(Spoiler-free attempt)

I’m about ten hours in and while I’m also overwhelmed with the story, I don’t get the abject hatred of it.  Yeah, it’s fucking complicated.  So is almost every anime ever made. 

My problem is that the application of the heavy storyline makes replay value impossible.  I’m loving the ride in this game, but I can’t see myself playing it a second time.  And yet I plug in the SNES and replay FFVI about once a year.  Much of this is in the fact that, yeah, ten hours in, I still have been unable to make a single decision on my own about gameplay.  Even the crystarium is pointless because by the end of the chapter you’ve filled it to the max.  I have no way to replay this game differently a second time.  That’s a deathly antithesis to everything the FF series is about.

Also, the game wants to be FFVII so fucking hard.  I’ve been joking with friends about how I’m not sure if Not-Cloud or Not-Yuffie is my favorite and if we think Not-Aeris is annoying or not.

I think it’s ultimately a fair price.  For sixty bucks I’m getting a storyline as complex as an entire 26-episode anime series and apparently just as long.  But what makes it a great story makes it much less of a video game.

Damn. My god that’s harsh.

But it is pretty accurate.

20 hours in? Have you played a JRPG before Jesse? It’s more like, someone gave you the Twilight book, you don’t know what a vampire is, and you’ve just read the first chapter…

Okay… maybe the first 4 chapters.

If you think that 20 hours is way too long to start knowings what the fuck is going on, well, there are other genres. It’s like complaining that there’s way too many elves in fantasy novels.

BTW, I figured all this out and I’m just 10 hours in, are you saying that there’s 10 more hours without anything new happening? (I’m in chapter 5.)

Also, here’s my nitpick on your review:

Suppose you lived in a world where, at any point, evil people could come and kidnap you, your spouse, your family, your best friends, and they could inject any of you with a drug which would kill them at evil’s whim of evil.  You were then given the vague hint of a mission, and whether you failed or succeeded, you would die.

This is a straw man, in that you’re complaining about the prospect of an ending that isn’t going to happen.  I think it’s willful ignorance for the sake of a negative argument to pretend that this story might end with all the characters dying or suffering in some unsatisfying way.  In a way this is equally annoying, but (SPOILER-ISH) of course Snow is going to redeem himself to Hope and Serah will in some way be saved and Lightning will be less of an introvert and Sezh will save his son.  Maybe, MAYBE, one of the four won’t happen for “drama.” (END SPOILER-ISH) Yes, what you proposed sucks.  That’s why the entire story is about these characters trying to stop that from happening.  It’s like you’re whining that Lord of the Rings is terrible because there’s no way two hobbits could make it to Mordor.

Final Fantasy is formulaic; that’s why Aeris’ death had such a revolutionary impact.  The entire theme of every Final Fantasy game is the concept of hope and adversity in the face of overwhelming odds.  Final Fantasy VII had a similar plot of hopelessness, and the storyline ended with essentially everyone saying “we’re fucked no matter what, let’s make the most of it.”  And it’s one of the greatest video games ever created. 

But the last thing you’d expect is for society as a whole to decide that the innocent victims of a murderous supernatural cadre were the real problem, and hunt them down. 

The writers of a political blog, of all people, should be aware of the reality in the masses being easily swayed by fear and weakness into the hatred of a designated target.  That this is among the concepts in the game you find unrealistic is startling.  It’s the most realistic part of the entire game for me.

“Cocoon lives in constant fear of lunch dates.”

Hah.

So it makes about as much sense morally as the Bible?

August:

I think it’s willful ignorance for the sake of a negative argument to pretend that this story might end with all the characters dying or suffering in some unsatisfying way.

That’s the explicit threat the story sets up.  Unless it’s willful ignorance to reflect what the game says, I’m not sure how that works. 

The writers of a political blog, of all people, should be aware of the reality in the masses being easily swayed by fear and weakness into the hatred of a designated target.  That this is among the concepts in the game you find unrealistic is startling.  It’s the most realistic part of the entire game for me.

The problem with it is that such swaying happens where there’s the ability to “other” the target.  What the game sets up is that the “other” is, potentially, everyone.  And given the fact that the “other” has thus far been realized as wholly ineffectual and nonthreatening, I’m not sure where this fear is supposed to come from.  The use of zombie-type characters as a part of the plot has me waiting for one of the archetypical moments from that genre - the realization that this menace threatens you and the people you love, and that it’s much harder to hate and fear something when it’s your mother or brother or lover who’s the enemy than it is when it’s just a nameless, faceless thing.

Final Fantasy VII had a similar plot of hopelessness, and the storyline ended with essentially everyone saying “we’re fucked no matter what, let’s make the most of it.” And it’s one of the greatest video games ever created.

VI, yes.  VII is a drastically overrated mishmash of dudes with big swords in fiery towns.  Aeris’s death is one of the most overhyped and underdelivered moments in videogame history - a bland, unappealing character “shockingly” killed so that we could get to the real story. 

Blackbloc:

If you think that 20 hours is way too long to start knowings what the fuck is going on, well, there are other genres. It’s like complaining that there’s way too many elves in fantasy novels.
BTW, I figured all this out and I’m just 10 hours in, are you saying that there’s 10 more hours without anything new happening? (I’m in chapter 5.)

I’ve played a ton of JRPGs.  Usually, by 20 hours in, you have some clue of what’s going on - we’ve all banded together to do X, and a substantial number of events have happened along the way.  I don’t expect to know everything about the plot or even the game world, but let’s look at, say, Chrono Trigger. By 20 hours in, I understood the general sweep of the plot, what I was fighting for, what was at stake and, most importantly, what the fundamental terms the game used meant.

I’m all of 2 hours into FFXIII, and it’s pretty bizarre, story-wise.  It seems like the datalogs are required reading to even begin to comprehend what’s going on (I’m not complaining, because I’m the kind of guy who goes through that stuff anyway, but I can definitely see that being a turn off).  But I’m digging the gameplay, so I don’t really care about the story.  It’s just an excuse to kill things, anyway.

In some ways, I feel like the Final Fantasy series doesn’t get enough credit.  So many developers are criticized for pumping out games that have little-to-no variation in gameplay, but Square Enix overhauls FF with every installment.  Some things they try work (Final Fantasy Tactics), some don’t (Final Fantasy VIII) - but they’re always doing something new.  How much has Madden, or Halo, or Call of Duty changed over the past ten years?

Thing is from everything I’ve heard SEGA, in another one of their brilliant strategic moves they are so known for, are releasing not one but two JRPGs superior to FFXIII tomorrow.  Resonance of Fate doesn’t look quite as good as FFXIII of course but supposedly has a story and gameplay that actually engage.  And Infinite Space is said to be wonderful.  I mean putting together your own fleet and going out and battling space pirates?  And the protagonist actually grows up so you’re not left controlling a 16 year old the entire game?  How can this be bad?  And this after SEGA released Yakuza 3 earlier in the month.

But instead of putting these off they release 2 RPGs right in FFXIII’s release window, the same day as GOWIII and DA:Awakenings.  I swear SEGA lost a bet with Nintendo 10 years ago and are forced to make crappy business decision until Miyamoto says enough.

FF VIII was the best game in the series.  It not only worked, it was awesomeness.

But yeah, tedious crap you can barely comprehend is pretty par for the course.  Maybe something’s lost in translation, or maybe they just didn’t do a good job thinking things out, but there’s always a lot of whizzbang cutscenes to start the game and some unintelligible backstory that eventually becomes clear (or seems clear - maybe I just forget the plot holes and stick with what they fill in).

And while Crono Trigger may have made sense, did you play Crono Cross?  Fun game, I enjoyed the hell out of it, but that game had a totally f’ed up storyline.  So, a game can have a poorly constructed storyline (and waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many playable characters - like 4 or 5 times as many as FFVI) and still be fun to play. 

And, though I have not played FFXIII (and its doubtful I ever will - I’m working on giving up the video games), I very much doubt the storyline could be any worse than the Final Fantasy movie.  That was a shit script, plot, everything.  The animation was great, but the film itself was a giant piece of rat shit.

In all fairness, the FF Movie has the courtesy of being over in 2ish hours. FF13…Having played and beaten 9 of the FFs so far, this is by far the least impressive story and characterization I’ve seen since the first two.

I’ll beat this one, but then I may have to hit Persona for a palette cleanser.

Suppose you lived in a world where, at any point, evil people could come and kidnap you, your spouse, your family, your best friends, and they could inject any of you with a drug which would kill them at evil’s whim of evil.  You were then given the vague hint of a mission, and whether you failed or succeeded, you would die.

And this is the single biggest complaint I have with the characterization and dialogue. There are unbelievable missed opportunities to address the situation on a meaningful, emotional level. Out of the 30 hours I’ve put into it (and there are some things I do enjoy about the game), I’ve yet to see more than 3 (I’m being generous here) depictions of unforced emotional reactions beyond “this sucks” and “let’s make the best of it.”

As a friend of mine refers to it, “The ever-less-aptly-named Final Fantasy franchise”.

I was thinking of picking this up for the kids, but your review (among others) suggests that would be really, really dumb. They’ve all got the new Pokémon games anyway and the DA:O expansion is out tomorrow, so why bother?

Just tell me who to stab.

Xenosaga’s story was, imo, actually pretty interesting. It had one of the worst ending sequences ever, though.

I’d rather go back and play FF12 again.

I don’t know how it’s better on that point. The first plot point in FF12 happens 20 hours in. I know this because that’s the point right after which I saved, then my brother in law stole the game to sell for drug money, which ended up with me frustratingly waiting for it to become a bestseller so I would only spend 20$ to get it back, at which point my PS2 died *on the very moment* I put in my new FF12 disc to restart.

FF VIII was the best game in the series.

It’s the very WORSE. The series improved until FF6, which was the pinacle. Then the series took a break into mediocrity during the entire PSX years, only becoming good again for a little while with X, took a jaunt into MMOland with XI (which I refuses to play on principle), released a quirky X-2 that was better than all the PSX FF games combined and was actually a whole lot of fun for what it was, then FF12 which I can’t really judge because of the universe conspiring against me playing it. And now FF13 has IMO the best game mechanics in a long time (Paradigm Shift is FUN! which is something I haven’t been able to say about RPG mechanics in a while), but the story is a bit plodding and I expect the voice acting in the translation must have been bought on the cheap because there is no ‘acting’ to speak of (also, in the Quebec version the French subtitles barely correspond to what the characters are saying in English, so for all I know the reason the story sucks is just that the English doesn’t correspond to the Japanese). Of course since IMO the battle gameplay is everything, exploration is BORING and best done away with, and the story is just going to be some Japanese weirdness anyway so who cares about it, FF13 is basically tailor-made for me.

Just tell me who to stab.

You…you mean in-game, right?

Final Fantasy is formulaic; that’s why Aeris’ death had such a revolutionary impact.

I haven’t played any FF games, so I’m talking out of my ass, but I wonder how much of this is due to your average gaming fan-dude not knowing a lot of actual women/decent female characters? It seems like a lot of the Aeris worship is based on very very low standards for female characters/people. Some guy was trying to explain to me that she was all special ‘cause she died and then helped out the main dudes and I was like, oh, a girl dying to advance the plot/goals of her male companions? So revolutionary.

Seriously. Aeris did NOTHING in the game except dying, thus proving Generic Bishounen Bad Ass’s bad assery. It’s the Women in Refrigerators of console RPGs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Refrigerators

I was like, oh, a girl dying to advance the plot/goals of her male companions? So revolutionary

In a way it was. generally in games you don’t lose party characters unless its someone you get saddled with at the start and those characters are basically red shirts or its a character you don’t know at all and your character feels anguish over their death while you sit there thinking who gives a shit.

Most of the time game give gamers what they want. More recently in Mass Effect at one point you can potentially end up killing one of your teammates (Wrex) if you haven’t done his sidemission or your charm skills are too low. The first time I played through the encounter he died and it was really compelling because I had had him with me through the whole game but then I reloaded and he lived and that was far less compelling. If they had made it so that Wrex has to die and you can only affect how he dies it would have upset me (insofar as one can be upset by the death of a fictional character) but it would have made a better story because the game wouldn’t have been giving me what I wanted and it would have been raising the dramatic stakes. It would also have made perfect emotional sense because my character and I would be feeling the same things, regret or satisfaction depending on how you have been playing.

The Aeris death is like that. I just can’t remember enough about the game to make comments about it.

You know what pisses me off about the Aeris death sequence? People treating it like this amazing, shocking thing that was totally unprecedented in the history of JRPGs.

No you little shits, that’s not true.

You see, there is this company called Sega. They had a series called Phantasy Star. Now, I know that Phantasy Star is a crappy hack and slash MMO series nowadays, but back in the good old days of the Sega Genesis it was a proper JRPG line. Now, with Phantasy Star 4, the last proper Phantasy Star game, there was a character called Alys, who most people assumed was the main character. Only thing, is that she gets attacked by the mid game boss, gets sick, and dies in agony. That’s right, Sega killed off what people thought was the main character for the first third of the game. This was in 1994 people.

But lets go back even further, to PS (Phantasy Star) 2. In that game, it turns out that a character you have from the beginning of the game is a split being from an mutant who is trying to destroy the planet. If the party kills the mutant, the character, Nei, dies as well. The directly forces you to kill a character, not some sword wielding dipshit from offscreen who has mommy issues. And this game… was released in 1989. Suck it.

FF6 has Shadow dying but at least you can save him (spoiler!). By doing something outrageous like actually *waiting for him* while the clock counts down to self-destruction instead of leaving him behind. When you actually figure it out you feel like a jackass for letting him die on your first playthrough (well, that’s if you haven’t bought a guide…).

Aeris’ death in contrast was mostly meaningless because she *literally did nothing of interest in the entire game up to the point she was killed*.  She was like those red shirts from the previous games, except she stuck around longer so some people actually got fooled into thinking she was a main character. I still can’t believe people still care about Aeris. Or any of the crap characters in FF7, for that matter. And the only thing good about Sephiroth is his theme song (and Kefka’s better).

In a way it was. generally in games you don’t lose party characters unless its someone you get saddled with at the start and those characters are basically red shirts or its a character you don’t know at all and your character feels anguish over their death while you sit there thinking who gives a shit.

Most of the time game give gamers what they want.

I guess this is part of what I was getting at—when I think about a particular medium I draw on my experience with other media to judge it. If something happens in a game I think about similar events in books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, etc. and don’t just treat the gaming world like some huge social/artistic blank slate. Personally, I’m not going to get my mind blown by the one of the most obnoxiously over-played tropes in fiction (for “dead women” see: every Disney movie ever) just because it’s got pixels now. So I can only assume that the people who found this Aeris thing shocking had *never* encountered this trope before… which makes me think they should get out of the house a little more often, so to speak.

Books don’t put up with that shit—you’ll get put through the wringer along with your favorite characters. And real life *certainly* doesn’t! Games are fun as escapism and all but it’s annoying when people are like “OMG did you know that sometimes women are sacrificed for the greater good and endings aren’t always happy? I learned that from a video game because they are revolutionary.” :p

(spoiler!) ... When you actually figure it out you feel like a jackass for letting him die on your first playthrough (well, that’s if you haven’t bought a guide…)

This seems like one of the only fronts on which games can *truly* be revolutionary as a medium, to me—make the player do things. Sometimes make them do *terrible* things. Explore what people are willing to do (or not do.) Much more compelling than seeing some underdeveloped character kill another underdeveloped character in a cut-scene. If Sephiroth or whoever asked you to *pick* someone to die from your party that would maybe be interesting or novel…

I find the story of FFXIII to be not too objectionable. Which is true for most Final Fantasy games I’ve played (almost all of them).

To be entirely accurate here, you know the entirety of the spoiler in the original post within the first couple of hours. It does not take twenty hours to figure this stuff out. You then spend 18 hours wandering around like a bunch of emo teenagers dealing with personal issues related to the l’Cie thing. Which is understandable to a certain extent since, with one or two exceptions, your characters are pretty much emo teenagers (or early twentysomethings).

Though this 18 hour random wandering was not a great choice by the designers, it does have some utility. It allows you to get to know the characters, both as characters and as the various mechanics they represent, and slowly introduces you to the gameplay without any huge plot related stuff getting in the way. I think it would have made a lot more sense for this to happen over say, two hours, not 12+, but I did not find it in any way unbearable.

As a sidenote, it is an unusual choice, particularly within the series, to introduce you to almost all of the playable characters very early on and allow you to use them. I think it was an interesting, if flawed, choice to let you wander around as (almost) all of the characters so quickly. I’d like to see more games doing this in the future (for less than 18 hours, please).

Contrary to what others have said, I’m actually really enjoying the combat system. I’m an experienced RPG-er and gamer, so it wasn’t too tough to get a handle on despite being somewhat complex. I like that it’s fast paced without being completely action oriented (sidenote: if you find the action to be too fast paced for you, there is a setting to slow the battle speed down.). I’m kind of just playing the game to enjoy the combat system and see the shiny pretty art, which is exactly what I expected to play it for when I bought it.

Cocoon had too damn much hugging for me, so I’ll skip this one.

I’ll stick to Lego Star Wars Original Trilogy, thankyouverymuch.

Falsies!

Seriously? The Bad Guys are called Falsies? Really?

Jesus, you guys are going backhand Aeris now?  Good lord.  This is the same game that farted Sephiroth into the collective fanboy consciousness everywhere and you all want to bitch that Aeris is a pointless, plotless character?  Aaaalllllright.

Yes, “it” was significant, especially in America, where until then the Nintendo license for FF restricted almost anything as high-caliber as that.  Even VI, my favorite game ever, was butchered. (They couldn’t even say the word “kill” in FFVI)  Because of the new video technology at the time, making a cinematic moment out of a character death had, in fact, impact.  Especially since, no, it wasn’t really common in a FF game for one of your main characters to spontaneously die.  (Yet Joss Whedon does this every three episodes and people fight over who gets to blow him first.  Huh)

As far as the attempt to gender-label Aeris, give me a break.  She’s not the girl in a refrigerator.  For fuck’s sake up until her death she was one of the most powerful and essential characters in the game if you play a style that uses a heavy healer backup.  If anything, Aeris was one of the most prominent Christ allegories in the entire series, so if you want to whine about identity issues argue that.

Back to FFXIII though, compared to current RPGs that are happening, as I said I think FFXIII has heavy flaws, but I would sure as shit rather spend twenty hours being guided along a pathway with plot points and dialog then spend twenty hours mindlessly killing Kobolds to acquire twenty-four rough jawbone fragments to make the ethereal pendant for my Runesbane Armor Set, which will be awesome for a week until the next update or expansion comes out that I’d have to pay forty bucks for.

The problem with it is that such swaying happens where there’s the ability to “other” the target.  What the game sets up is that the “other” is, potentially, everyone.  And given the fact that the “other” has thus far been realized as wholly ineffectual and nonthreatening, I’m not sure where this fear is supposed to come from.

Well, that’s sort of like blaming rape victims…  Everyone is a potential target, yet something about human nature makes people feel less like a possible victim if they think the victims did something to deserve it, so I don’t know how unrealistic this is either.

Thing is, I find most anime and JRPGs pretty inscrutable.  There are all sorts of things I don’t explicitly understand, so I just try to roll with it when I can.  Hell, I spent $60 on this thing, I’m gonna do what I can to enjoy it.

When I was toying with the idea of restarting Feminist Gamers, I tried to write a “what’s wrong with JRPGs” manifesto and a lot of it (apart from poor localization) came back to the fact that they can’t seem to pick a ESRB rating and write for that crowd. If your game is rated “T” (which FFXIII is), then you need to accept that your target audience, being over 13, knows the basic After School Special stuff you’re trying to pitch to them like it’s some major revelation that needs to be reaffirmed every 5 minutes. I’m so sick of JRPGs that are ostensibly “T” rated games having hours of poorly-translated unskippable cutscenes that drone on like Vogon poetry about how !Important! friendship is. Or how judging people based on something they have no control over (race/illness/asshole parents) is BAD. You know what? They can put that stuff in. I don’t care. But don’t spend Planescape:Torment levels of dialog telling me shit I already learned when I was six.

Also, they need to get over themselves. The cosmology of JRPGs is dumb. It always comes down to the same basic premise no matter what title you’re playing: If you’re not out to save the very existence of the world, then you’re at least out to save the existence of all of humanity (or whatever subset race), and there will be cruel tyrants standing in your way. Once you dedicate more than 10 minutes telling me about how there’s a dark rainbow that corrupts everything in its path and it can only be changed back to the rainbow of joy that will bring peace and magic back to the land is by restoring the hamsters of light to their proper altar in the war-stricken realm of the sky elves… hold on I’m gonna write this down.

I’m so disappointed that FF XIII seems to be getting universally bad reviews.  My wife and I have been fans of the series ever since X, and we both thought that XII was huge leap forward in terms of story and playability.  To hear that they’ve taken a huge step backwards is heartbreaking.

That’s OK though, because we’re about 30 hours into Dragon Age, and it’s been pushing all of our D & D buttons in the exactly the right ways—it’s the only RPG I’ve played that truly recreates the feeling of sitting around a table with a bunch of dice and, uh, friends?  I guess.  No really, it’s a great game.

One thing, though…  How old is Serah, and does it seem sorta statutory-rapey to anyone else that Snow is going to marry her?

Games are fun as escapism and all but it’s annoying when people are like “OMG did you know that sometimes women are sacrificed for the greater good and endings aren’t always happy? I learned that from a video game because they are revolutionary.”

Generally games are just escapism. That’s why its so much more enjoyable when developers decide that they are going to go for a range of different emotions instead of just adrenaline fueled power fantasy. Also when a lot of people played ff7 they were quite young. I think I was like 11 or 12 and I didn’t have as much of a basis of comparison then.

The whole thing is can you make the player become emotionally invested in the characters? If you can its time to mess with them and take them away. If you can comparisons the player can make don’t matter as much because they are wrapped up in what’s going on and aren’t thinking “Simpsons did it”.

I don’t read comics but as far as I can the dead women in refrigerators thing was about killing off the love interest to make the main character mad and to provide a storyline. I’m not sure Aeris counts for that because she died in disc 2 or 3 (I forget) and you had already been trying to stop guy in black for ages.

Just speaking from my own personal gaming experiences, I never understood how anyone could think any of the Final Fantasy series held a candle to Suikoden II. There was a game with an actual plot and character development.

I’m so sick of people declaring certain installments of Final Fantasy THE BEST or THE WORST as if it is objectively true.  I’ve met tons of passionate fans of FF and there is always a huge diversity of opinions that has a lot to do with what game was played first, how old they were when certain games came out, and what they love about the games. 

I’m mostly enjoying the fact that two major female characters are so far motivated by their relationship with another woman, not a guy.

So, Jesse, it surpriese me that you get no emotional gravitas from the fact that the entire system of Cocoon is run on ANTI-Pulse sentiment.  Now, these defenders of Cocoon (with a couple of exceptions) are thrust into the role of being enemies of Cocoon, ostensibly (in other words, when they become Pulse L’cie, they become the hated enemy of Cocoon).  The internal struggle aside, the dawning realization that the entire structure of society is based on a system of god-heads LYING to that society has to at some point make an impact.  Have you made it to the surface of Gran Pulse yet?  This is where my wife is (doing some of the running around/grinding/side-questing that is so much a part of this type of game), and it really dawned on me the level of significance this societal lie has on this group.  They want to save Cocoon, they want to preserve what they know and love and yet, they are marked as its destroyers and realize that what really needs to be destroyed is the lie of the Fal’cie.  Cocoon and Pulse are pawns in a god-world struggle, with humans and l’cie as play-things.  You have no sympathy or interest in that situation?
Yes, I can see the gripe about how much time it takes to get to this point, but really, it’s all set-up.  A few others have pointed out that this is the time when we get to know these people.  And yes, they are melodramatic, and act a bit like emo teenagers…but…really, what did you all expect?  Hope is a perfect example…I really thought I was going to hate that kid…but then, through the course of this lengthy introduction, he really grew on me.  Now, I really like Hope and his story drives my interest (this didn’t happen with JUST Hope, I’m using him as an example).
And to the commenter about Snow and Serah and the potential for weird, underaged stuff going on…yeah…that’s the only thing about the game that’s stuck in my craw (and my wife’s as she played).  I keep saying outloud…well, maybe she’s just really SMALL, like…you know…Snow’s 6’5” and she’s 5’3” ... maybe…I hope…Lightning turns 21 in the story, and Serah is her little sister, so she’s supposed to be anywhere from 18-20, I would assume.  But still…yick.
((Nota bene: I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but these are my observations as a watcher.  It’s my wife who’s been actually playing.  I get to play through after she’s beaten it )

I was more bothered by Sazh leering at Vanille than by Snow and Serah.

I think for the most part they are all a lot less emo than, say, Cloud or Squall. The characters are a more self-aware and more capable of dealing with issues of guilt and redemption than anyone in VII. 

I agree with you, Aureas. I had the same reaction to Hope and now I actually like him, Vanille and Sazh despite my intial reactions. (I’m not to Gran Pulse yet, and I’m reading all the comments very carefully to avoid spoilers!)

Aw, August, I’d type something to soothe your ego but apparently my hands are busy leveling my level 12billion Knight Mage Death Elf King and my mouth is full of Joss Whedon. :p

So the New York Times article says there are no towns and no sidequests in this game?  How is this FF again?  There better be some motherfucking chocobos! 

Still waiting for my copy to arrive via Amazon’s free shipping.

I’ve got the game.  I’m enjoying it - combat is very different from anything I’ve played before, and can be very challenging at times.  Or maybe I’m just dumb.  Who knows?

Re: plot.  Nothing wrong with it, IMO, except for the length of the exposition and the varying quality of the writing and voice acting.  Pretty par for a FF game.  Interesting, even.

I know I’m not going to change anyone’s mind who’s already played the game, but I think some of the criticism of the setup for the game world is a little unfair.  This is how I’m seeing things from my (admittedly only 10 hours or so in) perspective:

It’s perfectly normal (though quite unfortunate) for people to freak out about the l’Cie.  They’ve got a terminal disease.  They’re under the control of possibly nefarious foreign powers.  And anyone could become infected - you, your friends, your family - anyone.  Think of how the average dumb American would react to finding out their neighbor is a Muslim - with AIDS.  That’s the reaction you’re going to get.

So the Purge makes perfect sense from a kind of stupid, populist, reactionary viewpoint - but also from a political one.  Those in power are not going to want a population of possibly disloyal people under foreign control living in their cities.  The mechanism of conversion doesn’t seem to even be all that well understood (something I’m sure demagogues use to their advantage in demonizing the l’Cie).  So, perfect target for fear, hate, and extermination.

I’m also confused as to why people think you have to be visibly different to be othered.  History is full of people who were othered and persecuted because it was politically convenient, due to paranoia, or whatever (Joe McCarthy says “hi”).  The l’Cie, on the other hand, literally wield magic and wear the Devil’s Mark.  Is a witch hunt, then, not inevitable?

“Seriously? The Bad Guys are called Falsies? Really?”

I think it’s pronounced fal-chee, not fal-see.

I’m a little embarrassed that my first comment here is on FFXIII, but hey, this is a topic that I can actually contribute to.

“Also, they need to get over themselves. The cosmology of JRPGs is dumb. It always comes down to the same basic premise no matter what title you’re playing: If you’re not out to save the very existence of the world, then you’re at least out to save the existence of all of humanity (or whatever subset race), and there will be cruel tyrants standing in your way.”

What are you comparing this to? The Western sci-fi standard of fighting off aliens instead of tyrants? I don’t play many Western RPGs (maybe because a lot of them are sci-fi and I like fantasy), but I don’t notice much variation in them either.

I’m kind of taken aback by the vitriol in the post and some of the comments, actually. JRPGS are horrible because they don’t match the ESRB rating? They’re made for Japan where there’s a totally different rating system. The Japanese market is their main target market. Might suck for us but the story, and characters aren’t designed with the Western market foremost in their minds.

FFXIII is not my favourite FF, but it’s not awful, I quite like the not-Cloud (I assume you mean Lightning here), although I was disappointed that she didn’t get much character development. I had some trouble getting the story, but I was reading it in Japanese. I assume if I played the English version I’d get the story faster. They did do a good job with Hope’s story, and actually Vanille is much better than Yuffie. Plus Fang is IMO the most kickass character in the whole game.

Snowe is made to look older than he really is, which is 21(I think he acts more like his specified age, he looks like he could be 10 years older), plus he’s 6’5”, anyone would look tiny beside him. Sera is modelled as a typical young Japanese celebrity, who do look that small, but she’s 18.

I was happy that the storyline was linear, I like heavy-story, linear RPGs and there’s not as many around now. What I didn’t like was how narrow the line was in the first half - no matter that you jump from platform to platform, hall to hall, the actual range of space to play in was very small. I kept waiting for a chance to do some sidequests or just wander around and level, and we didn’t get that really until Gran Pulse. The sidequests weren’t really enough for me either, but oh well.

Also, FFVII’s impact is overrated because it was 1) the first big RPG that 2) killed off a major character with no foreshadowing 3) in a dramatic cutscene. I was shocked when it happened, though glad, because Aeris is the original manic pixie dream girl and she annoyed me.

I think with the advent of spoken dialogue and more realistic graphics, our expectations for how characters act get higher. When you actually read the dialogue of FFVII and FVIII and think how it would sound, it’s incredibly inane, but we didn’t notice because it wasn’t as obvious (being younger and more naive probably also helped). In FFXIII I constantly reminded myself that these characters are (mostly) in their teens and early 20’s - it made the dialogue much more believable.

Blitzgal, there are sidequests as well as chocobos.

The “a” sound in “Fal’cie” is a bit prolonged, so you get more of a “fall” sound to it, than “faal”  the cie is pronounced “see” so it’s not falsie but “fall-see”  A small distinction, but it’s not (in the American English version, I should specify) pronounced “faal-chee”

OH AND…there are towns, there are sidequests.  The difference here is that the towns are not really interactive.  There are no shops in towns, you don’t start dialogue with residents, etc.  Shopping is all handled through the save menu, which, imho, is FAR superior to walking around a town built JUST for shops.  Count me as a fan of the new shop system
As for sidequests, from where I’m watching, they happen in one place, and are a lot like the hunts of XII.  Not a ton of other stuff to do, though.  One of the developers pre-release said that they had cut nearly half the game over again in content, which is probably where all the side quests went.  Oh, well, instead we get a pretty streamlined game with a bit less frill.  OH!  And there’s chocobo digging   Who can complain

I bought FF III for SNES (VI in reality) when I was in high school, and it was the first one I bought with my own money and it was $70 or $80 (for those who complain about the price of games today…).  It’s my favorite.  Along with Phantasy Star II, they were the first two JRPGs I ever played, they were good.  So good games+years=the best evah!

FF XIII is pretty ok so far.  I thought I would hate the auto battle, but with the paradigm shifts, it’s actually pretty enjoyable.  The story is really no more nonsensical than say… Evangelion.  Angels are attacking the world?  And for some reason this wimpy emo kid is just right to pilot a giant robot thing?  Uh, OK!  I chalk it up to different cultures and just try to get one big surge of suspension of disbelief to ride through the story.  Accept the initial premise and the rest of the ride is much more enjoyable.  I still don’t understand the acceptance of apparently really little girls being fair game for romantic prospects, but I just try, like Aureas, to imagine they’re older but just physically small.

Yes but the big question, does it like all FF games fall apart completely in the 4th act?  Also known as you now got an airship but we no longer have any plot so go grind for 8 hours to prepare yourself for act 5.

What I really want to know is, do we ever get the FF victory music? WHERE IS IT?

Since the vast majority of the people angry are scaring me due to their level of love/hate for the whole genre let me keep my post simple.  It’s Japanese.  Each title is written in Japan for the Japanese audience.  Since I don’t know my Japanese mythology really at all I couldn’t fathom a guess but almost every FF game and most of their RPGs tie into the mythology and religion of their society.  Then you combine that with their sensibilities and you see why their games seem strange to us.  To western society it is either good or evil, to the eastern society (and this just a vague generalization) it is good, evil, and evelyn the angel-demon down the street who is neither good nor evil but a floating beauty who wants to sack your city and then love you forever more. 

Some of the point of the Japanese RPG genre is not getting it for Americans, the stories are interesting but really don’t make a great deal of sense for our moral compass as a whole.

There are two reasons the Aeris death was a big deal:

1) We forget how absurdly popular FFVII was.  It was a ton of people’s introduction to the genre.

2) The incredibly clever decision to have Aeris’s Plot Weapon show up after her death, thus gleefully rubbing it in.

Aeris was a main character and thoroughly playable.

That said, Aeris was a MPDG, with all the cultural baggage that implies.

Xeranar—I dunno, Okami isn’t so completely obtuse as all that, and you don’t get much more “Japanese mythology and culture” than that game.

jesse:  it’s what you might call a crapsack world.

Seems like a lot of pixles being spilled because some gamers have matured beyond the target audience of the game.

“Let me e’splain… no, that will take too long.  Let me sum up; Your favorite game sucks!”

I think the victory music does show up Astraea - I can’t remember if it’s after boss battles or high-level hunts…or maybe it’s when you get summons, but I’m 95% sure that it’s there.

I’m so sick of JRPGs that are ostensibly “T” rated games having hours of poorly-translated unskippable cutscenes that drone on like Vogon poetry about how !Important! friendship is. Or how judging people based on something they have no control over (race/illness/asshole parents) is BAD. You know what? They can put that stuff in. I don’t care. But don’t spend Planescape:Torment levels of dialog telling me shit I already learned when I was six.

That may be a Japanese thing.  Most Japanese teenagers spend so much of their time studying for their high school or college admissions exams that they may genuinely need to be reminded that “friendship is important.”  I know they definitely need to be reminded that judging people based on something they have no control over is bad.  Remember, this is a society that still penalizes people of Korean descent, even generations after the families have completely assimilated into Japanese society. 

I spent a year teaching in a Japanese junior high school, and this sort of thing (i.e., spending time talking about stuff that we all know already) happens all the time.  I think it’s more of a social ritual than anything else—either that, or it’s “let’s listen respectfully while the principal drones on and on about whatever thoughts happen to cross his mind this morning.”

The fact that the “Good” people live in a place called “cocoon” and habitually hunt and kill innocents who have been taken over by the “bad” spirit (including your team) sounds like they’re setting up a “what you think of as good is actually not that good” storyline. Maybe its a freewill vs determinism thing?

I’m not playing the game, though, so I have no idea. I still have to beat FFVII. Damn you sephiroth!

Ah, FF music.  Since Nobuo Uematsu left SE, it’s been a bit hit and miss.  The music is a lot more John Williams now with the occasional classic FF score tossed in (think Chocobo riding remix…again…and more ... western ... with lyrics).  I’ve not really been fond of the music since X, though the pop fun of X-2 was enjoyable.  I hated XII’s Star Wars Jr soundtrack.

We forget how absurdly popular FFVII was.  It was a ton of people’s introduction to the genre.

It was the first mass-market JRPG with mass-market (read: 3d) graphics on the first mass-market console (the PSX). It was not just most people’s first Final Fantasy, it was most people’s first RPG altogether. So yeah… some nostalgia might have set in.

I played it much later than the release (I got a Sega Saturn in the generation… had to wait a few years before getting on the PSX bandwagon). At roughly the same time I was playing Planescape Torment. So, yeah. My memory of it is of a lackluster JRPG compared to previous entries, being played right next to the best Western CRPG ever made. I might be biased in my recollections.

I’m surprised it took until comment #63 (I skimmed—sorry if I missed something) for someone to mention Japanese culture.

As one review of XIII I read mentioned, in an interview with the producer for the game, the linear story with afterschool-special morals, an ambiguos/confusing premise, and slow development are absolute STAPLES of what Japanese gamers look for in their RPGs and more cerebral animes.  We Americans tend to be impatient and want easier stories, fewer “triumph over adversity” themes, free reign over the environment and lots and lots and lots of swag collection.  I think lot of what FFXIII is has been lost in translation.

I’ve never missed an installment of the game, and that’s basically my take.  Personally, my favorites are VI, VII and VIII, with X as a runner up.  I hated XII.  Couldn’t make it 10 hours in without feeling hopelessly frustrated by the MMORPG setup.  (Okay, I lied, I skipped XI for that reason.)

Maybe it’s stupid, but I loved VIII.  Yes, the battle system was a pain, but I liked the grittiness and political intrigue and even the sappy lost-love reuinted through their children thing.  And the moombas.  I feel like there were a lot of subtleties that most people missed.  (I have friends who completely missed why Squall and Laguna were connected.  Seriously.)  At the same time, I can also understand why a lot of people didn’t like it.

My impressions of XIII at 15 hours in are that: 1) it is gorgeous, 2) the themes are familiar and probably more significant to a Japanese audience than an American one, 3) writing is mediocre and the characters are stale, 4) battle system is interesting but a bit too centralized 5) the extremely linear and timed progress of the game takes away a lot of the edge-of-the-seat quality but is the only way to tell a story this completely, and 6) will probably not have a lot of replay value.  Like it more than XII, but less than IX.

We are all different in our tastes.  The final fantasy games are always challenging those sorts of gamers who are very set in their ways.  They don’t always work, but there’s a good bet that any group of 10 final fantasy fans will have 10 favorite games.  As series go that’s a pretty impressive spread.

LOL—you think that the storyline is somehow “deep” and that us dumb Americans can’t grasp the complexity of it? It’s only the “omg the good guys aren’t who they say they are!” plot twist that every since JRPG ever has flogged.

I think you’re looking for depth where there is none. It’s that the plot twists and message are so mind-numbingly obvious that people actually try to invent hidden meanings to justify why they’re reading something so poorly-written.

If you compare the “ZOMG THE ANGELS ARE THE REAL BADGUYS!” plot twists of most JRPGs to something like the NWN titles or PS:T where even with a dichotomy of good and evil there are nuances and complexities, then I’m sorry, but western RPGs have JRPGs beat in the writing department every time when it comes to a western audience. And yes, it might be a difference in culture, but that doesn’t mean that I have to sit there being talked down to about how important friendship is because Japanese Culture is so different and I need to appreciate that they’re trying to tell me something very important. It may be that a Japanese gamer could look at something like Mask of the Betrayer and feel like the story is immature and facile, and they have every right to complain about western RPGs.

At least Lost Odyssey allowed a slightly more interesting cosmology even while it was trotting out wave after wave of over-the-top caricature of Evil Power-Hungry Bad Guys and bad O. Henry rip-off dreams.

I just noticed that Dragon Age: Origins Digital Deluxe edition (sort of like a GOTY edition) is on sale on Steam today. Guess I’ll be getting that.

It may be that a Japanese gamer could look at something like Mask of the Betrayer and feel like the story is immature and facile, and they have every right to complain about western RPGs.

Its kind of cheap to pick two Chris Avellone (who is the bestest) titles and say jrpg suck in comparison. I mean NWN1, DragonAge (characters are not plot) and Icewind Dale have amazingly shit stories. They make the story of ff10 look good.

I actually didn’t mind the NWN1 story. It wasn’t terribly complex, but it did what it needed to do and I never felt like they were trying to make more out of the thin story than they did. Icewind Dale was never supposed to be anything more than a straight-up dungeon crawl. But frankly, Chris Avallone *is* the writer for western RPGs. I’m sure there are JRPGs out there that aren’t complete tripe, they’re just hard as hell to find.

Again, I really don’t care if an RPG has a facile story (esp. if there are other redeeming qualities), but when they try to over-sell their weak story, I get annoyed. I mean, I doubt Jesse would have written this post if it hadn’t been twenty hours of flogging their weak-ass premise.

To be fair, I don’t know that Square is the worst offender. I refuse to buy a Namco-Bandai game ever again.

I just noticed that Dragon Age: Origins Digital Deluxe edition (sort of like a GOTY edition) is on sale on Steam today. Guess I’ll be getting that.

It’s good but not great. It rankles me that every sub mission of the main narrative thread has *exactly two* factions vying against each other and you need to choose one to join your army. Seems… convenient. Or more likely, lazy mission writing.

At least for most of them there isn’t a clear-cut “This is the Evil/Pragmatic faction”, “This is the Good/Hopelessly Idealistic faction”. Well, except for the blood thirsty cult that more or less wants you to take a piss on the most sacred relic of the national religion (I mean, I was playing a dwarf and couldn’t give a shit about the Maker, and I’m an atheist IRL, but even I know that this is just Bad with a capital B). I’m trying to find a character concept where siding with them won’t be hopelessly out of character, and I have a hard time even figuring my Blood Mage would do that on purpose (seems like the “kick old people for the fun of it” school of Evil).

I refuse to buy a Namco-Bandai game ever again.

Let me guess… you also got suckered into the .HACK fiasco?

Eternal Sonata was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I’m actually replaying PS:T now ... Gibberling’s 3 released a hi-res widescreen patch for it so my eyes don’t even bleed from the old graphics now. Such a great game. A bit of a beast on the difficulty curve, but deeply rewarding.

What can change the nature of a man?

It’s also worth pointing out that, AFAIK, the idea that your character couldn’t die (which is taken for granted now) was introduced with that game. I was trying to explain to a friend who’s just discovered gaming now that she’s playing WoW with her bf that when Torment came out, the idea that you didn’t have to reload every time your character kicked off pretty much blew the mind of every gamer, everywhere.

Again, I really don’t care if an RPG has a facile story

It matters to me when I’m playing. The lizard people from before recorded history coming back to rule the world was a “really, no really moment?” You should check out The Witcher. The enhanced edition that’s on steam has great writing and story and the only real problem is the game habitually giving you cringe worthy naughty pictures of women but that bothered me a lot less than bioware always writing twu wuv love stories.

But DA is going cheap because the expansion is out today or not tomorrow.

I’m told that persona 4 was a really good jrpg but I don’t have a ps2 so I don’t know.

You might find this really interesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUIuQUtCRq0

Its chris avellone talking about designing planescape torment. He starts at 2:47. Before that he is on about Kotor 2

pharma—the Witcher lost me at the “women as collectible cards” aspect of the game.

The lizard people from before recorded history coming back to rule the world was dumb, but at least you didn’t have over an hour of dialog where people stand around talking about how very bad it would be if the lizard people from before recorded history coming back to rule the world. And belaboring the point that the lizard people are bad. And that if they come back, it will mean very bad things. Oh, and twenty minutes of how Lady Aribeth is still that same Paladin from the beginning of the game even though she’s wearing a different suit of armor now that she’s renounced her faith and switched teams. And how she used to be good but now she’s bad. And how important friendship is. And how we shouldn’t judge our little thief friend because he’s a halfling.

That was a kind of naff move on their part and its pretty indefensible but the rest of the game is so well done I was able to let it go.

Its been a while but didn’t nwn 1 do exactly that kind of thing with arbeth?

No—you get her sympathetic backstory and that’s it. You know she’s turned evil, she’s left the faith, and you basically have to go off and deal with it. They don’t sit there and flog it to death that she’s betrayed her oath. In fact, it was pretty low-key at the start of Act II. She was gone and until you get well into the act you don’t realize the extent to which Aribeth has taken off.

I mean NWN1, DragonAge (characters are not plot) and Icewind Dale have amazingly shit stories.

The best thing about NWN1 was the wonderful array of user-generated content (mods, haks, etc.).  I enjoyed user-written mods more than I ever liked the NWN1 OC.  Of course, NWN2 had to kill all that (I’ve heard that the toolset is much harder to use than that of NWN1).  I still play NWN1 user mods—my machine is too slow to play NWN2 or DA without an infuriating amount of lag.

I’ll take your word for it. That still leaves NWN1 as being a total dungeoncrawl\grindfest which is 1\2 a jrpg. The other 1\2 being awkward sexually charged conversations with 13 year old girls and a man in black with white hair who wants a mystical stone and rpgamers want that. Or at least a decent story that will go in its place. Maybe we will get a japanese planescape one of these days and there will be awkward sexually charged conversations with a man in black with white hair and a 13 year old girl who wants a mystical stone.

Planescape Torment is a reference point and a masterpiece. I hope I can see another RPG surpass it in my lifetime (hopefully using the D&D4;ruleset or something similarly ‘modern’). It was perfect as a narrative, it had a great supporting cast of characters (your own character background is… well, vague on purpose) and it hits that sweet spot where it looks dated now because it’s 2d sprites with old computer resolution, but it’s not completly unplayable because the old graphics stop immersion (I believe it had 800x600 resolution! wow!) unlike, say, Baldur’s Gate (which I never could get into).

A few things i like about the FF13 gameplay:

a) auto-heal between fights. Seems like an innovation that’s not going away. It’s in D&D4;(to the great damnation of Simulationists everywhere), Dragon Age and now this. The root of that idea I believe was laid in Halo for the FPS genre, the idea that each encounter should be self-contained as much as possible. The advantage of that design is that it reduces long-term inventory management concerns which can lead into unwinnable game states when you’re not careful (you spent too much potions early in the game and now there’s no way you’ll ever get to the end). In counterpart, it means that individual battles can have ramped up difficulty because each is a self-contained event.

b) battle ranking. Coupled with a), changes the gameplay of previous FF games so that instead of each battle being an annoyance in between walking from point A to point B, every battle is a puzzle or contest that you need to score as high as possible in. If you like going about leisurely you can still just fight without caring for the star ranks, but if you like the competitive aspect of it you can try shooting for 5-stars in every battle. I know I’ve learned a bunch of combos just trying to figure out how to beat certain battles in 5 stars when I was stuck on 3 with another strategy. It makes battles fun. Whereas it used to be that FF was a movie where you occasionally got to play a game.

c) Paradigm Shift. Basically you need to create strategies first so there’s both the long term strategic view (pre-battle) and short term tactical view. This was necessary because of the removal of the old strategic gameplay, which was based on inventory and MP ressource management (which is a boring way to plan strategically, except for accountants). The shifts + ATB coupled with auto-attack also allow for a much more active pace to combat. Instead of choosing Attack, Heal, etc… you’re choosing Commando, Healer, etc. Then in challenging battles you can customize further by choosing individual Skills instead of automating your actions.

I just wish the plot was as good as the gameplay. I certainly hope they keep elements of the gameplay in future games.

thank you for review !

Ponygirl@68

And yes, it might be a difference in culture, but that doesn’t mean that I have to sit there being talked down to about how important friendship is because Japanese Culture is so different and I need to appreciate that they’re trying to tell me something very important.

Agreed.  My only point (assuming you were responding to me) was that ritualized Talking About Things We Already Know appears to be a Japanese cultural thing.  I in no way meant to imply that we Westerners have to enjoy it, or that those who don’t cannot appreciate the “depth” of Japanese culture.  Frankly, I found it irritating when I was there.

No, because the lizard people popped up at the end. The problem with the NWN original campaigns is that they can’t write an ending to save their life, which is unfortunate. Often, it’s hard to draw a straight line from the main plot of the game to the ending. This is not good. But just because NWN2 ended with “rock falls and kills everyone and then you woke up” didn’t mean I didn’t (mostly) have a good time during the actual game.

At the beginning of the OC for NWN1, you are in a city that is sealed off because it is being stricken with a nasty plague. You have quarters of the city that are not accessible because chaos is starting to take hold. You’re not sure what’s causing the plague (ok, I admit I’ve got a bit of fascination with the Black Death, but it’s still a good hook). Again, you have the cliche of “the people who are supposed to be helping are actually spreading the plague!” But here’s the thing: You don’t have to spend 20 minutes hearing over and over again how you got taken for a sucker. Turns out that the priests were spreading the plague. So we deal with that and we move on and the game respects that we a) know how to read b) have the ability to remember things all on our own without being reminded like we’re two and haven’t figured out that we need to wash our hands after using the potty, and c) can reasonably determine moral value or emotional reaction based on actions without a lot of prompting. We don’t have to listen to some 4 page monologue about how betrayed you feel because the priests turned out to be bad guys. We get it. The priests are assholes.

OK, next.  Then, with the city weakened, you have to go and deal with the fact that there is a hostile nation to the south that has been looking for a moment of weakness. We don’t get subjected to longwinded exposition about just how evil Luskan is, how bad war with Luskan would be, how war causes so much pain and suffering and we have to do Everything! We! Can! to prevent it, because war is so BAD! We discover that Luskan is looking to use Neverwinter’s weakened state to take over and we fucking get to it. No speechifying. No soliloquies. No “let’s examine how bad the Luskans are from every angle and make sure we show teary-eyed kids whose fathers are soldiers so we can drive home how bad war is and how important! it is to prevent war with Luskan.”

Whether or not you sign on to the plot is entirely up to you. Western RPGs don’t feel the need to force-feed buy-in the way that JRPGs do.

Captain Bathrobe, fair enough

Length of mindless prattling does not equal deep storytelling.  My moment of eye-rolling in anything Japanese is where the villain utter the phrase “You must agree that ...”, because whatever follows after is going to be either (a) so incomprehensibly stupid as to defy any hope you ever had for humanity (“power and leadership are the rightful due of the one who can sew the most zombie hamsters to their genitals”), or (b) so full of logical loopholes and outright fallacies that the ramblings of “hard-core” internet libertarians living in their moms’ basements seem Solomonic in comparison.  Add to that the fact that it generally takes me about 5 minutes to tell you who is the secret bad guy because they all but tattoo ‘I R BAD DUDE” across his forehead, and I can only surmise that the Japanese audience for this sort of thing are either mentally retarded or high on Keith-Richardsian levels of drugs.  And it truly bites when trying to play a game, since the developers of said game seem dead-set against me doing that.  I don’t care how mind-blowing you think your fifth-generation photocopy of the plot of a Very Special Episode of Blossom is, if it takes more than 15 minutes of cut-scenes (total; this does not include interactive dialogue unless you start taking 10 screens of exposition to my one 3-word sentence) for every 10 hours of gameplay, you suck at game design.  “Lizard-men from beyond time” worked perfectly well because it wound up the characters, ie the player, and let them go.  It didn’t require sandbagging the player every 2.345 seconds to flash a cut-scene where you watch passively while the Emo-Retard Actors Troupe reprises their summer-stock ensemble of the smash hit (in 1385 BC) of Bad Dorm-room Philosophy for the Simple Set.

The plot of NWN1 was you are in a central hub and you have to collect an item in each map that is off that central hub. Its just a dungeon crawl. In the first hub its magic animals and then its onto the next hub and the plot is entirely cursory. Its just an excuse to send you off to fight somewhere else.

Contrast that to Mask of the Betrayer where you go somewhere in order to have a conversation and find something out. You fight along the way but if you cut that out it would be fine. If you cut the fighting from NWN1 all you have is item collecting. The lizard people is so stupid but in a way it fits because why the hell not? It has no more depth than anything else you were doing. 

Whether or not you sign on to the plot is entirely up to you. Western RPGs don’t feel the need to force-feed buy-in the way that JRPGs do

If you aren’t signed up for the plot and characters you may as well play Diablo. And that’s fine too but as an rpg I think it sucks.

Western RPGs don’t feel the need to force-feed buy-in the way that JRPGs do.

Incidently, I can’t remember this having been how FF6 (or FF4 for that matter) dealt with their own plots. Maybe that’s why I liked them better. Sure there was the Evil Empire but the characters weren’t spending the whole game being emo about how life sucked, they were actually doing something about it.

But I have to give credence to the “Japanese culture” effect. *We* don’t have to like it. But when Lightning basically goes “The gods use as as pawns, let’s kill them and destroy our own society as well”, I’m reminded of the fact that Japan is a country where people dying from overworking themselves is frequent enough that they make PSAs about it telling people it’s okay to not do overtime *every day*. Where obedience to authority in general is seen as just and good. In America maybe the theme of a bunch of rebels going against their own government isnt’ exactly novel… in Japan I think they must have a great need of these narratives, hence why they’re (ironically) mass producing them.

No, if you aren’t signed up for the plot, no amount of forcing the plot is going to do the trick. You’re mistaking allowing the plot to rest on its own with not having a plot. I felt that the plots of the OC for both NWN1 and 2 were perfectly acceptable for me to play with. I felt that the plague situation in Neverwinter was a fine plot device to get you dungeon crawling, but considering each of the four quarters had its own PLOT DRIVEN problem that you had to resolve in order to claim the magical mcguffin animals, it wasn’t just Nethack set in a plague city by a longshot. Mask of the Betrayer was fantastic. But at no point did I feel that any western RPG was trying to FORCE me to accept the plot with the exception of PS:T which we’ve established is an exemplary bit of writing so it’s allowed. If I wanted to approach the game as a dungeon crawl, that was within my right. If I wanted to ponder the implications of The King of Shadows as a tortured being stripped of his humanity, created to defend a dying civilization, whose very existence sends unintended ripples throughout the various planes of reality, that was being roused from what was supposed to be an indefinite sleep against his will by evil wizards for Nefarious Purposes, then the game gives me plenty to work with so that I can do that without forcing me to contemplate those things with longwinded cutscenes and unskippable dialog. I’m free to explore what I want to explore at my own pace. I am allowed to accept the plot or not. That doesn’t mean I should just play Diablo. It means the game respects my ability to interact with the themes and messages of the game without making absolutely sure that I comprehend every little point the writer is trying to make.

BlackBloc—did you play the Mask of the Betrayer expansion for NWN2? It sort of requires that you complete the OC, but I really feel it’s some of the best RPG writing I’ve encountered since PS:T.

Xeranar—I dunno, Okami isn’t so completely obtuse as all that, and you don’t get much more “Japanese mythology and culture” than that game.

I was shooting for humor largely.  But if you dig deep enough almost all of the JRPGs come from some mythological reference.  Eastern society no matter how consumer-influenced they are by the west still don’t share our ideals about most things.  I guess the most ironic thing is that the only eastern games we do seem like imported are Mario, Sonic, and RPGs and Mario is about as silly as you get with an attempt to be “American.”

I think NWN1 was the closest a computer game has come to simulating D&D;—again, due to the plethora and relative ease of creating user-generated content.  There are literally thousands of user-generated NWN1 adventures.  Sure, most of them suck, but some are truly remarkable—far superior to any of the commercially available NWN franchise adventures out there.

Of course, I am probably more charitable toward user-generated content, since the fact that a private citizen has spent hundreds if not thousands of hours to create an adventure that lazy slobs like me can download and play for free is pretty damn cool.  It’s democratic at its core:  if you don’t like the stories that the big studios are putting out, then go out and make some of your own.  Of course, most of us (like me) have lives and lack the scripting ability to do so, but that fact that so many people did is probably the neatest thing about the NWN franchise.

I frequently try to build some user-generated content for NWN2 (it sucks having a world and a book stuck in your head and not enough time to properly program it), but the toolkit for NWN2 is pretty difficult to use. I wonder if they ever fixed that problem where you couldn’t move the x/y coordinates of the camera while you were working on an area.

NWN1 didn’t have jack shit in terms of theme and for that matter NWN2 wasn’t up to much either in plot. It was an improvement but it was a far cry from very good. Compare it to its predeccesors Baldurs gate 2 or even 1 and it is flavorless. And they should try to make the character get involved in the plot and if they fail its a failure but if they don’t it means you are playing a game that isn’t as good as its rivals in the gameplay department. No rpg plays as well as an action game or a strategy game. Unreal tournament is a better shooter than Deus Ex and if Deus Ex can’t draw you into its world you are just playing a bad fps where everyone wears trench coats

unskippable dialog <i> is something presumably every modern game has done away with it.

<i> It’s canonical.

That doesn’t mean its a good idea and they toss that stuff around a lot anyway.

It’s a lot better than Dragon Age’s setting, where every. bad. thing. is the result of the same monolithic evil.

Might ponygirl hasn’t played it so I’m not going to spoil it but at the very least what’s going on with the elves and dwarves isn’t a result of the same monolithic evil.

But I’m not comparing NWN1 and NWN2 to Baldur’s Gate 2 or even 1. I’m comparing them to crap like Baiten Kaitos and Eternal Sonata and Tales of Symphonia. And yes, comparing the plots of NWN1 or 2 to just about every JRPG I’ve played has NWN coming out ahead. It might tie with Lost Odyssey, but that’s being generous to a 4-DVD emo-fest that wants very badly to be Planescape Torment with a fucking GUN AXE.

We should also point out that Mass Effect and its sequel has had some pretty positive things to say about writing. It’s not fantasy, but it’s still a Western RPG.

I guess we will have to agree to disagree. I like that they are willing to try to get you involved in the plot. They try to make a world, to give a sense of place and then threaten it. They may fuck it up more often than not and it turns out to be a bad game but the idea is right and when they do make it work you get something fantastic. Even when they fuck it up with horrible characters like in ff10 they do make a better world than a lot of what you get in wrpgs with the goddamn elves, dwarves, lords and ladies and every other thing that is just so played out. 

I was posting about Mass Effect somewhere above and the second one is sooooooo good.

I was ruined on Mass Effect because my husband is one of those 100% players. So whenever I walked by it seemed like he was cruising around a barren wasteland on a buggy mission in the first ME, and in ME2 he would spend hours on end scanning for minerals. I heard “probe away” in my sleep.

Oh wow. The driving around thing could get tiring in mass effect but in mass effect 2 you really don’t have to spend that long looking for minerals. Its like a couple of minutes between missions. The mini game was a bad idea but nothing is perfect.

3) It’s a lot better than Dragon Age’s setting, where every. bad. thing. is the result of the same monolithic evil. Ogres, even dragons are demonic darkspawn? It makes for a world that feels very small. Doesn’t feel anything at all like D&D;to me.

Never played NWN, but as a D & D player from the AD & D era onwards, I gotta just disagree here.  Maybe the dialogue thing feels hackneyed nowadays, and maybe the choices could be more complex than the be a jerk/be a hero binary dialogue trees you tend to be given, but I find that the characters and the relationships you develop with them are far more gratifying than the last tabletop game I played:  it was billed as a “sandbox” game, but it turned out to be a hackneyed borefest.  With a DM that couldn’t roleplay his way through a supermarket checkout line. 

DA:O has a fascinating political feel to it, like a slightly more high fantasy version of Song of Ice and Fire.  I really liked how they presented the Dwarves, and the City Elves (haven’t played the Dalish Elf origin and we haven’t reached that part of the game), and the Mages Circle.  And since I have these 4th Edition D & D books cluttering my shelf with no one to play with, DA is the closest I’m going to get to a real game for a long time.  Sniff.

The only problem, devolution-wise, with Mass Effect 2, was COME ON REALLY AMMUNITION’S JUST LAYING AROUND? I pretty much stopped playing it after about 3 hours and have yet to start back up, Martin Sheen’s voice notwithstanding.

Ammo on the ground bothered you that much? I think its a good design choice because in ME1 you just use the same gun all the time without ammo limits. In ME2 limited ammo forces you to use different weapons and powers. Most of the time its dead enemies dropping it or its on shelves and whatnot

I’m not going to give my reasons but no it ain’t and the discussion can’t really go any further here.

Sorry to come in so late to the discussion, but I feel like I need to offer a bit of a defense of the whole ‘blah blah friendship blah’ thing. I don’t get the impression that it’s about education or trying to tell people something they don’t already know (“Friendship is good!”) so much as about characterization. It’s about portraying the main characters as Good People with the Right Ideals. Your typical JRPG of the sort being talked about here is basically a feel-good escapist ‘good triumphs over evil’ story at its core. For that kind of story to work, both the good and the evil need to come across as genuine. I think it’s an attempt at that.

Admittedly, it comes across as shallow when done poorly, but I really think you’re exaggerating, Mighty Ponygirl, about how bad it is. Most well done games of the genre, I think, do a pretty good job of passing off the ‘friendship is good!’ speeches as legitimate conversation. Of course, I haven’t played any of the games you single out as particularly bad offenders, so maybe I’m just the ignorant one here.

I ain’t really played it or anything but it sounds like Jesse is saying that this Final Fantasy game is a Final Fantasy game?

What’s that you say? Navel-gazing? Boring characters? Incomprehensible bullshit? Why I never!?

It’s a lot better than Dragon Age’s setting, where every. bad. thing. is the result of the same monolithic evil. Ogres, even dragons are demonic darkspawn?

In DA:O, dragons are not darkspawn, and neither are demons for that matter. There is no Big Bad behind the deal with the dwarves (it’s all politics), the issue with the elves has nothing to do with the darkspawn and neither did the Circle of Magi problems. Denerim issues are all political as well and related to Orlesian politics.

Dragons are dragons. Some of the more powerful ones were Old Gods. When the darkspawn get a hold of an Old God they infect it and turn it into an Archdemon. It does not follow that the dragons are darkspawn (there is one near Andraste’s Tomb which is NOT a darkspawn).

Other things that aren’t darkspawn: reanimated corpses, werewolves, abominations…

August Fifteenth—I had to abandon Symphonia 2 after five hours of gameplay made me want to rip the heads off of puppies.

PUPPIES I SAY.

Maybe it was a culmination of everything that had been bothering me about JRPGs, but the fact that a) the main character could barely stop talking about how scared and unimportant he was to catch his breath, b) we had played for hours and still not gotten to the part where we could play co-op mode (like advertised… sort of defeats the purpose), c) we had played for hours and still not gotten out of tutorial bullshit, d) we had played for hours and most of that time was padding with the main character flashing back to a conversation that had played literally a minute earlier in the game, e) we had played for hours and every character that was introduced was introduced at least two-three times, but each time the character was introduced the player was reminded that it was the same character as the person before… so even though the hair, face, boots, etc were all the same, the fact that this time the character was wearing a *RED SCARF* they were in fact the same character you’d seen only a few minutes before, and every time they were introduced we were reminded that “this is a bad character. They’re bad. Don’t forget, we hate them!”, oh yeah, and a lot of extra special messaging about how it’s wrong to be mean to people for things they can’t control (like who their parents are, etc).

Rather than repeat more of less what I just wrote about a different title, I’ll just point you to This review I did a while back for Eternal Sonata.

Mighty Ponygirl -

I’ll accept that Tales of Symphonia 2 and Eternal Sonata have terrible writing. Like I said, I haven’t played them. How do you feel about the friendship speeches in, say, Persona 4, which is a game I would consider well-written?

I really liked how they presented the Dwarves, and the City Elves (haven’t played the Dalish Elf origin and we haven’t reached that part of the game), and the Mages Circle.

The Dalish elves are probably the most disappointing part, conceptually speaking. They didn’t really do much except the outcast angle which you know already. But if you’ve saved it for last then at least you’ll get through it more quickly (when you have all the powers you need at your disposal it’s a lot easier to chew through enemies in that game).

Is there a better plotted JRPG than Chrono Trigger? It’s been too long since I played Suikoden 2 (which has been mentioned). My favorite-plotted FF is actually 10, though everyone hates Tidus. It does a pretty good job of exposition and has a decent enough cosmology.

I don’t think NWN has got a very good plot; its strength is really in the user mods.

I think Starcraft has the best plot! No, not that single player stuff—the multiplayer against the computer kind! Nothing beats the drama of trying to build a bunker and hearing “not enough minerals” ... freaking heartstopping. Truly, limited supplies of glowing blue resources are the real villain.

August, I don’t own a Playstation. It may be that all of the Playstation JRPGs burst stars from the eyes of Henry James and Jane Austen, but I somehow doubt it. The best JRPG story I have encountered thus far, as I already wrote, was Lost Odyssey, and it still had horrible voice acting, ridiculous caricature badguys, and a little too overestimated in its own depth… a lot of those dreams read like an episode of The Scary Door.

It looks like I may be remembering Lost Odyssey through rose-colored glasses.

horrible voice acting

a little too overestimated in its own depth

You never see any of this in western rpgs. Have fun with Dragon Age by the way. It got review scores in the 90s everywhere and it totally would never have any problems like you just mentioned.

I have never had a western RPG put a bunch of gasping and non-words to fill space between dialog because it was poorly localized. I’ve yet to see a maniacal laughing badguy in a western RPG. and I’ve already addressed that western RPGs, even if they have a silly plot, at least don’t keep beating you over the head with how important the horrible plot is and you’re free to ignore it if you like.

Yeah, we talked about plot earlier. That’s not where I was at. I’m saying they share a lot of faults. Specifically the ones you mentioned. Especially the voice acting one and the caricature characters one.

How you have a problem with caricature characters and enjoyed NWN2 is beyond me. How many times are we going to get a drunken dwarf with a scottish accent and a thing for violence as a major npc? And there was that bit at the end where they tried to steal depth by ripping character concepts from planescape torment. I felt bad for them. And the voice acting? I guess you thought the two people that voiced almost all of oblivion sounded plausible.

Oblivion was an RPG? I thought it was a strange FPS-style game coupled with a GTA-like sandbox. I got tired of the game before I even found out there was a story (apparently while I was busy getting lost in an unimaginably vast wasteland devoid of story content, there was some sort of plot going on in some other part of the gameworld that I would have eventually gone on to see if I’d found it).

At least Fallout 3 gave me some indications that I should be moving in a given direction. But I hate Bethesda games. You should have figured it out when I noted that I saw the streamlining of the stupid exploration aspect in FF13 as a *plus* for it.

drunken dwarf with a scottish accent and a thing for violence as a major npc

.... who wanted to train to be a monk.

C’mon. That was original and you know it.

That was the most minor of twists. They have the exact same guy in Dragon Age and the minor twist is he has a sort of southern accent. He’s still a violent drunk but he’s on your side so its all in good fun. They have the exact same guy in BG2 but he sexually harasses aerie and is a bit evil.  They had the elf druid who is just kerazy for nature and all nature related products, the stiff upright paladin, the thief who is kind of wacky and just in it for the fun, the sorceress who just wants to set shit on fire. It was a collection of dnd archetypes.

I’d recommend that if you don’t like lots of dialogue and character interaction in the form of dialogue, JRPGs in general are not going to be your thing. Ponygirl, that’s what it sounds like you dislike the most. And yes, JRPGs usually have lots of this. I enjoy it. I tried Morrowind and Oblivion, but honestly didn’t get a feeling of an overarching story, which is important to me in an RPG. I guess that’s why I like the linear nature of JRPGs.

I don’t buy that this makes JRPGs overall inferior to WRPGs though

lijakaca—you could suggest that, but you’d be wrong. Torment had epic levels of dialog and I liked that just fine.

What part of I don’t like being told the same shit over and over and over again are you not grasping, people? Or am I about to reach the magical JRPG level of repetition where you guys will suddenly cue in that this is important?

If you are sick of the conversation that’s fine. Yesterday I disagreed with you about the importance of plot. We had a variety of arguments about that.

Today you claimed that jrpgs have a problems that wrpgs don’t, such as the same caricatures turning up over and over when they of course do. I haven’t been saying the same things over and over. How are you not grasping that, pony. If you say it loud enough will it get to a magical level where its becomes true?

I don’t think the strength of the FF series have EVER been the plots - they are too convoluted, too ridiculous, to deus ex especially in the last quarter, to really provide me any emotional catharsis.  What FF seems to have done well (especially since FF7) is tie together some really impressive scenes into a sort of narrative, and put those scenes into an interesting gameplay matrix.  Each game has its own little gameplay formulas, and by and large, they are pretty decent.  I think the series reached its zenith of this “pretty scenes connected moderately to one another” in FFX, where there were moments of honest beauty in between grinding by killing bandersnatches (also - bandersnatch?  Seriously?)

I’m not that far into XIII yet, but I’m expecting much of the same: mind-blowing visuals and a fun activity to do (combat) in between the next pretty set-piece.  I haven’t turned to JRPGs for serious, compelling storytelling ever.  Bioshock 1 had a better story about free will and good/evil than any FF I’ve ever played.

I’m fine with allowing that there are caricatures in WRPGs. My biggest problem is Maniacal Laughing Evil Villain who Kicks Puppies and Executes Grannies. Don’t see a lot of those in WRPGs and it seems like I can’t go 20 minutes in a JRPG without that villain not only making an appearance but doing yet another Dastardly Act of Evil to Remind You Just How Evil He Is In Case You Forgot. Stereotypical Gimli just doesn’t bother me compared to that, because I don’t have to sit through cutscenes of Kelghar being a stereotypical drunken brawling dwarf every five minutes, like I would in a JRPG.  Casavir was pretty stereotypical, except for when he fucked me. Wasn’t expecting to get down with that.

Bioshock 1 had a better story about free will and good/evil than any FF I’ve ever played.

Big agree! there. I don’t really think of Bioshock as an RPG though ... I know it’s billed as one, but it’s a shooter. Not really your argument, I know.

The problem of the JRPG genre (or RPGs in general) is that, as much as I like stories in my games, game designers overvalue story as a component of the videogame medium. Video games are not novels or cinema. Because games are an infant medium, it seems that the artistic minded designers feel a need to make them Serious Art. And they do it by aping other mediums instead of working with the strengths of this one. In this sense, for the ‘connoisseurs’ a game with ANY story whatsoever is seen as inherently superior in the artistic sense, and more Serious, as games without story. Most of the success of the JRPG genre in general and FF in particular stems from this bias, that even the crappiest narrative is inherently superior to no narrative at all, and that it supplants gameplay in importance (lame gameplay was excusable in the days of the first Dragon Quest and FF, but the idea of filler battles whose only purpose is to force long-term ressource management while being individually trivial and boring has been around since then and only has been challenged very recently by modern designs).

IMO the pinacle of gaming qua gaming is Tetris. It has no narrative but it has an elegant design and the gameplay itself is paramount. And as an art form I’d have to say Shadow of the Colossus / ICO are, and again there’s next to no narrative to speak of in those two games. A narrative tends to run counter to the strength of video gaming as a medium, which is player control. I think most of the artfulness in a good narrative game is in the tension between gameplay and narrative being transcended. Unfortunatly it seems for many game designers that the art of gaming resides in narrative subsuming gameplay and making it *at best* a secondary element of your game (I’m looking at you, Metal Gear Solid series).

Mighty Pony Girl-read up on thr SMT series in general and the Persona series in particular.  If you have a PSP consider picking up Persona 3 Portable when it comes out.

As for DA:O and everything come from one super evil, god no.  In fact thats a big issue, there is no proof of god and the origin of the darkspawn is tied up in the Chant and an overall hatred of the Tevinter (read Rome) Empire and their dragon worship. And given you that find out how the darkspawn are created and that doesn’t jive with what teh Chantry states assigning good and evil to anything is difficult.

And why side with the cultists?  You’re a mage that hates life under thr chantry’s yoke, you’re an elf and feel no love for the foreign religion of an invading people?  You just don’t feel like fighting them?

BlackBloc—very well said.

One game that I felt had a fantastic story was Portal. This is a game that was basically a FPS puzzle game. Rather than beat you over the head with exposition and longwinded dialogs about why things the way they are, you learn the story almost completely in the negative space: the fact that you are increasingly referred to as an android, the fact that you are put through incrementally more dangerous rooms, all of these things you can laugh at as just the game’s wacky humor. But when you are exploring the remains of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center after breaking out of the last test area, the story begins to unfold in a very quiet, eerie way—there are no log files, there are no dialog sequences. There are empty conference rooms and abandoned labs. The only interaction with any previous survivors is the bloody messages they’ve scrawled on the wall that became the catchphrase of the year.

Hemingway wrote “the world’s shortest novel” and I feel Portal interacted in much the same way.

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Yeah Portal was awesome. GLADOS had more personality than most JRPG (or WRPG) protagonists or antagonists, in much less screentime.

It’s also an example of a basic rule of cinema narrative: show, don’t tell. In games I would amend that to “let your players do, don’t show nor tell”.

BlackBloc -
I’d argue that video games do have one advantage as a narrative medium over novels or especially film: they let you interact with the story and examine it from multiple angles. Novels or film have to move straight forward consistently, but in a videogame, you can take your time to explore the setting. When done well, that aspect can really help the world seem alive. In other words, videogames are good for worldbuilding.

Give me a generic fantasy novel, and I assure you I won’t care one bit about the history or culture of madeuptopia. But put the same sort of thing in a videogame, and at the very least I’ll have some fun exploring.

Portal’s actually a really good example of this. It would have probably only made for a mediocre film or novel, but being able to explore the facility (a little) and piece together what was going on made it a deeply engrossing experience.

Give me a generic fantasy novel, and I assure you I won’t care one bit about the history or culture of madeuptopia. But put the same sort of thing in a videogame, and at the very least I’ll have some fun exploring.

That’s a valid point, but how much of that is you being a captive audience?

In a book, when J.R.R. Tolkien decides to go on for five-six pages about the history of Tom Bombadil, you either dig it or you don’t. If you don’t dig it, then you could suffer through it (which is going to bring down your enjoyment of the book), or you could decide the book isn’t worthwhile, or you could try to flip ahead and hope you didn’t miss anything critical.

With Videogames, we have the third choice, which is the Optional Narrative. You could find a book on a library shelf and open it up to read about the history of the 3rd Kingdom and why the King of Smake decided to declare war on the Gerbilians, or you could just ignore it and focus on the plot at hand and assume that the unskippable stuff is mostly left to the information that is germain to the main plot-at-hand (like how the dreams in Lost Odyssey were skippable).

When games don’t do this, or operate in a sort of “the 12 days of christmas in reverse” where they have to repeat everything you already know in order to tag one more item onto the end of it, they circumvent the player’s ability to interact with the story at the level they are most comfortable with.

Here’s an example that touches on a related thing: I’m replaying Okami at the moment and it’s a wonderful, imaginative game. It keeps the repetitive crap to a minimum, but there is absolutely no assumption that the player is intelligent enough to explore and solve a puzzle on their own. The *second* I walk into a room, there’s a cutscene.

Is it going to tell me something important about the plot (show the bars going down, show someone running through that door over there, etc?) or is it going to show Issun pointing out exactly how I need to beat the room before I even have a chance to figure it out on my own?  I can’t hit the “skip” button because I don’t want to take the chance that something important to the plot is going to be revealed, so instead I have to sit and listen to Issun point out the obvious bomb-here crack in the wall that I noticed the second the room came into view and suggest that I bomb it. We’ve come to expect that hints for a game should be on an as-needed basis, and so when a game takes that away from you and wastes your time pointing out stuff that you either already knew or could have figured out pretty quickly, it’s pretty obnoxious.

Honestly, poor writing and character development doesn’t bother me so much as when I have no choice but to sit through it.

For example: Let’s say that the King of Smake is up to no good, something I could have surmised for myself based on the fact that I’ve been battling his Royal Guard for the last 3 hours.

Instead of forcibly taking me from my own POV to His Majesty’s royal chambers, where he is currently laughing maniacally over a pool of bubbling puppies which he is tossing grandmothers into so that he can spawn new, tougher opponents for me to fight, why not do this instead: I walk up to the Old Lady With The Magic Mirror. She says “The King of Smake is up to no good, he creates monsters. The proof is in the mirror.” Would I like to look in the mirror? If I decide that I’ve gotten what I need from the Old Lady’s account, I can decline and still have the same plot point as if I said yes and got the full cutscene.  Moreover, by making this something that the player can elect to view by means of some sort of surveilence (rather than a straight-up Meanwhile Back On The Ranch cutscene), the player is now allowed to interact more directly with the story by being left to wonder if the Old Lady is trustworthy, or if she’s making shit up because she hates the royal family and wants them all to die and wants to trick you into doing it.

Ack, that third paragraph made no sense.

Basically, I want stuff that isn’t germane to the plot at hand to be optional. It can be a sidequest, even, but I shouldn’t have to know about the history in order to enjoy the game, and I really shouldn’t have to read a bunch of history texts if they have no purpose but to flesh out the world.

game designers overvalue story as a component of the videogame medium

And I can only put it this way again. if you play an rpg and you aren’t into it for the story or the characters you are either playing a sub average action game or sub average strategy game. Unless you are into the setting and story of Fallout 2 you should play Jagged Alliance 2 instead because Fallout 2 is a crap turn based strategy game and if you don’t like JC or care about the plot in Deus Ex you should play Unreal Tournament instead because Deus Ex is a crap shooter. They don’t cut it as games without the story. 
 

Because games are an infant medium, it seems that the artistic minded designers feel a need to make them Serious Art.

To a very large degree I think the total opposite is true. Certainly the majority of what sells well isn’t artistic in anyway. This week the big release is God of War 3. Graphically lovely but more less just another adrenaline fueled power fantasy.

My biggest problem is Maniacal Laughing Evil Villain who Kicks Puppies and Executes Grannies. Don’t see a lot of those in WRPGs and it seems like I can’t go 20 minutes in a JRPG without that villain

Even if you have the villain every 20 minutes you are stuck with your npcs all the time. And you totally do see them in wrpgs.

It’s also an example of a basic rule of cinema narrative: show, don’t tell. In games I would amend that to “let your players do, don’t show nor tell”.

I disagree but I find it difficult to phrase why. Its like every main character will become John Everyman. Like Niko Bellic is an interesting guy but I in no way identify with him.

They don’t cut it as games without the story.

pharma, or it might be that the story would have been good as a novella, but they decided to make a 1600-page trilogy out of it and force you, clockwork-orangelike, to absorb as much of their MASTERPIECE as they could fit on the disc. 

More is not always better.

I’m not saying that its a success every single time or even most of the time I’m saying its necessary for an rpg to have a story that pulls you in (and failures can only try). I think they should cut down the size of the games because they go on for too long and they should integrate the story into the gameplay better but without a story what are they really?

Here’s the problem though. When you say “the story HAS to pull you in,” then you get a lot more bloated abominations than you do trim, elegant stories.

The story doesn’t HAVE to do anything other than “not suck.” If it’s a good story, it *will* pull me in. If it’s a mediocre story, then I can cruise along and enjoy the game on the level that I’m most comfortable with. If it’s a bad story, I abandon the game. But if it’s a mediocre story that tries to manhandle me into treating it like it’s a good story, I’m going to have problems with it.

OC for NWN2—had a mediocre story. There were parts that dragged and I admit I abandoned the game for a long time when I couldn’t figure out why the hell I was in these damn cliche orc caverns. But around Act II it got going and pulled me in.

Mask of the Betrayer had a fantastic story and I couldn’t stop playing the game. I think that was the fastest runthrough of a game I’d ever pulled.

Storm of Zehir—2nd expansion for NWN2 had a weak story. The game was pretty enjoyable as a straight-up dungeon crawl and the plotpoints were interesting enough to keep me going even if I don’t rave about it. But the story wasn’t horrible and there was no point where I felt I was *suffering* through the story. So I kept playing it. If they had tried to beat me over the head with their weak story, I would have abandoned it.

Mysteries of Westgate—download-only expansion for NWN2 had a BAD story. I couldn’t get involved in the game, even in the “well, maybe I could just dungeoncrawl this shit” capacity. They made their bad story too much of a centerpiece to the game, where you were required to sit through the story in order to move along.

Here’s the problem though. When you say “the story HAS to pull you in,” then you get a lot more bloated abominations than you do trim, elegant stories.

Entirely true but most books in a bookshop aren’t great and most films in the cinema are garbage.

The bit that wrecked my head the most in the OC was killing undead and the necromancer in the graveyard with the dwarf and the thief. It was so incredibly generic and completely pointless I was wondering why it was even in the game.

NWN2 was not a good game. It doesn’t have much of a plot, the setting is played out and the characters are dull as hell. It picks up a bit in places like with the stuff in bald warlock’s castle or the trial, or the siege but so what. I kept playing because I wanted a savegame for MotB and because 3.5 mechanics amuse me but that’s like playing a star wars game for the sound of lightsabers. The truth is I’d rather play prototype than go near it again. Protoype throws endless generic mobs at me but at least its fun as hell to kill them

That’s just how it goes though with rpgs. I get them on the basis of reviews that say they have good stories and interesting characters. I hope they aren’t going to suck and I wait until the price drops a bunch if I’m uncertain.

if you play an rpg and you aren’t into it for the story or the characters you are either playing a sub average action game or sub average strategy game

We are agreed, except I don’t qualify it with an “if”. If you are playing an RPG most of the time you ARE playing a sub average game, period. And you’re suffering through it to get at little tidbits of story, like some codependant. And somehow, so-called fans of the genre use that fact as a crutch to refuse to accept the reality, that the gameplay FAIL is not an intrinsic function of the genre, and they refuse to take game designers to task and demand quality gameplay with their story. Worse, many fans point out the crap gameplay as an advantage because they like story and believe there’s some ludicrous zero-sum competition between story and gameplay (like the defenders of old school D&D;in the face of the mechanistically superior 4th edition).

Blackbloc @131, you’re kind of missing the point by lumping in Tetris with, say NWN because they’re both “games”; you might as well try to compare a steeplechase with a Ferris wheel because they both involve “rides”.  Narrative games are not all that new; surely you’re old enough to remember Colossal Cave and Zork? Which is really what narrative games like NWN and BG and so forth are: interactive fiction. So yes, it is a bit silly to dismiss criticism of JRPGs or other RPGs by saying, in essense, that nobody cares about the narrative structure of Tetris. When the structure of the game is supposed to hang on the story, what’s wrong with criticizing the story?

I’m also not buying the argument that stupid plots in JRPGs are secretly OK, which lets us pick between the delightful choices of the Japanese having the easy-to-please, narrative unsophistication of children, or Americans being cultural idiots who only think FFXIII is stupid because we’re so culturally blind.

Now, one legitimate cultural gap is exemplified by the original plot of Guild Wars; one of the lead writers integrated a plot where Prince Rurik can’t get his father to make the smart, save-the-world choice, so he defies his father and is disowned. American players shrugged this off, but Korean players really disliked it and thought Rurik was an asshole for behaving that way toward his own dad. (GW had lots of other problems, including the situation where you can see right away that one of the supposedly Good Guys is a bwah-hah-hah’ing Evil Guy who’s going to betray you, but there’s absolutely no way in the game to do anything but go along with his plan and then get betrayed.)

<blockquote>So yes, it is a bit silly to dismiss criticism of JRPGs or other RPGs by saying, in essense, that nobody cares about the narrative structure of Tetris.</blockquote

I’m not dismissing criticisms. I’m heaping in more. I’m saying most are pretty bad games that players are willing to suffer through to get at a prize (the story tidbits). I find it particularly telling that the entire review is about something which is more or less secondary (the story) and doesn’t mention the gameplay, when it is the only Final Fantasy in years which actually has an actual game behind it, instead of a series of time-wasting random encounters that you can get through without making any decisions (just spam Attack) and whose existence is only there to justify the real game mechanic, which is an inventory / MP management that only accountants would love. (In the case of early FF12, I can say that you still have battles as time wasters in between cutscenes, but at least they’re not random encounters anymore.)

I’m also saying RPGers are willing to suffer through bad gaming design for story because they drink the Kool-Aid of story as being somehow central to gaming ‘as an artistic medium’ and that because of that most people give actually more points to a game with an awful story (see Metal Gear Solid) than one that does not have any because ‘at least they’re trying’. In my opinion, if you were to take away the plot and people would go ‘why would I play this game, there’s nothing of interest left?’, then that means you’ve got a shitty game being camouflaged under a deceiving veneer. (And of course that means I’m not impressed by Heavy Rain. Simon Says with artistic pretension.)

Most console and computer RPGs (in particular MMOs) are based on trying to replicate, possibly unconsciously but I’m too cynical to think that, addiction patterns. Rat presses lever, rat gets cheese (or cutscene, as the case may be). Rat presses lever, gets level up. FF13 is a step in the right direction, gameplay wise. The battles are actually fun to play through. If I were to just skip all cutscenes, I’d be happy with the game. Ergo the game is good. The narrative is bad.

Myth, I think you make an excellent point… but I think the problem I have with the cultural difference of the JRPG vs. the WRPG isn’t so much the actual plot (because they both tend to be pretty standard “you save the world” crap with a ridiculous cosmology behind it) but rather the messaging.

Let’s say that an American studio put together a game with the idea that Americans really don’t appreciate the quality and craft of their own work, that Americans don’t appreciate their own legacy, and that duty to family should be one of the most important things. So the beginning of the game shows the protagonist who works for his/her parents slacking off, goofing off with idiot friends, doing shoddy work, and when their exposition machine fires up, it malfunctions horribly, brings a lot of progressively harder-to-beat demons into the world, kills mom and dad, and the protagonist is left to right great wrongs—but part of that is learning not to cut corners, not to do shoddy work, to pay attention to the people who are instructing him on how to fix the machine, and ultimately honor the memory of mother and father and realize that his idiot asshole ‘friends’ aren’t really enhancing his/her life and making a little distance with them to go and be a productive member of society.

Now, I’m not saying that American audiences everywhere would feel that this was some fantastic original story, but I think that there is a large enough population in America who you could argue *would* need to hear this message that it could be successful if it were pretty enough, if the battle mechanic were interesting enough, and if it were scored well. And I think the “messaging” of the game wouldn’t necessarily come off as patronizing so long as every third bit of dialog wasn’t some overwrought “oh, if only I’d done a good job my parents would still be alive. You don’t realize what you have until its gone, and blood is thicker than water!”

But it sure as hell would come off as patronizing to an Asian audience, because they’ve been absorbing that message from the crib.

Obviously, anytime a game hammers its message over and over and over again, you run the risk of it becoming patronizing and obnoxious. But the threshold is different for different cultures depending on what the message is.

Some of us rpg’ers who like jrpgs actually enjoy the gameplay, you know, and criticize the games where we don’t like it.  It’s not some torturous exercise we put ourselves through for the sake of the pretty without complaint.  Come on.

This is why I hate video game wank. It’s all about a bunch of people declaring their tastes to be superior, when we’re all gaming for different reasons and therefore appreciate different aspects of games.

In my opinion, if you were to take away the plot and people would go ‘why would I play this game, there’s nothing of interest left?’, then that means you’ve got a shitty game being camouflaged under a deceiving veneer.

I find it easies to compare rpgs to the Total War games, you know Rome: Total War and so on. You play through what happens on the field of battle like Red Alert but you determine where the battlefield will be like in Civilization and you develop cities, technologies etc on a sort of civ style map. What happens in one amplifies the importance of what happens in the other. For example, 2 armies are going to fight. So what? But because you know what led to this situation and what will come from it commanding the armies is not only fun but compelling because if you don’t stop the French here they will punch through and be in the middle of some mostly undefended cities and losing those will destroy your economy on the civ map.

RPGs are like that. The gameplay mechanics on the battlefield are not as good as their contemporaries but they tend to be much more interesting because of what happened on the strategy/story screen. In unreal tournament you kill someone, big deal. Where’s your next kill coming from. In Deus Ex its should I kill this person and why am I killing this person? Even if the shooting dynamics aren’t as fluid as in UT the significance of your choices make the whole thing enjoyable. If you lose the strategy screen you don’t have much left in Rome. Its just armies fighting. Same as in RPGs. Crap story and you have half a game. Actually, less than half.

Some of us rpg’ers who like jrpgs actually enjoy the gameplay, you know

The only type of gamer I can figure ever being interested in old school JRPG gameplay is the Explorer personality type. They’re also the only ones who would cry bloody murder at FF13’s gameplay, because in all other respect it’s superior to all installments of the series (including my all time overall favorite, FF6). I would suspect that FF12 would be their favorite installment, as it had the same type of meandering dungeons as the old series but didn’t suffer from repeated annoyances from random encounters (if you’re only interested in exploring, you can try to avoid the fights at least… and you don’t need to fight again and again when you need to backtrack).

I hear the Explorer types will find a lot to do post Chapter 11 (though to be fair, having to go through 25-30 hours of play before you get to the part you actually like is not something anyone should have to go through).

I would be interested in your input on what JRPGs you found had better gameplay in your opinion and what brings them over the top.

pharmakos: but the story and the gameplay are not zero sum. There’s no reason you couldn’t have top notch gameplay AND synergize it with a good story.

and if you did you would have a stunning blow everything away game like mass effect 2. I think you are thinking of story as like in the command conquer games where you finish a mission and you are rewarded with an fmv sequence. Story is ideally part of gameplay because it gives weight and meaning to gameplay. Gameplay without that weight can be fun, sure. Unreal tournament was fun but Deus Ex was a much better game.

Pharma, just because he’s disagreeing with you doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what a story is. It’s that he disagrees with you about what a good, worthwhile story is, and how intrinsic that needs to be to a game.

and now I expect you to show me where I said he doesn’t understand what a story is.

We were discussing the importance or unimportance of a story for a game and whether or not having one has anything to do with gameplay. He thinks there gameplay and story are two separate things and I think they aren’t in the case of rpgs and the dynamics of a game that takes story seriously and a game that doesn’t are different.

I would be interested in your input on what JRPGs you found had better gameplay in your opinion and what brings them over the top.

I am actually really loving FF13 at about 37-40 hours in now.  It’s a lot easier than some of the others, and sometimes felt like FF for Dummies early on, but many of the worst parts of FF gameplay are mitigated somewhat. 

My favorite rpg to play is actually FF8.  The battles and having to get spells can get tedious, but the game provides opportunities to play with different strategies that take careful planning.  My FF8 guidebook is worn and dog eared from use.  I also really liked Digital Devil Saga, but I haven’t had the time to invest in really playing it through and playing it well.  And my first rpg, Phantasy Star IV totally hooked me.

I don’t have very good hand-eye coordination or very quick reflexes, so I honestly find the challenge of a game like Devil May Cry much more tedious and frustrating than, say, getting stuck on the worldmap in FF7 for half an hour because I don’t know where to go.

I haven’t played nearly as many games as many people here have, so I’m a little limited in my experiences.  But overall, I really like an rpg that rewards planning and thought (though not too much on the strategy end).

Yeah, I don’t really dispute the crux of the post. I guess I just don’t really have much in the expectation of storyline in video games. Pretty much as a general rule, the interactive nature of the medium makes truly unvarnished excellent storytelling a practical impossibility. Heavy Rain, as an example, was a tremendous attempt at bridging this gap, but not only was the plot full of holes, but even regardless it would have been laughed out of the theater if attempted as a movie.

What I’m enjoying about XIII are just taking in the incredible sights in the environments and enjoying the frenetic combat system. I’m not too thrilled with the characters and plot, but I think with very few exceptions (VI being one), most people have really inflated the narrative value of past RPG’s more so than XIII is truly significantly inferior to them in this respect.