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AdmiralViscen posted:Mass Effect 3 has its own "Squall is dead" theory that says that Shepard is dominated by the reapers at the end or something and the ending didn't happen. yeah I already posted about indoc theory a while ago. although I find it amusing you could take the ME3 fan ending theories and transpose them straight onto FF8 for matching fan ending theories. Sure, you can change the setting, but you don't change the ideas 
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Nov 9, 2017 07:20
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:That's only because there's no dog sized space helmets It would be funny if they'd added some weird doggy cosmonaut accessory in a minor shop or quest and it just lets you use angelo in space.
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Nov 9, 2017 07:51
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Thanks you, Cool Ghost, for this LP. FF8's been a game I've liked a lot even when I was young, even if it didn't make too much sense to my teenaged mind, I liked a lot of the aesthetics of the games and reading this LP have reinforced my impressions of with your analysis. Being able to vocal and bring this LP to mind about how FF8 DO have some depth to it's plot, just being rather subtle and being hidden in the world -- and requiring some analysis. Again, thanks you very much, good sir, congratulations on a... what, this was a multiyear project? Cosmic Afro fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Nov 9, 2017 |
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Nov 9, 2017 08:33
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Wrex = Ultimecia Teach the controversy
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Nov 9, 2017 11:25
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Indoctrination theory was stupid and bad because if it was true, it'd mean we never got the REAAALL ending to ME3, and that even if we had, BioWare had cut out the REAAALL ending to make us pay money for it later. It's just the ending of ME3 was so bad that people literally didn't believe it COULD be that bad. ME3 is a classic example of "don't get clever in the last 10 minutes of your game." Gonna spring a big surprise? Foreshadow the gently caress out of it. Not going to? Don't do it. Twists only work when people can look back and say "how the gently caress did I not see that coming? It was so obvious!" Bringing this post on-topic, thank you Cool Ghost for this LP. It was super awesome and hit my nostalgia in all the right places.
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Nov 9, 2017 13:13
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Zeniel posted:Wrex = Ultimecia Someone please redo the camera scrolling down from the moon to Ultimecia except Wrex is there and he just says Shepard
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Nov 9, 2017 20:07
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Sky Shadowing posted:Indoctrination theory was stupid and bad because if it was true, it'd mean we never got the REAAALL ending to ME3, and that even if we had, BioWare had cut out the REAAALL ending to make us pay money for it later. It's just the ending of ME3 was so bad that people literally didn't believe it COULD be that bad. ME3's ending made three design choices that individually were either risky or dumb, and combined to real awful: 1: Early on BW apparently decided to make the ending a huge bummer where nearly everyone dies. This is pretty consistent with the elegiac tone for a lot of the game, but it's generally hard to make ending on a low note satisfying for a player. It's also a marked contrast with ME2, where you're repeatedly told that you're on a suicide mission and you must be prepared to sacrifice, but by shooting enough aliens in the face you can in fact win, keep everyone alive, tell Cerberus to get hosed. The player ends up feeling like a big drat hero. ME3 was made with the intention of not invoking that feeling. Again, fine, if done well. 2: They decided to offer a set of very slightly different Sophie's Choice and Deus Ex Machina combination endings, all of which involved being awful in some way. Forcing the player to press a genocide button as their final action is inevitably a very sour note to end your game on. 3: The staging with the twist "haha this was the secret plan all along, here have a virtual autistic child avatar explain it" reveal was inexcusable sub-Shyamalan bullshit. You can certainly end a game on a depressing note if you do it well (see: Last of Us, The), but in that case you can't hedge your bets and you probably want to your protagonist to have their own motivations and not be a blank slate player avatar. No one is going to love you and your game for forcing them to actively commit galactic genocide, even in a well-constructed narrative. But, I derail. FF8 and others never had that particular set of problems because their protagonists are definitely not blank slates and have distinct agendas, and the games are good about avoiding forcing the player into empty choices. Primarily they do that by avoiding choices, but anyhow. The problems in FFs, especially the Playstation era ones, are more related to the fact that Square's process is often about making the storyboards and often cinematics for the cool set pieces they want first, and then filling in the narrative details around those set pieces later. This sometimes fails spectacularly, and the ending of 8 is one of those cases. There's some cool ideas in there and they almost coalesce into something coherent, but inevitably there's a lot of hand-waving and plot holes. The narrative was never planned out in detail and the cinematics were locked in by the time they were finalizing the actual details of the script.
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Nov 9, 2017 21:09
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rickiep00h posted:INDOCTRINATION. The FF13 trilogy wasn't nearly as popular as ME, and SE didn't spend the better part of a decade hyping it up as a grand overarching narrative where Your Choices Matter. The ME3 ending being bad had nothing to do with "loving up its own lore". It just sucked. A lot. Also Snow and Hope are good and cool.
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Nov 9, 2017 21:18
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Xerophyte posted:The narrative was never planned out in detail and the cinematics were locked in by the time they were finalizing the actual details of the script. I've read this assertion a lot based on Square titles well after the PSX trilogy, but I've never heard it sourced for 8. I also don't buy it; 7-9 all have stories that remain relatively consistent start to end. Are they perfect, no, are there holes, sure. There's nothing like dead characters reappearing in an endgame CG or whatever.
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Nov 9, 2017 21:25
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Psion posted:I've read this assertion a lot based on Square titles well after the PSX trilogy, but I've never heard it sourced for 8. I also don't buy it; 7-9 all have stories that remain relatively consistent start to end. Are they perfect, no, are there holes, sure. There's nothing like dead characters reappearing in an endgame CG or whatever. I'll happily admit I have no primary source handy, but I'm sure I've at least read elsewhere that this was a necessary compromise even in the PSX era. Allegedly the prerendered backgrounds and cutscenes sequences were so time-consuming to produce that they had to be start working on them before the game design and script were final to be able to complete the game on a reasonable schedule. I'm sure they had the overarching narrative and sequence of events scoped out from pre-production, but typically the actual script and dialogue will be some of the last parts done. It makes sense to me, given the cost of CG rendering at the time and the more or less unprecedented scale at which Squeenix used it. I certainly expect that doing all the cutscenes and backgrounds was the biggest, scariest element on their Gantt chart that they'd want to launch work on ASAP, and there's not that much else those teams could work on. I could, of course, be completely wrong.
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Nov 9, 2017 21:42
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You don't have any source because none exists. The whole "cutscenes first" methodology was a much later accusation leveled against the XIII games, and (if true) was a result of SE getting very, very good at making them during the PSX era.
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Nov 9, 2017 21:56
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Thank you for a great LP, Cool Ghost. It's been very enjoyable to follow the thread and very nice to see the things I've missed during my own playthroughs. ME talk: As far as I'm concerned there's only 2 Shepard ME games. Both are pretty good.
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Nov 9, 2017 22:36
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ME3 hosed up by almost completely ignoring the first two games. In ME1 you make a choice between two of your squadmates, leaving one to die and one to continue along with you. In ME2 unless you do things perfectly some of your team will straight up die. In ME3 Shepard doesn't give a poo poo about any of those people and instead spends the whole game crying about a little boy he didn't know but saw playing with a little jet before getting owned. It was so stupid. Squall is dead is a dumb fan theory because late 90's/early 2000's internet was full of that poo poo (still looking for the triforce in OOT). The indoctrination theory was a reflexive "it can't possibly be this bad after 3 whole games and years and years" reaction.
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Nov 9, 2017 23:32
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Fister Roboto posted:Also Hope [is] good and cool. Yessssss Fister Roboto posted:Also Snow [is] good and cool. Nooooooo
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Nov 10, 2017 02:12
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Xerophyte posted:No one is going to love you and your game for forcing them to actively commit galactic genocide, even in a well-constructed narrative. It doesn’t count as genocide if it only kills robots. 
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Nov 10, 2017 07:11
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Comrade Koba posted:It doesn’t count as genocide if it only kills robots. Thank you for that insight, Nines.
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Nov 10, 2017 07:42
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The whole coma/character is secretly dead thing can work, but really only if it's established really early and not an ending twist. Driver San Francisco does interesting things with it, like the realisation that Jericho's plot as Tanner has imagined it doesn't make any sense, as he is a thief, not a terrorist, leading him to realise that the bioweapon theft was actually a smokescreen in the real world - he only thought it was the real deal because his brain told him it was.
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Nov 10, 2017 21:26
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I would have been fine with ME3's ending if there'd been a proper epilogue about what happened to the different characters and species, based on my choices throughout the series.
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Nov 11, 2017 01:35
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Giving a thorough look at a Final Fantasy game with a less than favorable reputation and appreciating its strengths in spite of its flaws? Well that's just good manners. 
Zeikier fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Nov 11, 2017 |
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Nov 11, 2017 12:39
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Thank you very much for the LP, Cool Ghost  It's been a very enjoyable ride and I've had this thread open in a tab for many, many months now, waiting for updates. I've never really known much about FFVIII apart from a short bit of the train sequence and just generally latched onto the "ok FFVIII is the bad game" -mindset, mainly because FFVII was such a huge thing and as a kid I heard that VIII is about a romance between two characters and that's just not cool at that age, haha. It's been really interesting to learn what this game is actually about! 
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Nov 16, 2017 13:09
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I've updated the post with SeeD exam errata to include the NPC dialogue around the place during the exam, which was about the last thing I wanted to do with this thread, so I'm planning to submit it for archiving by Tuesday. So, if you've been sitting on fanart or somesuch, now's the time to submit it.
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Nov 18, 2017 05:56
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And now that we're done here, let's go on a trip.
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Nov 19, 2017 02:21
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I've honestly wanted to share this since the thread started but was waiting until it wasn't spoilers anymore--but then I fell real behind so I suppose now is as good a time as any. Angela Aki (who did Kiss Me Goodbye from FFXII) did a cover of Eyes On Me that, honestly, I like quite a bit more than the in-game version. To me it sounds more like...Julia, I guess? Who was supposed to be just a pianist and a vocalist. Nothing wrong with the Faye Wong version of it (it is the original after all), but I just really like the cover so much better imho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOPyeaTxVRk Edit: Thanks for the thread, Cool Ghost. It's been fun to revisit this game without someone making GBS threads all over it. This game has a lot of issues but there are still some really great moments. Happy Landfill fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Nov 19, 2017 |
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Nov 19, 2017 03:34
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Thank you once again for a very good LP. I'll be sure to follow your next LPs, I really like your style
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Nov 19, 2017 23:02
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Happy Landfill posted:I've honestly wanted to share this since the thread started but was waiting until it wasn't spoilers anymore--but then I fell real behind so I suppose now is as good a time as any. Angela Aki (who did Kiss Me Goodbye from FFXII) did a cover of Eyes On Me that, honestly, I like quite a bit more than the in-game version. To me it sounds more like...Julia, I guess? Who was supposed to be just a pianist and a vocalist. Nothing wrong with the Faye Wong version of it (it is the original after all), but I just really like the cover so much better imho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOPyeaTxVRk I read this thinking like "sounds more like Julia? lol what"... but no you're totally right, this is way better and more in keeping with Julia's whole thing. Thanks for the LP, Cool Ghost! It was really great!
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Nov 20, 2017 00:43
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Thanks for the LP man, it was a pretty good read. FFVIII really needed an LP like yours.
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Nov 20, 2017 00:47
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eating only apples posted:I read this thinking like "sounds more like Julia? lol what"... but no you're totally right, this is way better and more in keeping with Julia's whole thing. Yeah, I was having a really hard time wording that 
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Nov 20, 2017 03:09
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FF8 was one of the only FFs I never finished, because my brother apparently "threw the game away because it was bad" after he finished it himself (I have a feeling he just gave it away/lost it, but whatevs), so I only had the very beginning of the game to go off of. On the one hand, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as a teenager, because I would probably just grind drawing everything... So thanks for this. I'm glad to be able to see why people enjoy this game, and why it still has a pretty decent following even now; I love the FF franchise, and being able to experience this game, even a little bit, has made me appreciate it a lot more. The fact that the entire backstory of FF8 was a big love story to FF3 is something that I definitely appreciate.
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Nov 20, 2017 09:58
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I've now sent this thread in for archiving, on its official third birthday. It was a fun thread and I really enjoyed doing it. Thanks again to everyone who followed and enjoyed the LP, and thanks to everyone who submitted fan art for the second post.
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Nov 22, 2017 01:00
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