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1st AD posted:The best Final Fantasy games are 5 and 6 because they were still stuck in a low-tech era where anime bullshit could not feasibly be reproduced in a video game. Someone's just living in denial.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:06
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FF5 is a mid-90s anime given flesh, right down to the general visual design. Basically the only thing that doesn't fit is the Amano artwork for the protagonists. It is all the animes. Hell, it's even the one they made a ridiculous sequel anime out of. (FF4 and FF6 are too but FF5 is like dead-on for the specific tone it is going for.)
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Sep 6, 2013 01:18
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Hey. Hey guys, guys. I know this is going to sound crazy, but you gotta hear me out here. What if everything Japan has ever done or will do has been anime?
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Sep 6, 2013 01:25
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Gologle posted:Hey. Hey guys, guys. I know this is going to sound crazy, but you gotta hear me out here. What if everything Japan has ever done or will do has been anime? Japan actually does a lot of things which aren't anime. They just don't get commonly brought over and translated because the internet being what it is, people are more likely to pay money for children's animated programming and dudes in rubber suits fighting monsters than they are for dramas or historical fiction or documentaries.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:27
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Gologle posted:What if everything Japan has ever done or will do has been anime? Better sink it.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:27
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ImpAtom posted:FF5 is a mid-90s anime given flesh, right down to the general visual design. Basically the only thing that doesn't fit is the Amano artwork for the protagonists. It is all the animes. Hell, it's even the one they made a ridiculous sequel anime out of. I kind of disagree, because there are limitations to how you could present that kind of story with sprites in 2D, as soon as hardware become more powerful you got to exercise more obnoxious elements like the "adorably" wacky and precocious pre-teen characters and crazy lovely looking fashion. Oh and bad J-pop songs. Basically all I am saying is that 2D flat out prevents you from having characters with annoying looks and mannerisms because, well, it's 1994 and the tech just isn't there to make that work. Gologle posted:Hey. Hey guys, guys. I know this is going to sound crazy, but you gotta hear me out here. What if everything Japan has ever done or will do has been anime? Nope, there are plenty of good films from Japan that involve real (adults, not manbabies) people making them and they're not anime at all.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:29
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1st AD posted:I kind of disagree, because there are limitations to how you could present that kind of story with sprites in 2D, as soon as hardware become more powerful you got to exercise more obnoxious elements like the "adorably" wacky and precocious pre-teen characters and crazy lovely looking fashion. Oh and bad J-pop songs. FFV literally has a precocious pre-teen character who talks to adorable mascots characters though. v  v Tales of Phantasia and a few other SNES games even had the bad J-Pop songs actually! I kind of get what you mean but I'd blame it more on "Japan's trends have changed to involve a lot more annoying poo poo" than "this wasn't anime but later stuff is."
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Sep 6, 2013 01:32
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Shachi posted:Maybe this is opening a can of worms but here goes: It really comes down to expectations. FFXIII took a very long time to develop and ultimately released with numerous problems from story, visuals, and game content. These problems arose from how FFXIII and various other Square Enix games are developed. If people had problems with a previous FF game's story, then they were mitigated by the gameplay, unique world design, or sheer content. FF12 has a story that suffers from pacing and focus issues but it has a lot of quest content, semi-open world environments, and possibly the best Japanese to English localization ever created for any piece of media originating from Japan (separate English accents for different regions, Sanskrit and Indus Valley influence that was not in the original Japanese release). While not everybody liked it, a great deal of care went in FF12's world design from its post 9/11-WoT political commentary to its themes of power (magic atomic bomb) being placed in the hands of a few people and used for revenge. In a roulette analogy, FF13 puts all of its chips in its story and fails to deliver on it by falling on black. The story of FFXIII's problems is the story of how Square-Enix failed to nurture their talent for the next generation, to manage their once powerful brands, and to adapt to HD game development. FFXIII encapsulates the journey of a once innovative and forward thinking company into a xenophobic and stagnate company. Square-Enix designs games in a waterfall methodology according to the various postmortems on their games. In other words, once part A of game development is complete the team then moves onto part B. The advantage in this is that the game has a shared vision and can feel like a cohesive product from music to visuals and game design. While this works well in small to medium scale games, it suffers from bottlenecks and undercooked gameplay systems when team sizes balloon to the hundreds. This is why many game developers in AAA development have moved to Agile and Rapid development. Agile development utilizes heavy prototyping in order to identify and fix gameplay or technical issues early in development. You'll notice that many people enjoyed SE's games on the PSP and DS. The low budgets and manpower requirements of these handheld games allowed their teams to experiment with gameplay and story, such as in The World Ends With You. However, this company faces severe project management and game design issues once it has to deal with HD development. Due to how the game was developed, FFXIII is content starved and what content was there isn't polished well. According to the FFXIII postmortem at Game Developer Magazine, they developed game assets, such as enemies and environments, before they had an idea of how the game would play in the end. Yes, they actually made the assets first and then tried string those together in order to make a game around the technical limitations they encountered with their game engine. The development team actually didn't have a shared idea of what the actual end product would look or play like until they started to develop the demo that came in the Japanese version of FF7: Advent Children on Blu-Ray. The game essentially had a little over a year of solid planning and development before its's Japanese release in December of 2009. The development team did not communicate with each other and created bottlenecks which led to delays and work being thrown out. This is how Final Fantasy games were designed in the past. A small group of people at the very top would design the game and direct the rest of the team through close scrutiny and micromanagement. This did not scale very well with FFXIII which had over 400 people working on it (not including PR, localization, etc.) The game's technical artists made assets that had to be thrown out or were mismatched with other areas of the game due to a shared vision that was established very late in the development cycle. For example, FFXIII begins with the genocide of a people in its opening scene. Normally, this Holocaust inspired imagery would be very emotionally powerful. However, the tone of the opening section is lighthearted and comical. Then there is the fact that the easy ability to identity the targets of the genocide by glowing tattoos undermines the whole motivation for 'processing' people. Oh, and the genocide victims wear expensive looking robes for some reason. You see issues such as this throughout the game. With how the game was designed, various 'cool looking' imagery is created before a final world design was agreed upon. You end up with a bunch of contradictory visual and story beats. It's the same problem that plagues the the Star Wars prequel films. The game and story are made to lead to a bunch of cool visuals rather than the other way around. FFXII (yes, that is FF12) suffered from issues that would go onto plague FFXIII (FF13). Point for point in their postmortems on Gamasutra, FF12's issues from poor development methodology to a lack of a shared vision would go on to be repeated during FF13's development. This tells you how bad the management is at the company. FF12 was when the company first encountered issues with their technology and game design. FF12 suffered from a lengthy development cycle and high development costs ($40 million) due to the sheer ambition of the game. Bottlenecks in development and a team comprised largely of people who hadn't worked on a big budget FF game before led to multiple delays. FF13/FFvs13 were actually announced before FF12's Western release. In fact, the game's moving release date delayed FF13 from the PS2 to the PS3/Xbox 360. FF12 also had various development hurdles due to its engine and development tool chain. The company had flirted with licensing Renderware middleware until EA bought out Criterion. This leads to my next point. The other issue is that their game engine, Crystal Tools, did not live up to the expectations of players and Square Enix's game designers. Many Western developers came from a PC background and were able to adapt to the GPU-centric nature of development on the HD consoles. However, many Japanese struggled to adapt to HD development and create an efficient development pipeline. Capcom (and maybe SEGA) was pretty much the only Japanese developer to keep up with Western developers due to strong planning. The Crystal Tools engine was meant to be used for FFXIII, the more action based FFvsXIII (now FFXV), FFXIV (a MMORPG). The broad scope of the engine meant it was not good at meeting any of their needs and the development pipeline was not efficient at all. FFXIII didn't have towns or large non-linear environments for most of the game because the development team struggled to create enough content for them and the engine struggled to render them. Then there is the issue of how the game was designed. The designers were limited in their vision due to team mismanagement and a problematic game engine. All of the eggs were put into the story basket. The game is designed to have the player connect with the story and their characters. Gameplay unlocks are tied to advances in story and even the character upgrade system is linear. With content starved game, a hastily written story and underdeveloped characters would be the nail in the coffin. At a surface level, FFX seems to share many of FFXIII's problems. It's a very linear game with a wacky story. However, FFX is more thoughtful in how it tells its story and develops its gameplay systems. For example, Tidus is a 'fish out of water' character that allows the designers to organically introduce the game world to players. He meets Rikku and the Al-Bhed early in the game which allows him to learn of the religious politics in the world in a safe environment. This also allows Wakka to be the humanized yet bigoted face of the Yevon religion in a subplot. Gameplay opens up at a much quicker pace and introduces concepts such as armored enemies, flying enemies, magic, summons, limit breaks, and environmental actions at steady pace. It has towns that help develop the game world. For example, the Crusader Lounge shown early on in Besaid ties into how desperate humanity's struggle against Sin is and how important it is for the Final Aeon to be summoned. This isn't done through lengthy cutscenes or an in-game dictionary but through they player exploring the town. FFXIII lacks this thoughtful story design and haphazardly throws neologisms such as Fal'cie, Lu'cie, Pulse Lu'cie, enemy of Cocoon, and Focus at the player. Its game systems expand up at a sluggish pace to the point that people say that 'the game opens up' after 30 hours. Is it right for a game to be designed around a story? Shouldn't it concentrate on having great gameplay first? I guess it depends on the game. Metal Gear Solid 3 has many of the same problems that affect FFXIII, such a lengthy tutorial and long cutscenes. However, MGS3 is one of my favorite games and that of many others due to how it ties its narrative to its gameplay. When the main character is grievously injured, you use the first-aid menu to use emergency medicine. Once the prologue chapter is done, the game opens up and regularly throws new environments, plot developments, enemies, weapons and tools at you. A player feels like they're on an epic journey due to how many novel gameplay segments there are in the game. You can tell that three years of development were well spent on MGS3 from its ambitious game design to its numerous Easter eggs. So there you have it. A lot of hype and development time for a game that ended up as very flawed and undercooked. From the time it took for Square-Enix to announce FFXIII and release it, a once fledgling company like CDProjekt Red made the Witcher 2 on a new, cutting edge game engine and received great critical and commercial success. CDPR did this on fraction of FFXIII's budget and manpower. FFXIII was a regression of FFX's solid game/story design and didn't match FF12's technical ambition/world design in spite of the stronger hardware it released on. Square-Enix seems to be attempting to fix the problems that plagued FFXIII (and FFXIV) but it will probably be a generation cycle before we see the results. It's why I don't understand why people are looking forward to FFXV for the PS4/XB1. Apparently, they're all excited that Tetsuya Nomura is behind the game. FFXII, FFXIII, FFXIII-2, FFXIV all released with various issues due to how SE develops their games and manages their development teams. FFXII (Yasumi Matsuno), FFXIII (Yoshinori Kitase), and FFXIV (Hiromichi Tanaka), all had experienced veterans behind them that could not address development issues when creating big budget games with extremely large teams. In spite of his work on the Kingdom Hearts series, I don't expect Nomura to be any different considering the long development cycle of the game and talk of how FFXV's game design is still not nailed down. For the time that it will take to make FFXV, Naughty Dog made the Uncharted Trilogy + The Last of Us, Rocksteady made two Batman games with extremely high metacritic scores, Bethesda grew Fallout and Elder Scrolls to sales and critical acclaim that rivals or even exceed that of Final Fantasy, Ubisoft made Five+ Assassin's Creed games, CDProjeckt Red will have made the Witcher trilogy + their own game next gen engine. This is a very troubled game and a couple of unplayable videos from E3 don't inspire much confidence. Then you hear about how their next-gen Luminous engine isn't optimized for game development (demo took a year to create and characters are rendered with toes inside shoes) and you have to wonder just how prepared they are for next-gen. That isn't to say I don't have hope for the future of SE. In spite of its relaunch issues, Naoki Yoshida has done a tremendously good job with repairing FFXIV. He is someone who never worked on the FF series but realized the technical and design problems that plague the game. This is someone who is relatively young and took initiative in modernizing FFXIV when heads rolled over its catastrophic launch in 2010. I feel that the company's stagnancy came from an inability for new, young to replace old, aging veterans. There has been a tremendous brain drain (Yasumi Matsuno, Nobou Uematsu, Tetsuya Takahashi of Monolith Soft) over the years but little in the way of new talent replacing it. It probably doesn't help that the next potential star for SE is busy being the low man on the totem pole of a 400 man project for a mismanaged game.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:33
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I kinda liked FF13, but that was mostly despite two major issues. The first issue is that the game hides the good combat gameplay for a good 15+ hours. I forget if you have three people at the very start of the game (is it Lightning+Sazh+Snow for the tutorial stuff or is Snow just in the cutscenes?), but even if you do you almost immediately lose the third party member and are forced to use two party members all the way until chapter 8. The combat in FF13 is designed around having three party members to juggle roles and with only two people you are routinely unable to build and maintain staggers. Probably the worst section is the section where you're stuck with Snow and Hope. Hope is so loving squishy you have to use Snow as a Sentinel so you can't deal any damage and Hope needs to keep him alive as a Medic. If you try to swap over to Commando/Ravager it'll usually only last a few seconds before you need to go back and heal. On the other hand, once you've got a full party, then all roles unlocked the game opens up a shitload and you'll be flying around between paradigms ruining many asses. The second issue is that the story starts off with actual character conflict that I kind of liked. Random poo poo happens and people are split off into groups and forced to cope. You know how I hated the Snow/Hope combat? I actually liked the story there because Hope hates Snow because he blames him for his mother's death, while Snow is trying to protect the kid because he's a big dumb wannabe hero. The character interaction there is neat to watch. The problem is that as they resolve their character arcs it all devolves into SUPER ANIME JRPG "We gotta kill God now!" nonsense. It's especially laughable how Vanille gets her character conflict resolution on some random cliff because the developers realized she still didn't have her summon. So that's my issue with the game, the combat starts of really poorly while the characters and story were interesting (...ish, there were some dumb as poo poo moments, "Moms are tough!"), then the story turns into bog-standard JRPG fare while the combat gets really good and you finally reach an open area, even if you do have to work at it a bit for the extra content there. Nine loving chapters of bullshit before you reach Gran Pulse. Nine.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:40
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Holy text walls Batman. Hey, wanna know why FF13 was bad? Because the guys who made the other games that you liked as a kid left the company. Also because apparently anime. And by those things that aren't anime, you mean those crouching tiger, hidden dragon stuffs? Those constant remakes of journey to the west and romance of the five kingdoms? Yeah, because those aren't anime at all...
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Sep 6, 2013 01:51
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Sunning posted:A good post about SE's dysfunctional development strategy Why don't they just do another game with Unreal Engine? Last Remnant ran like rear end on the Xbox 360 (looked fine on PC though), but I'm impressed that their first time out they managed to make a game within 1 year. If they didn't skimp on programmers and gave the project a better budget and longer development timeline, I feel like they could develop a good game without spending a bajillion dollars developing on an inefficient system. Gologle posted:Holy text walls Batman. 1)gently caress you for being a dismissive prick when someone actually made an effortpost 2)gently caress you, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon isn't anime 3)The guys that left Square went on to make even shittier video games 1st AD fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 01:52
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No, gently caress him because Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon isn't even Japanese. Seriously, what the actual gently caress.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:57
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Mr. Maltose posted:No, gently caress him because Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon isn't even Japanese. Seriously, what the actual gently caress. Also at no point in CTHD does anyone say something that makes another character mad so they make a big angry face that takes up the entire screen and the other guys face gets all small and there's a teardrop on his forehead and ISN'T THAT HILARIOUS YOU GUYS?
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Sep 6, 2013 02:09
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Sunning posted:(An insightful and informative effort post about Square Enix that sadly may have intimidated others by the sheer length of it.) Much kudos, Sunning, and thanks as well. It's baffling how poorly managed SE is when development teams with only a small fraction of their size and budget could make several blockbuster games in the span of time it takes for them to make a single mediocre one. Gologle posted:Holy text walls Batman 
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Sep 6, 2013 02:10
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Gologle posted:And by those things that aren't anime, you mean those crouching tiger, hidden dragon stuffs? Those constant remakes of journey to the west and romance of the five kingdoms? Yeah, because those aren't anime at all... No, that isn't what we actually mean at all. Also Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon isn't even remotely Japanese, what the hell? ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 02:12
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Nice post Sunning, alsoSunning posted:characters are rendered with toes inside shoes  What? Why would they do this? Why waste time on something so unnecessary?
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Sep 6, 2013 02:47
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Electric Phantasm posted:Nice post Sunning, also Somebody up the chain had a foot fetish, obv. After seeing all this creepo obsession Toriyama has with Lightning, I'd believe it.
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Sep 6, 2013 03:12
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With regards to all things being animes or not, I will say that I recently rewatched a select few scenes from The Good, The Bad, and The Weird and it so easy to see that being animelike is just a huge part of appealing to the demographic(and I understand the movie is S. Korean). Everything about the bad guy is so melodramatic and exaggerated, there is plot twist at the end, and they even do the intense closeup wide eyed reaction shot(the bad guy pulls of his leather glove to reveal a metal finger which whistles as wind blows through the joint, all while giving a psycho desperate stare into the camera). It's just what's appealing whether a cartoon or not and its hilarious bad a lot of the time. So there is my gross overgeneralization, see ya!!
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Sep 6, 2013 03:20
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Calling The Good, The Bad, and The Weird anime is so goddamn dumb. It's literally a Slapstick Western. But obviously closeups reaction shots are an import of glorious nippon. If only we gaijin could capture such emotions on film. EDIT: Let us take a moment to remember the great Mangaka Sergio Leone, who's inspiration inundated that film.
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Sep 6, 2013 03:22
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Evil Sagan posted:So FFXIV has gotten me a fair bit nostalgic. I keep on thinking I'm done with Final Fantasy (I regret that I took the time to beat XIII) but drat if the music and the various aesthetic callbacks don't speak to me. I just realized that I've never actually beaten the original Final Fantasy, and I feel a need to correct that. I saw some recent discussion about the pros and cons of the various releases, but not a lot of talk about the iOS version. How's that one? My iPhone is on hand more than any other system, handheld or otherwise, I've ever owned and it would be nice to play on there... if it isn't total crap. It's a more balanced game and uses MP instead of a D&D spell slot system. The difficulty seems a fair bit lower as well, but maybe it's just me. I'd suggest no playing the Dawn of Souls (GBA/iOS) version to be honest. That said, you're not nearly as god like at higher levels and Black Belts got nerfed down from their previous godhood so while it's easier overall there's no "get in to the mid 30s or higher, destroy everything" difficulty drop. Gologle posted:Holy text walls Batman. Also because SE made Last Remnant and decided "this game's combat is going to be the base for how we design the combat for the next final Fantasy." Last Remnant was a game where you could have a squad of nothing but healers and not get the option to try and heal another squad that's almost completely dead because your control over fights is limited to very generic orders and an excessive amount of QTEs, the latter likely in place so you don't fall asleep while playing.
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Sep 6, 2013 03:33
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1st AD posted:Why don't they just do another game with Unreal Engine? Last Remnant ran like rear end on the Xbox 360 (looked fine on PC though), but I'm impressed that their first time out they managed to make a game within 1 year. If they didn't skimp on programmers and gave the project a better budget and longer development timeline, I feel like they could develop a good game without spending a bajillion dollars developing on an inefficient system. They released a Unreal Engine game on iOS just recently; it's called Bloodmasque. It was supposed to be released on consoles as well but that was cancelled due to SE's many cost cutting measures. Will they release a AAA game with UE3 or any other middleware engine? Probably not for games developed within Japan. Eidos will probably use the Crystal Engine (The Tomb Raider Engine, not Crystal Tools) for future AAA games. The Japanese side of the company is heading towards heavy mobile development with the recent change in management. Mobile revenue has outstripped traditional handheld gaming revenue in Japan and will continue to rise worldwide. Even Eidos is dabbling in 'AAA' mobile games with their Deus Ex game. Even if they had the interest, the staff that worked on The Last Remnant is busy working on FFXIV:RR and its post launch content. In fact, FFXIV:RR cannibalized a lot of resources in Japan to the point that several Japanese games in development were cancelled. The success of FFXIV:RR/FFXV/KH3 will decide how SE Japan goes forward on AAA console development. We might end up in a scenario where SE Japan only makes mobile games of various budgets and Eidos makes AAA console games and the occasional 'AAA' mobile game. T.G. Xarbala posted:Much kudos, Sunning, and thanks as well. It's baffling how poorly managed SE is when development teams with only a small fraction of their size and budget could make several blockbuster games in the span of time it takes for them to make a single mediocre one. I think Square-Enix is similar to other Japanese developers in that they excel at mid-tier games with moderately sized budgets. By that I mean games that aren't AAA in production values or features but have enough to money to concentrate on a few ideas and do them well in a cohesive experience. It's a pretty wide range that could include games such as Vanquish, Dark Souls, or even various Nintendo handheld games. Many people hate SE's non-Eidos AAA offerings and bottom of the barrel mobile games but enjoy their various handheld gaming offers, such as The World Ends With You and Tactics Ogre PSP. They are reminiscent of the SNES-PS1 era in which development costs were low enough for them to experiment and give young designers a chance at creating their own games. This is how SE Osaka came into being. Unfortunately, the polarization of the retail market has made it difficult to get funding for this type of game. Due to their massive overhead, big publishers would rather bulk up the marketing/development budget of AAA games or explore the emerging mobile and social game market. We've seen a resurgence in these types of games through crowd funding or small publishers but Japan has been slow to take advantage of it. I don't expect a Japanese giant to concentrate on these types of games outside of maybe Namco-Bandai. As for Square-Enix, under Yoichi Wada, the company wanted to be a EA or Acti-Blizzard level AAA publisher. Wada aggressively expanded Square-Enix such as purchasing Eidos (who were actually months away from releasing the smash Hit, Batman: Arkham Asylum) and buying out Taito for a king's ransom of $409.1 million. Wada wanted to compete with the top tier Western developers but he was unaware of how cutthroat the competition was. To borrow a Game of Thrones quote, EA and Activision-Blizzard want to be 'king of the ashes.' They want to raise developments/marketing costs and force competitors out of the market to the point that it will eat into their own profits and cause damage to the long term stability of the market. THQ was a victim of this in addition to the bottom falling out of their children's licensed games and a disastrous attempt to expand their Upad to HD consoles. It's similar to Hollywood in that the big studios don't necessarily enjoy high production costs but want to force competitors out of the market. They will sacrifice profits for long term stability. This creates a prisoner's dilemma in that it's incredibly expensive and dangerous to take risks and innovate. If you're ever curious why big budget movies and games and are risk averse in regard to story/gender/race/politics, then this is your answer. The publisher that takes a risk and fails may not have enough money to stay alive during the next AAA showdown. We saw Activision and EA take divergent paths during this generation. EA tried a bunch of new IPs which were largely very expensive and unsuccessful. It's buyout of Popcap led to layoffs and restructuring because of the culture clash between a AAA publisher and a casual game developer. Activision was very conservative in what it green lit and cancelled many games when it merged with Sierra. The company killed Guitar Hero/Tony Hawk by burning out consumers and but succeeded in making Skylanders a huge hit that scales well with yearly releases. It has a steady blue chip in yearly Call of Duty/Skylanders games and several Blizzard games. EA now emulates Acti-Blizzard in cutting down the games it makes and concentrating on surefire hits. Under Wada, we saw game development cut down to the just surefire Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and AAA Eidos games. However, this didn't pan out well because of the development problems for Japanese AAA games, the high development costs of Eidos games eating into profits, and Warner Bros taking the Arkham games from them (Eidos still owns a portion of Rocksteady). Final Fantasy has suffered from diminished popularity and Dragon Quest has limited worldwide appeal. He needed a steady stream of AAA hits each year and his studios could not deliver. It's why FFXIII-2 and Kingdom Hearts 3D had shorter development cycles. I don't think Wada realized how expensive and dangerous it was to compete with EA/Activision until it was too late. Oh, and SE's headqurters moved from Meguro to Shinjuku, Tokyo way back in the day. It led to Nobou Uematsu's departure into freelance work because he was unhappy with the move. Wada moved the company because a fortuneteller told him to. Yeah... Electric Phantasm posted:
The tech demo of the engine was based more on rendering a traditional Visualworks CGI in real time as opposed to creating a tool chain for game development. It wasn't optimized for rendering a game. It's why I'm so skeptical of this next-gen engine in comparison to something like Kojima Production's Fox engine. Sunning fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 03:41
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Electric Phantasm posted:
They made the bodies and then dressed them?
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Sep 6, 2013 03:42
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Sunning posted:I think Square-Enix is similar to other Japanese developers in that they excel at mid-tier games with moderately sized budgets. By that I mean games that aren't AAA in production values or features but have enough to money to concentrate on a few ideas and do them well in a cohesive experience. It's a pretty wide range that could include games such as Vanquish, Dark Souls, or even various Nintendo handheld games. Many people hate SE's non-Eidos AAA offerings and bottom of the barrel mobile games but enjoy their various handheld gaming offers, such as The World Ends With You and Tactics Ogre PSP. They are reminiscent of the SNES-PS1 era in which development costs were low enough for them to experiment and give young designers a chance at creating their own games. This is how SE Osaka came into being. Yeah, this is one of S-E's biggest problems. They do a lot better when they're making mid-tier games because it is a lot more what they are built to do. Their teams are clearly more comfortable with them and they can put out the games on a much more regular basis and with a higher overall level of quality. It's just that market doesn't really exist in the same way it used to and is becoming increasingly small. S-E kind of got lucky (to a small degree) that the PSP took off in Japan and they could basically create PS2-level games in a way that would sell. They'd have been a lot luckier if the PSP took off anywhere else.
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Sep 6, 2013 03:50
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Guys I don't know. I've been to Japan once. I think I might be anime too.
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Sep 6, 2013 04:19
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Sunning posted:Wada moved the company because a fortuneteller told him to. What? This is a joke, right?
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Sep 6, 2013 06:20
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Silly Voodoo posted:What? Simply put, Japanese companies often decide the name of the company based on traditional 'lucky' systems. Parents often choose certain names for their children because the amount of strokes in the characters composing their name add up to a 'lucky number'. This is why Toyota is called Toyota, even though the family name is Toyoda. (トヨタ vs. トヨダ, rather, 8 (lucky) strokes vs. 10 strokes). I am also currently playing through 13 and enjoying myself, for what it's worth. I definitely understand where everyone is coming from with their criticisms though. I do not mind linearity at all, but I guess not so much when it's literally a line. I also felt that the sections with 2-2-2 characters, while effective enough per the story, were not great for gameplay. Someone mentioned the scene with Vanille getting her Eidolon, and I had to laugh because it was such an ovbious, tacked-on afterthought. Other than that, I kind of like how everyone interacts with each other, and you can sorta-kinda-somewhat see a small progression from total strangers to friendly teammates, despite everyone's differences. It takes way too long to open up though, for sure. People brought up Nier; I've never played it but I had no clue the versions were that different. Has anyone played both versions? Being in Japan that version is most readily available, but now I'm not sure what I should do if I ever want to play it... also apparently it's actually a sequel to something?
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Sep 6, 2013 06:35
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That business superstition stuff is, well, I'd heard of such a thing happening but hadn't actually heard of specific cases of it applying. I guess that fortune Wada got wasn't worth his money.Elec posted:People brought up Nier; I've never played it but I had no clue the versions were that different. Has anyone played both versions? Being in Japan that version is most readily available, but now I'm not sure what I should do if I ever want to play it... also apparently it's actually a sequel to something? Nier is sort of a There But For the Grace of God scenario following the aftermath of one of the alternate Drakengard endings, but they're otherwise unconnected. You really don't need to play Drakengard first. Really. At risk of turning this post into a CIA document. here's the gist of it if you're curious: In the aforementioned ending, gleeful mass murderer Caim and his equally genocidal yet slightly less gleeful dragon grumpy funbuddy Angelus got shunted into the real world, of Tokyo, where they fought and blew up an ancient creepy god thing before getting blown up themselves by jets. But the aftermath of that battle left some poisonous crap that basically killed everyone and ends the world. Earth got apocalypse'd by accident, basically. That's when Nier happens. Runa fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 06:52
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Elec posted:People brought up Nier; I've never played it but I had no clue the versions were that different. Has anyone played both versions? Being in Japan that version is most readily available, but now I'm not sure what I should do if I ever want to play it... also apparently it's actually a sequel to something? I think The Dark Id's Nier LP has some selections from the Japanese version contrasted with the American version.
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Sep 6, 2013 07:59
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How does the Steam version of FF7 run? Does it work well with the xbox controller? It's been a long rear end time since I played a final fantasy game and I've kinda got the itch
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Sep 6, 2013 08:48
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Fly McCool posted:How does the Steam version of FF7 run? Does it work well with the xbox controller? It's been a long rear end time since I played a final fantasy game and I've kinda got the itch It does but as usual you're forced to use the analog stick which I can't stand, I just use a PS2 controller with a USB adaptor.
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Sep 6, 2013 12:34
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Mr. Maltose posted:Calling The Good, The Bad, and The Weird anime is so goddamn dumb. It's literally a Slapstick Western. But obviously closeups reaction shots are an import of glorious nippon. If only we gaijin could capture such emotions on film. oh yes I forgot at the end when Blondie found out that Angel Eyes was the guy whose family he killed and left a lasting mark when Angel Eyes ripped open his shirt to show a scar and then made a "come on" gesture with his hand a la The Matrix or the opening to FF8 Or maybe it was a bunch of ugly sweaty gritty dudes staring at each other for 5 minutes ~~ Even Kojima-san cant avoid adding animeism to what is at its core a western espionage dystopian action series
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Sep 6, 2013 13:31
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I did read the posts despite my own, and I'm sorry for acting like a jerk. I think I just got mad at how people were both saying that the earlier games were still very anime despite my own assumptions that the earlier games were Square's attempts at bringing over Western RPGs, and how people still kept talking about FFXIII, and in such great detail too when it seems every second page of this thread is devoted to FFXIII. It isn't even the most recent FF game anymore! Everything that can be said about it has already been said about it! Why dredge up the same information and bring up more bad will? But I'm sorry for being an asshat.
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Sep 6, 2013 15:39
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Crazyweasel posted:oh yes I forgot at the end when Blondie found out that Angel Eyes was the guy whose family he killed and left a lasting mark when Angel Eyes ripped open his shirt to show a scar and then made a "come on" gesture with his hand a la The Matrix or the opening to FF8 You need to watch more Westerns, holy poo poo.
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Sep 6, 2013 15:40
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The irony here is that a lot of Westerns are based on samurai movies. A Fistful of Dollars - the biggest anime?!?
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Sep 6, 2013 15:50
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Fister Roboto posted:The irony here is that a lot of Westerns are based on samurai movies. Do you really expect me to believe a villain would never shoot anywhere but the heart? What anime-weeaboo bullshit is this?
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Sep 6, 2013 15:54
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Which came first chicken or egg? Do we have any evidence of ancient Asian plays with young unsuspecting warriors challenging and defeating deities or exclaiming "blame yourself or God."
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Sep 6, 2013 15:57
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Fister Roboto posted:The irony here is that a lot of Westerns are based on samurai movies. Get Three Coffins ready, desu~
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Sep 6, 2013 16:45
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Hey you jerks, Anime != anything Japanese
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Sep 6, 2013 16:53
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1st AD posted:Hey you jerks, Anime != anything Japanese Wrong, anime is actually the French word for Japan.
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Sep 6, 2013 16:55
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:Get Three Coffins ready, desu~ The Man with No Nakama Kawaii Plains Drifter Unforgiven-san Barudak fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 17:08
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