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16-Bit Sprite Based RPG Cutscenes: How They Hurt
JohnnyFirebird
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Now that we're riding high on a wave of nostalgia-based re-releases, it's pretty easy to see the evolution of storylines, writing, and character progression. It's nice to have a look back at these games and see the ways that games still have similar levels of complexity (like combat systems and storylines) and ways that they've deepened and improved.
But one thing I've noticed in going back and playing old-style roleplaying games: sprite-based cutscenes are pretty hard to watch.
In going back and replaying an older, sprite based Japanese roleplaying game, I realized I was going to be spending a lot of time watching characters bounce around the screen, nod, make goofy expressions, and otherwise emote in their 16-bit manner. I'm not sure I have the patience for this.
In this particular nameless game, every line or two of dialogue is accompanied by head shaking, head nodding, or word balloons of pained expressions. There is no way to speed this up. A simple conversation consisting of "Do you want to accompany me to Town X?" "Yes, we do." "It'll be a great adventure!" takes a good 30 seconds to a minute, due to all this sprite acting.
I also notice that there's not too much in the way of distracting sprite acting in American games. They tend to avoid it by describing what happens in text windows, rather than showing their small sprites acting it out.
Games like Phantasy Star IV, where such dialogues were laid out in comic-book style panels, are also much easier to go through. Plus you can just skip them by tapping the button.
How do you guys and gals feel about this? Do you mind watching sprite theatre during your roleplaying games? I remember being vaguely amused by it in 1991, but going back now, it's pretty tiring. Do you remember being moved, amused, and entertained by these sprite-based cutscenes in the past? Or did you always find them a little tedious?
But one thing I've noticed in going back and playing old-style roleplaying games: sprite-based cutscenes are pretty hard to watch.
In going back and replaying an older, sprite based Japanese roleplaying game, I realized I was going to be spending a lot of time watching characters bounce around the screen, nod, make goofy expressions, and otherwise emote in their 16-bit manner. I'm not sure I have the patience for this.
In this particular nameless game, every line or two of dialogue is accompanied by head shaking, head nodding, or word balloons of pained expressions. There is no way to speed this up. A simple conversation consisting of "Do you want to accompany me to Town X?" "Yes, we do." "It'll be a great adventure!" takes a good 30 seconds to a minute, due to all this sprite acting.
I also notice that there's not too much in the way of distracting sprite acting in American games. They tend to avoid it by describing what happens in text windows, rather than showing their small sprites acting it out.
Games like Phantasy Star IV, where such dialogues were laid out in comic-book style panels, are also much easier to go through. Plus you can just skip them by tapping the button.
How do you guys and gals feel about this? Do you mind watching sprite theatre during your roleplaying games? I remember being vaguely amused by it in 1991, but going back now, it's pretty tiring. Do you remember being moved, amused, and entertained by these sprite-based cutscenes in the past? Or did you always find them a little tedious?
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I'm pretty sure this is more a case of you already knowing the story, what's going to happen, etc etc and wanting to play the game instead of get to know the characters. You already know the characters and you don't give a shit.
And if you want to get to one of the cardinal rules of usability... "Don't tell, show." Game writers fucking suck. There are some exceptions (Hi Houk!), but for the most part, and this goes triple for localized stuff, and quintuple for anything from more than a generation ago (I got a good feeling!) they're paid for their ability to translate, not write. You get your choice of 2 lines of clumsy poorly written text saying "and Edgar was embarrassed by Terra's insult to his manhood" or you can somehow suffer through 1.5 seconds of him sweatdropping. Which is more emotive again?
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Note that these aren't FMV. They're big-ass sprites being moved against static backgrounds. The Turbo Duo and Sega CD never switch rendering modes when these player. They're honest to god sprite cut scenes.
I can see the appreciation of using sprites as a form of animation. There is a style to it all their own, and it's an interesting way to display a story within the system limitations of the time, what with the constraints of graphics, memory, and text capacity.
So do you need to bring this sort of knowledge back when you play older games?
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Why bother with old games? Looks at stuff like Pokemon which does the same thing still, or the N-1 games. Or Riviera. They're still handling it just fine.
Maybe technology has made me blazé about such things. I don't think I ever took it too seriously when Cid fell off the airship in Final Fantasy II, even at age 12. When games used more cinematic angles, I found it easier to get into the story.
I do remember, though, finding the Opera scene of Final Fantasy VI pretty moving at the time, and that was done without any close-ups, cuts, or zooms. So yeah, maybe these scenes can be carried by the quality of the translation?
Hardware wise, they're the same thing. Those images are made up of several sprites layed out in various ways. It's the same thing.
Like, take some of those DBZ cutscenes. They're giant static backgrounds with little sprites of their mouths moving. Just a different application.
By the by, the reason PSIV's cutscenes are so different from any other 16 bit RPG's cutscenes is because it was going to be a sega CD game that got changed to a genesis game midway through production. It was originally going to feature sprite cutscenes like the ones I posted above. The only reason SNES and genesis cutscenes are different is physical limitation.
For the opera scene, I'm pretty sure it was the background music that carried it. Still, FFVI was pretty good at making these things bearable.
Still, damn were Phantasy Star IV's scenes good. When is that thing coming to VC?
beyond oasis intro
i think, though, the op is complaining about stuff like this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbjNnX9Hhvk
I've never been bothered by them, but it always seemed to me that people would complain about "Why all these cutscenes and unskippable conversations" during the PSX/PS2 era, when it was obvious to me at least that such things had been happening since even the NES/SNES days.
It has to be Golden Sun.
Golden Sun has way too much pointless dialogue + way too many sprite emotions. Slows the game way down.
Go play Contra like real men. Or better yet; don't play Contra and take up knitting you woman.
Agreed.. and Golden Sun reminded me way too much of Beyond the Beyond in the exact same way.
See, I never minded the "sprite emotes" in most RPGs, because most of them used the emotes when appropriate. FF6 didn't constantly have sweat drops, gaping jaws, and shaking fingers... just at certain points in the dialog. It was used just enough to convey emotions at the time.
ZZZ...
It's true. I don't remember Phantasy Star IV having much at all in the way of animation for your on-map characters. But when, as in so many of the games, a major character nobly sacrifices him or herself, it's better to really see it, then to see a small sprite do something that sort of looks like nodding.
I have to admit to not having played Chrono Trigger, though... I'd like to. Maybe if it gets rereleased on the GBA or DS.
I'm at the end of KH2 right now, and yesterday I walked up to a door at which point the screen blanked for a few seconds and then came up with a cutscene in which Mickey Mouse said (in some sort of fantastically voiced and animated way), "Common Sora! Let's Go!" and waved his hand. Then the game moved on. Did I need a fuckin' cutscene for that? Was it worth the extra 10 seconds? No way in hell. But the game itself is ok, so I didn't start an entire thread bitching about it.
Same with Kingdom Hearts 2, I'm a cutscene whore I guess.
As for the old cutscenes, I never experienced anything overly bad, but I really only played Square RPGs too.
...huh. You play RPGs but haven't played CT.
Let me put this as simply as possible.
You need to be playing this game, any way you can, this very instant. It is the greatest RPG ever made and it will never be surpassed.
It could have been that people were just starting to get into the Japanese roleplaying games at that point, and hadn't really gone through the tediously long conversations of, say, Super Ninja Boy. Final Fantasy VII introduced a lot of people to the genre.
Still, back in 1991, I was glad that they had a plot. It wasn't just a mindless dungeon hack, and that was the most viable solution for fitting that much content onto a relatively small storage medium. At the time, for my preteen mind, any sort of story, whether it was told in text, dialogue, or even hopping sprites, was good.
Hmm, but that's somewhat off topic with its polygons and whatnot... I don't remember enough of the sprite based RPG's. Possibly because we never had a SNES and never got any decent RPG's anyway.
...though, now I want to play Terranigma (Come to the PAL VC, damn it!).
My pet peve is how SLOW characters move in many ingame cutscenes. Scenes where you say goodbye to one character and he walks INCREDIBLY SLOWLY to the door. Stops. Waits. Then the door opens. Then he moves INCREDIBLY SLOWLY through the door. pause. wait. the door closes. wait. wait. the door opens again. Oh, a new character, a guard, walks through the door. stops. waits. announces that some other character is going to come in. then the guard slowly leaves the room. door closes, wait, door opens. said character finally enters the room and SLOWLY walks over to you, and THEN finally you get his text bubble with slow scrolling text you can't speed up.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
I dont care if that above scene is sprite or 3d models. It SUCKS. I HATE that kind of thing. I have seen it in sprite based games like the handheld zeldas, as well as 3d games like the later final fantasies and things like baten kaidos.
Don't drag out the cutscene with unnecessarily slowly moving characters, and don't make watch three consecutive text bubbles filled with "..." I HATE "..."
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I'll agree with you on that. I like story in my game, and I have a fondness for good sprite animation. But if it's not particularly well done, and if it ruins the flow of the game, that's no good. As for what you are talking about, I hear that Hellboy is possibly the worst example of that in existence.
He hasn't played CT?
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Palom: Ready, Porom?
Porom: Yes!
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As soon as it's released onto a portable format, whether it be GBA, DS, or PSP, I'll do so. I don't have an SNES any more, and I really only have time to play 60 hour roleplaying games when I'm waiting for things to process at work, so it's gotta be portable.
Did you seriously cry? Seriously? Honestly? I kind of hated those little guys. I was glad to see them go. Maybe I was a callous 12 year old.
I played Chrono Trigger and I didn't like it. It was easy and predictable. All the hype ruined it for me.
Also I don't like unskippable, otherwise I'm cool with them no matter how stupid they are. I'll watch them once and then never again.
I got goosebumps.
No, you don't understand. First off, Squeenix will never touch the Chrono series ever again in any form because they are huge penises (I didn't say they have them, I said they ARE them), and you must make playing Chrono Trigger your life's priority number one, because it's a phenomenal landmark, and because it summarizes everything that was awesome about the golden age of videogames (that's the 16-bit era for you young'ins) better than any other game, with the possible exception of Super Metroid. They simply don't make games with as much heart and soul anymore. What you do, is you eBay the SNES version or Final Fantasy Chronicles (in fact, you may still be able to get Chronicles new in some stores, but beware, it is inferior despite the cool anime FMVs, because it has atrocious loading times), you sit down and don't get up until you've killed Lavos. No excuses. I don't care if you have other stuff to do or if you don't have a SNES or any PlayStation. You do what you have to do, but you play that game.
Now.
My theory is that years of dealing with good looking but limited animation character portraits alongside sprites with only two frames of animation for the earlier Shining Force games broke them. When they had the opportunity to use more animated sprites, it was like giving a hobo the key to a Thunderbird distillery.
No tears here. FF4 offed soooooo many characters that it just became routine after a while.
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Phantasy Star II-IV are available on the Sega Genesis Collection for PS2 and PSP. Cheaply, too.
That said, I do actually prefer reading text, yeah, I grew up mostly on D&D games and then moved on to Final Fantasy once I'd played like all of them.
Absolutely. One of the things I hate about games these days is how drawn-out they are. I don't mind a good FMV furthuring a good story but shit is out of control.
In general 3D games are too vast. In 2D sprite based games time and space could be condensed and fudged without real consequences. Today cutscenes and to a lesser degree interactions require cinematic pacing otherwise they'd look retarded and hurried. Today in-game space generally attempts to mimic real-world scale and proportion.
Sometimes I feel like many 100hr+ 3D RPGs would be at least less than half as long had they been made in the 16bit era, given the same basic gameplay content. There's a ton of padding just cause, again, cheating time & space ends up so much more difficult and awkward in 3D. Some 3D games skirt around this: I'd argue Xenogears, while mostly 3D, largely interacts with space and time like classic sprite-based gaming.
OTOH, there's definitely a wad of plodding sprite based stuff out there, but I'd take it over conventional 3D anyday.
Note that Oenden is actually made entirely out of sprite-based cutscenes.
And it's