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Ibram Gaunt posted:I'm not going to listen to an austin walker podcast about ff16 regardless of its quality but I thought Benedikta was fine. It's fine to have an evil lady I think. People been begging for that in FF14 and they got their wish in 16. I don't think this is for lack of trying, off the top of my head Ysayle Yotsuyu and Fordola all get a decent push in their respective expansions, the male NPCs just always end up way way waaaaay more popular.
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Jul 23, 2023 21:54
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Sleng Teng posted:lol yeah, in fact I think the game is kinda funny overall. some examples of different sorts of things but kupka's handless rage, the very weird sequence where dion sort of mills about stabbing a couple of guys looking confused before he gets back on the ship at drake's spine, are also kinda funny in addition to all the over the top stuff the game does that dion scene was so funny like were they planning on killing him off there or something. why'd he do that. why did clive go "thank you..." as he stayed behind to stab some random dudes. ff16 clearly had a way smoother production than 15 but there was absolutely some goofy poo poo that happened with its script at some point to lead to bits like that
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Jul 23, 2023 21:54
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mycot posted:I don't think this is for lack of trying, off the top of my head Ysayle Yotsuyu and Fordola all get a decent push in their respective expansions, the male NPCs just always end up way way waaaaay more popular. i mean ysayle's kinda the odd one there. she was an evil woman for like, five minutes, before her expansion, which is largely where all her best stuff is, and then the actual expansion feels kinda waffle-y about what to do with her at all and then just kinda punts her out of the cast right at the end at like the most comical moment after they already just did a big dramatic scene everyone remembers so doing what they did with her there was always going to come off a bit ridiculous
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Jul 23, 2023 21:56
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The Colonel posted:that dion scene was so funny like were they planning on killing him off there or something. why'd he do that. why did clive go "thank you..." as he stayed behind to stab some random dudes. ff16 clearly had a way smoother production than 15 but there was absolutely some goofy poo poo that happened with its script at some point to lead to bits like that I think it's supposed to be like, he's going to keep the akashic from trying to board the ship or something and so Clive is thankful for the defense? but at no point do the akashic seem to do anything to suggest they're gonna try, they're just sorta 20 orcs and guys standing there looking vaguely menacing and slowly shuffling around one at a time and grouping up so that Dion can look cool killing them. just loving weird lmfao. was he going to get sephiroth stabbed by ultima
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Jul 23, 2023 22:01
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Thanks for the opinions on Ar Tonelico! I'll probably just skip to 2 when I can make time for it, unless there's a reason to play 1 first. And as far as FF16, I wonder if the story's extreme Clive-focus was an intentional move for the sake of the audience that's normally disinterested in Final Fantasy, which 16's definitely trying to win the favor of. That audience includes people that seem to be confused by any plot in Japanese media that's more complicated than Dragon Quest, so having that narrow scope might have been deliberate. Also just on top of having one of the simpler plots in a mainline FF.
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Jul 23, 2023 22:04
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FF6 is better than the preceding 5 FF games
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Jul 23, 2023 22:08
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Sakurazuka posted:FF6 is better than the preceding 5 FF games o_O
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Jul 23, 2023 22:09
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The Colonel posted:i mean ysayle's kinda the odd one there. she was an evil woman for like, five minutes, before her expansion, which is largely where all her best stuff is, and then the actual expansion feels kinda waffle-y about what to do with her at all and then just kinda punts her out of the cast right at the end at like the most comical moment after they already just did a big dramatic scene everyone remembers so doing what they did with her there was always going to come off a bit ridiculous I actually really like Ysayle and her death scene was very affecting to me even if she does get brutally owned over and over, but I guess what I'm getting at is that if any of the female antagonists/NPCs were a huge breakout hit they would definitely get referenced more, regardless of pesky things like "not being alive". Example (spoilers across all of FF14): Gaius, Emet showing up every patch. But they've never really achieved that. mycot fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Jul 23, 2023 |
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Jul 23, 2023 22:10
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A Sinister Rap posted:Thanks for the opinions on Ar Tonelico! I'll probably just skip to 2 when I can make time for it, unless there's a reason to play 1 first. be sure to use the fan retranslation for at2 when you get around to it also idk. i keep saying it but a big chunk of 16's story concept is like. basically just tactics again in a lot of smaller, funnier ways. it's not the "most" traditional ff plot but it's one based in ff games members of staff either like or, in the case of 16's writer, directly worked on. it's why i dont really see the got influence everyone likes to bring up as the biggest thing, the got influence is part of some of the variations in the setup, not the basis for its visual and narrative theming. and if they were trying to court that audience i dunno why they'd go for one of the most final fantasy-esque plots of all time that all of those people bitched about, for being a pretty standard final fantasy plot setup lol. the problem isn't the clive focus itself cause again all of the hideaway characters are pretty well rounded and interesting, it's literally just, annabella's stuff cuts off in an odd way, and jill and joshua and dion's writing kinda slides off for some reason. i'd say the reason the game has the clive focus is simply just cause they wanted to make a one man-focused ff action rpg cause it was the smoothest way to execute the gameplay and story delivery they wanted.
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Jul 23, 2023 22:16
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it is funny contrasting how 16 and stranger approach that stuff cause stranger has much more interaction between the player and the party, 16 is very heavily defined by how eikons work and how it bases itself around them as a thing solely the player accumulates and mashes together into sick summon attack combos, but jobs are always a group thing, you don't have just one guy who does every job at once (unless you're using cheesy late game super jobs lol), you have a group of people filling multiple roles. so while jack can switch jobs, he can still only fill a couple slots, slots that naturally in a job system will be filled by your allies. i dont think 16 could ever achieve that same sort of thing because there's simply not enough room in its mechanics for it, you're already juggling all these different flashy explosive attacks on one guy, if there was more it'd turn into tales of xillia 2 where you have one guy doing dmc combos and then three other guys you have to worry about separately or something. it already gets kinda close with the torgal commands.
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Jul 23, 2023 22:25
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The Colonel posted:the real funny moment of realizing that they just didnt really know how to work jill into stuff is how byron has his whole big intro scene and like. effectively ignores jill's existence for all of it. like the easiest moment to work her into and she's not really involved in it at all. really does feel like they just had to surgically insert her into scenes she wasn't actually supposed to be present for sometimes Just a very baffling series of decisions
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Jul 23, 2023 22:25
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Going from ff4 to ff6 as a kid was a revolutionary experience cuz it was such a massive leap in quality, but going from ff5 to ff6 pixel remasters in 2023 I'm just like hmmm I want some cool mechanics to play around with please and there just arent any  I wonder how different things would have been if ff5 was released in the west on snes
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Jul 23, 2023 23:06
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fridge corn posted:You wanna read something interesting.. After playing through ff pixel remasters 1-5 my feelings on all 5 games have gone up up up!!! But since starting to play 6... I think I'm starting to rate it less than before... what do you think about that? I get that. FF 1-5 are all very refined takes on a sort of "default" fantasy role playing game experience, while FF6 is where the series really started attempting to be something more distinct. There's a lot to like about FF6 but it's no longer the best at what it is, while some of the earlier games hold up much better.
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Jul 23, 2023 23:09
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i wouldnt call early ff default tbh, 1 is kinda scrambling to find its identity but 2 is reeeeeal weird and introduces a lot of the more unique bits of recurring iconography and by 4 what they're doing is fairly distinct from what dragon quest was doing, which was more heavily that. i'd actually say ff5, is where the series really comes into its own and is where a lot of games like to refer back to
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Jul 23, 2023 23:12
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Schwarzwald posted:I get that. FF 1-5 are all very refined takes on a sort of "default" fantasy role playing game experience, while FF6 is where the series really started attempting to be something more distinct. There's a lot to like about FF6 but it's no longer the best at what it is, while some of the earlier games hold up much better. Yeah, ff6 has more in common with 7 and 8 than the earlier games it's true
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Jul 23, 2023 23:18
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Weird experimental RPG some of you might like: https://www.rpgfan.com/review/24-killers/
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Jul 23, 2023 23:18
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I think it's easy to see why FF6 is still "the favorite" for many people of a certain age BUT I would personally place it in the weaker half of the mainline Final Fantasy games I've played. Respect the ambition but there's a little too much looseness to the world, too many characters, kind of meandering storyline. Many would see those as pluses though. FF7 onwards is when I think Square got much better at making their settings feel like a cohesive world rather than a mishmash of whatever the developers thought was cool. Still one of Uematsu's best soundtracks.
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Jul 23, 2023 23:20
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I think my SNES era order is still V > VI > IV but it mostly comes down to mechanics, IV having the least variety or replay value. On the other hand I hadn't played this in so long that it's blindsiding me with how fast some of the plot beats happen. I legitimately cracked up at Cid returning for two whole minutes before sealing the underworld, all in the space of one cutscene.
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Jul 23, 2023 23:26
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Schwarzwald posted:I get that. FF 1-5 are all very refined takes on a sort of "default" fantasy role playing game experience, while FF6 is where the series really started attempting to be something more distinct. There's a lot to like about FF6 but it's no longer the best at what it is, while some of the earlier games hold up much better. I feel like if you think that games like FF1 or FF2 are "refined" takes, you have never played a JRPG in your life, ever they're janky messes, that's part of their charm
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Jul 23, 2023 23:27
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only just realizing how funny it is that the one recurring bad guy in volume 1 of el dorado gate is the law. the town it takes place in just has the strictest laws in the world and gives people bizarre and cruel death sentences for no reason. the bad guy of the second chapter is an evil governor-general who at the end shouts "hahaha! i actually gaslit and gatekeeped you into hating the law so much that you'd sacrifice all your senses to get the cursed vengeance masks so i could take them from you because i didn't want to lose those!" and then he turns into a fire monster and you kill him with a big hammer. also they have not given an explanation for why bad guys turn into big monsters so i think the game just dramatizes the big fights by having guys literally turn into freaky elemental monsters for no reason
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Jul 23, 2023 23:36
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It is a drat shame the US didn't get FF5 until a rerelease one console generation after the fact.
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Jul 23, 2023 23:36
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it doesnt make sense to cast ff1-5 as a monolith because they were not a linear refinement of some basic idea. they were explorations of different ideas and goals, sometimes in conflict with each other. cutting it off specifically at 5 also privileges 6 by making it its Own Thing when its not. 6 is a mechanical step backwards for the sake of more ambitious presentation and story, meaning its the same throughline as what 4 did 3 years earlier. and i think it stumbled in ways 4 didnt at the part that actually matters, and then didnt have more refined gameplay to fall back on like say 5. so oops!
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Jul 23, 2023 23:45
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avoraciopoctules posted:Wanna see some of the bad ones? quote:Ultimately, I want to suggest to you that this way of reading Tales of the Abyss helps us to understand and appreciate one of the most otherwise puzzling elements of its story: the plot doesn’t offer clear-cut resolutions to its core conflicts and its main characters’ developmental arcs which makes me question if the author's ever read a book before
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Jul 23, 2023 23:58
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the whole point of abyss is that its a setting thats defined entirely by a magic prophecy that people consult for poo poo as minute and unimportant as what they should have for dinner today. the future of the world and characters is uncertain when the game ends because the thing that the characters think is bad is the idea of their future being predetermined. they all had complete character arcs, but the question of what they're going to do from now on is left up in the air. because thats the point. like abyss has some influence from esotericism/jewish mysticism but you do not need to dig deep into that to figure out why it doesnt end with a series of slides telling you where every major character ended up like a fire emblem game.
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Jul 24, 2023 00:01
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its often bad practice to predicate your story on the idea it will definitively have a 100% resolute happy ending that answers every lingering question for everyone and the entire world. if you can land it in a satisfying way that's good, but it's not a necessity, uncertainty is a fact of life and in text it's a sea of possibilities for the audience to entertain in their own heads. what's between or after the lines can be more important than providing a clear end point for them
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Jul 24, 2023 00:08
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Schwarzwald posted:There's a lot to like about FF6 but it's no longer the best at what it is, while some of the earlier games hold up much better. Also as far as the pixel remaster, I think it's the least impressive if only for the fact that FF6 has a bit of a wow factor of "dang, they really went for it for this SNES game" that gets kinda muted in the update. The Colonel posted:also idk. i keep saying it but a big chunk of 16's story concept is like. basically just tactics again in a lot of smaller, funnier ways. it's not the "most" traditional ff plot but it's one based in ff games members of staff either like or, in the case of 16's writer, directly worked on. it's why i dont really see the got influence everyone likes to bring up as the biggest thing, the got influence is part of some of the variations in the setup, not the basis for its visual and narrative theming. and if they were trying to court that audience i dunno why they'd go for one of the most final fantasy-esque plots of all time that all of those people bitched about, for being a pretty standard final fantasy plot setup lol. the problem isn't the clive focus itself cause again all of the hideaway characters are pretty well rounded and interesting, it's literally just, annabella's stuff cuts off in an odd way, and jill and joshua and dion's writing kinda slides off for some reason. i'd say the reason the game has the clive focus is simply just cause they wanted to make a one man-focused ff action rpg cause it was the smoothest way to execute the gameplay and story delivery they wanted. Yeah, I can see it from that point of view too. I guess I've been focused on how it feels like FF16 wants to grab a new audience that I try to view most of its decisions through that lens.
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Jul 24, 2023 00:11
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not to mention the whole theme of abyss is the idea of 'why you're born,' and such. like the second-to-last boss theme is literally titled 'the meaning of birth,' its not subtle. the game doesn't give a clean answer to that in terms of like, 'i was born to help people' or w/e. the point it arrives at is that being born is meaning in itself. moving forward, making decisions, taking responsibility for the results of those decisions, thats what being alive is. the main antagonists are largely sympathetic because they are trying to create their own path and they do take responsibility for their own actions. they have reasons and justifications, but they don't have excuses. the handful of antagonists the game does treat as purely evil, and the point where luke is treated as being at his worst, are because they aren't taking responsibility for their own decisions - in luke's case, it's even framed as him 'rejecting being alive' in some ways. thats why the game slips in lines about the war probably starting up again in a few years, and then never circles back to that point or undercuts it - jade is largely treated as correct in these matters, and he's a fairly high ranking military official, so he'd know. there's no reason to doubt that there will be another war, really, but the game doesn't comment one way or the other beyond bringing up the possibility. because the future being uncertain is part of what being alive is. if the characters never had to deal with an uncertain future, one that could be just as bad as the emotional lowpoints of the game's story, than the whole thematic point about what being alive means wouldn't really make sense.
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Jul 24, 2023 00:14
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The Colonel posted:its often bad practice to predicate your story on the idea it will definitively have a 100% resolute happy ending that answers every lingering question for everyone and the entire world. if you can land it in a satisfying way that's good, but it's not a necessity, uncertainty is a fact of life and in text it's a sea of possibilities for the audience to entertain in their own heads. what's between or after the lines can be more important than providing a clear end point for them its also a really annoying constraint on writing that makes games more boring. because now games have to be covering a totality of events, and cant just be vignettes. so games that already wanted to cover everything no longer stand out from the crowd by trying to tackle that thoughtfully, and games that dont want to do it now have to and are absolutely gonna suck poo poo for it cuz theres probably not much worse you can do for a written work than demand an arbitrary minimum word count.
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Jul 24, 2023 00:15
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i think the biggest argument for ff16 trying to grab a drastically new audience would be its heavy focus on the english dub but honestly i could believe that might just be cause they had the contacts with an english va studio people like and someone high up really liked the ff12 english dub
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Jul 24, 2023 00:16
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the ff12 dub owns so if someone high up likes it they are right
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Jul 24, 2023 00:17
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the ff14 dub is also good and the ff16 english va is good so it was a solid call overall. and it's funny seeing jp players talk on twitter about whether adult joshua's english or jp va has a hotter voice
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Jul 24, 2023 00:18
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Kagaya Homoraisan posted:its also a really annoying constraint on writing that makes games more boring. because now games have to be covering a totality of events, and cant just be vignettes. so games that already wanted to cover everything no longer stand out from the crowd by trying to tackle that thoughtfully, and games that dont want to do it now have to and are absolutely gonna suck poo poo for it cuz theres probably not much worse you can do for a written work than demand an arbitrary minimum word count. i think the funniest thing come about from people not really understanding what you can do with narrative structure is like the multitudes of confusion and weird reads people express at like. a suda51 game. if you go into them with the right mindset they're never actually that hard to understand because it's 90% him writing what he thinks is funny or awesome but he does it in a way people aren't used to so they spend too much time wasting brain power on trying to logically deduce what's happening instead of accepting that the game is about a tiny pre-rendered cartoon game programmer man spinning around on a chair while a drunk homophobic gay detective points at him and tells you to reclaim your life now
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Jul 24, 2023 00:23
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Trevor Pearlharbor
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Jul 24, 2023 00:23
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The Colonel posted:i think the biggest argument for ff16 trying to grab a drastically new audience would be its heavy focus on the english dub but honestly i could believe that might just be cause they had the contacts with an english va studio people like and someone high up really liked the ff12 english dub hearing vaan scream that he's Basch fon Ronsenburg 100 times and going this is it this is the poo poo I like. e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl-5gWAm9hk ftw
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Jul 24, 2023 00:25
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Endorph posted:Trevor Pearlharbor i like the part of the silver case where suda's co-writer just wrote a half dozen scenes about a guy who loves turtles hanging out with a gay bartender who's into bdsm and out of nowhere they start talking about what the internet will be like in 20 years and literally everything they say is exactly what social media ended up being. like so close that the translation got cheeky and inserted a joke about twitter into the exchange. this happens, after the gay bartender just randomly goes "you know i've been getting into bdsm lately. i found out that i really like men." and the turtle guy just goes "huh. that's nice."
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Jul 24, 2023 00:26
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I think Tales from the Abyss was the one where you start off as the bratty noble guy and get dragged into a big conspiracy when someone tries to assassinate you. I did not get super far in it, but I remember that Jade Curtiss was an excellent smart snarky guy in the party skits and the towns were quite fun to explore. Also a bunch of technobabble explaining their "Fonon" magic, I think I bailed on the game when you were escorting the Fonon pope and your shady mentor figure through a forest. A couple friends got way more into it than I did, and it seemed like the game takes some pretty wild swerves later on, but I always gravitated towards the Tales games with more immediately likeable casts. It's on my list of games to re-try at some point, but it is pretty far down. Definitely glad to see there are other folks who really enjoy it, though!
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Jul 24, 2023 00:28
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The Colonel posted:i like the part of the silver case where suda's co-writer just wrote a half dozen scenes about a guy who loves turtles hanging out with a gay bartender who's into bdsm and out of nowhere they start talking about what the internet will be like in 20 years and literally everything they say is exactly what social media ended up being. like so close that the translation got cheeky and inserted a joke about twitter into the exchange. this happens, after the gay bartender just randomly goes "you know i've been getting into bdsm lately. i found out that i really like men." and the turtle guy just goes "huh. that's nice." lol that sounds ftw
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Jul 24, 2023 00:29
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whyd you read an article about explaining the themes of tales of the abyss before actually playing it...
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Jul 24, 2023 00:29
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avoraciopoctules posted:I think Tales from the Abyss was the one where you start off as the bratty noble guy and get dragged into a big conspiracy when someone tries to assassinate you. I did not get super far in it, but I remember that Jade Curtiss was an excellent smart snarky guy in the party skits and the towns were quite fun to explore. Also a bunch of technobabble explaining their "Fonon" magic, I think I bailed on the game when you were escorting the Fonon pope and your shady mentor figure through a forest. You should return to it because its extremely good
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Jul 24, 2023 00:30
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Kagaya Homoraisan posted:lol that sounds ftw Played the Silver Case and its sequel for the first time earlier this year and yeah it's very ftw
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Jul 24, 2023 00:31
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