You know, there's something that has always seemed a bit odd to me is RPG characters' dreams. Do they EVER just have regular, non-plot-essential dreams? I mean, if an RPG character has a dream, at LEAST 75% of the time it's a vision telling them of some immensely important upcoming event, usually one that spells doom and destruction for all they know if they don't go out and level up at least 40 times while procuring some holy super-powered divine object/weapon/maiden. They never just have a normal dream about random crap their minds throw together. It's ALWAYS prophetic somehow; even the purpose of the vision can't just be some made up crap. If they dream that they're the chosen one and that a race of aliens are gonna attack their world and they're the only person who can stop the aliens by finding 7 magic rings that can forge the Hyper Force Sword, then EVERY PART of that is true. Not one part of it can be made up, even though, for some reason, most of the characters who have the dreams ignore them until the predicted stuff is currently about to happen or IS happening. Even though EVERY dream has huge significance, they seem to treat the things with as little or even LESS interest than we do with our dreams.
The only real exception that accounts for the 25 or lower percent of the time is when a dream is showing a character some part of their past. And again, there's no possibility that this part of their past isn't incredibly important. Shadow of Final Fantasy 6 never just dreams about how fun it was to go hang-gliding with Baram that one time. He has to have dreams remembering monumental moments that changed his life forever. Karen from Phantasy Star Universe doesn't have a memory dream of a conversation she had with someone last Friday about what kind of boots she prefers. She has a traumatic memory dream of her mom dying when she was a little kid. I mean, I know that these are the kinds of moments that do stay with a person forever, and compared to the 100% accurate prophetic dreams, these ones are pretty believable, but still, no one dreams about massively significant memories like that all the time.
Y'know, I had a dream last week. I don't remember too many particulars (frankly, I'm surprised I remember it at all, because I usually forget dreams the moment I wake up), but I do remember that for some reason or other, I was talking to God about roast beef sandwiches. I really kinda wish I could remember the set-up to that conversation, and what I and God said exactly, because I know I really enjoyed it while it was going on and it would definitely be fun to relate, but that's life.
Anyways, living in this world, which makes more sense than it doesn't, I know I can disregard that dream as probably unimportant overall. But if I were living in an RPG world, this dream would have been a holy vision, and I would know for sure that God himself was granting it to me, and telling me that I must go on a journey to find the legendary Roast Beef Sandwich of El-Al-Eeal, lost since ancient times and key to the salvation of my world from the heinous Bologna Demons, summoned forth every thousand years to bring ruination to all. Not only that, but the dream might have then gone on to display a memory I had of my father leaving on a journey to discover the truth behind the Whole Wheat civilizations of old that created the sandwich I was now to find.
Seriously, though, I know this isn't a big deal or anything, but it still IS kinda silly. I know it would get boring if every time you slept at the inn you had to watch an inane dream sequence that means nothing, but still, it would be a lot more realistic if every now and then your sad-hearted pretty-boy protagonist just had a non-plot-significant dream where he was in front of his entire graduating class from Generic Main Character Mercenary Academy in his underwear.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Suikoden 4
Wow. You know, I'm not very big on Suikoden 5. As I've mentioned before, it rang kinda hollow to me--had all the dressings of a Suikoden, but none of the heart. You'd play it, you'd be entertained for a while, you'd finish it, and you'd slowly start to realize that something was missing...you hadn't witnessed anything monumental, inspiring, and/or touching, you hadn't experienced anything enriching or really worthy of much note, you'd just...played a game that felt like Suikoden but was written like a very average RPG.
Yet, from what I've seen, the game was received very well by most fans, better even than the far superior Suikoden 3 was, and hailed as finally being a "true" Suikoden to follow the 2nd in the series. I've always kind of wondered at this...what is it that people found in S5 that they loved so much? Was I missing something? Usually I pass off such differences in RPG appreciation as people generally having lower standards than myself and/or that they all just happen to be stupid and wrong.* But the fan base of the Suikoden series tends to be a slight cut above your average rabble of fantards, so such a dismissal didn't seem right.
But I think I get it, now that I have played Suikoden 4. I understand. People loved Suikoden 5 because, after Suikoden 4, they were ecstatic to play a game with the name Suikoden in the title that wasn't completely terrible.
Now, I say Suikoden 4 is completely terrible. But when I say "completely," I don't just mean that in the usual way of emphasizing that it's very, very terrible. I mean "completely" in the sense that the game is wholly terrible. I mean that its terribleness is complete; it permeates every aspect of the title. This is the most boring RPG I've played in years. In fact, it may be THE most boring, period. I mean, with terrible yawn-fests like Shadow Hearts 3, 7th Saga, and Lufia 1, the stuff in them was so horrible, stupid, and badly-envisioned and/or executed, that it was bad enough to offend the audience at times into actively hating the game. But this...with the exception of S4's minigames, there isn't enough life in this title to spark anything more than bored dislike. Allow me to go into detail.
Graphics: There's nothing especially bad about the graphics, but there's certainly absolutely nothing that will catch your eye. The few special effects are little more than bright, colored lights and generic "This Thing Is On Fire" effects. Probably the best-looking part of the game is the water, and your appreciation for its waves and shine will last for approximately 1/80000th of the time that you'll be looking at it.
The cutscenes are very jerk and disjointed. You'll see something for like 10-30 seconds, usually, of what's going on, and hopefully you'll get the idea, because they won't go into very much detail. It'll start suddenly, and stop suddenly, with a tiny sound clip played. It just...I don't know. It's like someone cut up a movie reel and then glued a bunch of pieces together to form a shorter version of the flick.
Sound: The music is forgettable background noise, the sound effects are dead average, and the voice acting is generic at the best of times, and awkward the rest of time. Even Michael McConnohie, who I've enjoyed in a few previous RPGs enough to look up his name, provides a rather flat performance--even when being generous in considering that, enjoyable voice or no, his distinguishing tone and inflections make him a one-trick pony, it sounds like a tired repeat. The one person who stood out at all was the character of Graham Cray, whose voice actor must have been watching Gargoyles when he was recording, because I could have sworn that it was Keith David (Goliath from Gargoyles) doing the voice. But yeah. In general, this is a terrible showing for the series.
Gameplay: Okay. I'm not going to talk about Sailing here. That gets its own rant. Because it's just too terrible not to be its own topic. Let's just say that the gameplay involved in moving from one place to another in Suikoden 4 is the most mind-numbing activity imaginable. If you can actually think of something that you would find less entertaining than navigating Suikoden 4's map, then congratulations, one of the following is true:
A. You have never played Suikoden 4
B. You must be more manically depressed than Marvin the Paranoid Android.
As for the rest of the time...well, RPG battles aren't usually very exciting or interesting, but Suikoden 4's is even more uninteresting than the usual Suikoden fare in that instead of the standard 6 characters to control in battle, you're brought down to 4, eliminating some of the strategy from it, even if said strategy in the series is usually pretty basic and simple. And the strategic battles? It's sort of like a mix of Chess and Battleship, only with all the strategy taken out of the Chess and all the fun taken out of the Battleship. You aren't even given any incentive to do anything more than a minimal job with it--whether you win with one badly damaged ship left, or don't get hit once, the result is the same. In the other Suikodens, you get rewards of cash and sometimes items if you do well in strategic battles, and of course you've got to be careful because doing poorly can mean the permanent deaths of some characters, but in this one? Nothing. No penalties or rewards, barely any strategy, and certainly no fun. And finally, the one-on-one battles are okay, I suppose, but they lack a lot of the oomph of the other games', and the choreography for them is rather bland.
Minigames: Suikoden 4 manages, against all odds, to have worse minigames than the rest of the series. The usual dice-in-bowl crap is back, they've got stupid and random top-spinning, and Ritapon...there is no justice in this world until God personally rains fire upon whoever thought up Ritapon.
Little Things That Bug Me: I know this isn't a big deal and all, but dear lord, the way the hero of the game runs. It's like...you know that utterly stupid way that anime girls sometimes run, where their entire bodies sway left and right with every step while they hold their arms against their chest with their forearms folded up and outward, so that the whole process of simply running becomes more clumsy and laughable to see than watching a penguin walk uphill? It's like he's doing THAT. Konami invented a way for an anime GUY to run that way. You have to watch this idiot's ass sway against itself for the entire game as he not so much runs as stumbles quickly.
Characters: The Suikoden series has had some of the most thought-provoking, appealing, deep, and excellent characters in all of RPGs. But in this one...well, it's like the saying "Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink." 108 Stars of Destiny, 0 Good Characters. I mean, for God's sake, they made VIKI boring. If there were laws for how to handle plots and characters when making an RPG, that would be a fucking criminal act. There's not a single character or villain in here that you'll have anything beyond a very mild like or dislike for. They're just...there. Pointless, and there.
Plot: I'm not sure there's enough of one for me to even report on. What's there is meager. Some island country up north wants to expand southward (why, I can't imagine, the combined lands of the islands you visit in this game would barely be enough to make up a county in one of the other games' countries, and none of the islands have very much of note), and it uses a big, unimaginative super cannon and an exceptionally small navy to try to take over the southern island nations. It's up to your hero to lead a coalition of these southern islands, the result of which is a massive fleet of...4 ships all together, against these aggressors at a rather leisurely pace, with the aid of a drunken old hag whose brilliant strategies amount to using very obvious decoys and predictable pincer formations. I mean, I think the only people on the planet who care about this story less than the player does are probably the people who MADE the game. You'd get more satisfaction from a Save The Princess quest.
And while the overview of the plot is very boring, the details of it are either missing or nonsensical. Half the time, you don't know anything about how or why something is happening, and the game sure as hell doesn't seem to feel obligated to let you know. The other half of the time, the plot's moved along by events that just don't make sense. The hero's exile? He's banished for allegedly killing his commander without anyone even stopping to acknowledge his pleas of innocence. I mean, it's not just that they don't believe him (which is odd enough as it is, since the only "witness" is known to be unreliable and the proposed motives for the supposed murder don't make any sense). It's like they don't even HEAR him. It's like, "Hey, we've decided you're guilty. Don't expect a trial, or accusation, or anything like that. Just hit the road. Er, ocean." And then near the end of the game, there's this one character, Ramada? He's fooling around in the enemy base, see. And he gets shot through the chest by a large, pointy, fast-moving projectile which we later find out is also poisoned, see. And after he's been shot, your army begins to sail for the enemy base, and the old booze-swilling bag says it'll take 3 days to get there. So presumably 3 days later, your characters are inside, meet the villain who shot Ramada, and the villain lets loose another projectile. Ramada comes out of nowhere and gets himself shot in the chest AGAIN. While mentioning that it's poisoned. 3. Days. After getting shot the first time. If I were a villain, I'd be using a better poison, as this one apparently can't finish off a mortally wounded man over the course of 3 days.
Now, as much as that doesn't make sense, here's the kicker: after getting shot in the chest and suffering from poison for 3 days, then getting shot in the chest again and given a second dose of poison, Ramada apparently lives. Nice job on the story telling, S4.
At least the plot's short. If it weren't for the endless Sailing and the running around to get the 108 Stars of Destiny, this game would take about a third as long as it does to get done, because so few things happen, and all of them so quickly. Just another example of this thing being boring and terrible.
So yeah, there you go. Do I hate this game? Nah. Hate's reserved for genuinely loathsome games, horrible, excruciating shit like Wild Arms 4 or Final Fantasy 10-2. Would I ever suggest that any man or woman in his or her right mind, or even not in his or her right mind, play it? Fuck NO.
* Yes, I am aware that I'm an egotistical jerk. But the great thing about being an egotistical jerk is that I don't care if you like that or not, so phoo on you!
Yet, from what I've seen, the game was received very well by most fans, better even than the far superior Suikoden 3 was, and hailed as finally being a "true" Suikoden to follow the 2nd in the series. I've always kind of wondered at this...what is it that people found in S5 that they loved so much? Was I missing something? Usually I pass off such differences in RPG appreciation as people generally having lower standards than myself and/or that they all just happen to be stupid and wrong.* But the fan base of the Suikoden series tends to be a slight cut above your average rabble of fantards, so such a dismissal didn't seem right.
But I think I get it, now that I have played Suikoden 4. I understand. People loved Suikoden 5 because, after Suikoden 4, they were ecstatic to play a game with the name Suikoden in the title that wasn't completely terrible.
Now, I say Suikoden 4 is completely terrible. But when I say "completely," I don't just mean that in the usual way of emphasizing that it's very, very terrible. I mean "completely" in the sense that the game is wholly terrible. I mean that its terribleness is complete; it permeates every aspect of the title. This is the most boring RPG I've played in years. In fact, it may be THE most boring, period. I mean, with terrible yawn-fests like Shadow Hearts 3, 7th Saga, and Lufia 1, the stuff in them was so horrible, stupid, and badly-envisioned and/or executed, that it was bad enough to offend the audience at times into actively hating the game. But this...with the exception of S4's minigames, there isn't enough life in this title to spark anything more than bored dislike. Allow me to go into detail.
Graphics: There's nothing especially bad about the graphics, but there's certainly absolutely nothing that will catch your eye. The few special effects are little more than bright, colored lights and generic "This Thing Is On Fire" effects. Probably the best-looking part of the game is the water, and your appreciation for its waves and shine will last for approximately 1/80000th of the time that you'll be looking at it.
The cutscenes are very jerk and disjointed. You'll see something for like 10-30 seconds, usually, of what's going on, and hopefully you'll get the idea, because they won't go into very much detail. It'll start suddenly, and stop suddenly, with a tiny sound clip played. It just...I don't know. It's like someone cut up a movie reel and then glued a bunch of pieces together to form a shorter version of the flick.
Sound: The music is forgettable background noise, the sound effects are dead average, and the voice acting is generic at the best of times, and awkward the rest of time. Even Michael McConnohie, who I've enjoyed in a few previous RPGs enough to look up his name, provides a rather flat performance--even when being generous in considering that, enjoyable voice or no, his distinguishing tone and inflections make him a one-trick pony, it sounds like a tired repeat. The one person who stood out at all was the character of Graham Cray, whose voice actor must have been watching Gargoyles when he was recording, because I could have sworn that it was Keith David (Goliath from Gargoyles) doing the voice. But yeah. In general, this is a terrible showing for the series.
Gameplay: Okay. I'm not going to talk about Sailing here. That gets its own rant. Because it's just too terrible not to be its own topic. Let's just say that the gameplay involved in moving from one place to another in Suikoden 4 is the most mind-numbing activity imaginable. If you can actually think of something that you would find less entertaining than navigating Suikoden 4's map, then congratulations, one of the following is true:
A. You have never played Suikoden 4
B. You must be more manically depressed than Marvin the Paranoid Android.
As for the rest of the time...well, RPG battles aren't usually very exciting or interesting, but Suikoden 4's is even more uninteresting than the usual Suikoden fare in that instead of the standard 6 characters to control in battle, you're brought down to 4, eliminating some of the strategy from it, even if said strategy in the series is usually pretty basic and simple. And the strategic battles? It's sort of like a mix of Chess and Battleship, only with all the strategy taken out of the Chess and all the fun taken out of the Battleship. You aren't even given any incentive to do anything more than a minimal job with it--whether you win with one badly damaged ship left, or don't get hit once, the result is the same. In the other Suikodens, you get rewards of cash and sometimes items if you do well in strategic battles, and of course you've got to be careful because doing poorly can mean the permanent deaths of some characters, but in this one? Nothing. No penalties or rewards, barely any strategy, and certainly no fun. And finally, the one-on-one battles are okay, I suppose, but they lack a lot of the oomph of the other games', and the choreography for them is rather bland.
Minigames: Suikoden 4 manages, against all odds, to have worse minigames than the rest of the series. The usual dice-in-bowl crap is back, they've got stupid and random top-spinning, and Ritapon...there is no justice in this world until God personally rains fire upon whoever thought up Ritapon.
Little Things That Bug Me: I know this isn't a big deal and all, but dear lord, the way the hero of the game runs. It's like...you know that utterly stupid way that anime girls sometimes run, where their entire bodies sway left and right with every step while they hold their arms against their chest with their forearms folded up and outward, so that the whole process of simply running becomes more clumsy and laughable to see than watching a penguin walk uphill? It's like he's doing THAT. Konami invented a way for an anime GUY to run that way. You have to watch this idiot's ass sway against itself for the entire game as he not so much runs as stumbles quickly.
Characters: The Suikoden series has had some of the most thought-provoking, appealing, deep, and excellent characters in all of RPGs. But in this one...well, it's like the saying "Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink." 108 Stars of Destiny, 0 Good Characters. I mean, for God's sake, they made VIKI boring. If there were laws for how to handle plots and characters when making an RPG, that would be a fucking criminal act. There's not a single character or villain in here that you'll have anything beyond a very mild like or dislike for. They're just...there. Pointless, and there.
Plot: I'm not sure there's enough of one for me to even report on. What's there is meager. Some island country up north wants to expand southward (why, I can't imagine, the combined lands of the islands you visit in this game would barely be enough to make up a county in one of the other games' countries, and none of the islands have very much of note), and it uses a big, unimaginative super cannon and an exceptionally small navy to try to take over the southern island nations. It's up to your hero to lead a coalition of these southern islands, the result of which is a massive fleet of...4 ships all together, against these aggressors at a rather leisurely pace, with the aid of a drunken old hag whose brilliant strategies amount to using very obvious decoys and predictable pincer formations. I mean, I think the only people on the planet who care about this story less than the player does are probably the people who MADE the game. You'd get more satisfaction from a Save The Princess quest.
And while the overview of the plot is very boring, the details of it are either missing or nonsensical. Half the time, you don't know anything about how or why something is happening, and the game sure as hell doesn't seem to feel obligated to let you know. The other half of the time, the plot's moved along by events that just don't make sense. The hero's exile? He's banished for allegedly killing his commander without anyone even stopping to acknowledge his pleas of innocence. I mean, it's not just that they don't believe him (which is odd enough as it is, since the only "witness" is known to be unreliable and the proposed motives for the supposed murder don't make any sense). It's like they don't even HEAR him. It's like, "Hey, we've decided you're guilty. Don't expect a trial, or accusation, or anything like that. Just hit the road. Er, ocean." And then near the end of the game, there's this one character, Ramada? He's fooling around in the enemy base, see. And he gets shot through the chest by a large, pointy, fast-moving projectile which we later find out is also poisoned, see. And after he's been shot, your army begins to sail for the enemy base, and the old booze-swilling bag says it'll take 3 days to get there. So presumably 3 days later, your characters are inside, meet the villain who shot Ramada, and the villain lets loose another projectile. Ramada comes out of nowhere and gets himself shot in the chest AGAIN. While mentioning that it's poisoned. 3. Days. After getting shot the first time. If I were a villain, I'd be using a better poison, as this one apparently can't finish off a mortally wounded man over the course of 3 days.
Now, as much as that doesn't make sense, here's the kicker: after getting shot in the chest and suffering from poison for 3 days, then getting shot in the chest again and given a second dose of poison, Ramada apparently lives. Nice job on the story telling, S4.
At least the plot's short. If it weren't for the endless Sailing and the running around to get the 108 Stars of Destiny, this game would take about a third as long as it does to get done, because so few things happen, and all of them so quickly. Just another example of this thing being boring and terrible.
So yeah, there you go. Do I hate this game? Nah. Hate's reserved for genuinely loathsome games, horrible, excruciating shit like Wild Arms 4 or Final Fantasy 10-2. Would I ever suggest that any man or woman in his or her right mind, or even not in his or her right mind, play it? Fuck NO.
* Yes, I am aware that I'm an egotistical jerk. But the great thing about being an egotistical jerk is that I don't care if you like that or not, so phoo on you!
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
La Pucelle Tactics: Why I Was Disappointed With It
Before I make this rant, I'd like to say, for the record, that La Pucelle Tactics is a decent RPG. Its plot is dead average, but not BAD, and its characters, though they disappointed me terribly, are ultimately fairly decent, I guess. In most ways, the biggest disappointment of Nippon Ichi's RPGs is easily Disgaea 2; that was just a lousy RPG, plain and simple. If you play LPT, you will more than likely enjoy it. So keep that in mind.
That being said, the game is a tremendous let-down to me. Not so much because I'd heard or expected it to be good and it wasn't, as most RPG disappointments are, but rather because the game disappoints the expectations that it, itself, gave me.
La Pucelle Tactics follows a girl named Prier, her brother, and their friends as they perform duties for their small Christian-esque religious group which is more or less dedicated to protecting people and ridding the world of evil crap like demons and zombies and so on, in a land where people have this legend of a holy maiden once beating this super evil dark demon, and all that usual back story jazz. It starts out very well--the premise isn't exactly unique, but as is the usual for Nippon Ichi, the characters are incredibly appealing, and most have deep and engaging development. Prier's brother Culotte is pretty good, as is the object of his boyhood affections, Alouette, Homard is mildly amusing, Croix is okay, and Eclair seems, early on, to have a heck of a lot of potential as a character. As for Prier, early on, I just loved this gal. She's a breath of fresh air from your regular RPG protagonist (good or bad). She's outspoken, fun, cheerful (but not in a sappy or grating way), strongly independent, and amusingly direct (her philosophy seems to be that any problem can be solved with a good enough kick or uppercut). She's also got plenty of heart-warming and well-executed development as a character, too. For the first half of the game, she's one of the best main characters in an RPG that I've seen.
But then...jeez. It's like...okay, think back to Final Fantasy 8. Yes, yes, I know that you probably don't WANT to, but do it anyways. Now, you know how about halfway through the game, Squall does a complete and totally bizarre 180 from being an apathetic, miserable, totally loathsome asshole to being a love-sick, clingy, equally loathsome nitwit who is head-over-heels infatuated with a woman who, five minutes before, he couldn't stand the presence of? And how after this totally out-of-the-blue event, the entirety of the plot from then on is focused on their lame and nonsensical romance? To such an annoying degree that most of the rest of the cast's development was from that point on was focused on new ways to enhance and develop this flawed and moronic love story? That's what happens to La Pucelle Tactics. Seriously. I mean, it is just as unexpected and groundless as Squall and Rinoa's romance, completely overruns every aspect of the plot just like theirs, relegates other characters' development to only growing in ways that enhances this pointless theme of love, everything. And it's worse than FF8, because with FF8, at least the characters being twisted and ruined were lousy and shallow anyways.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against romance in RPGs or anything. I like a good love story as much as anyone, possibly more. But the key idea there is that I like a GOOD love story. Not a crappy, unnecessary and undesirable one like this. It all starts when Prier spends a story chapter helping two NPCs get together. At seeing their love, she suddenly realizes that she's never really thought about love before and wonders if she maybe should love someone. And from that point on, every part of her development and the story's progression become about nothing more than her having a crush on her teammate Croix. And we're not talking a good love story here, folks. We're talking the most cliched anime crap you can imagine. Thrill as Prier privately blushes each and every time Croix talks to her, looks at her, or just happens to stand within eyesight of her! Ooh and ahh as she proves just how much she loves him by doing everything within her power to avoid admitting that she has any feelings for him at all! Feel awe at the incredible originality as Prier gets upset and violent to anyone who dares to point out her extremely obvious infatuation! Be amazed as Croix predictably doesn't notice a goddamn thing! Well actually, I guess that IS rather surprising, just not in a good way. If it's a tired and painfully stupid anime cliche for romance, it's here.
And of course, not being content to utterly destroy the previously best character in the game, LPT's writers also included a stupid little side-romance for the second best, Eclair, who had the potential to be an even better character than Prier, with Homard, using even LESS believable circumstances to do it (Prier and Croix, at least, knew each other for more than 10 minutes before Prier dove into her crush on him, and actually got along). They argue about something (and the argument itself, incidentally, doesn't seem to make much sense anyway), Eclair admits that she was wrong eventually, and...that seems to be the only thing necessary for these two to be crazily into each other. It's made even worse by the fact that Homard is like 18 or so, and Eclair, near as I can figure, is 11. Maybe she's a little older and I just didn't figure the arithmetic right from the game's few clues about her age, but I can't be off by more than a year or two. I don't care how unrealistically developed Dark Eclair is physically, that's just creepy.
A romance plot in an RPG (or anything, really, this rule doesn't just apply to games) can be a great thing. It can be a fantastic way to get a new perspective into a character and all the other aspects of that character's personality. But it can't just REPLACE all the other parts of the character's personality, or it utterly ruins that character, which it did with LPT. Same is true with a romantic subplot being a part of a main story--if it just overtakes everything else, the whole thing is cheapened and loses its worth. And when the love story that takes everything over is bland and poorly-conceived like this one, that makes the situation worse. And what makes the whole thing both crappy AND disappointing is how much potential the game had that was was lost in the process.
It's not like Nippon Ichi can't make a decent love story. I've seen'em do it. I liked the small but sweet one in Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, the one in Makai Kingdom was fantastic for how quietly profound it was, and hell, the NPCs of LPT that got Prier mixed up in the love concept actually had a pretty nice story themselves. NIS can do it, they just...totally flubbed it up on this one. Stick to the smaller, less plot-dominating romances, NIS, or we'll just keep getting more disappointments like LPT and yawn-fests like Disgaea 2.
That being said, the game is a tremendous let-down to me. Not so much because I'd heard or expected it to be good and it wasn't, as most RPG disappointments are, but rather because the game disappoints the expectations that it, itself, gave me.
La Pucelle Tactics follows a girl named Prier, her brother, and their friends as they perform duties for their small Christian-esque religious group which is more or less dedicated to protecting people and ridding the world of evil crap like demons and zombies and so on, in a land where people have this legend of a holy maiden once beating this super evil dark demon, and all that usual back story jazz. It starts out very well--the premise isn't exactly unique, but as is the usual for Nippon Ichi, the characters are incredibly appealing, and most have deep and engaging development. Prier's brother Culotte is pretty good, as is the object of his boyhood affections, Alouette, Homard is mildly amusing, Croix is okay, and Eclair seems, early on, to have a heck of a lot of potential as a character. As for Prier, early on, I just loved this gal. She's a breath of fresh air from your regular RPG protagonist (good or bad). She's outspoken, fun, cheerful (but not in a sappy or grating way), strongly independent, and amusingly direct (her philosophy seems to be that any problem can be solved with a good enough kick or uppercut). She's also got plenty of heart-warming and well-executed development as a character, too. For the first half of the game, she's one of the best main characters in an RPG that I've seen.
But then...jeez. It's like...okay, think back to Final Fantasy 8. Yes, yes, I know that you probably don't WANT to, but do it anyways. Now, you know how about halfway through the game, Squall does a complete and totally bizarre 180 from being an apathetic, miserable, totally loathsome asshole to being a love-sick, clingy, equally loathsome nitwit who is head-over-heels infatuated with a woman who, five minutes before, he couldn't stand the presence of? And how after this totally out-of-the-blue event, the entirety of the plot from then on is focused on their lame and nonsensical romance? To such an annoying degree that most of the rest of the cast's development was from that point on was focused on new ways to enhance and develop this flawed and moronic love story? That's what happens to La Pucelle Tactics. Seriously. I mean, it is just as unexpected and groundless as Squall and Rinoa's romance, completely overruns every aspect of the plot just like theirs, relegates other characters' development to only growing in ways that enhances this pointless theme of love, everything. And it's worse than FF8, because with FF8, at least the characters being twisted and ruined were lousy and shallow anyways.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against romance in RPGs or anything. I like a good love story as much as anyone, possibly more. But the key idea there is that I like a GOOD love story. Not a crappy, unnecessary and undesirable one like this. It all starts when Prier spends a story chapter helping two NPCs get together. At seeing their love, she suddenly realizes that she's never really thought about love before and wonders if she maybe should love someone. And from that point on, every part of her development and the story's progression become about nothing more than her having a crush on her teammate Croix. And we're not talking a good love story here, folks. We're talking the most cliched anime crap you can imagine. Thrill as Prier privately blushes each and every time Croix talks to her, looks at her, or just happens to stand within eyesight of her! Ooh and ahh as she proves just how much she loves him by doing everything within her power to avoid admitting that she has any feelings for him at all! Feel awe at the incredible originality as Prier gets upset and violent to anyone who dares to point out her extremely obvious infatuation! Be amazed as Croix predictably doesn't notice a goddamn thing! Well actually, I guess that IS rather surprising, just not in a good way. If it's a tired and painfully stupid anime cliche for romance, it's here.
And of course, not being content to utterly destroy the previously best character in the game, LPT's writers also included a stupid little side-romance for the second best, Eclair, who had the potential to be an even better character than Prier, with Homard, using even LESS believable circumstances to do it (Prier and Croix, at least, knew each other for more than 10 minutes before Prier dove into her crush on him, and actually got along). They argue about something (and the argument itself, incidentally, doesn't seem to make much sense anyway), Eclair admits that she was wrong eventually, and...that seems to be the only thing necessary for these two to be crazily into each other. It's made even worse by the fact that Homard is like 18 or so, and Eclair, near as I can figure, is 11. Maybe she's a little older and I just didn't figure the arithmetic right from the game's few clues about her age, but I can't be off by more than a year or two. I don't care how unrealistically developed Dark Eclair is physically, that's just creepy.
A romance plot in an RPG (or anything, really, this rule doesn't just apply to games) can be a great thing. It can be a fantastic way to get a new perspective into a character and all the other aspects of that character's personality. But it can't just REPLACE all the other parts of the character's personality, or it utterly ruins that character, which it did with LPT. Same is true with a romantic subplot being a part of a main story--if it just overtakes everything else, the whole thing is cheapened and loses its worth. And when the love story that takes everything over is bland and poorly-conceived like this one, that makes the situation worse. And what makes the whole thing both crappy AND disappointing is how much potential the game had that was was lost in the process.
It's not like Nippon Ichi can't make a decent love story. I've seen'em do it. I liked the small but sweet one in Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, the one in Makai Kingdom was fantastic for how quietly profound it was, and hell, the NPCs of LPT that got Prier mixed up in the love concept actually had a pretty nice story themselves. NIS can do it, they just...totally flubbed it up on this one. Stick to the smaller, less plot-dominating romances, NIS, or we'll just keep getting more disappointments like LPT and yawn-fests like Disgaea 2.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Annual Summary: 2007
Well, 2007's pretty much over and done with. It's been an interesting year for RPGs for me. I'm thinking that, assuming this blog manages to survive multiple years past this point in spite of every non-effort I make to not update it, I'll do an end of year report for the RPGs I've played that year, a sort of brief sum-up. Some'll be new. Some'll be as old as Wii = Penis jokes. I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum here, but be warned that there'll surely be some mild ones.
The RPGs I played and beat in 2007 are, ordered alphabetically rather than chronologically (cuz I didn't really think to keep track of that early on):
7th Saga (SNES)
Baten Kaitos 2 (GC)
Dark Cloud 2 (PS2)
Disgaea 1 (PS2)
Disgaea 2 (PS2)
Dragon Quest 8 (PS2)
Final Fantasy 12 (PS2)
La Pucelle Tactics (PS2)
Lagoon (SNES)
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii)
Makai Kingdom (PS2)
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (PS1)
Rogue Galaxy (PS2)
Shadow Hearts 1 (PS2)
Shadow Hearts 2 (PS2)
Shadow Hearts 3 (PS2)
Shin Megami Tensei 1 (SNES)
Shin Megami Tensei 2 (SNES)
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. The Soulless Army (PS2)
Suikoden 5 (PS2)
Tales of Symphonia (GC)
Tales of the Abyss (PS2)
Treasure of the Rudras (SNES)
Wild Arms 4 (PS2)
So, 2007 started off very well in general. I began with Suikoden 5. Admittedly, in retrospect, I don't think it's a very good RPG--it has very few really touching and emotional scenes in it, unlike 3/4 of its predecessors, and what I consider to be the most impressive and touching scene in the game (a character death that makes the character my favorite in the game) you won't even SEE if you make the right decisions. But it at least FEELS just like a real Suikoden while you're playing--just leaves an empty aftertaste.
Things got more fulfilling, though, with Baten Kaitos 2, Makai Kingdom, and Treasure of the Rudras. TotR is an obscure, challenging old SNES RPG by Square. The setup is as unique as an RPG comes (you control 3 protagonists separately over the same period of 15 days on a planet, and each of them saves all life on the planet in a different way, with the 16th day seeing a final 4th protagonist leading the other 3 to ensure that the threats they defeated never come back again), the characters are decent, the plot is very cool (though complicated; you've gotta play it a couple times and make sure to keep track of it all to really follow some of it). It was never translated officially, only through emulation, so of course I can't strongly encourage you to play it because that would be impossible without emulation, and that is evil and all that.
Baten Kaitos 2 was fantastic--long, but fantastic. As original as the first, even more compelling, and with equally likable characters. As for Makai Kingdom, damn. This has become my favorite Nippon Ichi-made RPG by far. And on the subject of that company, this has pretty much been my Nippon Ichi year--I've now played every NI-developed game released over here. Disgaea 1 is as excellent as its cult-like fans say, and Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure is a delightful, fun, cute little adventure that helped a lot in breaking up some of the seriousness of several other RPGs I was playing at the time. I was TERRIBLY disappointed with Disgaea 2, though. The humor mostly felt off, the plot's focus and goals were, for NI, shockingly unoriginal and blandly executed, and it even couldn't pull off the elements it had brought from the previous game very well (basically, Etna was 90% superfluous and boringly static). And I don't see what was up with the battle system--why the hell did NI go BACKWARDS to Disgaea 1's battle set up when it had achieved near PERFECTION with Makai Kingdom's?
Speaking of NI, I also played La Pucelle Tactics. This was even more disappointing to me than Disgaea 2 because it was so GOOD for the first half, then became a mash-up of dull anime cliches later. More on that in a later rant.
I checked out a couple series I hadn't ever touched before this year, too: Shadow Hearts and Shin Megami Tensei. SMT1 and 2 are pretty much the most brilliantly written RPGs I've come across, and I found Shin Megami Tensei: Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. The Soulless Army to be reasonably decent, if disappointingly not epic like the other two. I did like that it tied in with them at the end, though, neat little surprise there.
Shadow Hearts was odd. The first game was moderately good, and had a definitely unique feel to it that I enjoyed, being set mostly in the real world, but with a certain level of magic and mysticism that seems an interesting blend of both traditional and newer views on it. SH2 was surprising, though, in that it was pretty amazing while the predecessor had only been decent. Its plot was okay, but it really shined with the characters (the main two in particular) and the emotional impact several of its scenes had--I most definitely consider the scene of Yuri and Roger trying to use the Emigre Manuscript to be one of the most touching and heartrending moments of all the RPGs I've played. And then SH3 turned around and was as SUCKY as the second one was good. I've already said my piece about that in a previous rant, though.
Weird coincidence: this year, I had to kick Grigori Rasputin's ass in RPGs twice. He's a major villain in both SH2 and SMTRKVtSA. Not that he doesn't make a good punching bag; it's just a little odd to use him for such twice in the same year.
The end of the year was mostly disappointing to me, sadly enough. The last games I played were Lagoon for the SNES, La Pucelle Tactics, and Rogue Galaxy. LPT was disappointing, as I mentioned above, and RG was somewhat the same--very average game that had been hyped a lot by other RPGers I'd spoken to. As for Lagoon, well...there was basically a time of the SNES that I call the Awkward Age, and Lagoon is the result of it. It is just about the most clumsily controlled game you can imagine--by the swing of your sword, you can determine that the hero you control must be holding a paring knife, and his arms must be about as long as a chipmunk's. You have to be so close to an enemy just to score a hit that an observer might think you're making out with him/her/it.
Now, you may see that I am criticizing the game for its control system, rather than the things that I claim are important in RPGs (plot and character development). This is because I want to use it as a metaphor for them--the plot is as clumsy and inept as the battle system, and the character's attack reach is as lengthy and effective as his characterization.
Thankfully, I finished the year off with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. What a pleasant surprise that game is--a Zelda game with a plot AND character development! Granted, not really all that much for Link, but just the act of giving the characters around him some decent development and dialog is a pretty incredible feat for a Zelda game. And I gotta admit, the game is fun to play. Up until now, Link's always seemed to me to be a pointless hero. I mean, he never really DID much that was special--most of the time, the stuff that he did was stuff just about anyone could do, and his goals were mostly accomplished through gadgets rather than actual skill. Not to mention he was always such a sucky swordsman. With this installment, though, he's performing all kinds of neat feats of strength, agility, and skill, he's actively learning advanced sword techniques...he's actually living up to the idea of a hero being more than the Average Joe being given a sword and told to go save everything.
Alright, enough random rambling. Let's finish this up bulletin-style.
RPG Moments of Interest in 2007:
1. Beating 100 RPGs. With the completion of FF12, I had officially become a loser to the world. Well, I mean, I guess that's true of anyone who actually has the patience to see that craphole of a game through to the end, but more so for me, because it marked the 100th time I've spent circa 50 hours on a video game.
2. Beating 7th Saga. This game, which I hate more than just about every other RPG ever (that's a big maybe, there're a lot of shitfests out there), has been my nemesis for something like 7 years. Each time I tried to pick it up again, I would be defeated inevitably by my distaste and disgust for it. But this year, I finally just sat down and played the thing from start to finish. I consider that a test of endurance.
3. Tales of the Abyss. After playing Tales of Symphonia and being completely unsurprised at how unoriginal and dull it was through and through, I didn't have high expectations for the latest game in the Series That Creativity Forgot. I was also feeling a little burned out by then on Japanese RPGs; after a while, you start to get tired of seeing so many of the exact same themes and character bases reused time and time again. Tales of the Abyss was exactly what I needed. It's got a ton of anime BS, like your usual RPG from the land of sushi, but it's all mixed with a lot of creative ideas, characters which are interesting and characterized well, and a decent plot. You really feel for all of them, and unlike most games, no character's left behind--each one's developed to a great extent, and each remains an active part of the plot and party's dynamic to the very end. Jade especially is quite interesting and amusing; while I'm no stranger to my heroes being more psychologically fucked up than the very villains they face, Jade's the first time I've seen a sociopath on the heroes' team in an RPG. And he pulls it off with a delightfully dry charm.
Also, a weird note: why does Tales of the Abyss have a much, much greater recurrence of the theme of music than Tales of Symphonia does?
4. FF12 and Dragon Quest 8. I played these two back to back, and I wondered if I'd somehow slipped into Bizarro World. The latest Final Fantasy is dull as dirt, with a nonsensical and stupid plot barely dragged along by unimaginative, almost personality-less characters, while the latest Dragon Quest is decent, featuring a cast that, if not exceptional, is at least entertaining and not shallow. I'm not saying that the FF series has never made a boring and stupid game before, but it just seems like a strange reversal to have the FF be the one so boring that you consider amputating one of your toes just to liven up your day, while the DQ you actually enjoy.
Best Sequel/Prequel of 2007:
Winner: Baten Kaitos 2
Perfectly fleshing out the original BK1's plot, characters, and origins while maintaining a concrete individuality, BK2 is EVERYTHING you could ask for in a prequel. I actually think it may even have beaten out Lufia 2 as my favorite prequel ever.
Runners-Up: Shadow Hearts 2, Shin Megami Tensei 2
HEAVY competition for BK2, lemme tell you. SMT2 is a fantastic follow-up to SMT1's events: the only flaw that keeps it from being the winner is that it very quickly goes in its own direction and leaves SMT1's events behind, so as a sequel, it only builds on the original rather than builds on AND meshes with it. As for SH2, well, there it's just personal preference on my part--SH2 continues and fleshes out its world much as BK2 does for its own, and enhances pre-existing characters just as excellently. I just like a good prequel a bit more than a good sequel, just because it's harder to make a prequel stand on its own as well.
Biggest Disappointment of 2007:
Loser: La Pucelle Tactics
As I plan to make this into its own rant, I won't really get into it. Let's just leave it at this: it's one thing to be disappointed by a game that you've heard from everyone is great. It's a worse thing to be disappointed by a game that you've heard from everyone is great that showed itself to have the potential to BE as great as you'd heard for the first half.
Almost As Bad: Disgaea 2, Final Fantasy 12, Shadow Hearts 3
After a creative, heartfelt tale of love and growth like Disgaea 1, it's very saddening to see a sequel that reeks of bad cliches whose execution is sub-average and humor feels forced. As for FF12, it's a mainstream FF whose pedigree was FF Tactics and FF Tactics Advance. I think that's enough explanation right there for the disappointment. And Shadow Hearts 3 not only follows an excellent game, but it ALSO has a new setting that has the most potential to be awesome so far for the games, and it still manages to suck ass.
Worst RPG of 2007:
Loser: Wild Arms 4
I did a rant on this. Look it up if you want to know why. I don't want to have to talk about this shit convention again.
Almost As Bad: 7th Saga, Final Fantasy 12, Lagoon
Now I hate 7th Saga more than WA4. I think. Maybe. Actually, it's hard to say. But anyways, the reasons I do are just personal taste, so I'm going to be objective and put WA4 as being the worst. But 7S is a close second. FF12 I've said enough about, and the same goes with Lagoon.
Most Improved of its Series of 2007:
Winner: Dragon Quest 8
Frankly, any Dragon Quest that can't be used as medication for insomniacs automatically wins any category involving improvement in a series.
Runners-Up: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Tales of the Abyss
Pretty much listed my reasoning for them being improvements on previous titles earlier.
Most Original of 2007:
Winner: Treasure of the Rudras
Seriously. I don't know why Square doesn't have the kind of clever ideas it had years ago with forgotten classics like TotR, Live A Live, and Bahamut Lagoon.
Runners-Up: Disgaea 1, Makai Kingdom, Shin Megami Tensei 1
It says something about Nippon Ichi that they can use the original idea and execution they had with Disgaea 1 of demons and love, and then do it again in a different way in Makai Kingdom well enough that I would think it incredibly original still. As for SMT1, well, it's the first of two games that intensely examine and use real-world beliefs and the mentalities behind those beliefs to weave an intriguing story of Heaven, Hell, and Earth, of angels, demons, humans, and everything in between.
Best RPG of 2007:
Winner: Shin Megami Tensei 2
Again, this thing is just fucking brilliant. There is no other way to describe it. It's like a great, epic work of literature.
Runners-Up: Makai Kingdom, Shadow Hearts 2, Shin Megami Tensei 1
Hard to discount Baten Kaitos 2 and Disgaea 1 from the list, but these three edge'em out. SMT1 is also brilliant, I just think SMT2 is a little more so. Makai Kingdom is a perfect blend of hilarity and emotional depth, a subtle and quiet tale of incredible love hidden behind wonderful, Nippon Ichi-brand humor. And Shadow Hearts 2, well, what can I say? It got my eyes watery. The list of games and/or animes that can get me to tear up is pretty damn small. A game that can affect me that much has some definite merit.
Phew. Well, that's all for now. Hope you're not all asleep, and all. May 2008 see many more awesome RPGs! Although I'm sure as hell not starting it off on the right foot for that--after I finish TLoZTP, it's gonna be Suikoden 4 and Suikoden Tactics for me.
The RPGs I played and beat in 2007 are, ordered alphabetically rather than chronologically (cuz I didn't really think to keep track of that early on):
7th Saga (SNES)
Baten Kaitos 2 (GC)
Dark Cloud 2 (PS2)
Disgaea 1 (PS2)
Disgaea 2 (PS2)
Dragon Quest 8 (PS2)
Final Fantasy 12 (PS2)
La Pucelle Tactics (PS2)
Lagoon (SNES)
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii)
Makai Kingdom (PS2)
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (PS1)
Rogue Galaxy (PS2)
Shadow Hearts 1 (PS2)
Shadow Hearts 2 (PS2)
Shadow Hearts 3 (PS2)
Shin Megami Tensei 1 (SNES)
Shin Megami Tensei 2 (SNES)
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. The Soulless Army (PS2)
Suikoden 5 (PS2)
Tales of Symphonia (GC)
Tales of the Abyss (PS2)
Treasure of the Rudras (SNES)
Wild Arms 4 (PS2)
So, 2007 started off very well in general. I began with Suikoden 5. Admittedly, in retrospect, I don't think it's a very good RPG--it has very few really touching and emotional scenes in it, unlike 3/4 of its predecessors, and what I consider to be the most impressive and touching scene in the game (a character death that makes the character my favorite in the game) you won't even SEE if you make the right decisions. But it at least FEELS just like a real Suikoden while you're playing--just leaves an empty aftertaste.
Things got more fulfilling, though, with Baten Kaitos 2, Makai Kingdom, and Treasure of the Rudras. TotR is an obscure, challenging old SNES RPG by Square. The setup is as unique as an RPG comes (you control 3 protagonists separately over the same period of 15 days on a planet, and each of them saves all life on the planet in a different way, with the 16th day seeing a final 4th protagonist leading the other 3 to ensure that the threats they defeated never come back again), the characters are decent, the plot is very cool (though complicated; you've gotta play it a couple times and make sure to keep track of it all to really follow some of it). It was never translated officially, only through emulation, so of course I can't strongly encourage you to play it because that would be impossible without emulation, and that is evil and all that.
Baten Kaitos 2 was fantastic--long, but fantastic. As original as the first, even more compelling, and with equally likable characters. As for Makai Kingdom, damn. This has become my favorite Nippon Ichi-made RPG by far. And on the subject of that company, this has pretty much been my Nippon Ichi year--I've now played every NI-developed game released over here. Disgaea 1 is as excellent as its cult-like fans say, and Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure is a delightful, fun, cute little adventure that helped a lot in breaking up some of the seriousness of several other RPGs I was playing at the time. I was TERRIBLY disappointed with Disgaea 2, though. The humor mostly felt off, the plot's focus and goals were, for NI, shockingly unoriginal and blandly executed, and it even couldn't pull off the elements it had brought from the previous game very well (basically, Etna was 90% superfluous and boringly static). And I don't see what was up with the battle system--why the hell did NI go BACKWARDS to Disgaea 1's battle set up when it had achieved near PERFECTION with Makai Kingdom's?
Speaking of NI, I also played La Pucelle Tactics. This was even more disappointing to me than Disgaea 2 because it was so GOOD for the first half, then became a mash-up of dull anime cliches later. More on that in a later rant.
I checked out a couple series I hadn't ever touched before this year, too: Shadow Hearts and Shin Megami Tensei. SMT1 and 2 are pretty much the most brilliantly written RPGs I've come across, and I found Shin Megami Tensei: Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. The Soulless Army to be reasonably decent, if disappointingly not epic like the other two. I did like that it tied in with them at the end, though, neat little surprise there.
Shadow Hearts was odd. The first game was moderately good, and had a definitely unique feel to it that I enjoyed, being set mostly in the real world, but with a certain level of magic and mysticism that seems an interesting blend of both traditional and newer views on it. SH2 was surprising, though, in that it was pretty amazing while the predecessor had only been decent. Its plot was okay, but it really shined with the characters (the main two in particular) and the emotional impact several of its scenes had--I most definitely consider the scene of Yuri and Roger trying to use the Emigre Manuscript to be one of the most touching and heartrending moments of all the RPGs I've played. And then SH3 turned around and was as SUCKY as the second one was good. I've already said my piece about that in a previous rant, though.
Weird coincidence: this year, I had to kick Grigori Rasputin's ass in RPGs twice. He's a major villain in both SH2 and SMTRKVtSA. Not that he doesn't make a good punching bag; it's just a little odd to use him for such twice in the same year.
The end of the year was mostly disappointing to me, sadly enough. The last games I played were Lagoon for the SNES, La Pucelle Tactics, and Rogue Galaxy. LPT was disappointing, as I mentioned above, and RG was somewhat the same--very average game that had been hyped a lot by other RPGers I'd spoken to. As for Lagoon, well...there was basically a time of the SNES that I call the Awkward Age, and Lagoon is the result of it. It is just about the most clumsily controlled game you can imagine--by the swing of your sword, you can determine that the hero you control must be holding a paring knife, and his arms must be about as long as a chipmunk's. You have to be so close to an enemy just to score a hit that an observer might think you're making out with him/her/it.
Now, you may see that I am criticizing the game for its control system, rather than the things that I claim are important in RPGs (plot and character development). This is because I want to use it as a metaphor for them--the plot is as clumsy and inept as the battle system, and the character's attack reach is as lengthy and effective as his characterization.
Thankfully, I finished the year off with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. What a pleasant surprise that game is--a Zelda game with a plot AND character development! Granted, not really all that much for Link, but just the act of giving the characters around him some decent development and dialog is a pretty incredible feat for a Zelda game. And I gotta admit, the game is fun to play. Up until now, Link's always seemed to me to be a pointless hero. I mean, he never really DID much that was special--most of the time, the stuff that he did was stuff just about anyone could do, and his goals were mostly accomplished through gadgets rather than actual skill. Not to mention he was always such a sucky swordsman. With this installment, though, he's performing all kinds of neat feats of strength, agility, and skill, he's actively learning advanced sword techniques...he's actually living up to the idea of a hero being more than the Average Joe being given a sword and told to go save everything.
Alright, enough random rambling. Let's finish this up bulletin-style.
RPG Moments of Interest in 2007:
1. Beating 100 RPGs. With the completion of FF12, I had officially become a loser to the world. Well, I mean, I guess that's true of anyone who actually has the patience to see that craphole of a game through to the end, but more so for me, because it marked the 100th time I've spent circa 50 hours on a video game.
2. Beating 7th Saga. This game, which I hate more than just about every other RPG ever (that's a big maybe, there're a lot of shitfests out there), has been my nemesis for something like 7 years. Each time I tried to pick it up again, I would be defeated inevitably by my distaste and disgust for it. But this year, I finally just sat down and played the thing from start to finish. I consider that a test of endurance.
3. Tales of the Abyss. After playing Tales of Symphonia and being completely unsurprised at how unoriginal and dull it was through and through, I didn't have high expectations for the latest game in the Series That Creativity Forgot. I was also feeling a little burned out by then on Japanese RPGs; after a while, you start to get tired of seeing so many of the exact same themes and character bases reused time and time again. Tales of the Abyss was exactly what I needed. It's got a ton of anime BS, like your usual RPG from the land of sushi, but it's all mixed with a lot of creative ideas, characters which are interesting and characterized well, and a decent plot. You really feel for all of them, and unlike most games, no character's left behind--each one's developed to a great extent, and each remains an active part of the plot and party's dynamic to the very end. Jade especially is quite interesting and amusing; while I'm no stranger to my heroes being more psychologically fucked up than the very villains they face, Jade's the first time I've seen a sociopath on the heroes' team in an RPG. And he pulls it off with a delightfully dry charm.
Also, a weird note: why does Tales of the Abyss have a much, much greater recurrence of the theme of music than Tales of Symphonia does?
4. FF12 and Dragon Quest 8. I played these two back to back, and I wondered if I'd somehow slipped into Bizarro World. The latest Final Fantasy is dull as dirt, with a nonsensical and stupid plot barely dragged along by unimaginative, almost personality-less characters, while the latest Dragon Quest is decent, featuring a cast that, if not exceptional, is at least entertaining and not shallow. I'm not saying that the FF series has never made a boring and stupid game before, but it just seems like a strange reversal to have the FF be the one so boring that you consider amputating one of your toes just to liven up your day, while the DQ you actually enjoy.
Best Sequel/Prequel of 2007:
Winner: Baten Kaitos 2
Perfectly fleshing out the original BK1's plot, characters, and origins while maintaining a concrete individuality, BK2 is EVERYTHING you could ask for in a prequel. I actually think it may even have beaten out Lufia 2 as my favorite prequel ever.
Runners-Up: Shadow Hearts 2, Shin Megami Tensei 2
HEAVY competition for BK2, lemme tell you. SMT2 is a fantastic follow-up to SMT1's events: the only flaw that keeps it from being the winner is that it very quickly goes in its own direction and leaves SMT1's events behind, so as a sequel, it only builds on the original rather than builds on AND meshes with it. As for SH2, well, there it's just personal preference on my part--SH2 continues and fleshes out its world much as BK2 does for its own, and enhances pre-existing characters just as excellently. I just like a good prequel a bit more than a good sequel, just because it's harder to make a prequel stand on its own as well.
Biggest Disappointment of 2007:
Loser: La Pucelle Tactics
As I plan to make this into its own rant, I won't really get into it. Let's just leave it at this: it's one thing to be disappointed by a game that you've heard from everyone is great. It's a worse thing to be disappointed by a game that you've heard from everyone is great that showed itself to have the potential to BE as great as you'd heard for the first half.
Almost As Bad: Disgaea 2, Final Fantasy 12, Shadow Hearts 3
After a creative, heartfelt tale of love and growth like Disgaea 1, it's very saddening to see a sequel that reeks of bad cliches whose execution is sub-average and humor feels forced. As for FF12, it's a mainstream FF whose pedigree was FF Tactics and FF Tactics Advance. I think that's enough explanation right there for the disappointment. And Shadow Hearts 3 not only follows an excellent game, but it ALSO has a new setting that has the most potential to be awesome so far for the games, and it still manages to suck ass.
Worst RPG of 2007:
Loser: Wild Arms 4
I did a rant on this. Look it up if you want to know why. I don't want to have to talk about this shit convention again.
Almost As Bad: 7th Saga, Final Fantasy 12, Lagoon
Now I hate 7th Saga more than WA4. I think. Maybe. Actually, it's hard to say. But anyways, the reasons I do are just personal taste, so I'm going to be objective and put WA4 as being the worst. But 7S is a close second. FF12 I've said enough about, and the same goes with Lagoon.
Most Improved of its Series of 2007:
Winner: Dragon Quest 8
Frankly, any Dragon Quest that can't be used as medication for insomniacs automatically wins any category involving improvement in a series.
Runners-Up: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Tales of the Abyss
Pretty much listed my reasoning for them being improvements on previous titles earlier.
Most Original of 2007:
Winner: Treasure of the Rudras
Seriously. I don't know why Square doesn't have the kind of clever ideas it had years ago with forgotten classics like TotR, Live A Live, and Bahamut Lagoon.
Runners-Up: Disgaea 1, Makai Kingdom, Shin Megami Tensei 1
It says something about Nippon Ichi that they can use the original idea and execution they had with Disgaea 1 of demons and love, and then do it again in a different way in Makai Kingdom well enough that I would think it incredibly original still. As for SMT1, well, it's the first of two games that intensely examine and use real-world beliefs and the mentalities behind those beliefs to weave an intriguing story of Heaven, Hell, and Earth, of angels, demons, humans, and everything in between.
Best RPG of 2007:
Winner: Shin Megami Tensei 2
Again, this thing is just fucking brilliant. There is no other way to describe it. It's like a great, epic work of literature.
Runners-Up: Makai Kingdom, Shadow Hearts 2, Shin Megami Tensei 1
Hard to discount Baten Kaitos 2 and Disgaea 1 from the list, but these three edge'em out. SMT1 is also brilliant, I just think SMT2 is a little more so. Makai Kingdom is a perfect blend of hilarity and emotional depth, a subtle and quiet tale of incredible love hidden behind wonderful, Nippon Ichi-brand humor. And Shadow Hearts 2, well, what can I say? It got my eyes watery. The list of games and/or animes that can get me to tear up is pretty damn small. A game that can affect me that much has some definite merit.
Phew. Well, that's all for now. Hope you're not all asleep, and all. May 2008 see many more awesome RPGs! Although I'm sure as hell not starting it off on the right foot for that--after I finish TLoZTP, it's gonna be Suikoden 4 and Suikoden Tactics for me.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
General RPGs' Minigames 6: Fishing
Thanks to Queelez for helping me with some of this rant's content.
There are a lot of minigames (mostly bad ones) that you see recur in a number of RPGs. You can find some races, be they on horseback, snowboard, or crazy future car down a mutant-infested highway against a man that is also a motorcycle (Dear Online Gaming Community: FF13's Shiva design is not a new idea. This is something Square already came up with over a decade ago). At other times with other games, you may come across DDR-ripoffs, minigames that have you, for no particular reason, enter in certain combinations of buttons to a certain rhythm (you know, I bet DDR players would kick a lot of ass at those midway boss fights that do this in Dark Cloud 1). And of course, there's always RPG Casino minigames. Those sad, simplistic little time-wasting yawn-fests just keep getting recycled from one game to another over and over again, with each new version having even fewer significant differences from the old than a SquareEnix Final Fantasy rerelease.
But no minigame theme out there is as old, overused, and totally boring as Fishing. Goddamn fishing. It's everywhere--new RPGs, old RPGs, regular RPGs, action RPGs, good RPGs, bad RPGs. I suppose that I shouldn't find it all that surprising, considering that most RPGs come out of Japan, and like half their diet consists of (mostly tasteless) seafood dishes. But really, come on, game developers. You're putting in a minigame based on a pastime where you sit around waiting, possibly for hours, for something to happen. Maybe game developers originally came up with the idea as a way of making the rest of the game's repetitive, turn-based boredom gameplay seem entertaining by comparison. But that still doesn't account for its presence in games like Dark Cloud and The Legend of Zelda, which, as action RPGs, are relatively fun to play normally anyways.
Idiotic premise aside, I admit that the idea's execution wasn't so bad in some of its earlier incarnations. I mean, in Breath of Fire 1, it wasn't even really a minigame at all--you basically just equipped a rod and bait, went to a place with fish, pressed the A button, and got a free, sometimes fairly useful, curing item fish. In Breath of Fire 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, you threw your line out, positioned it near a fish, and then just reeled it in. Simple, straightforward, a little challenging but not frustrating.
But ever since the jump to 32 Bit and beyond, it's gotten long, stupid, and frustrating. Nowadays, when you have a fishing game, it's loaded with dozens of pointless, annoying variables, over-complicated, gimmicky, and mandatory at least once in the game. You have to pick out the right lures, go to the right spot (and most of the time, you won't be able to tell what kind of fish are in each place until you catch them, which is stupid because you won't know what lures to use to get them), cast out the line, and wait for the fish to randomly go for the lure (and this can take a fair amount of time). You just sit there, waiting. Who are these game companies making the fishing minigames for, at this point? Who goes and puts in a video game so that they can sit back and not play it? Then, if and when a fish DOES bite, you either have to pull and jiggle the rod all over the place in patterns which have no rhyme or reason, and seem like they don't work at least as often as they do.* Or, even worse, there's some random meter with a Safe Zone and a Not Safe Zone on it, and rather than simulating any sort of struggle for landing the fish, you instead reel him back by keeping your cursor inside the Safe Zone and preventing it from going into the Not Safe Zone on the meter. All this crap, and you may still also have to deal with needing to pick the right fishing rod for the job as well, or, even more annoyingly, actually level-grinding for your rod's stats.
Ugh. As is the case with RPG battle systems, the more time goes on and technology improves to the point of giving programmers the freedom to engineer whatever game rules they want, the more this minigame gets tediously complex and ridiculous. It's a simple pastime, it SHOULD be a simple game activity. The game industry needs to recognize that sometimes simplicity is best--minigame fishing still wasn't exactly fun back in the days of BoF2 and TLoZ:LA, but it wasn't infuriating and loathsome like it is now, either.
*I realize this sounds extremely gay. Shut up.
There are a lot of minigames (mostly bad ones) that you see recur in a number of RPGs. You can find some races, be they on horseback, snowboard, or crazy future car down a mutant-infested highway against a man that is also a motorcycle (Dear Online Gaming Community: FF13's Shiva design is not a new idea. This is something Square already came up with over a decade ago). At other times with other games, you may come across DDR-ripoffs, minigames that have you, for no particular reason, enter in certain combinations of buttons to a certain rhythm (you know, I bet DDR players would kick a lot of ass at those midway boss fights that do this in Dark Cloud 1). And of course, there's always RPG Casino minigames. Those sad, simplistic little time-wasting yawn-fests just keep getting recycled from one game to another over and over again, with each new version having even fewer significant differences from the old than a SquareEnix Final Fantasy rerelease.
But no minigame theme out there is as old, overused, and totally boring as Fishing. Goddamn fishing. It's everywhere--new RPGs, old RPGs, regular RPGs, action RPGs, good RPGs, bad RPGs. I suppose that I shouldn't find it all that surprising, considering that most RPGs come out of Japan, and like half their diet consists of (mostly tasteless) seafood dishes. But really, come on, game developers. You're putting in a minigame based on a pastime where you sit around waiting, possibly for hours, for something to happen. Maybe game developers originally came up with the idea as a way of making the rest of the game's repetitive, turn-based boredom gameplay seem entertaining by comparison. But that still doesn't account for its presence in games like Dark Cloud and The Legend of Zelda, which, as action RPGs, are relatively fun to play normally anyways.
Idiotic premise aside, I admit that the idea's execution wasn't so bad in some of its earlier incarnations. I mean, in Breath of Fire 1, it wasn't even really a minigame at all--you basically just equipped a rod and bait, went to a place with fish, pressed the A button, and got a free, sometimes fairly useful, curing item fish. In Breath of Fire 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, you threw your line out, positioned it near a fish, and then just reeled it in. Simple, straightforward, a little challenging but not frustrating.
But ever since the jump to 32 Bit and beyond, it's gotten long, stupid, and frustrating. Nowadays, when you have a fishing game, it's loaded with dozens of pointless, annoying variables, over-complicated, gimmicky, and mandatory at least once in the game. You have to pick out the right lures, go to the right spot (and most of the time, you won't be able to tell what kind of fish are in each place until you catch them, which is stupid because you won't know what lures to use to get them), cast out the line, and wait for the fish to randomly go for the lure (and this can take a fair amount of time). You just sit there, waiting. Who are these game companies making the fishing minigames for, at this point? Who goes and puts in a video game so that they can sit back and not play it? Then, if and when a fish DOES bite, you either have to pull and jiggle the rod all over the place in patterns which have no rhyme or reason, and seem like they don't work at least as often as they do.* Or, even worse, there's some random meter with a Safe Zone and a Not Safe Zone on it, and rather than simulating any sort of struggle for landing the fish, you instead reel him back by keeping your cursor inside the Safe Zone and preventing it from going into the Not Safe Zone on the meter. All this crap, and you may still also have to deal with needing to pick the right fishing rod for the job as well, or, even more annoyingly, actually level-grinding for your rod's stats.
Ugh. As is the case with RPG battle systems, the more time goes on and technology improves to the point of giving programmers the freedom to engineer whatever game rules they want, the more this minigame gets tediously complex and ridiculous. It's a simple pastime, it SHOULD be a simple game activity. The game industry needs to recognize that sometimes simplicity is best--minigame fishing still wasn't exactly fun back in the days of BoF2 and TLoZ:LA, but it wasn't infuriating and loathsome like it is now, either.
*I realize this sounds extremely gay. Shut up.
Friday, November 23, 2007
General RPGs' Over-Complicated Battle Systems
The game industry seems a lot more competitive these days. I mean, it's always been competitive, no mistake about that--I was growing up around the time that Sega was still a game system company and thought it could compete with Nintendo. They were pretty into competing against each other back then; in fact, I think Sega was probably the only opponent that Nintendo's ever really taken seriously that I've seen. Ever since then, they've just cruised and done their own thing, and stayed in (or even, like now, on top of) the game just focusing on making games and systems rather than beating others at it. But Nintendo aside, things seem a lot more frenzied between game companies these days. Each new game is compared against a dozen others for how unique it is, its controls, how it looks, how it runs, and so on, and each big seller, besides Halo 3, seems to have busted its balls to provide something relatively new and exciting that's different than the others. I guess it's probably attributable partly to the fact that there are more big players in the industry than there used to be (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all have incredible resources to work with--Nintendo because it's got the longest history and most creative developers, Sony because it's obscenely rich, and Microsoft because it's obscenely obscenely rich), and partly to the fact that there are a lot more ways now to make games differently, with the better technologies.
Usually, this is a good thing. Game developers, in stark contrast to Hollywood, WANT to give the audience something new to lure their dollars away, rather than just keep trying to sell the same product over and over again with different titles. Well, I mean, they still do the latter, too, but that stuff is overshadowed by what's new and interesting. Thanks to all this competition for unique games and ways to play them, we get innovative products like the DS, the Wii, Guitar Hero, DDR, God of War, and so on.
But with RPGs, it's starting to irritate me a bit. The thing that RPGs do to compete with each other seems, in most cases, to be to make their battle systems ridiculously over-complicated.
Looking at some RPGs I've played lately, let's examine this. First, there's Final Fantasy 12, with its whole Gambit system. Now, I appreciate any attempt to not make me have to go through a million menus every single time I see a hostile enemy in a game. Taking the experience of actually playing the game's battles away is not something I mind at all, because it's a boring part of the game anyways. But the customization of how to set the damn thing up can be insanely complex, and if you don't have the imagination to tweak its little details in just the right way, you have a hell of a time defeating almost every side quest boss you find without a crapload of boring level-building. Thankfully, you can, for most of the game, probably get by with some basic "Heal when damaged badly, and attack/cast attack magic the rest of the time" Gambits. But if you want to get the full experience from the game? Be prepared to spend hours fine-tuning Gambits in the main menu. I thought the point of them was to LESSEN the amount of time navigating attack menus.
And the way you learn stuff in that game is just plain annoying. I mean, FF10's Sphere Grid? I could work with that. But when you have to get skill points just to equip a certain damn suit of armor, it's just plain irritating. I mean, you could have the skill to wear other, very similar sets of armor, but still somehow not know how to equip the next most powerful one, even though it would presumably take all the same, basic clothing putting-on skills as the previous one.
And that's just one of the more standard excessive innovations introduced to a recent game. There are some games that just take it to a pulling-hair-out extreme. Dark Cloud 2, for example, is just plain ridiculous. You have to keep track of your health, your weapon's health because it will break if not repaired, your robot ride's health, your weapons' experience levels (because THEY level up), the stats you'll need for them to evolve into their next form, which form you want the weapon to become, taking pictures of random crap to give your robot better parts, putting that random picture crap together to create the parts...it's like every time you clear a dungeon's floor, you have to then leave, go back to a village or whatever, get everything healed up, take about 15 minutes to figure out what you should do with your equipment, and then finally go back in and tackle the next floor, to repeat the process about 30+ times until you're at the end of the dungeon. It's needlessly complex.
And don't get me started about having to do the stat-building experience for your fucking fishing rod, too. I can't believe that they actually figured out a way to make fishing minigames even MORE infuriating and idiotic.
You know, my three favorite RPGs ever are Chrono Trigger, Suikoden 2, and Grandia 2. Grandia 2 has a reasonably complex (but not overly so) system of battle, but CT and Suikoden 2 are both pretty simplistic. You fight, you level up, you have a few magical spells and such that you can use when your level goes high enough, and characters' roles in combat are pretty well-defined, so you can concentrate on leaving magic to the magic-users and putting your hard-hitting equipment on the physical attackers. Neither of these fantastic games ever suffered from having a simple, straightforward system of gameplay. They're great for the stories they tell, and the characters in them.
Try getting something pleasantly straightforward like that today, though, and your options are limited to Action RPGs (which isn't so bad, but they're still not many to choose from), or be willing to settle for a Dragon Quest game, which is the complete opposite--rather than trying to create some sort of unique gameplay identity to set itself apart from the rest, that series distinguishes itself by having its games have NO identity.
I miss the days when RPGs were content with being simple. When I buy an RPG, I'm out to see a story being told. I'm not going to have fun with the battle system either way, so why foist a ton of time-wasting nonsense on me that's going to just disrupt my ability to actually follow the game's events? I mean, I know some people are into this stuff, but does that mean every single damn game has to come out with fifteen different ways in it to get your characters ready to swing a damn sword?
Usually, this is a good thing. Game developers, in stark contrast to Hollywood, WANT to give the audience something new to lure their dollars away, rather than just keep trying to sell the same product over and over again with different titles. Well, I mean, they still do the latter, too, but that stuff is overshadowed by what's new and interesting. Thanks to all this competition for unique games and ways to play them, we get innovative products like the DS, the Wii, Guitar Hero, DDR, God of War, and so on.
But with RPGs, it's starting to irritate me a bit. The thing that RPGs do to compete with each other seems, in most cases, to be to make their battle systems ridiculously over-complicated.
Looking at some RPGs I've played lately, let's examine this. First, there's Final Fantasy 12, with its whole Gambit system. Now, I appreciate any attempt to not make me have to go through a million menus every single time I see a hostile enemy in a game. Taking the experience of actually playing the game's battles away is not something I mind at all, because it's a boring part of the game anyways. But the customization of how to set the damn thing up can be insanely complex, and if you don't have the imagination to tweak its little details in just the right way, you have a hell of a time defeating almost every side quest boss you find without a crapload of boring level-building. Thankfully, you can, for most of the game, probably get by with some basic "Heal when damaged badly, and attack/cast attack magic the rest of the time" Gambits. But if you want to get the full experience from the game? Be prepared to spend hours fine-tuning Gambits in the main menu. I thought the point of them was to LESSEN the amount of time navigating attack menus.
And the way you learn stuff in that game is just plain annoying. I mean, FF10's Sphere Grid? I could work with that. But when you have to get skill points just to equip a certain damn suit of armor, it's just plain irritating. I mean, you could have the skill to wear other, very similar sets of armor, but still somehow not know how to equip the next most powerful one, even though it would presumably take all the same, basic clothing putting-on skills as the previous one.
And that's just one of the more standard excessive innovations introduced to a recent game. There are some games that just take it to a pulling-hair-out extreme. Dark Cloud 2, for example, is just plain ridiculous. You have to keep track of your health, your weapon's health because it will break if not repaired, your robot ride's health, your weapons' experience levels (because THEY level up), the stats you'll need for them to evolve into their next form, which form you want the weapon to become, taking pictures of random crap to give your robot better parts, putting that random picture crap together to create the parts...it's like every time you clear a dungeon's floor, you have to then leave, go back to a village or whatever, get everything healed up, take about 15 minutes to figure out what you should do with your equipment, and then finally go back in and tackle the next floor, to repeat the process about 30+ times until you're at the end of the dungeon. It's needlessly complex.
And don't get me started about having to do the stat-building experience for your fucking fishing rod, too. I can't believe that they actually figured out a way to make fishing minigames even MORE infuriating and idiotic.
You know, my three favorite RPGs ever are Chrono Trigger, Suikoden 2, and Grandia 2. Grandia 2 has a reasonably complex (but not overly so) system of battle, but CT and Suikoden 2 are both pretty simplistic. You fight, you level up, you have a few magical spells and such that you can use when your level goes high enough, and characters' roles in combat are pretty well-defined, so you can concentrate on leaving magic to the magic-users and putting your hard-hitting equipment on the physical attackers. Neither of these fantastic games ever suffered from having a simple, straightforward system of gameplay. They're great for the stories they tell, and the characters in them.
Try getting something pleasantly straightforward like that today, though, and your options are limited to Action RPGs (which isn't so bad, but they're still not many to choose from), or be willing to settle for a Dragon Quest game, which is the complete opposite--rather than trying to create some sort of unique gameplay identity to set itself apart from the rest, that series distinguishes itself by having its games have NO identity.
I miss the days when RPGs were content with being simple. When I buy an RPG, I'm out to see a story being told. I'm not going to have fun with the battle system either way, so why foist a ton of time-wasting nonsense on me that's going to just disrupt my ability to actually follow the game's events? I mean, I know some people are into this stuff, but does that mean every single damn game has to come out with fifteen different ways in it to get your characters ready to swing a damn sword?
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Final Fantasy 10's Tidus's Realness
Like every other large, popular series which attracts and entertains a fairly wide variety of people, Final Fantasy has some characters that, for one reason or another, a lot of people wind up hating. Most of the time, contrary to what you'd expect from a guy who uses the majority of his blog rants for RPG-related complaints, I find myself in opposition to people's opinions that so-and-so character sucks (I happen to like FF7's Cait Sith, see nothing wrong with FF9's Quina Quen, and think FF4's Edward is one of the more inspiring individuals in the entire series). Not to say that I don't sometimes agree that some characters suck, of course--FF5's X-Death is just downright lame, and there's frankly less creative talent behind the writing for FF8's Squall than there is behind See Spot Run. But in general, the FF characters who get bashed the most are ones I think are just fine.
FF10's Tidus is one of these characters. While perhaps not quite as universally mocked and denounced as the subject of my last rant, Edward, there are a lot of people out there who just plain can't stand him. Reasons for this range all over the place, although popular ones include the unreasonable and empathy-lacking "He whines too much," the shallow and stupid complaints about how he dresses and/or how he looks (some people apparently never mature past their "Middle School Cool Kids' Lunch Table" mindset for judging others), to a few--a very few--well-reasoned ones regarding aspects of his personality that indicate that the person expressing dislike was actually paying attention to the game.
Oh, yeah, and there's also people who hate Tidus (and/or Yuna) just for that one scene in the game where they're practicing how to laugh. I find this one hard to debate, because seriously, that was maybe the most fucktarded scene in the entire 20+ installment series, worse even than Odin being killed by that nitwit Seifer in FF8, or FF10-2 in general.
The reason for hating Tidus that I may hear the most often, however, and the one that I've taken 3 paragraphs to finally get around to discussing, is because he "isn't real." This view comes from the fact that Tidus is, like the Aeons you summon in that game, a manifestation of the dreams of the Fayth, put into the real world and maintained through inadequately-explored and plot-convenient magical means.
Now, there is an obvious rebuttal to this especially nonsensical reason to dislike a character: that NONE of the characters in ANY Final Fantasy game are real anyways, so for the love of sweet toast, how can it possibly matter how "real" they are in their own completely 100% imaginary worlds?
But, for the sake of having an actual rant on this, let's put aside that tidy piece of logic, and use our imaginations for a moment to pretend that a video game character's lack of realness in his/her/its own game is a legitimate complaint. Let's look at how "real" Tidus is.
First of all, in the strictest, most scientific sense, he seems real enough. He interacts with physical environments, affecting and being affected by them. He swims in water, holds and moves objects, and can physically interact with others, such as the ability to hug Yuna or strike Seymour. His body seems to work as any other real Spiran human's does--he feels physical sensations like cold, pain, and hunger. So I'm pretty sure he qualifies as being as physically real as anyone else in the game.
What about spiritually, though? What, if anything, decides whether he's "real" in terms of his humanity? I think the best way to go about determining that is to look at his existence as an emotional being, and his accomplishments and impact on others. Such things are, essentially, what verifies our existence to others, and to ourselves mentally.
So let's look at Tidus's state and development as a human being. Over the course of the game, Tidus shows (occasionally excessively) emotions of joy, sorrow, despair, determination, irritation, petulance, and enthusiasm, among many others. Over the course of the game, he develops from a somewhat selfish, very disrespectful loud-mouth to a selfless, supportive leader. He learns from experience, comes to terms with father issues he's had for many years, and falls deeply enough in love to be completely willing to give up his life so that the woman he loves and the world she inhabits will be able to live on in peace. It's pretty safe to say that he's as real a human being as any other given RPG character--hell, it's pretty safe to say that he's a lot MORE real than at least half of them.
What about accomplishments? His impact on others? Well, let's see. Tidus defeats hordes of monsters of all sizes, disrupts a global society's traditional religious views, brings a conclusion to a previously unending cycle of destruction and sacrifice, effects a complete change of thinking in several of the people who travel with him through his example and actions (teaching Wakka open-mindedness and tolerance, helping Lulu overcome some of the grief and distrust of emotions that she's had since Chappu's death, and, of course, showing Yuna what it is to live for herself and have the courage to break free and change what is wrong, rather than simply suffer it for others' sakes), and, of course, saves the world from a deranged, seemingly narcissistic nitwit out to destroy it for the most idiotic reasons imaginable (remember, it's not Final Fantasy if you don't feel like slamming your head against the wall at hearing the main villain's motivation!). Regardless of how "real" his origins are, Tidus is clearly real enough to be one of the most important figures in Spira's history.
So in the end, Tidus is real by any reasonable standard I can come up with. And even if one considers him not to be--it still obviously changes nothing about who he is and what he does, so how can it possibly be something to hate him for?
FF10's Tidus is one of these characters. While perhaps not quite as universally mocked and denounced as the subject of my last rant, Edward, there are a lot of people out there who just plain can't stand him. Reasons for this range all over the place, although popular ones include the unreasonable and empathy-lacking "He whines too much," the shallow and stupid complaints about how he dresses and/or how he looks (some people apparently never mature past their "Middle School Cool Kids' Lunch Table" mindset for judging others), to a few--a very few--well-reasoned ones regarding aspects of his personality that indicate that the person expressing dislike was actually paying attention to the game.
Oh, yeah, and there's also people who hate Tidus (and/or Yuna) just for that one scene in the game where they're practicing how to laugh. I find this one hard to debate, because seriously, that was maybe the most fucktarded scene in the entire 20+ installment series, worse even than Odin being killed by that nitwit Seifer in FF8, or FF10-2 in general.
The reason for hating Tidus that I may hear the most often, however, and the one that I've taken 3 paragraphs to finally get around to discussing, is because he "isn't real." This view comes from the fact that Tidus is, like the Aeons you summon in that game, a manifestation of the dreams of the Fayth, put into the real world and maintained through inadequately-explored and plot-convenient magical means.
Now, there is an obvious rebuttal to this especially nonsensical reason to dislike a character: that NONE of the characters in ANY Final Fantasy game are real anyways, so for the love of sweet toast, how can it possibly matter how "real" they are in their own completely 100% imaginary worlds?
But, for the sake of having an actual rant on this, let's put aside that tidy piece of logic, and use our imaginations for a moment to pretend that a video game character's lack of realness in his/her/its own game is a legitimate complaint. Let's look at how "real" Tidus is.
First of all, in the strictest, most scientific sense, he seems real enough. He interacts with physical environments, affecting and being affected by them. He swims in water, holds and moves objects, and can physically interact with others, such as the ability to hug Yuna or strike Seymour. His body seems to work as any other real Spiran human's does--he feels physical sensations like cold, pain, and hunger. So I'm pretty sure he qualifies as being as physically real as anyone else in the game.
What about spiritually, though? What, if anything, decides whether he's "real" in terms of his humanity? I think the best way to go about determining that is to look at his existence as an emotional being, and his accomplishments and impact on others. Such things are, essentially, what verifies our existence to others, and to ourselves mentally.
So let's look at Tidus's state and development as a human being. Over the course of the game, Tidus shows (occasionally excessively) emotions of joy, sorrow, despair, determination, irritation, petulance, and enthusiasm, among many others. Over the course of the game, he develops from a somewhat selfish, very disrespectful loud-mouth to a selfless, supportive leader. He learns from experience, comes to terms with father issues he's had for many years, and falls deeply enough in love to be completely willing to give up his life so that the woman he loves and the world she inhabits will be able to live on in peace. It's pretty safe to say that he's as real a human being as any other given RPG character--hell, it's pretty safe to say that he's a lot MORE real than at least half of them.
What about accomplishments? His impact on others? Well, let's see. Tidus defeats hordes of monsters of all sizes, disrupts a global society's traditional religious views, brings a conclusion to a previously unending cycle of destruction and sacrifice, effects a complete change of thinking in several of the people who travel with him through his example and actions (teaching Wakka open-mindedness and tolerance, helping Lulu overcome some of the grief and distrust of emotions that she's had since Chappu's death, and, of course, showing Yuna what it is to live for herself and have the courage to break free and change what is wrong, rather than simply suffer it for others' sakes), and, of course, saves the world from a deranged, seemingly narcissistic nitwit out to destroy it for the most idiotic reasons imaginable (remember, it's not Final Fantasy if you don't feel like slamming your head against the wall at hearing the main villain's motivation!). Regardless of how "real" his origins are, Tidus is clearly real enough to be one of the most important figures in Spira's history.
So in the end, Tidus is real by any reasonable standard I can come up with. And even if one considers him not to be--it still obviously changes nothing about who he is and what he does, so how can it possibly be something to hate him for?
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Final Fantasy 4's Edward's Worth
As I've done a couple times in the past, this rant will be a rehash of something I've said previously in conversation with others (in this case, a post on Gaia). I'm doing 60 hours at work this week, with a out-of-the-ordinary commute of 2 hours each way, so suffice to say that I am a little too tired to be really inventing new stuff. But I also feel guilty for not ranting as much as I should, so here you are. If you've already seen this before, you probably can just shake your head in disappointment at my lameness and move on to something more interesting. I recommend reading Crime and Punishment, playing Metroid Prime 3, or perhaps sending an email to J. Jaques that asks him when he plans to start making Questionable Content good again.
Anyways. Edward, or Gilbert if you're one of those people who believe that everything is better in its original Japanese form (sorry, folks, but Robotech, Nippon Ichi games' voice acting, and the renaming of Final Fantasy 6's Mash to Sabin, prove that this is not always the case), is the bard of FF4, universally ridiculed for his completely ineffective combat abilities. To sum it up real quick, he has lousy defense, mediocre HP at best, sub-average attacking abilities, and all his special abilities suck ass. He's considerably better than just not having anyone to fill a slot in the party, but that's about all you can really say for him.
Because of this, Edward suffers all kinds of unfair flak from the standard, shallow gamer whose only real concern is with how a character best serves his/her own demands. He is called useless and weak consistently.
Well, that's just not true. On either account.
First of all, on the matter of usefulness, Edward is one of the MOST important characters plot-wise. It is due entirely to Edward's help that:
Cecil gains a transportation vehicle to cross reef-ish areas.
Rosa doesn't die from fever.
The king of Fabul believes Cecil's warnings, and Fabul is at least that much more prepared for the invasion thanks to having that much more time to prepare defenses (hey, that invasion could have gone a LOT worse than it did without the entire castle ready to fight).
Cecil, Tellah, Cid, and Yang don't all die at the hands of the Dark Elf (and subsequently Rosa doesn't die because Cecil and company weren't able to complete their quest).
He also helps them in a joint effort with others several times, both in battle and out (such as the final battle, during which his prayers join with the others' to help re-energize Cecil's party).
He does a LOT to help Cecil save the world, more than quite a few of the other characters (while they all had important parts to play, the list of essential contributions to Cecil's cause that Palom, Porom, Tellah, and even Yang and Edge each has an equal or lesser number of achievements). Without his help, things just would've gone sour real quick.
But what gets me more is people calling him weak. Yes, fine, he's mostly useless in battle. I get it. But hey, here's something for people to consider: he's a prince and a bard. He's basically a guy who all his life has likely had very little need for physical training, whose talents in life are apparently crooning to a harp and impressing ladies. And when you meet him in the game, he JUST recently lost the love of his life, and she died protecting him. Plus, her father comes along to add a heaping portion of guilt to the tremendous grief and regret he already feels, after beating him senseless with a cane. Given that, I think the fact that this guy can pick himself up at ALL, and actually fight for a cause rather than just completely lose himself in grief and guilt-induced madness is remarkable. He KNOWS he's not a strong person, he says it himself, yet he's very soon after this catastrophe willing to do everything he can to prevent it from happening to another, even knowing his physical limitations.
Now I ask you all, seriously. I'm going to assume that most (certainly not all, of course, but most) of you have as little training and natural combat talent as Edward has (nothing to be ashamed of; we live in a world where it's not necessary). If, this afternoon or evening, after coming home from work or school or Social DDRing or whatever it is you do with your time, a group of people showed up and killed everyone you love, and destroyed your home, and left you in the ruins of your own life all for a family heirloom trinket...
Can you honestly tell me that you'd be even close to as strong a person as Edward is? Could you possibly pick yourself up almost immediately after it happened to help a group of strangers keep it from happening to any other? Or are you honest enough to admit that you would more than likely just sit in shock, terror, and grief beyond imagination, unable to cope with what just happened? Because I'll tell you right now, I may talk the talk, walk the walk, and balk the balk, but I'm pretty damn sure that I couldn't even hope to have the inner strength and courage to follow Edward's example.
Physical ability be damned--Edward's as strong as they come.
Anyways. Edward, or Gilbert if you're one of those people who believe that everything is better in its original Japanese form (sorry, folks, but Robotech, Nippon Ichi games' voice acting, and the renaming of Final Fantasy 6's Mash to Sabin, prove that this is not always the case), is the bard of FF4, universally ridiculed for his completely ineffective combat abilities. To sum it up real quick, he has lousy defense, mediocre HP at best, sub-average attacking abilities, and all his special abilities suck ass. He's considerably better than just not having anyone to fill a slot in the party, but that's about all you can really say for him.
Because of this, Edward suffers all kinds of unfair flak from the standard, shallow gamer whose only real concern is with how a character best serves his/her own demands. He is called useless and weak consistently.
Well, that's just not true. On either account.
First of all, on the matter of usefulness, Edward is one of the MOST important characters plot-wise. It is due entirely to Edward's help that:
Cecil gains a transportation vehicle to cross reef-ish areas.
Rosa doesn't die from fever.
The king of Fabul believes Cecil's warnings, and Fabul is at least that much more prepared for the invasion thanks to having that much more time to prepare defenses (hey, that invasion could have gone a LOT worse than it did without the entire castle ready to fight).
Cecil, Tellah, Cid, and Yang don't all die at the hands of the Dark Elf (and subsequently Rosa doesn't die because Cecil and company weren't able to complete their quest).
He also helps them in a joint effort with others several times, both in battle and out (such as the final battle, during which his prayers join with the others' to help re-energize Cecil's party).
He does a LOT to help Cecil save the world, more than quite a few of the other characters (while they all had important parts to play, the list of essential contributions to Cecil's cause that Palom, Porom, Tellah, and even Yang and Edge each has an equal or lesser number of achievements). Without his help, things just would've gone sour real quick.
But what gets me more is people calling him weak. Yes, fine, he's mostly useless in battle. I get it. But hey, here's something for people to consider: he's a prince and a bard. He's basically a guy who all his life has likely had very little need for physical training, whose talents in life are apparently crooning to a harp and impressing ladies. And when you meet him in the game, he JUST recently lost the love of his life, and she died protecting him. Plus, her father comes along to add a heaping portion of guilt to the tremendous grief and regret he already feels, after beating him senseless with a cane. Given that, I think the fact that this guy can pick himself up at ALL, and actually fight for a cause rather than just completely lose himself in grief and guilt-induced madness is remarkable. He KNOWS he's not a strong person, he says it himself, yet he's very soon after this catastrophe willing to do everything he can to prevent it from happening to another, even knowing his physical limitations.
Now I ask you all, seriously. I'm going to assume that most (certainly not all, of course, but most) of you have as little training and natural combat talent as Edward has (nothing to be ashamed of; we live in a world where it's not necessary). If, this afternoon or evening, after coming home from work or school or Social DDRing or whatever it is you do with your time, a group of people showed up and killed everyone you love, and destroyed your home, and left you in the ruins of your own life all for a family heirloom trinket...
Can you honestly tell me that you'd be even close to as strong a person as Edward is? Could you possibly pick yourself up almost immediately after it happened to help a group of strangers keep it from happening to any other? Or are you honest enough to admit that you would more than likely just sit in shock, terror, and grief beyond imagination, unable to cope with what just happened? Because I'll tell you right now, I may talk the talk, walk the walk, and balk the balk, but I'm pretty damn sure that I couldn't even hope to have the inner strength and courage to follow Edward's example.
Physical ability be damned--Edward's as strong as they come.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
General RPGs' Love Hina Syndrome
I will occasionally, when talking to friends and acquaintances, talk about an RPG as having a case of Love Hina Syndrome. I don't think that I've mentioned it in these rants yet, but I know I'm sure to sooner or later (it will probably be in the first sentence of any potential rant I do on Rogue Galaxy or Legend of Dragoon). So today I'm not going to rant so much specifically on one or more RPGs as I am just going to define what I mean by Love Hina Syndrome.
First of all, I'm apparently not the only person to use the phrase--I tried Googling it a few hours ago, and was surprised to see a few results showing other people saying it here and there. But there doesn't seem to be any set definition for it (one person was using it to describe a flawed main female character, another to describe bad manga-to-animes, and so on), so I'm gonna keep using mine until someone semi-officially recognizes a concrete definition.
So, basically, there's this anime, Love Hina. Some of you have seen it. Others of you, people who are much, much more fortunate, have not. It is, pretty much, the quintessential "harem" anime. While not even close to being the worst anime I've seen, or even the worst of its genre (Hand Maid May easily wins that dishonor--and if anyone disagrees, and knows of a harem anime that is even WORSE, I heartily encourage you to keep the filthy thing to yourself and don't tell me about it), it's still a terrible, empty pile of crap. Its plot is pointless, stupid, and shallow, a mindless story of ridiculous, annoying, and predictable circumstances leading two ridiculous, annoying, and predictable characters into a ridiculous, annoying, and predictable romance. You'd have trouble finding an anime love story cliche that it doesn't squeeze into its monotony. The main character is a talentless moron with no redeeming feature whatever, the main female is a raging nitwit whose character development really never quite goes any further than "This character has boobs," and the only positive aspect about their unoriginal "Let's make it obvious from Episode 3 that we dig each other but only actually commit to any kind of relationship in the last 10 minutes of the final episode, something like 35+ episodes later" is that at least these two dysfunctional morons will be making each OTHER miserable instead of any innocent, potentially decent other character that they might otherwise of hooked up with.
Sorta like FF8's Squall and Rinoa, really--the love story is hackneyed and laughable, but you still support it because they're such terrible, worthless people that the only ones lousy enough to deserve them are each other.
Anyways, so, the plot of Love Hina is mindless garbage, less interesting and believable than a plot arc of an ABC Daytime Television soap opera. And the only time that the main characters aren't extremely boring is when they're extremely annoying. BUT, the show very oddly has one notably GOOD aspect to its writing: the supporting cast. Almost all of the secondary characters in the show are genuinely decent and reasonably deep characters. Don't get me wrong, they're not really great or anything, but they're good, at least, and that's a real abnormality for Love Hina. They have issues to deal with (REAL ones, not the stuff like "I wonder what present I can get the girl I like so maybe she'll stop putting her fist through my face!" that the main characters have), personalities that develop and grow, and lessons to learn and to teach. Shinobu's quiet trials of growing up into a young adult, Motoko's attempts to reconcile her warrior's life with her gentle nature and emotional weaknesses, Kentaro's subtle, mostly unseen, but still noticeable transition from a self-centered jerk to a pretty dependable friend, and so on...there's lots of good stuff there. Most of it is, however, sadly never developed to anywhere near its potential, because, hey, why waste time building up the characters with depth when you only have 20 more episodes to spend almost-but-not-quite getting the main fools together?
So anyways, now that I've totally ruined the RPGs Only policy of this blog thing by ranting on an anime, let me get to the point. When I say an RPG has Love Hina Syndrome, what I mean is that it, like what I described above, has a supporting cast that is mostly or entirely made up of deep and involving characters, who more than likely are underdeveloped and overshadowed by the main characters, which are tiresome and cliched. The plot being sucky is also often associated with it, although not necessarily.
And let me tell you, Love Hina Syndrome drives me nuts. I mean, you take a game like Grandia 3, or Star Ocean 1, a game where the entire cast is just boring and stupid, written by people who either don't care or whose creative skills are so dismal that they should only be qualified to write nutrition labels, and that will annoy me. A lot. But you get a game like Legend of Dragoon, or Dragon Quest 8, one that suffers from Love Hina Syndrome, and you basically have a game that shows you that its creators DID have the ability to create great characters, but nevertheless made the most important one(s) shoddy and unlikeable. It just screams "wasted potential" to me, and that's what makes me irritated at such a game way more than just at one that's terrible all around. Take Rogue Galaxy--the minor characters Steve, Jupis, Simon, and Deego (especially Deego) all have great moments that really grip you and get you emotionally involved, interest you and get you thinking. But that's all they are: moments. Deego gets a bit more than the others, but it's still not nearly enough. Meanwhile, you get Jaster and Kisala, the Main Hero and Romantic Interest respectively, and they just wander their way through a rehash of dozens of previous stereotypical Main Heroes' and Romantic Interests' situations, without a single original twist or skillful execution the entire time. You're just sitting there, seeing what you've seen countless times before, while other characters sit on the side, their intriguing stories languishing. It sucks.
First of all, I'm apparently not the only person to use the phrase--I tried Googling it a few hours ago, and was surprised to see a few results showing other people saying it here and there. But there doesn't seem to be any set definition for it (one person was using it to describe a flawed main female character, another to describe bad manga-to-animes, and so on), so I'm gonna keep using mine until someone semi-officially recognizes a concrete definition.
So, basically, there's this anime, Love Hina. Some of you have seen it. Others of you, people who are much, much more fortunate, have not. It is, pretty much, the quintessential "harem" anime. While not even close to being the worst anime I've seen, or even the worst of its genre (Hand Maid May easily wins that dishonor--and if anyone disagrees, and knows of a harem anime that is even WORSE, I heartily encourage you to keep the filthy thing to yourself and don't tell me about it), it's still a terrible, empty pile of crap. Its plot is pointless, stupid, and shallow, a mindless story of ridiculous, annoying, and predictable circumstances leading two ridiculous, annoying, and predictable characters into a ridiculous, annoying, and predictable romance. You'd have trouble finding an anime love story cliche that it doesn't squeeze into its monotony. The main character is a talentless moron with no redeeming feature whatever, the main female is a raging nitwit whose character development really never quite goes any further than "This character has boobs," and the only positive aspect about their unoriginal "Let's make it obvious from Episode 3 that we dig each other but only actually commit to any kind of relationship in the last 10 minutes of the final episode, something like 35+ episodes later" is that at least these two dysfunctional morons will be making each OTHER miserable instead of any innocent, potentially decent other character that they might otherwise of hooked up with.
Sorta like FF8's Squall and Rinoa, really--the love story is hackneyed and laughable, but you still support it because they're such terrible, worthless people that the only ones lousy enough to deserve them are each other.
Anyways, so, the plot of Love Hina is mindless garbage, less interesting and believable than a plot arc of an ABC Daytime Television soap opera. And the only time that the main characters aren't extremely boring is when they're extremely annoying. BUT, the show very oddly has one notably GOOD aspect to its writing: the supporting cast. Almost all of the secondary characters in the show are genuinely decent and reasonably deep characters. Don't get me wrong, they're not really great or anything, but they're good, at least, and that's a real abnormality for Love Hina. They have issues to deal with (REAL ones, not the stuff like "I wonder what present I can get the girl I like so maybe she'll stop putting her fist through my face!" that the main characters have), personalities that develop and grow, and lessons to learn and to teach. Shinobu's quiet trials of growing up into a young adult, Motoko's attempts to reconcile her warrior's life with her gentle nature and emotional weaknesses, Kentaro's subtle, mostly unseen, but still noticeable transition from a self-centered jerk to a pretty dependable friend, and so on...there's lots of good stuff there. Most of it is, however, sadly never developed to anywhere near its potential, because, hey, why waste time building up the characters with depth when you only have 20 more episodes to spend almost-but-not-quite getting the main fools together?
So anyways, now that I've totally ruined the RPGs Only policy of this blog thing by ranting on an anime, let me get to the point. When I say an RPG has Love Hina Syndrome, what I mean is that it, like what I described above, has a supporting cast that is mostly or entirely made up of deep and involving characters, who more than likely are underdeveloped and overshadowed by the main characters, which are tiresome and cliched. The plot being sucky is also often associated with it, although not necessarily.
And let me tell you, Love Hina Syndrome drives me nuts. I mean, you take a game like Grandia 3, or Star Ocean 1, a game where the entire cast is just boring and stupid, written by people who either don't care or whose creative skills are so dismal that they should only be qualified to write nutrition labels, and that will annoy me. A lot. But you get a game like Legend of Dragoon, or Dragon Quest 8, one that suffers from Love Hina Syndrome, and you basically have a game that shows you that its creators DID have the ability to create great characters, but nevertheless made the most important one(s) shoddy and unlikeable. It just screams "wasted potential" to me, and that's what makes me irritated at such a game way more than just at one that's terrible all around. Take Rogue Galaxy--the minor characters Steve, Jupis, Simon, and Deego (especially Deego) all have great moments that really grip you and get you emotionally involved, interest you and get you thinking. But that's all they are: moments. Deego gets a bit more than the others, but it's still not nearly enough. Meanwhile, you get Jaster and Kisala, the Main Hero and Romantic Interest respectively, and they just wander their way through a rehash of dozens of previous stereotypical Main Heroes' and Romantic Interests' situations, without a single original twist or skillful execution the entire time. You're just sitting there, seeing what you've seen countless times before, while other characters sit on the side, their intriguing stories languishing. It sucks.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Wild Arms 3's Virginia: The Male Protagonist Who's a Girl
Many thanks to my friend Jolt for taking a lot of his time to help me organize my ideas on this.
I come to you tonight after another long lapse between updates, which will doubtless be followed by yet ANOTHER long gap, to talk about the protagonist of Wild Arms 3, Virginia Maxwell. Back when I made my rant on General RPGs' Odd Protagonists, I considered mentioning her in there, but I decided Virginia was worth a whole rant by herself, and I've finally gotten around to doing it.
There're a lot of RPG main characters who are female...Marona of Phantom Brave, Terra and Celes from Final Fantasy 6, Sailor Moon from Sailor Moon: Another Story, Shion from Xenosaga 1, and so on. And they can be pretty cool.
But when they're main characters, you KNOW it's a girl that's the main character. All the issues that they deal with, and their way of handling these issues, and the situations they run into, are most often very different from the normal ones that an RPG guy protagonist will deal with. Marona deals with friendship, acceptance and kindness. Celes and Terra both mainly deal with different forms of love. Shion deals with...well, being an annoying bitch, I guess. These are main personal conflicts and goals that you don't see in the main male characters as major issues so often. With guy protagonists, these things can be there, but they usually aren't the really defining, core dilemmas and issues that the guy will deal with. Take Luke from Tales of the Abyss. Like Marona, he deals with issues of acceptance, and his friendship with Guy is a minor part of his character development, and he does have a romantic interest in Tear, so, like Celes and Terra, love is also a part of his character growth, though a very small one. But mostly, Luke deals with issues of personal worth and identity, redemption, and apprentice vs. student conflict--things that female main characters rarely touch upon in any depth. I'm not trying to seem gender-biased or anything; this is just something I've noticed. Female protagonists very definitely deal with different priorities for their development as characters.
It's obviously good to have some variety, of course, but at the same time, the fact is that the game's very plot is tailored around that character's gender, which is, in most cases, ridiculous. A good game can still come about, of course, as FF6 and Phantom Brave prove conclusively, but still, it's like there NEEDS to be a change to the working formulas for any female main character. And I frankly think that something as trivial as one character's gender, even if it's an important character, shouldn't have such an overwhelming influence on how a story unfolds.
Now, let me describe a main character to you with great potential for emotional impact with the player, and to influence the plot well without dominating it.
A hero, using a powerful and destructive weapon, sets out on a quest to find personal vindication of ideals, which unfolds into a larger journey to save the world. Along the way, the hero holds the hero's party together through good and bad, and leads them with courage and strength of character. Along the way, the hero encounters the hero's estranged father, who is very deeply involved in the plot in ways that the hero only comes to understand over time. While not the only one, the issue of the hero's relationship with the father is one which weighs heavily on the hero's mind, and develops as the journey continues, until a final climax to and resolution for it is reached. Also during the journey, the hero encounters a rival, not necessarily a villain, but certainly a problematic obstacle at multiple occasions, who helps and cultivates the hero as much as the rival does hinder the hero. The rival is similar in many ways to the hero, and it is the similarity as much as it is the difference between them that causes the semi-hostilities.
Now, I just described an RPG protagonist that we can agree has a lot of good potential for artful, worthwhile development in a game. Not to say that this potential would necessarily be realized, but only that the potential for a great character is there. Nothing in the above paragraph is something we haven't all seen before, of course, and we can apply it to literally dozens of RPG heroes, both great and crappy, with few variations to it.
But what I just described above is not just the arguably most standard formula for an RPG hero. What I described is also the formula for a hero that is NOT a female. Even though all of the above can be made realistic and easy for the audience to understand and relate to, and is good material for a character of any gender, you really just do NOT see main female characters doing any of the above stuff. As I mentioned, their focus is on much more different issues and concerns.
The ONE exception to this is Virginia. Virginia is a female in a male protagonist's position and story--in fact, everything I wrote up there for the example of a male protagonist is based off of her. And it WORKS for her. It works fantastically. It's fresh, it's believable, it's not anime-gender biased as usual, it's just a human being working through times and issues that anyone, male or female, can have. The writers of Wild Arms 3 developed a great personal story for the game's main character, one that, if not exactly original in its premise, is at least interesting and original in much of its execution. And its impact and meaning doesn't get marred or lost at all by her gender. It's really just very refreshing to see an RPG plot and protagonist's story that don't dance around and make exceptions for the fact that oh my God, it's a girl.
I come to you tonight after another long lapse between updates, which will doubtless be followed by yet ANOTHER long gap, to talk about the protagonist of Wild Arms 3, Virginia Maxwell. Back when I made my rant on General RPGs' Odd Protagonists, I considered mentioning her in there, but I decided Virginia was worth a whole rant by herself, and I've finally gotten around to doing it.
There're a lot of RPG main characters who are female...Marona of Phantom Brave, Terra and Celes from Final Fantasy 6, Sailor Moon from Sailor Moon: Another Story, Shion from Xenosaga 1, and so on. And they can be pretty cool.
But when they're main characters, you KNOW it's a girl that's the main character. All the issues that they deal with, and their way of handling these issues, and the situations they run into, are most often very different from the normal ones that an RPG guy protagonist will deal with. Marona deals with friendship, acceptance and kindness. Celes and Terra both mainly deal with different forms of love. Shion deals with...well, being an annoying bitch, I guess. These are main personal conflicts and goals that you don't see in the main male characters as major issues so often. With guy protagonists, these things can be there, but they usually aren't the really defining, core dilemmas and issues that the guy will deal with. Take Luke from Tales of the Abyss. Like Marona, he deals with issues of acceptance, and his friendship with Guy is a minor part of his character development, and he does have a romantic interest in Tear, so, like Celes and Terra, love is also a part of his character growth, though a very small one. But mostly, Luke deals with issues of personal worth and identity, redemption, and apprentice vs. student conflict--things that female main characters rarely touch upon in any depth. I'm not trying to seem gender-biased or anything; this is just something I've noticed. Female protagonists very definitely deal with different priorities for their development as characters.
It's obviously good to have some variety, of course, but at the same time, the fact is that the game's very plot is tailored around that character's gender, which is, in most cases, ridiculous. A good game can still come about, of course, as FF6 and Phantom Brave prove conclusively, but still, it's like there NEEDS to be a change to the working formulas for any female main character. And I frankly think that something as trivial as one character's gender, even if it's an important character, shouldn't have such an overwhelming influence on how a story unfolds.
Now, let me describe a main character to you with great potential for emotional impact with the player, and to influence the plot well without dominating it.
A hero, using a powerful and destructive weapon, sets out on a quest to find personal vindication of ideals, which unfolds into a larger journey to save the world. Along the way, the hero holds the hero's party together through good and bad, and leads them with courage and strength of character. Along the way, the hero encounters the hero's estranged father, who is very deeply involved in the plot in ways that the hero only comes to understand over time. While not the only one, the issue of the hero's relationship with the father is one which weighs heavily on the hero's mind, and develops as the journey continues, until a final climax to and resolution for it is reached. Also during the journey, the hero encounters a rival, not necessarily a villain, but certainly a problematic obstacle at multiple occasions, who helps and cultivates the hero as much as the rival does hinder the hero. The rival is similar in many ways to the hero, and it is the similarity as much as it is the difference between them that causes the semi-hostilities.
Now, I just described an RPG protagonist that we can agree has a lot of good potential for artful, worthwhile development in a game. Not to say that this potential would necessarily be realized, but only that the potential for a great character is there. Nothing in the above paragraph is something we haven't all seen before, of course, and we can apply it to literally dozens of RPG heroes, both great and crappy, with few variations to it.
But what I just described above is not just the arguably most standard formula for an RPG hero. What I described is also the formula for a hero that is NOT a female. Even though all of the above can be made realistic and easy for the audience to understand and relate to, and is good material for a character of any gender, you really just do NOT see main female characters doing any of the above stuff. As I mentioned, their focus is on much more different issues and concerns.
The ONE exception to this is Virginia. Virginia is a female in a male protagonist's position and story--in fact, everything I wrote up there for the example of a male protagonist is based off of her. And it WORKS for her. It works fantastically. It's fresh, it's believable, it's not anime-gender biased as usual, it's just a human being working through times and issues that anyone, male or female, can have. The writers of Wild Arms 3 developed a great personal story for the game's main character, one that, if not exactly original in its premise, is at least interesting and original in much of its execution. And its impact and meaning doesn't get marred or lost at all by her gender. It's really just very refreshing to see an RPG plot and protagonist's story that don't dance around and make exceptions for the fact that oh my God, it's a girl.
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