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The White Dragon posted:Man you don't paint the walls with diarrhea more than once unless you still think it was the best idea since the telegraph. Or you just are not a very good writer and not particularly caring about the quality of your work because you're making Wacky Anime JRPG/Disney crossover and trying to make it as marketable as possible. Frankly, KH's thing is that they want to make it marketable and don't actually care of it is a good story, just that people keep buying the games. That's why they've got a bunch of interchangeable bullshit assholes in cloaks because those guys sell for some inexplicable reason. They sell so much they made a game about them despite the fact that none of them have a personality.
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Jun 7, 2012 04:38
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Cid being able to survive is just bizarre as hell. It makes no sense and converts that entire sequence to "Welp, thanks for all the fish. Have a raft. No, no, I'll stay here. No, no, no end to my character arc or anything. I just really fuckin' love fish."
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Jun 7, 2012 19:26
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Fanatic's Tower may as well be called "Did you get Moogle Charm? What, why not? Go and get it." It isn't even a fun dungeon, it's just a boring upwards slog even if you have the charm. I love FF6 but that dungeon is the biggest pile of poo poo.
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Jun 10, 2012 06:21
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Winks posted:My experience has been that if you liked the battle system in XIII, you'll generally enjoy XIII-2. I would say FFXIII-2 manages to screw up the battle system through awful balance while not actually improving anything else myself. What happens in FFXIII-2 is that you end up so cartoonishly overpowered so early on that none of the faintly interesting things about the combat system ever matter because you kill everything too quickly.
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Jun 11, 2012 01:27
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Spiritus Nox posted:Huh, I never really felt overpowered in my playthrough. I mean, there were only a few random encounters that gave me any trouble and I certainly wouldn't say the game was ever exceptionally difficult, but the bosses and tougher encounters generally put up a good fight, and I thought the endgame was very well done, in terms of difficulty. I think it may depend on the way you go. I went to one of the higher-level areas early and by the time I was through it it felt like nothing else in the game could keep up with me. I really really wanted to like it. I liked FFXIII's combat system a lot. 
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Jun 11, 2012 01:42
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Spiritus Nox posted:Which one, out of curiosity? Ah... I can't remember. I think it was one of the early timezones only covered with snow? Maybe I'm misremembering but that's what I seem to recall. Azure_Horizon posted:This argument seems weird to me because this happens in FFXIII all the time. FFXIII capped your levels so while it was possible to become powerful, it was less possible to become quite as ridiculously overpowered as in FFXIII-2 because at least at some point you'd hit a wall while in FFXIII-2 you just keep going.
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Jun 11, 2012 02:55
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Azure_Horizon posted:XIII capped your levels but aside from (a few) boss battles, the game is stupendously easy, about as easy as XIII-2 is. XIII-2 just gives you the benefit of strong monsters to make it faster. FFXIII is not hard, but the way it was balanced encourage use of more mechanics. The Stagger Bar is nearly worthless a lot of the time in FFXIII-2, as are a lot of the other neat little gimmicks. I think the moment it lost me is when I got to the area with the Behemoth and the game is like "RUN FROM THIS" and it's something I could defeat without trying using only Commando and Ravager and a sentinel monster I'd picked up and barely used. That's sort of my feel about the whole game. "This thing is supposed to be deadly!" and it's exactly as easy as every other mook trash I tore through before.
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Jun 11, 2012 12:31
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Miracon posted:I will never understand the corporate politics that allow consistent fuckups to keep their high-level positions like that. Connections and/or an unwillingless to hurt the company image/pride by admitting they hired a fuckup.
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Jun 11, 2012 18:03
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Gammatron 64 posted:Wait, wait, wait. What? What?! The premise of FFIV:TAY's villain is that it seeded crystals on worlds to cause evolution and blah blah bullshit. When you are venturing down to fight it, you battle through the crystals it has collected from the FFIV world, which is basically a FFIV boss rush. Then you battle crystals it collected from other worlds which represent a boss rush from FFI to FFVI. The implication was that it had already been to the other FF worlds. (Gilgamesh and Ultros both make direct references to their games IIRC.) ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Jun 13, 2012 |
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Jun 13, 2012 16:48
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p.crestmont posted:Yes I understand, maybe watch some videos of "essential" XIII story cutscenes on YouTube and then play XIII-2? If you think FFXIII was literally painful, FFXIII-2 isn't going to change your mind. It's almost identical except with a stupider plot, more poorly balanced combat and (relatively) less linearity. Jesus, people act like FFXIII killed their puppy instead of "was overly linear and had a stupid plot." It's ridiculous.
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Jun 13, 2012 19:29
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Pesky Splinter posted:And everytime someone says FFXIII had good moments, SE asks Yoko Taro to torch an animal shelter. Jesus, I'd hate to see what would happen if you ever had to play Last Rebellion.
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Jun 13, 2012 19:41
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Pesky Splinter posted:Hey, ImpAtom, I've only got so much time, and so much hate to go around. and no PS3 to hate it on Well, you're using that hatred wisely on DmC so I can't complain.  Cityinthesea posted:I think the stupider plot is endearing, personally; maybe because they aren't always so self serious all the time. I just couldn't stand the endless repetitive cutscenes filled with them effectively screaming the word PARADOX over and over. The nonlinearity hurt because there was no way to be sure the players had information and so they decided on redundancy. I can deal with the stupid but redundant stupid drives me crazy. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jun 13, 2012 |
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Jun 13, 2012 19:46
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The White Dragon posted:Admittedly it's second-hand, maybe third-, but some folks came around some of my LPs saying that they either worked on or were bros with someone who worked on the WotL localization staff and that they were specifically told to do this. Being told to keep a consistent localization style across games set in the same basic universe is a lot different from Square-Enix telling translators to 'ham it up' to keep their 'appeal.' ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Jun 14, 2012 |
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Jun 14, 2012 15:31
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Sex_Ferguson posted:Does PSone FFV have the great translation that the GBA one had? No, it has an incredibly awful translation. Like they translate Wyvern as "Y-Burn"
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Jun 15, 2012 07:50
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Hm. If that's real, they're using Aerith instead of Aeris. That would imply a retranslation.
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Jun 19, 2012 23:03
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Winks posted:Or CTRL-F Aeris, click 'find and replace', Aerith. They have, but it seems weird they'd go through the trouble of changing that and nothing else. Xillah posted:Thought it was only Aeris in the PAL release. Nope. US release too. That's while people get into crazy arguments about it because Aeris was how it was originally translated. It's been "Aerith" in almost everything since.
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Jun 19, 2012 23:29
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Allan Assiduity posted:Donald Duck literally looks like a kid dressing up, with a duck bill on a piece of string. The mind boggles as to how you could make this art-style look more unappealing than Cagnazzo's rear end-chin. To be (slightly) fair, that's the intent. At least in the social thing, it's supposed to be your avatars dressing up, not actually the character.
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Jul 4, 2012 23:28
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Suaimhneas posted:Didn't the PC version have a better translation than the PSX version already? I'm sure I remember reading that somewhere. It had an improved translation but only in that it fixed some of the most massively egregious errors. (Tseng 'dying' for example.) It was still pretty bad, but not as hilariously bad. I don't think it actually changed Aeris to Aerith tho' or anything like that, just fixed a few things which actively made no sense. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 13:31 on Jul 5, 2012 |
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Jul 5, 2012 13:26
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It really can't get worse than The Adventures of PARADOX: Paradox Paradox Paradox. Unless they start bringing in Parasite Eve 3 bullshit.
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Jul 5, 2012 15:23
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penguinmambo posted:I wouldn't mind if it's some Kingdom Hearts/God of War mashup where Lighting kills the Final Fantasy 13's Pantheon in ~fabulous~ fashion like we thought 13-2 was gonna be. I'd make a smarmy joke that the third will invariably poo poo up Lightning the way it happened to Aya Brea, but Square has been weirdly good about that. I got tons of issues with the sort of character Light is, but I'm very glad she exists and is popular in the fandom because it might make creators more receptive to including less (traditionally) cliche characters in other games. Vanille could have been interesting. They do some interesting things with foreshadowing with her, and the fact that she is the only one in the know about what is going on and hiding it out of shame could be interesting but... they never really do anything meaningful with it. She lies, people suffer, and it never really comes to anything.
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Jul 6, 2012 00:02
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The White Dragon posted:So you're saying a setting that requires a loving encyclopedia to get anything more out of than "my what a pretty setting" isn't a complete failure? You tend to believe that a game should give you as little as possible and allow you to work with that, but not everyone agrees. I'm not defending FFXIII here, but it's really appealing to certain kinds of settings to have things like that. Not just in video games but in books as well. It really depends on how the game is designed and who the players are. For some people the appeal is in exploring the world created by someone else. For others it is in being given a playground and basic information that they can use to make up their own story. Both have their own appeal. Again, this may or may not apply to FFXIII (depending on who really likes/dislikes it) but it isn't a universal feeling.
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Jul 6, 2012 22:24
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Shadow Hearts: Covenant is honestly one of the RPGs I like best on the PS2. It has its problems but it also has a ton of personality, interesting combat systems and a fun setting. The insanity is part of why it is interesting. It's not a generic fantasy world or generic sci-fi world, it's a weird blend of modern/near modern and urban mythology and fantasy and a whole lot of crazy. Shadow Hearts 3 clearly tried to recapture this and ended up just sucking. I'd rather have a batshit insane game than a boring one and SH:C manages to be a fun kind of batshit insane. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Jul 7, 2012 |
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Jul 7, 2012 20:31
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Teim posted:Not to derail the SH talk, but in FFIV does Edward ever stop being useless? I'm not really that far in, but so far all he seems to do is either hide or get buttfucked before I get him to heal everyone. Edward is fairly limited in usefulness. His exact abilities depend on the version you're playing.
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Jul 7, 2012 21:22
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I am pretty sure most people did that, which is why the common perception of JRPGs is "grind to win" despite the fact that there are a billion non-grinding solutions even in something as basic as Final Fantasy
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Jul 9, 2012 13:28
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Pesky Splinter posted:I thought that them joining to become Ragnarok was the Fal Cie's plan anyway. That's what the whole scene with Robo-pope torturing Vanille is about isn't it? And Vanille tells Fang not to become Ragnarok or something. But they do anyway. The Ragnarok plan was for them to become Ragnarok, destroy Coccoon and kill everyone. In a generic and boring twist they subverted that by using the power of Ragnarok to save Cocoon instead, even though it came at the cost of sacrificing themselves. It isn't particularly interesting but it's really straightforward. I should note that I played the Japanese version of FFXIII and from what I understand the English version has the most bizarre and inept translation a game has had in some time. FFXIII has a lovely plot but the people who play the English version appear to miss completely explained plot points for reasons I can only assume involved whoever translated it being a moron.
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Jul 12, 2012 03:44
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Pesky Splinter posted:While I can't comment on the translation (though everything seemed okay), the actual writing itself was really really lovely. Even for the usual JRPG standards. FFXIII doesn't have good writing to begin with but everything I've seen from FFXIII's translation appears overly-literal and stilted. It's 'translated' but with no effort made beyond that, so things that really should have been altered or clarified or cleaned up are not. It's like it was translated by a robot. It also appears to have been voiced directed by a robot whose job was "mimic the Japanese direction exactly" which is the stupidest possible voice direction in the history of mankind.
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Jul 12, 2012 04:15
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There's actually a reason for the Cid thing but it's pretty dumb. The CGI cutscenes were finished before everything else, and they were required to find a way to fit them into the plot. That is why Lightning has a gravity device (because she was supposed to have a gravity device in the early story design), it breaks as soon as they stop using it in CGI cutscenes, and then it fixes itself again for the big scene in Chapter 10 where Lightning is using it again. The entire reason for Cid being in that scene is that he was in the CGI cutscene and so they had to use him even though it no longer made sense. Not a GOOD excuse, but that's why it happened. They had expensive CGI cutscenes they were required to implement and did a poo poo job of doing so.
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Jul 12, 2012 06:36
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Eh, the Fal'cie thing should have been interesting. Even in FFXII, it was political drama w/hint of God. The idea of a setting where Gods exist and are cruel, capricious and self-centered and are perfectly willing to gently caress over people is one with a lot of potential weight to it. Likewise, the idea of a Focus isn't a bad one at all and could have lead to some really interesting drama. The primary problem it has, beyond just the general awkward writing, is that they failed to make it come across as horrible enough. If anything, FFXIII should have been structured like FFIV. You can and should have lost characters to underscore "holy poo poo, this is horrible." It should have been a grim story that leads up to eventual catharsis, not a bizarrely inconsistent story that leads up to a dull ending and an even more incoherent sequel. There's nothing in FFXIII which is conceptually bad or even conceptually difficult to pull off. It's an error of execution or an extreme lack of talent on Toriyama's part (or both!) rather than a problem with the setting itself. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Jul 12, 2012 |
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Jul 12, 2012 18:25
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Eh. If the only way to have fun is to play as a sociopath, then I don't particularly want to have fun. It feels to me like developers are so creatively bankrupt that the only way they can think of to creature 'fun' games is to make ones where you're a crazy rear end in a top hat who kills people in cartoonish ways. I miss fun heroic adventure games, which is why I enjoyed the older Final Fantasy games and why I still enjoy Dragon Quest games. I don't get much out of playing King rear end in a top hat and murdering children. I just wish FF games would remember to be lighthearted again. (4 Heroes of Light was pretty great for this tho'.)
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Jul 15, 2012 22:34
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Himuro posted:I wouldn't say that having a character who is a sociopath is creatively bankrupt. It is actually the opposite, because a lot of developers these days place emphasis on main character who feel and have feelings and emotions and want to make you cry. On the other hand, you have stuff like Saints Row The Third, where you play as a confident lead who takes no poo poo, and wants everything. gently caress feelings. How is that bankrupt if it is the anti-thesis to modern game character development? Because it's lazy. It recognizes that the primary problem with game design is that trying to make a even somewhat reasonable character in a setting where you murder thousands of people without the slightest hesitation or repercussions is to make someone who is pretty much cartoon evil. I don't hold it against Saint's Row because it is honest about it, but I wouldn't want any more games like Saint's Row where they decide that the solution is to just make sociopaths. The problem with modern game development isn't that characters have emotions. It is that they have emotions while murdering the entire population of several third-world countries without the two having an interaction. They is no sense of proper tone. Saint's Row at least has a proper tone and I respect it for that, but I wouldn't want the lesson people take away from it to be "sociopaths are the best protagonists" instead of "make a protagonist who fits your gameplay and gameplay that fits your protagonist." ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 23:25
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Zombies' Downfall posted:ImpAtom, I don't think there's ever been a Final Fantasy game that's sociopathic in the way you describe (the GTA/SR way) and probably never will be. And while the series has seemingly become melodramatic, it was never lighthearted all the time (there was a lot of dark, serious business stuff in 4/6/7; 4 starts with you committing war crimes that weigh heavily on the protagonist) and that levity and sense of adventure still pops up in the new games. 12 and 13-2 both had them, at least. I wasn't talking about FF. I was responding to the comment about how "at least developers remember what fun games are, like Saint's Row." I wouldn't want FF to become the kind of "fun" that Saint's Row is, although can respect what SR does. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 23:40
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I wanted to like FFXII so bad. If it had just had a combat system that wasn't abhorrent I would have loved it and been able to put up with all its other problems. I was so excited for the Zodiac Job System re-release but it didn't actually fix my fundamental problems, just addressed some of the more egregious errors.
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Jul 17, 2012 00:13
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Gammatron 64 posted:It's because upper management decided they needed to have teenage protagonists, because pretty much every JRPG does. Vaan and Penelo didn't even exist originally, they were very obviously shoehorned in. While Vaan is pretty tolerable, and isn't completely horrible like Squall or Tidus, I kinda wish they left him and Penelo out and just simply made Ashe and Basch the main characters as originally intended, because it would have been a breath of fresh air. Lightning is 21. v  v Not a big difference but still.
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Jul 17, 2012 04:17
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The Gunslinger posted:I thought the combat was pretty well implemented, if a bit easy at times. The gambits were hosed because they made most of the ones you need obtainable towards the end of the game. I wish the combat speed in the vanilla US release was a little faster so that you weren't watching auto-attack so often but other than that it was pretty standard FF fare. What were your specific issues out of curiosity? I hated the Gambit System. It isn't that I couldn't control anything it is that I didn't need to because I controlled everything. I automated almost everything and I never could figure out why I should be playing a game that clearly didn't need me there. I could turn off the Gambits but the user interface without them was an atrocity. It was clearly designed for only minimal manual input and trying to play it without gambits was awful. So I had a choice between setting the game up so that I was watching slow easy combat that I had no meaningful interaction with or watching slow easy combat where I wrestled with awkward menu systems that were not designed for what I was trying to make them do. The problem I have is that FFXII is too simple to automate in that manner. Unlike something like Dragon Age: Origins (which basically has the Gambit system), there's nothing really meaningful in the way of friendly fire and positioning or terrain or other things where automating the basic combat actions allows the player to focus on more complex matters. (And DA:O isn't really that complex.) There's a scant handful of bosses who kind of have this but even they're generally easy enough to automate. I'm not arguing that other FF games had deep combat, just that FF's simple and shallow combat is a poor choice for automation unless you add another layer to focus on. All automation did for me in FFXII was lead to me watching fights play out without me. If I'm going to remove the need to pick attack or cast buffs or whatever then I should be focusing on something else, not putting the controller down and waiting for the fight to end. Edit: Also, keep in mind that I never played FFXI so this was the first FF for me since FFX, and while FFX had problems it also had a combat system that was easy-but-interactive in a fun way. I even played through Lord of the Rings: The Third Age just because it had a combat system similar to FFX's, so going from that to FFXII was just depressing. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Jul 17, 2012 |
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Jul 17, 2012 14:47
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Fister Roboto posted:B-b-b-but the GAME PLAYS ITSELF! This is totally different from mashing X until the random encounter is over! It is, actually. It crosses the threshold where the simpleness of combat becomes hard to ignore and, more importantly, it applies to what should be harder battles as well. Even if it didn't, the solution to "our combat is so easy that you just mash X to get through it" really shouldn't be "Well, let's take out mashing X." I've said before but the FF combat systems are pretty bad and they tread a pretty thin line even at the best of times. That is why some people can tolerate certain FFs but not others despite them all being equally simplistic. FFXII and FF8 are the ones that leap over that line for me. (well, and FF2, but FF2 is just awful.) ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Jul 17, 2012 |
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Jul 17, 2012 15:21
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Heroic Yoshimitsu posted:So I guess everyone here hates Tidus? I liked him. He started out as whiny or whatever(although, I mean having your entire city destroyed in a flood and being sent to what seems like an alternate world is pretty stressing), I thought he developed into a pretty good character. His Japanese voice actor is awful and his English voice actor did a pretty bad job despite doing reasonably well elsewhere. It's kind of hard to get past that in the first fully voice acted game. Kyrosiris posted:I would respectfully disagree with this, having 100%'d the game. Even disregarding super-bosses like Omega Mk.12 and Yiazmat, there were still some tricky boss fights that did not involve just "mash X/let gambits do their work". And even if you could get away with coasting on gambits, I usually used them more for busy work (buff uptime, HP maintenance, auto-attacks) and controlled more fine-tuned stuff (item use - especially with the Nihopalaoa, special buffs like Decoy/Reverse, thievery and Expose, etc). I 100%ed the game too (beat it twice thanks to ZJS) and can only remember a very few situations where I bothered to do anything besides let the Gambits do their job. v v It's fine if it didn't happen for you, it did for me. I don't doubt that you had a lot of fun and played it that way. I guess I set my Gambits up differently and that colored my opinion of combat a lot.
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Jul 17, 2012 15:28
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The Gunslinger posted:Yeah, I don't agree with everything you said but you definitely make some fair points there about adding some complexity to make up for the automation. I think FFXII works best when you're underleveled for content as even the automation doesn't make up for the challenge and you're constantly tinkering or overriding things to go with the flow. I did the Gilgamesh fights at a very low level and it was probably one of the enjoyable and challenging boss fight in any FF game I've played. The fighting becomes rote when you have god equipment or are just facing little wolves in the desert though. I think every FF shines better at lower levels honestly. It just runs into the problem of it often being easy to outlevel content by accident if you're doing sidequests or stuff early. I had this problem really bad in FFXIII-2. I did a few sidequests as early as I could so that the boss fights would be more enjoyable and it ended up rendering a lot more of the game a bland cakewalk.
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Jul 17, 2012 15:32
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If you're going to play FFXII, play the Zodiac version. It's inarguably superior. The PSP version of FFT is the best version assuming you play it patched to remove the inexplicable slowdown.
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Jul 17, 2012 17:41
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The thing is that Lightning isn't really anything like Cloud. At best she is somewhat like the weirdo retcon Cloud they put into Advent Children and not even then. She is actively emotional and a lot of the time she is 'cold' it is actually 'she is so extremely pissed off she wants to punch everyone around her." She deals with her problems by rushing at them head on even when that's kind of a bad idea. If anything she's pretty hotblooded and quick to anger. Cloud, on the other hand, is basically never angry. He's cocky and confident and a bit silly on the outside and shy, awkward and sad on the inside. Even in Advent Children he's just morose and quiet and deals with his problems by running away from them or hiding them until he has no other choice. Cloud pretty rarely gets angry and when he does it's at himself more than anything else. He's about as different from Lightning as you can get. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Jul 18, 2012 |
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Jul 18, 2012 17:04
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The GBA version is by far the best. The only thing the SNES version has going for it is nostalgia and slightly better sound.
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Jul 19, 2012 03:03
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