Its kind of built into the premise of Suikoden, what with the 108 stars and being based around wars, and they did handle it somewhat better than most. (V especially, though 1 suffered from not knowing what to do with them all admittedly) Fire Emblem is also built from the ground up to deal with a large group of characters, both story wise and mechanics wise. Cross didn't need all the characters, so it ends up being a case of trying to use Quantity to make up for quality.
edited 14th Sep '14 12:19:59 PM by Alichains
to be fair, they had some semblence of an actual personality rather than a different accent, and overall the character design for each suikoden game is miles ahead of the majority of it in cross. excepting 1 and 4, maybe.
5 was <3 in terms of characters, imo.
the main problem with suikoden games in relation to their large cast, is that a significant portion of them are basically useless by the time they join anyways. it does occasionally seem like actual practicality of units is behind virtually everything else, and it becomes rather noticeable when you actually get around to using different characters like the game expects you to.
Of course. But then, why so many party characters?
I don't know about Suikoden, but Fire Emblem is a strategy game. You need a large holster for the game to work. Also, a matter of expectation. In an RPG, you expect all characters to be unique and in a strategy you expect them to be generic. CC have characters that are too generic for an RPG while FF is impressive by just having multiple unique characters. Fire Emblem also have the brilliant support system, that allow you to flesh out their personalities far beyond their relevance to the plot. Not as much you would expect in a RPG, but far more than you would from a strategy.
PS:Btw, personally I dislike games in which I can't utilize all my party and which I feel some of the members are there just to make volume. CT have just enough that I can rotate between them, bringing the ones that feel more relevant to the plot at the moment. In that case FE is a problem for me as well, but I still menage to use all of them in most games I've played and it helps I can bring a considerably number per mission. Games like CC or even FF6 are a bit of a pain to me (I love FF6, but that aspect still irks me).
edited 14th Sep '14 12:46:01 PM by Heatth
As I said already, in the time CC was released, the "I'm a strong, independent woman who—oops, now I'm kidnapped and out of the way for the majority of the game for the hero to rescue me" was such an epidemic cliche that the Grand List added it. I also said that her damseling struck me as the waste of what could have been the character she was presented to be.
Also, as I said, this isn't a moment-by-moment argument. If you want to argue on those levels, most damsels are only captured or imperiled "once". That isn't the point. The point is that Kid is essentially put into contrived distress situation one after the next. The last part of the game is basically her being brainwashed, then put into a coma, and then needing to be rescued from the past.
If that doesn't bother you, or whoever else, that's your business. But this is the reason I have issue with an argument that she is "better" than the cast of CT...an argument I've heard many, many times in the past 14 years.
I should note that the Grand List is a huuge list and includes many things that have only been used in a handful of games. Using the Grand List as evidence is questionable.
"What's out there? What's waiting for me?"I agree that the unnecessarily large cast is CC's biggest weakness. The single biggest improvement they could have made would have been cutting the cast down dramatically (perhaps keeping some of them as temporary members for their plot-relevant sections, like the Viper Manor guides) and expanding the role of the ones they kept. The "dozens of characters" thing was an experiment — one that I don't think worked, but I find it hard to fault them for trying. While the downside is obvious (shallower characters), I do think there was an upside that isn't usually considered. One of the reasons that Chrono Cross's world felt "alive" to me is the simple fact that you have so many characters whose lives are obviously and directly affected by your actions — while each individual character might not be the deepest, the sheer number of them means that there are "character moments" scattered around the game everywhere, which is something I enjoyed about CC quite a bit.
Still, some characters were just straight-up useless, and having about 20 times as many characters as you had party slots for them was not the best way to go about things. Many of them would have been just fine if they had remained non-playable (all of the dragoon characters, for instance) while others (like Turnip or NeoFio) had pretty much no reason to exist even as NPCs.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.My point is that the cliche existed at the time in an overabundance in that time period between the 90s and early 00s. The list is simply demonstrating that said cliche, like many others, was so prominent at the time that it could be pointed out. I can provide a more comprehensive list of similar examples, if you wish.
You guys better leave Starky as a playable character.
I wonder if he ever found a way back into space? Then again, considering the ending, maybe he never crashed to begin with.
edited 14th Sep '14 7:23:41 PM by Nikkolas
Actually I think Suikoden (or at least the second one, which many people consider the best) suffered from having so many characters. The majority of them were completely flat and one-note, and even the ones who had more screen time and characterization weren't THAT interesting.
so yeah i think the "huge amount of party members" thing is kind of bad. i'd much rather have a small party full of fleshed out and memorable characters rather than having 50 disposable ones.
not that i'm far enough into cross to really make that much of a judgment on its cast. i just met harle for the first time in viper manor.
Yeah you won't have access to a huge load of party members for a good while yet. Who did you use as your guide to Viper Manor? Guile, Nikki or Pierre?
Nikki. I'm pretty much going into the game 100% blind and have no real idea what's going to happen as a result of my choices. given that there's so many characters to unlock i suppose i'm bound to miss a few, but i can always replay it later if i enjoy the game enough for it.
Fun fact: Nikki was originally named Slash, as a reference to Slash from Guns & Roses.
...except the English release of Trigger had already renamed a character Slash, referencing the exact same thing. So they renamed Slash to a differen rock star reference entirely.
I have a message from another time...On this point, and do correct me if I'm wrong since it's been years since I last read on this, the original Japanese game had unique lines for every character in those situations. This became a problem when they started translating the game, as now they had a ton of lines that were all written in a very quirky fashion and many included puns or such that were based on how the specific characters spoke in Japanese. Since the unique lines were mostly characterization and less about plot, the translators decided that the simplest solution would be to create a scrip trough which a line of dialog would be run that'd add an appropriate accent based on the character you had in party at the time. So it's an english-only feature.
edited 16th Sep '14 6:47:58 AM by GabrieltheThird
This is the only thing I can say about the Chrono Cross translation. To me, it sounds like the localization improved more things since Kato himself worked with them to clarify plot points and characterization.
The Japanese version also auto-generated lines through accents, though apparently it wasn't as complex as the English version. It's mentioned in this interview, for example.
edited 16th Sep '14 12:16:52 PM by Vehek
I'll say this, it's a somewhat more interesting solution than Final Fantasy VI had, which was to, in scenes with no mandatory characters, not specify who was talking at all.
Well, except for a few moments that accomodated for Gau being the only speaker.
I have a message from another time...The way Japanese accents work makes it pretty straightforward, so that doesn't surprise me. It's also a feature that makes more sense in Japanese, because a lot more information is embedded in how people speak. Personally it feels like something that had to be clumsily adapted into English, and maybe that affected the quality of the game. I dunno.
Nah, English works will often use accents to encode personality traits. In many pieces of fiction, someone who speaks Received Pronunciation will be treated far differently from one who uses a Texan drawl or who sounds like they're from Brooklyn. Sometimes, characters will have those accents even when it makes no sense that those people would have them, simply because it quickly tells you their personality or intelligence. Japanese dialects aren't terribly difficult to translate into English.
"What's out there? What's waiting for me?"I always loved that Karsh, kinda the head knight guy, spoke so crassly and harshly and....un-knightly.
I guess all the Acacia Dragoons are kinda like that but Karsh was actually in the story more than the others. Well, he was for me. I didn't do Nikki's path originally so I barely interacted with Zoah. Marcy I had the one boss fight and the inevitable 3 Dragoons Boss Fight but that was about it. Karsh is one of the first people you meet in Another World so he kinda left a strong impression on me I guess.
The thing is, in Japanese they aren't just dialects, they're also generic language differences that mark politeness, gender, etc. It's just impossible to speak in Japanese without conveying a lot of information about the speaker. You can do the same thing in English but it's more subtle, and relying so heavily on accent stereotypes just makes the whole thing a bit clumsier and harder to pull off.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the characters in Japanese speak more normally than they do in English.
edited 16th Sep '14 8:06:30 PM by Clarste
@Clarste,
That is true. The system does make more sense as you can both convey a lot of information based on just that while still making the characters sound reasonably normal.
Still sucks they talk exactly the same thing except for a few different marksnote , though. The characterization still suffer as a result.
edited 16th Sep '14 9:50:28 PM by Heatth
Isn't there one character who's verbal tic is just umlauts? My friend and I couldn't figure out how that would sound.
Not Three Laws compliant.Different pronunciation of the effected vöwels?
I have a message from another time...So random question about Trigger:
Do we have any confirmed ages for the characters:
I once saw something that claimed Chrono was 17, Marle was 16, Lucca was 18 or 19, and Ayla was 24, but this isn't something I'm sure about.
I think I got those pages from a Chrono Trigger wiki, but Wiki's are only as accurate as the information the people writing them can get.
Also, for shits and giggles, pit a random character from Chrono Trigger against any character in any other game or manga that fights in a similar manner, and then take a guess who wins.
For example, pit Lucca against another fire based mage.
I'm going with Ayla vs Tifa Lockhart, and calling it a draw.
One Strip! One Strip!
Frankly, I'm confused as to why the large roster is so often brought up against Chrono Cross, and yet people very rarely criticize games like Suikoden or Fire emblem for their large casts. If anything, it's considered a plus for those series. Though, they somehow managed to have a huge amount of optional dialogue. Chrono Cross has a lot of that, but not as much.
"What's out there? What's waiting for me?"