Yes, it does. The devs specifically chose not to use dialogue or even just VA for reciting the same thing the text tells you about. Like I said, text can be a better choice than voicework.
Your new point isn't really the same as what I was responding to. Your original point was about voice acting relative to "clumsy exposition scenes where all relevant events get explicitly and painfully explained". Metroid Prime has no relevant events to explain in the story, and no person other than Samus, which is why I don't see it as a good example of voice-work vs text. And I don't think Metroid Prime 2 would be significantly better or worse if U-mos had a voice or not. Same with Fusion. You can just as easily have clumsy exposition cutscenes without any voicework at all.
Voicework would have severely reduced the sense of isolation and solitude, even if it was just reading off the same text files you dig up.
While I guess I agree, I couldn't imagine them bothering to voice all of that text in the first place, good or bad aside. Mass Effect is the only game I know that voices the in-game encyclopedia, and I find it weird that they even bother. Prime does have one voiced line that could have been text ('evacute immediately'), but I don't see how that hurts. I also find Samus's groans (when she's hurt) to be immersive and not detracting to the atmosphere.
On top of that, having to waste time and space on VA work would've meant less exploration and less actual game. With the exact same game, having to cut out 10-15% of the overall content to work in voice acting would've been a clear detriment to the final result. How much more actual game content could we have in select other games if devs weren't compelled to put voice acting regardless of whether it's actually the better choice?
This is very much a case-by-case basis. Metroid Prime has nothing worth voicing, but I would find the Mass Effect games much less enjoyable without voice acting. Even if the devs shoehorned Samus monologues into Prime, I can't see how that would take up much dev time. With huge, story-driven, character-filled games like RPGs, then yes, voice acting is a significant investment.
I just don't think Metroid Prime is a good example because there isn't a complex story going on, there is only one character who can talk, no one to talk to, no reason to talk, nothing worth voicing, and all of the story morsels you do come across are fluff with no real bearing on what Samus is up to. The game seems to be avoiding dialog, and the lack of voice acting is incidental, instead of an explicit design decision.
Man, I hate young protagonists, especially ones that go on about deep and meaningful shit while saving the world.
Young people aren't deep and meaningful. Young people are idiots.
Me, I'm tired of young, stupid, idealistic English-speakers saving the world. A consequence of the whole world/universe speaking English must be that it's constantly endanger of annihilation. Like some twist on the story of the Christian God and the Tower of Babel.
More seriously, I'm getting tired of science fiction games where all humans, much less all alien races, speak English. Which is not to say there isn't a role for English in a game, but to expect that all alien races speak it? Good grief. Localization is not the issue. It's fine if they are speaking English for an English audience. But when all the signs on an alien space station are in English, goddamn it, this again?
EDIT: Also, everyone being white in high fantasy games...but I guess that's just a staple of the high fantasy genre, what with Lord of the Rings and the like. And even that's starting to change (at least in games like Warcraft).
Synthesis on
0
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
More seriously, I'm getting tired of science fiction games where all humans, much less all alien races, speak English. Which is not to say there isn't a role for English in a game, but to expect that all alien races speak it? Good grief.
Localization is not the issue. It's fine if they are speaking English for an English audience. But when all the signs on an alien space station are in English, goddamn it, this again?
Man, I don't know if it's a good idea to ask developers to make up a whole language for every race they include. Development time would explode.
More seriously, I'm getting tired of science fiction games where all humans, much less all alien races, speak English. Which is not to say there isn't a role for English in a game, but to expect that all alien races speak it? Good grief.
Localization is not the issue. It's fine if they are speaking English for an English audience. But when all the signs on an alien space station are in English, goddamn it, this again?
Man, I don't know if it's a good idea to ask developers to make up a whole language for every race they include. Development time would explode.
Unnecessary (though any developer that does deserves credit for it). You'd have to create fictional pictographs or hieroglyphs for specific words on signs, yes, but hardly a whole language (and you could get away with reusing it with very slight variations easily). Any body of text you have read, like in an book that you can open, is going to be in the localized language for the obvious reason of the player has to be able to interpret it.
The ending was fucking terrible. I know I can go back to an earlier save and do whatever I want now with my bud Fawkes, but it just feels so wrong when I know there's a water purifier that needs to be turned on and I'm supposed to die. I literally felt physical pain when I realized I had just died. I POPPED 5 FUCKING RAD MAXES, GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK. Looking back, the entire story was really weak, and this ending was actually fitting for such a stupid plot.
You're killing mutants to save your dad, who wants to build a water purifier.
And then he gets killed by the government. Even though they both had the same ultimate goal.
And the president is a fucking computer, who is easily convinced to self-destruct.
What really saddened me the most was how short the game is, I understand there's DLC that I may or may not buy, but under 20 hours is pretty short, especially considering how everyone on the Steam forums lectured me on how huge it is when I complained about its 50 dollar price tag. The game was fun, but that ending just ruined the rest of the game for me.
TL;DR: I hated the ending.
AzadIsCool on
0
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
edited August 2010
Eh, I'd rather them just concentrate on other things. it's easy to think 'huh, they're all speaking english? Guess my guy has a universal translator'.
Eh, I'd rather them just concentrate on other things. it's easy to think 'huh, they're all speaking english? Guess my guy has a universal translator'.
For me, it's part of the setting and immersion. In the same area of "Huh, what do you know, apparently, the inside of alien spaceships looks exactly like the inside of human spaceships. Huh."
Sort of like, "Do you really need that distinct alien architecture? How about you put that time towards polishing the hacking mechanic." Sometimes it's worth it.
It should be held in consideration with other aspects of the game, of course. But creating, say, twenty hieroglyphs to be used in variations on signs isn't a huge task. It doesn't have to be any less nonsensical than the other aspects of the games' setting.
Me, I'm tired of young, stupid, idealistic English-speakers saving the world. A consequence of the whole world/universe speaking English must be that it's constantly endanger of annihilation. Like some twist on the story of the Christian God and the Tower of Babel.
More seriously, I'm getting tired of science fiction games where all humans, much less all alien races, speak English. Which is not to say there isn't a role for English in a game, but to expect that all alien races speak it? Good grief. Localization is not the issue. It's fine if they are speaking English for an English audience. But when all the signs on an alien space station are in English, goddamn it, this again?
EDIT: Also, everyone being white in high fantasy games...but I guess that's just a staple of the high fantasy genre, what with Lord of the Rings and the like. And even that's starting to change (at least in games like Warcraft).
I think the super-young hero thing is mostly a JRPG tradition, and doesn't really seem to be all that prevalent among even Japanese games of other genres, at least judging by the other Japanese games I'm familiar with - Mario, Metroid, the Silent Hill series (except for 3, and that's justified), Resident Evil, etc. Even Final Fantasy didn't really do it until 8 (although Cloud is like 20-21, so that's still fairly young since he's supposed to be a hardened veteran).
It seems like the 14-15 year old heroes are usually in the more "JRPG-ish" JRPGs (if that makes sense) like Lunar, Tales, and what have you. Most American games seem to place their PCs in a vague mid-20s age.
Although it is pretty silly when you think about it, it's pretty easy to play those games and basically not think about it, because usually the characters are designed in such a way that it's not really noticeable that they're teenagers and in the game world they might as well be full adults. If you played Xenogears without reading the manual I think most people would assume the characters were older than they "actually" are.
It can get grating if the game actually draws attention to the young age of the character, though. One example from a game I thought was otherwise pretty great was Suikoden 2. In the first of the game you're literally in the setting's equivalent of the Boy Scouts, but by the end of the game you're leading armies and acting as the driving force behind combat veterans and officers with decades of experience (nevermind the ridiculous stuff that Jowy got up to), even though the game didn't seem to take place over more than a year at the most.
The game tries to justify this to an extent by stating that the main character/PC is basically a figurehead for the older and wiser Shu to motivate people with, but it still relies on your guy supposedly being this inspiring and charismatic figure, when really he's just your typical silent protagonist JRPG dude whose portrait makes him look like he might be all of 14 years old. It also really makes the duel battles seem silly, because why is this scrawny kid with a pair of blunt instruments dueling some dude in full armor with a sword, especially when guys like Viktor and Flik are usually right there?
Even Tales breaks away from it slightly (Yuri Lowell).
Synthesis on
0
L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
edited August 2010
One more gripe to add to the stew.
RPG's that give you the choice to fight things, and not to fight things.
By not fighting things, you don't kill things and get XP. You also don't get XP from choosing not to fight.
OR
You fight, and kill things, and get XP, and become more powerful, usually get some decent loot, and the game becomes slightly easier because of it.
The only downside that I can conceive of is that you waste slightly less of your time by not fighting. As far as the game world goes, you're infinitely better off fighting and killing than avoiding it.
The false choice always seems to put me off, anyway...
I personally like it when I can (eventually) turn off random battles. You obviously can't do a whole run like that (unless you're one of those crazy low-level/no-equip/no-item/no-save/no-controller kinds of players), but a big part of the fun of an RPG is exploring their world, and that can get kind of tedious if every few steps you're forced into a fight - especially if you're of a significantly higher level than the monsters in the area, and thus the fight doesn't pose any real challenge or significant reward.
There's two basic ways to deal with this. My personal favorite is the Secret of Mana model, where simply walking around using your basic attacks can get fun and addicting, even against weak enemies from the first of the game. Of course, this is only really applicable to action/rpg hybrids, but those are pretty common these days.
The other way is the Earthbound model, where as you level up, weaker enemies eventually flee from you and will only attack if you seek them out to do it. This way, the game always stays relatively challenging, but you never get bogged down in tedious, unnecessary battles. Earthbound has always been one of my favorite games, and although the battle system itself was pretty stale and outdated even at the time of its release, I think the enemy detection/random battle system was inspired and I'm surprised more RPGs didn't pick up on it. It was also really nice that you could see exactly what enemy you were going to face before the battle actually started.
I prefer being given a choice about what to fight.
First off, the games are generally really easy, so any time I feel like I'm getting too strong I can just stop fighting.
Second, there are so many other reasons to avoid battles. Backtracking, puzzles, obnoxious enemies, saving time or just saving mp or items. Most rpgs, and jrpgs in particular, have dungeons designed to beat the player through attrition, so avoiding a fight means saving pots, mana, and whatever else, which can be used on a boss.
I hate how JRPG worlds are absolutely covered with a completely random and inane assortment of monsters, none of which are actually acknowledged by the storyline. In FF VII, shacks attack you in Midgard and ghost pirates attack you in underwater military installations, and nobody thinks anything of it.
FF VII is the worst. Not even a single throw away line about it. You just kinda have to infer that genova cells have been corrupting animals/ancients for so long that there are a bunch of crazy things out there.
I hate how JRPG worlds are absolutely covered with a completely random and inane assortment of monsters, none of which are actually acknowledged by the storyline. In FF VII, shacks attack you in Midgard and ghost pirates attack you in underwater military installations, and nobody thinks anything of it.
Hey, FFVIII addressed it!
All the monsters were from the moon.
Every now and then they piled up into a giant monster lump and fell to the Earth.
When I was replaying Golden Sun, the first enemy I ran into outside of the starting town was a zombie. There are zombies roaming the countryside, and it doesn't seem to bother anyone!
FF7 was also really bad about a similar gripe: a modern-day setting without any signs of infrastructure that that would require. People have TV, computers, the internet, manufactured goods, automobiles, etc., but in between the scattered towns there was nothing connecting them together. I guess that post-industrial society still uses chocobo wagons for most of their freight?
FF8 at least acknowledged it, and most of the towns were connected by roads and railway lines.
When I was replaying Golden Sun, the first enemy I ran into outside of the starting town was a zombie. There are zombies roaming the countryside, and it doesn't seem to bother anyone!
They do explain that one near the end of the second game.
The world is dying and magic is going haywire because the lighthouses aren't lit.
FF VII is the worst. Not even a single throw away line about it. You just kinda have to infer that genova cells have been corrupting animals/ancients for so long that there are a bunch of crazy things out there.
There is a line about it. It has something to do with Mako leaks. I can't remember it off the top of my head.
I think during Cloud's flashback they talk about the things in the Mako reactor and somebody says something like, "That would explain the increase in monsters lately."
----
There's usually that one token guy in every RPG - usually some NPC in the first town - who talks about "how many monsters there are these days" or "it's not safe to go to [x location] anymore". But, for some reason this never seems to result in people actually dying in between towns, or villagers barricading the doors and windows, general panic or even much of a change in daily routine (other than precipitating unimaginative fetch quests for the heroes, who apparently have nothing better to do - "I know you had to reactive the Seven Mystic Talismans but my mom 30 map squares over needs her special tea, I mean she needs it REALLY REALLY BAD, so bad the plot won't progress until you do it")
FF VII is the worst. Not even a single throw away line about it. You just kinda have to infer that genova cells have been corrupting animals/ancients for so long that there are a bunch of crazy things out there.
There is a line about it. It has something to do with Mako leaks. I can't remember it off the top of my head.
The game makes multiple allusions to mako causing mutations in the wildlife, even before the Shinra Company started building reactors. There are even more around the reactors, unsurprisingly. Life forms, if they didn't kill themselves in the process, would feed on it to become stronger.
Of course, that doesn't explain why there's zero infrastructure outside of settlements. I guess you could say "war" or "monsters chewed it up", but the fact that there aren't railroad tracks between the cities (or evidence of stations) is pretty stupid (unless it was all deliberately destroyed by Wutai). Shinra is shown building a highway going out of Midgar (you use it when you escape), probably to Junon (the one other big city), but they weren't exactly making a lot of progress.
It doesn't help that FFVII is one of the few in the line that has a setting filled with artifacts of normal, daily life--cheap computers, electricity, gasoline engines, water heaters, telephone lines, etc. As oppose to using magical spheres to talk to everyone else, sleeping in thatch huts on the beech or giant crystal palaces, floating platforms as transit, etc. It's a lot easier to point out the obvious problems.
Synthesis on
0
L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
edited August 2010
Well, there's a difference between the random encounters, and things like:
Fight the big fucking dragon, or don't fight the big fucking dragon.
My own personal bias is that the extra dungeons in games like the Final Fantasies, where they're completely optional, as a fun challenge. I know those are often designed to kill the player, and you get the best loot after killing the super hard boss at the bottom, but I'm not really talking about those. If you want the best loot, you're going to have to slog through the dungeon. I'm talking about the supposed choices you get in the main game.
I'm talking about the games, can't think of an exact example offhand-sorry, where the story naturally progresses, and you're given the choices of fighting things, like that dragon, or not.
Random trash battles can diaf though. I hate going back to the first town because you need to go there, only to have a level 1 worthless rat try to fight your army of people.
That guy's just a silly goose game designer/programmer who needs to be shot.
Unless you just mean there's a choice between paths A and B, where A would have more enemies to fight. Or games where you can talk yourself out of a fight. But even when you can do that there's almost always a reward, sometimes even better than what you'd get if you fought.
There is NO WAY to see the exact date your Live Gold expires from your Xbox. Except in one situation.
About a couple weeks before it expires, if you sign in to any part of a game that throws up the '4 quadrants' sign in (ie, PD XBLA combat sim, etc) it'll pop up "Your Live will explire on SPECIFIC DATE. Do you want to set your account to auto renew now?"
It's so blatant that they're hoping that other people are signing in and you'll be 'shamed' into autorenewing.
Oblivion maybe? You can beat all the gates without killing enemies, by just running all the way up to the crystal or whatever was in there, which results in the gate shutting down and you back in the overworld.
The game makes multiple allusions to mako causing mutations in the wildlife, even before the Shinra Company started building reactors. There are even more around the reactors, unsurprisingly. Life forms, if they didn't kill themselves in the process, would feed on it to become stronger.
Of course, that doesn't explain why there's zero infrastructure outside of settlements. I guess you could say "war" or "monsters chewed it up", but the fact that there aren't railroad tracks between the cities (or evidence of stations) is pretty stupid (unless it was all deliberately destroyed by Wutai). Shinra is shown building a highway going out of Midgar (you use it when you escape), probably to Junon (the one other big city), but they weren't exactly making a lot of progress.
It doesn't help that FFVII is one of the few in the line that has a setting filled with artifacts of normal, daily life--cheap computers, electricity, gasoline engines, water heaters, telephone lines, etc. As oppose to using magical spheres to talk to everyone else, sleeping in thatch huts on the beech or giant crystal palaces, floating platforms as transit, etc. It's a lot easier to point out the obvious problems.
It was pretty weird to think that the two largest cities in what is apparently a highly advanced, information-age society were only accessible to each other by a road that passed through both a treacherous swamp filled with 80-foot cobras and a cave.
One thing that always annoyed me about some RPGs - although I'll admit that it's unavoidable - is how they're basically locked into the whole "1 city per nation/region" thing. If the side-games of FF7 had focussed on fleshing out the setting instead of delving into the minutae of the main character's pasts I might have actually bought some of them. You could have made a great game that never left Midgar. What was life like for people who lived in the wastes outside of that city? Surely there were some smaller towns between there and Kalm? How cool would it have been if they just ditched the whole Avalanche/Hojo/Sephiroth angle entirely and just focused on some people like Pre-Corel Barret or Tifa when she was young, who were basically just trying to get by in a world of rapid change and oppressive corporate domination?
In one of the first scenes, Tifa tells Cloud how all the boys in town were moving off to places like Midgar. What were their stories? Did they all make it there, and if not, what happened to them along the way? Could have made a good game, IMO. You'd obviously have had to introduce conflict into the story somehow, but every game doesn't need to have the Chosen One with super powers as the protagonist, or the Ultimate Evil as the last boss. I think that kind of territory would make for much better sequels than trying to drag out the old antagonists for some contrived reason.
In one of the first scenes, Tifa tells Cloud how all the boys in town were moving off to places like Midgar. What were their stories? Did they all make it there, and if not, what happened to them along the way?
Do you really care? Most likely they moved to Midgar where they started some shitty store in the slums or joined Shinra to be another nameless grunt.
Didn't pretty much everybody hate the expansion games as they were? Like I say, I never played them, but surely not every interesting adventure in that world happened to Cloud or somebody Cloud knew.
I've often wished they'd expand the FF6 universe with stuff like this - doing stuff for the Returners, sneaking into Vector and spying, maybe play as General Leo when he was young.
Didn't pretty much everybody hate the expansion games as they were? Like I say, I never played them, but surely not every interesting adventure in that world happened to Cloud or somebody Cloud knew.
I've often wished they'd expand the FF6 universe with stuff like this - doing stuff for the Returners, sneaking into Vector and spying, maybe play as General Leo when he was young.
Crisis Core was good. Its only problem was that doing missions was the whole point of the game, and the only way to get cool abilities, but it also left you INCREDIBLY overpowered for the main quest. I'd normally be on their side, saying that it should be focused on creating a good story/gameplay flow, and not demanding grinding, which, honestly, that's what the missions were, but again, that was the whole point- it's portable, you power it on for a few minutes, do a mission or two, get back to whatever else you were doing. That is the real deal with the game- it wasn't boring padding, like the side missions in most RPGs.
Man, I hate young protagonists, especially ones that go on about deep and meaningful shit while saving the world.
Young people aren't deep and meaningful. Young people are idiots.
Me, I'm tired of young, stupid, idealistic English-speakers saving the world. A consequence of the whole world/universe speaking English must be that it's constantly endanger of annihilation. Like some twist on the story of the Christian God and the Tower of Babel.
More seriously, I'm getting tired of science fiction games where all humans, much less all alien races, speak English. Which is not to say there isn't a role for English in a game, but to expect that all alien races speak it? Good grief. Localization is not the issue. It's fine if they are speaking English for an English audience. But when all the signs on an alien space station are in English, goddamn it, this again?
EDIT: Also, everyone being white in high fantasy games...but I guess that's just a staple of the high fantasy genre, what with Lord of the Rings and the like. And even that's starting to change (at least in games like Warcraft).
Don't worry, I hear ya. It's not like they even speak English, they speak American.
It just annoys me because so much money gets spent on "production value" but the people spending that money have so little imagination.
I mean, people, usually American, are always asking for VA in Zelda games. Nintendo have invented a Hylian language. The only way VA would be good in a Zelda game is if people spoke Hylian with subs but people would be "fuck that I'm not reading subtitles." Well fuck your American voices in every game regardless of where it's set. America is not the only place in the universe, you know?
Another bitch for me is MEGA EXPLOSION SPACE BATTLE SOUND EFFECTS in the vacuum of space. Not just in games. Every time it's just... dumb. And following from that, people who say "turn off your sound HAHA I'm so funny and cutting wit!" That is not a good solution. If something is set in space, why not use the opportunity to really explore what it's like to be in space? How vast and empty and lifeless the space between the other bits of the universe actually is. Space is not underwater. Space is not an endless sky. It's different. Use the opportunity to crate something different. Someone could really do awesome things with a space sim that actually incorporated 3d battles and cockpit or bridge sound effects instead of ignoring the problem or even worse, making things sound like they are underwater.
That depends entirely on the type of game in question and that is a total blanket statement. There is room for all types of games, it's just that most games pander to a specific audience and suffer for that.
Yeah, but Rainbow 6 did realism before it was the thing to do, and it also did it the right way.
After that devs decided to just take the worst parts of realism and jam them into their made up physics. Like head shots, or limited movement abilities, or only being able to carry around 2 weapons at a time. Even worse when they apply them arbitrarily, so enemies drop like flies, but the player can take 30 rounds in the chest and all they need is a few seconds to catch their breath.
I'd rather a game go all in with realism than just use it to put dumb barriers in my way.
In one of the first scenes, Tifa tells Cloud how all the boys in town were moving off to places like Midgar. What were their stories? Did they all make it there, and if not, what happened to them along the way?
Do you really care? Most likely they moved to Midgar where they started some shitty store in the slums or joined Shinra to be another nameless grunt.
Midgar's the big city. Nibelheim is a farm village out in the boonies.
They just wanted to live the Midgardian Dream. No real mystery there.
The game makes multiple allusions to mako causing mutations in the wildlife, even before the Shinra Company started building reactors. There are even more around the reactors, unsurprisingly. Life forms, if they didn't kill themselves in the process, would feed on it to become stronger.
Of course, that doesn't explain why there's zero infrastructure outside of settlements. I guess you could say "war" or "monsters chewed it up", but the fact that there aren't railroad tracks between the cities (or evidence of stations) is pretty stupid (unless it was all deliberately destroyed by Wutai). Shinra is shown building a highway going out of Midgar (you use it when you escape), probably to Junon (the one other big city), but they weren't exactly making a lot of progress.
It doesn't help that FFVII is one of the few in the line that has a setting filled with artifacts of normal, daily life--cheap computers, electricity, gasoline engines, water heaters, telephone lines, etc. As oppose to using magical spheres to talk to everyone else, sleeping in thatch huts on the beech or giant crystal palaces, floating platforms as transit, etc. It's a lot easier to point out the obvious problems.
It was pretty weird to think that the two largest cities in what is apparently a highly advanced, information-age society were only accessible to each other by a road that passed through both a treacherous swamp filled with 80-foot cobras and a cave.
One thing that always annoyed me about some RPGs - although I'll admit that it's unavoidable - is how they're basically locked into the whole "1 city per nation/region" thing. If the side-games of FF7 had focussed on fleshing out the setting instead of delving into the minutae of the main character's pasts I might have actually bought some of them. You could have made a great game that never left Midgar. What was life like for people who lived in the wastes outside of that city? Surely there were some smaller towns between there and Kalm? How cool would it have been if they just ditched the whole Avalanche/Hojo/Sephiroth angle entirely and just focused on some people like Pre-Corel Barret or Tifa when she was young, who were basically just trying to get by in a world of rapid change and oppressive corporate domination?
In one of the first scenes, Tifa tells Cloud how all the boys in town were moving off to places like Midgar. What were their stories? Did they all make it there, and if not, what happened to them along the way? Could have made a good game, IMO. You'd obviously have had to introduce conflict into the story somehow, but every game doesn't need to have the Chosen One with super powers as the protagonist, or the Ultimate Evil as the last boss. I think that kind of territory would make for much better sequels than trying to drag out the old antagonists for some contrived reason.
I agree with a lot of this, though I think the game does the right thing in leaving Midgar, there was no shortage of room to expand on the setting itself. Obviously, the game follows the story it aims to tell, but there's no shortage of interesting questions. This is, in part, because FFVII actually succeeds, if barely, in the area of "more than one city per country". The whole of the eastern continent is probably one country, albeit a sparely populated one. Kalm is almost certainly part of the same country, historically, as the slums of Midgar (and Midgar itself, by extension). The national delimination of FFVII's world is probably not as relevant seeing how all the governments collapsed and their responsibilities taken over by the Shinra Corporation.
It does leave questions, nonetheless. We know what happened to Midgar, more or less. What about Junon, which was home to the Shinra's fleet and aviation service, not to mention the Junon Army and probably the best armed city in the world (until the moving of the Sister Ray). What happened after Rufus' death in the chaos after Meteor? What happened when that huge, now-headless military decided to take over? Was the war with Wutai to the west what caused Junon to be converted into a fortress so tough not even WEAPON could assault it successfully?
It is, of course, entirely unavoidable. It might even be the side effect of a setting that interests people (I wouldn't ask these same questions about Spira--the mystical knock-off of Polynesia where people communicate through spheres and do so much dancing in their daily lives it's a little suspicious).
In one of the first scenes, Tifa tells Cloud how all the boys in town were moving off to places like Midgar. What were their stories? Did they all make it there, and if not, what happened to them along the way?
Do you really care? Most likely they moved to Midgar where they started some shitty store in the slums or joined Shinra to be another nameless grunt.
Midgar's the big city. Nibelheim is a farm village out in the boonies.
They just wanted to live the Midgardian Dream. No real mystery there.
Given that the option was to...remain in a town with, what, 12 other people? Maybe 11? I'd get the fuck out of dodge too.
Posts
While I guess I agree, I couldn't imagine them bothering to voice all of that text in the first place, good or bad aside. Mass Effect is the only game I know that voices the in-game encyclopedia, and I find it weird that they even bother. Prime does have one voiced line that could have been text ('evacute immediately'), but I don't see how that hurts. I also find Samus's groans (when she's hurt) to be immersive and not detracting to the atmosphere.
This is very much a case-by-case basis. Metroid Prime has nothing worth voicing, but I would find the Mass Effect games much less enjoyable without voice acting. Even if the devs shoehorned Samus monologues into Prime, I can't see how that would take up much dev time. With huge, story-driven, character-filled games like RPGs, then yes, voice acting is a significant investment.
I just don't think Metroid Prime is a good example because there isn't a complex story going on, there is only one character who can talk, no one to talk to, no reason to talk, nothing worth voicing, and all of the story morsels you do come across are fluff with no real bearing on what Samus is up to. The game seems to be avoiding dialog, and the lack of voice acting is incidental, instead of an explicit design decision.
Me, I'm tired of young, stupid, idealistic English-speakers saving the world. A consequence of the whole world/universe speaking English must be that it's constantly endanger of annihilation. Like some twist on the story of the Christian God and the Tower of Babel.
More seriously, I'm getting tired of science fiction games where all humans, much less all alien races, speak English. Which is not to say there isn't a role for English in a game, but to expect that all alien races speak it? Good grief. Localization is not the issue. It's fine if they are speaking English for an English audience. But when all the signs on an alien space station are in English, goddamn it, this again?
EDIT: Also, everyone being white in high fantasy games...but I guess that's just a staple of the high fantasy genre, what with Lord of the Rings and the like. And even that's starting to change (at least in games like Warcraft).
Man, I don't know if it's a good idea to ask developers to make up a whole language for every race they include. Development time would explode.
Unnecessary (though any developer that does deserves credit for it). You'd have to create fictional pictographs or hieroglyphs for specific words on signs, yes, but hardly a whole language (and you could get away with reusing it with very slight variations easily). Any body of text you have read, like in an book that you can open, is going to be in the localized language for the obvious reason of the player has to be able to interpret it.
For me, it's part of the setting and immersion. In the same area of "Huh, what do you know, apparently, the inside of alien spaceships looks exactly like the inside of human spaceships. Huh."
Sort of like, "Do you really need that distinct alien architecture? How about you put that time towards polishing the hacking mechanic." Sometimes it's worth it.
It should be held in consideration with other aspects of the game, of course. But creating, say, twenty hieroglyphs to be used in variations on signs isn't a huge task. It doesn't have to be any less nonsensical than the other aspects of the games' setting.
It seems like the 14-15 year old heroes are usually in the more "JRPG-ish" JRPGs (if that makes sense) like Lunar, Tales, and what have you. Most American games seem to place their PCs in a vague mid-20s age.
Although it is pretty silly when you think about it, it's pretty easy to play those games and basically not think about it, because usually the characters are designed in such a way that it's not really noticeable that they're teenagers and in the game world they might as well be full adults. If you played Xenogears without reading the manual I think most people would assume the characters were older than they "actually" are.
It can get grating if the game actually draws attention to the young age of the character, though. One example from a game I thought was otherwise pretty great was Suikoden 2. In the first of the game you're literally in the setting's equivalent of the Boy Scouts, but by the end of the game you're leading armies and acting as the driving force behind combat veterans and officers with decades of experience (nevermind the ridiculous stuff that Jowy got up to), even though the game didn't seem to take place over more than a year at the most.
The game tries to justify this to an extent by stating that the main character/PC is basically a figurehead for the older and wiser Shu to motivate people with, but it still relies on your guy supposedly being this inspiring and charismatic figure, when really he's just your typical silent protagonist JRPG dude whose portrait makes him look like he might be all of 14 years old. It also really makes the duel battles seem silly, because why is this scrawny kid with a pair of blunt instruments dueling some dude in full armor with a sword, especially when guys like Viktor and Flik are usually right there?
RPG's that give you the choice to fight things, and not to fight things.
By not fighting things, you don't kill things and get XP. You also don't get XP from choosing not to fight.
OR
You fight, and kill things, and get XP, and become more powerful, usually get some decent loot, and the game becomes slightly easier because of it.
The only downside that I can conceive of is that you waste slightly less of your time by not fighting. As far as the game world goes, you're infinitely better off fighting and killing than avoiding it.
The false choice always seems to put me off, anyway...
I'm pretty sure someone already brought up this complaint (possibly in the first few pages) but its still one that pisses me off.
There's two basic ways to deal with this. My personal favorite is the Secret of Mana model, where simply walking around using your basic attacks can get fun and addicting, even against weak enemies from the first of the game. Of course, this is only really applicable to action/rpg hybrids, but those are pretty common these days.
The other way is the Earthbound model, where as you level up, weaker enemies eventually flee from you and will only attack if you seek them out to do it. This way, the game always stays relatively challenging, but you never get bogged down in tedious, unnecessary battles. Earthbound has always been one of my favorite games, and although the battle system itself was pretty stale and outdated even at the time of its release, I think the enemy detection/random battle system was inspired and I'm surprised more RPGs didn't pick up on it. It was also really nice that you could see exactly what enemy you were going to face before the battle actually started.
First off, the games are generally really easy, so any time I feel like I'm getting too strong I can just stop fighting.
Second, there are so many other reasons to avoid battles. Backtracking, puzzles, obnoxious enemies, saving time or just saving mp or items. Most rpgs, and jrpgs in particular, have dungeons designed to beat the player through attrition, so avoiding a fight means saving pots, mana, and whatever else, which can be used on a boss.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
Hey, FFVIII addressed it!
Every now and then they piled up into a giant monster lump and fell to the Earth.
It's about as silly as it sounds.
FF8 at least acknowledged it, and most of the towns were connected by roads and railway lines.
They do explain that one near the end of the second game.
There is a line about it. It has something to do with Mako leaks. I can't remember it off the top of my head.
----
There's usually that one token guy in every RPG - usually some NPC in the first town - who talks about "how many monsters there are these days" or "it's not safe to go to [x location] anymore". But, for some reason this never seems to result in people actually dying in between towns, or villagers barricading the doors and windows, general panic or even much of a change in daily routine (other than precipitating unimaginative fetch quests for the heroes, who apparently have nothing better to do - "I know you had to reactive the Seven Mystic Talismans but my mom 30 map squares over needs her special tea, I mean she needs it REALLY REALLY BAD, so bad the plot won't progress until you do it")
The game makes multiple allusions to mako causing mutations in the wildlife, even before the Shinra Company started building reactors. There are even more around the reactors, unsurprisingly. Life forms, if they didn't kill themselves in the process, would feed on it to become stronger.
Of course, that doesn't explain why there's zero infrastructure outside of settlements. I guess you could say "war" or "monsters chewed it up", but the fact that there aren't railroad tracks between the cities (or evidence of stations) is pretty stupid (unless it was all deliberately destroyed by Wutai). Shinra is shown building a highway going out of Midgar (you use it when you escape), probably to Junon (the one other big city), but they weren't exactly making a lot of progress.
It doesn't help that FFVII is one of the few in the line that has a setting filled with artifacts of normal, daily life--cheap computers, electricity, gasoline engines, water heaters, telephone lines, etc. As oppose to using magical spheres to talk to everyone else, sleeping in thatch huts on the beech or giant crystal palaces, floating platforms as transit, etc. It's a lot easier to point out the obvious problems.
Fight the big fucking dragon, or don't fight the big fucking dragon.
My own personal bias is that the extra dungeons in games like the Final Fantasies, where they're completely optional, as a fun challenge. I know those are often designed to kill the player, and you get the best loot after killing the super hard boss at the bottom, but I'm not really talking about those. If you want the best loot, you're going to have to slog through the dungeon. I'm talking about the supposed choices you get in the main game.
I'm talking about the games, can't think of an exact example offhand-sorry, where the story naturally progresses, and you're given the choices of fighting things, like that dragon, or not.
Random trash battles can diaf though. I hate going back to the first town because you need to go there, only to have a level 1 worthless rat try to fight your army of people.
That guy's just a silly goose game designer/programmer who needs to be shot.
Unless you just mean there's a choice between paths A and B, where A would have more enemies to fight. Or games where you can talk yourself out of a fight. But even when you can do that there's almost always a reward, sometimes even better than what you'd get if you fought.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
There is NO WAY to see the exact date your Live Gold expires from your Xbox. Except in one situation.
About a couple weeks before it expires, if you sign in to any part of a game that throws up the '4 quadrants' sign in (ie, PD XBLA combat sim, etc) it'll pop up "Your Live will explire on SPECIFIC DATE. Do you want to set your account to auto renew now?"
It's so blatant that they're hoping that other people are signing in and you'll be 'shamed' into autorenewing.
ok.
One thing that always annoyed me about some RPGs - although I'll admit that it's unavoidable - is how they're basically locked into the whole "1 city per nation/region" thing. If the side-games of FF7 had focussed on fleshing out the setting instead of delving into the minutae of the main character's pasts I might have actually bought some of them. You could have made a great game that never left Midgar. What was life like for people who lived in the wastes outside of that city? Surely there were some smaller towns between there and Kalm? How cool would it have been if they just ditched the whole Avalanche/Hojo/Sephiroth angle entirely and just focused on some people like Pre-Corel Barret or Tifa when she was young, who were basically just trying to get by in a world of rapid change and oppressive corporate domination?
In one of the first scenes, Tifa tells Cloud how all the boys in town were moving off to places like Midgar. What were their stories? Did they all make it there, and if not, what happened to them along the way? Could have made a good game, IMO. You'd obviously have had to introduce conflict into the story somehow, but every game doesn't need to have the Chosen One with super powers as the protagonist, or the Ultimate Evil as the last boss. I think that kind of territory would make for much better sequels than trying to drag out the old antagonists for some contrived reason.
Do you really care? Most likely they moved to Midgar where they started some shitty store in the slums or joined Shinra to be another nameless grunt.
I've often wished they'd expand the FF6 universe with stuff like this - doing stuff for the Returners, sneaking into Vector and spying, maybe play as General Leo when he was young.
And most people are more interested in the characters. If you're into world building then read a book.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Crisis Core was good. Its only problem was that doing missions was the whole point of the game, and the only way to get cool abilities, but it also left you INCREDIBLY overpowered for the main quest. I'd normally be on their side, saying that it should be focused on creating a good story/gameplay flow, and not demanding grinding, which, honestly, that's what the missions were, but again, that was the whole point- it's portable, you power it on for a few minutes, do a mission or two, get back to whatever else you were doing. That is the real deal with the game- it wasn't boring padding, like the side missions in most RPGs.
Don't worry, I hear ya. It's not like they even speak English, they speak American.
It just annoys me because so much money gets spent on "production value" but the people spending that money have so little imagination.
I mean, people, usually American, are always asking for VA in Zelda games. Nintendo have invented a Hylian language. The only way VA would be good in a Zelda game is if people spoke Hylian with subs but people would be "fuck that I'm not reading subtitles." Well fuck your American voices in every game regardless of where it's set. America is not the only place in the universe, you know?
Another bitch for me is MEGA EXPLOSION SPACE BATTLE SOUND EFFECTS in the vacuum of space. Not just in games. Every time it's just... dumb. And following from that, people who say "turn off your sound HAHA I'm so funny and cutting wit!" That is not a good solution. If something is set in space, why not use the opportunity to really explore what it's like to be in space? How vast and empty and lifeless the space between the other bits of the universe actually is. Space is not underwater. Space is not an endless sky. It's different. Use the opportunity to crate something different. Someone could really do awesome things with a space sim that actually incorporated 3d battles and cockpit or bridge sound effects instead of ignoring the problem or even worse, making things sound like they are underwater.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Says the guy that was talking about Rainbow Six in this very thread. :P
After that devs decided to just take the worst parts of realism and jam them into their made up physics. Like head shots, or limited movement abilities, or only being able to carry around 2 weapons at a time. Even worse when they apply them arbitrarily, so enemies drop like flies, but the player can take 30 rounds in the chest and all they need is a few seconds to catch their breath.
I'd rather a game go all in with realism than just use it to put dumb barriers in my way.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Midgar's the big city. Nibelheim is a farm village out in the boonies.
They just wanted to live the Midgardian Dream. No real mystery there.
Blog||Tumblr|Steam|Twitter|FFXIV|Twitch|YouTube|Podcast|PSN|XBL|DarkZero
I agree with a lot of this, though I think the game does the right thing in leaving Midgar, there was no shortage of room to expand on the setting itself. Obviously, the game follows the story it aims to tell, but there's no shortage of interesting questions. This is, in part, because FFVII actually succeeds, if barely, in the area of "more than one city per country". The whole of the eastern continent is probably one country, albeit a sparely populated one. Kalm is almost certainly part of the same country, historically, as the slums of Midgar (and Midgar itself, by extension). The national delimination of FFVII's world is probably not as relevant seeing how all the governments collapsed and their responsibilities taken over by the Shinra Corporation.
It does leave questions, nonetheless. We know what happened to Midgar, more or less. What about Junon, which was home to the Shinra's fleet and aviation service, not to mention the Junon Army and probably the best armed city in the world (until the moving of the Sister Ray). What happened after Rufus' death in the chaos after Meteor? What happened when that huge, now-headless military decided to take over? Was the war with Wutai to the west what caused Junon to be converted into a fortress so tough not even WEAPON could assault it successfully?
It is, of course, entirely unavoidable. It might even be the side effect of a setting that interests people (I wouldn't ask these same questions about Spira--the mystical knock-off of Polynesia where people communicate through spheres and do so much dancing in their daily lives it's a little suspicious).
Given that the option was to...remain in a town with, what, 12 other people? Maybe 11? I'd get the fuck out of dodge too.