great game. I'm sure that lacking effort didn't make this go belly up so quickly … but then again, I'm the resident SQEX-week-nerd, so ymmv! |
Well, Square Enix does have a history of disasters as well. I mean, FFXIV before they changed it was literally a game where you sat around for eight hours every four hours. I think a game can feed off its sequels, as the Final Fantasy series tried to do with all the offshoots that shared its name but had nothing to do with "Final Fantasy" proper. Lords of Shadow 2 seems to be doing that now. Selling well despite the media not liking the game at all. So maybe it's marketing plus feeding off a fanbase. Marvel and Lego games do this a lot too, though as a brand they also target kids, which might be a better choice than targeting adults (Earthbound as an example was intended to a game that everyone could enjoy, and for different reasons, though doing that also required a really great writer and designer at the helm).
I agree with acceptance and purchasing varying based on interest, but a lot of that interest depends on marketing reach. And maybe selling nostalgia? Unsure, but it certainly seems to be the case with Kickstarter. I think Bravely Default is a good example of selling nostalgia, especially because it misses what is actually nostalgic about those old games, yet is still a selling point for a lot of people.
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Last edited by Talbain on Tue Mar 04, 2014 11:55 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2014 11:57 pm |
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| Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote: |
| 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. |
Yeah, I agree with this, but that's precisely why it's strange. People are claiming the wallpaper as being nostalgic. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, misremembering the past isn't exactly new.
The Last Story is actually pretty good. It's shorter than most jRPGs but I actually consider that a far smarter approach than most games that just wear out their welcome. It's super corny though.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2014 5:43 am |
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| Texican Rude wrote: |
| The Last Story does absolutely nothing new. |
Not disagreeing, but this can be said of most videogames. It's my opinion that Bravely Default does nothing new, but people seem to like it just fine.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:50 pm |
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| Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote: |
| Ben Reed wrote: |
tbh after the past 2 weeks I have come to fundamentally disagree with the premise of this thread
i submit instead that the greatest NPC dialogue in a jRPG can in fact be found in the GB Pokemon games
so many beautiful silly little lines, I nearly ruptured something laughing at some of them |
Hey, I'm not dissing the Earthbound/early Pokemon/Mario RPG school of goofy/wacky NPC dialogue designed primarily to amuse. I just think games that attempt at least partly straight-faced NPC dialogue and do it well also deserve recognition. |
I would still argue that Earthbound has the best NPC Dialogue, and I'm actually sure its ambiguity as to whether or not it is serious is part of what makes it great.
"You can't envision the fall of capitalism? Incredible!"
Also Earthbound spawned Hyperbound, which is such a delightful game. More and more I'm thinking Earthbound might be my favorite game. I'm not sure anything can really displace Chrono Trigger in my young memory though.
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