Final Fantasy general

I feel like we've reached an Uncanny Valley of JRPG plots.

Used to be they were simple and video gamey, but ahead of the curve of the "shoot the bad guy" standards of their contemporaries. Nowadays they're extremely plot and character driven, but written by people who aren't particularly good writers. Not that they were back then, but they didn't need to b due to the elementary school levels of writing we were used to in other video games.

Yeah the barthandalus fights are great. Died i don't even know how many times on that one til i got my strategy down. I actually love the battle system, it's like an extension to the X-2 job system.

It's a pity 'cause some of the character moments have the potential to be great. The "fight against your fate" story i thought was self defeating, but I've also recently finished xenoblade chronicles 1, and the theme was done so much better.

But as it is i get to watch them talk to hope about his hope, which i fully embraced this time around.

It's notable that almost all JRP Gs have taken a page out of Persona's book (Or did Persona take a note out of Fire Emblem's book?) and put a very large focus on one-to-one character interactions. And how FF doesn't have those to the point that many party members across the franchise pretty much end up being ancillary.

I'd love to see something like the heart-to-heart events in Xenoblade at the very least.

Even the new edition of Dragon Quest on the Switch coming out will let you choose the main character's Love Interest.

Edited by ShirowShirow on Jul 15th 2019 at 3:01:00 PM

Yeah I don't have high expectations for most JRPG stories these days, really. I've heard FFXIV (which is an MMO but whatever) has some pretty good writing but even that has a rather steep barrier of entry to get to the parts people actually like.

To be honest I'm not a huge fan of these Persona-like elements creeping up in other games. I mean I guess they're fine conceptually but I rarely if ever feel like they added all that much. Most social links in Persona are not that good, especially for your party members.

Ugh, I just managed to get Omnislash with my last ten BP.

There are two main types of RPGs in my experience: story-driven and sandbox.

In the story-driven style, you play a defined character who interacts with other defined characters, following a mostly pre-determined story in which you have greater or lesser degrees of freedom to alter the path depending on the game. See The Witcher, most JRPGs, etc.

A story-driven RPG depends vitally on its characters and how well the writing draws players in to caring about them. Characters who don't engage or who turn the audience off; stories that are trite, silly, or unbelievable — these fail at the basic purpose of this type of game.

In the sandbox style, there is still a narrative structure but the emphasis is on you building a customized character who interacts with the story in a way determined entirely by you, within the allowed parameters. See Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect (depending on which one), etc.

A sandbox RPG depends on mechanics that allow players to choose their own path yet still be able to navigate the game. If it's possible to make reasonable choices that prevent the game from being completed (besides murdering all the NPCs for the larfs)... well, sometimes that's intentional and sometimes it's not, but it's generally seen as undesirable. Story quality is also helpful but not required, depending on the game. You generally want a feeling of accomplishment from overcoming challenges and to be able to arrive at some kind of endpoint where you've "won".

All this is to say that, as soon as a story-driven RPG loses me by having characters that I can't relate to or a story that makes no sense, I'm taken out of the experience and am no longer having fun.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 15th 2019 at 3:39:39 PM

I think the problem with the Persona approach is half the time the Cast isn't developed by the Writers to warrant any actually deep exploration

Its nice in Fire emblem that everybody have this little interconnected relationships of being in the army together

Because the Writers intend for EVERYBODY to have some form of backstory

Persona tends to fall apart cause the social links are more for the MC to build his harem then actually explore the characters

Final Fantasy general its the location that brings out character development

Cosmo Canyon better use Red, Wutai revolves around Yuffie, Zell during Balamb's occupation, Selphie at Trabia, Lulu at the Calm lands... etc etc

FF's approach is unless their development is the crux of the plot, The party members tend to get relegated to almost Spotlight Stealing when its time to give them focus

and then they go right back into place once the areas cleared

Well, yeah, in most RPGs, characters are only characters during story beats, then they go back to being piles of stats that you hurl at enemies. I'm not sure that's avoidable, or even undesirable.

I've seen a few games try and incorporate personality traits into game mechanics but even than it's mostly window dressing more than anything else.

It's been overused to death but One Winged Angel is still a total banger.

And I did all that work for Omnislash and forgot to equip it.

Edited by RodimusMinor on Jul 15th 2019 at 5:00:13 AM

That's a shame.

Eh, he still went down like a bitch. He only destroyed the entire solar system one time. The worst thing he did was turn Cid into a frog.

So how much of a fuss was kicked up over FFVII's lack of a "and they all lived happily ever after" thing and only revealing Red's descendants and the ruined Midgar? I'm not much of a fan of ambiguous endings but I thought it was fine enough.

Edited by RodimusMinor on Jul 15th 2019 at 5:11:09 AM

Not much. I prefer it that way but the Remake is almost certainly going to change it.

Some people apparently didn't like it and were glad that Advent Children gave a more definitive answer as to what happened.

I can't say I agree but to each their own I suppose.

I guess the way I see it, there's really no need for a little stinger of the Highwind and everyone going "yay we're alive". I tend to hate ambiguous endings on principle if they're only there to make the audience fill in the blanks rather than come to a conclusion based on the evidence given to them, and this kind of feels like the latter more than the former. The Lifestream erupts and encroaches onto Meteor, and there's no need for that to happen if the Lifestream doesn't do something to repel it. Still, most of the time it's the characters you latch onto rather than the themes, so I get that there might have been some backlash.

There was the possibility of Holy wiping humanity out if it deemed it enough of a threat to the planet's well being, which ties into the game's mild environmental themes.

Maybe humanity was gone, maybe they'd just abandoned Shinra and its Mako Reactors and embraced cleaner, more earth friendly energy sources.

Obviously it's the latter because how else are you going to keep marketing Cloud and Tifa, but personally I like pretending it's up to interpretation.

I never thought the ending was all that ambiguous. It is ambiguous how exactly Holy was affecting the situation, but the scene has a clear turning point in Lifestream coming out to fend off Meteor. There's a certain thematic weight to that, in that the planet and humanity is saved by the very thing humanity was recklessly destroying, that thing essentially being both the planet and humanity itself.

That and Red XIII being shown alive at the end is good enough for me to think that everything turned out fine even without an epilogue of the heroes returning home and whatever. Instead the final scene drives in one of the game's themes a final time, showing that in the end the planet as recovered and flourished, the previously desolate region around Midgar is now a jungle which has overtaken the old ruins of Midgar and the reactors.

So naturally, they all switch to coal fuel.

Gotta start somewhere

I mean its fairly realistic,they may make the switch to non fossel eventually fuels like we're doing now

At least they aren't using souls anymore.

I wonder what they were using before. Aren't Mako reactors relatively new?

They were using coal. It's covered when you go to Barret's home town. They were a coal mine.

Barret has miner's lung confirmed.

I too took the interpretation that the Lifestram's intervention, presumably guided by Aerith, allowed both the planet and humanity to be saved.