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Back to Alpha Protocol for a second: It's one of my favorite games. There's a lot of things people look for in RPGs - hell, there's a lot of different things I look for in RPGs - but my personal favorite is the "choose-your-own-adventure" sense. In this regard, in terms of player action affecting the plot, Alpha Protocol is probably the best game ever released. It has it's flaws, to be sure - the combat is only so-so, it glitches occasionally, and apparently the PC release is awkward to control? But I beat it four times without stopping. I've never finished a second play through of any Bioware or hell, Black Isle game (actually... might have beaten Fallout 2 twice) but Alpha Protocol allows you to react in so many interesting and different ways, that it blew me the gently caress away. So if the interactive storytelling thing is part of what draws you to RPGs, I actually can't really recommend anything more than Alpha Protocol. (Vampire: Bloodlines, as mentioned, is also really good at this. I also loving love in Vampire that your decisions don't necessarily change your actions, but they completely re-contextualize them so you're doing similar things for different reasons. It's a clever and very successful way to give player choice in a game where they probably didn't have the resources to map out whole different levels or whatever.)
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Oct 2, 2010 18:34
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The Monster Rancher GBA games had some alternate methods of monster design - I think you picked a string of characters? It wouldn't really be too hard to rip some of the id tags off a random MP3 file if they wanted to stick to music or something, right? Anyway I guess what I'm saying is BRING BACK MONSTER RANCHER
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Feb 28, 2015 20:35
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I just beat Persona 5, the first JRPG in like a decade that I finished. Can someone tell me why every single japanese role playing game ends with you murdering god? I'm actually being serious here, there seem to be a lot of people heavily into JRPGs and anime culture and poo poo in this thread, if anyone can explain what the cultural antecedents to that I'd be really interested. Because it's probably more prevalent than "crooked military contractor" as the bad guy in American action movies, or "her boss was in on the conspiracy the whole time" in Hong Kong cop movies.
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May 12, 2017 23:04
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Yeah, I was being hyperbolic. When I was a teenager and played JRPGs regularly, I'd say over 80% of them ended with you killing god, but it's entirely possible things have changed. And yeah, SMT makes the god-killing theme make sense (never beaten another one, but I played about half of Persona 3.) It still strikes me as odd. Endorph, you seemed to imply that the Japanese view Christianity as being central to American involvement in WW2. But uh, didn't they kinda... get us involved in WW2? I'm not history scholar, and I don't know much about Japanese culture, but I can see for example their obsession with giant robots crushing cities being a result of both the shock of a rapid, successful industrialization and of course the A-bomb. But I don't know much about Japanese religion - aren't only some astonishingly small percentage of Japanese people Christian? Was the emperor always considered a God? I know there were long periods of Japanese history where the emperor had basically no real power, so it seems weird the trope of "Organized religion is evil" would come from there. Were there atrocities committed by early Christian missionaries? I don't know much about that history either. And I don't understand at all why referencing the prevalence of a trope in one culture and medium to the prevalence of a trope in another culture and medium is at all weird. I'm not comparing the two tropes or the two mediums, I'm just talking about their relative frequency - and like I said, I haven't consumed much Japanese culture in a while.
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May 12, 2017 23:45
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Irony Be My Shield posted:Someone in a previous discussion suggested it was due to Aum Shinrikyo, whose founder claimed to be Jesus. Like how most American depictions of Islam were not particularly positive after 9/11. That's a really interesting thought! I find it super loving weird that those guys are still around. Tangents posted:Yeah, there's certainly a great aesthetic you can pull out of christianity. Grand buildings, fancy outfits, rituals and symbolism out the rear end. Obviously that's hardly exclusive to christianity, but it's altogether a great package imo. I think I also probably underrated this reason too. Like I said, it's been a while since I consumed any Japanese cultural products outside of a few live-action films - I think I forgot how much of their pop-culture goes by "the rule of cool." Another, random thought - Japan was basically the only non-European country that successfully competed with European Great Powers during the age of colonization, right? Maybe their rush to embrace industrialization gave them a chance to really study and be influenced by European culture - except when it didn't. If you see Christianity is important to these countries you're trying to emulate, but you have no Abrahamic religious tradition and don't convert, that leaves it as a kind of powerful, exotic, and inexplicable outside force - I can certainly see that leading to "gently caress yeah let's have them fight an evil space pope!" I mean it's not like there wasn't a ton of western culture from the 80s and 90s that had ninjas or Japanese mega-corps or whatever as the villains. It's easy to exotify and vilify something you see is influential but don't really understand.
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May 13, 2017 01:38
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shadow hearts loving rules. The setting was a breath of fresh air, the characters tended to be either legitimately compelling or completely bugnuts crazy, and I dug their spinny-wheel attack thing. I really liked how stats would interact with it, so you would have to make trade-offs like making the critical hit area larger or slowing down the needle or whatever. weren't there a couple of SMT spin-offs set around that same time period? were they any good / is there any way to play them these days?
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May 13, 2017 05:36
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 20:04 |
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Awesome guys, thanks for the name, the opinion, and where I can buy it! Still have my PS3 so we're good. I'm honestly... honestly kind of considering buying a Vita for P4G. I shouldn't do this, right? I mean, I don't even commute. I also had similar thoughts about SMT4 and whatever flavor of DS it came out for. I should probably take a day or two of living real life before I commit to another hundred hours of living a fake life, right?
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May 13, 2017 06:08
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