lolplatypus: On the topic of Final Fantasy: 9 > 6 > [...]
dtgreene: (Ignoring the fact that you rank the worst FF I've played above the best one)
There are actually two significant issues I have with these two FF games in particular:
1. The fact that time does not stop, even during battle animations. This results in the action queue being constantly full, so when you enter a command it may be a while before it gets executed. In these games, I found myself, with battle mode set to Wait, frequently entering a submenu just to let the queue run down. It's annoying entering a command, only to find out that the character I gave the command to is effectively already dead. In FF9, things can get even more ridiculous with long summon animations (especially if you equip the ability that forces long animations) and auto-regen working during animations; by the time the animation finishes, your party is at full health and the enemy's Shell spell has worn off, allowing your summon to do full damage.
2. The fact that stat growth depends on what you have equipped at the time of level up, and there's no other way to increase your stats permanently or (baring a glitch in the US version of FF6 Advance) reduce your level so you can gain more stats. This has mutiple issues, including the fact that it penalizes players who take their time, it makes the precise timing of level ups too important (one of the reasons I dislike it when games restore HP/MP at level up), and it introduces the problem of missable stats. (One nice thing about FF2 and FF5 is that they don't have missable stats; I believe the same is true of the original FF3 unless there's a way to reach level 99 without 9,999 HP.)
So, how do you manage these two issues?
By ignoring them. Neither is an issue for me, I'm not even sure if I've noticed those points.
I think I've usually geared for stat growth, anyways, because why wouldn't I. It's not a great system, granted, but it's par for the course, isn't it? In 7 you had materia growth, in 8 GF management, in 5 job acquisition afair. You're always growing
something, anyways.
On your first point: my first FFs were 7 and 8. I don't like spending MP to begin with and magic in those two games is a bit lackluster from a powergaming standpoint imo. If I used a summon, it was for flavour and I was fine with the animation. Because if 8 taught me anything, it's that even in a world with guns and magic and stupid giant revolver swords, nothing beats a swift kick in the teeth. So I was already trained to ignore magic and summons by the time I got to 9.
On a related note, there's more to these games than combat and story. I mainly play games for the kind of excapism books and movies just can't supply. So setting is a huge selling point. Yes, I know the story after playing through a game once, but like a good vacation spot I can always return to an interesting setting without it loosing its magic. Just
being in Dollet or Timber has a certain charme, wondering how life would be there, soaking in the atmosphere, that sort of thing. Hence the ranking and why I might even be convinced to put 8 up top at a push. 5 would likely rank higher purely in terms of combat, even though I'm not a massive fan of all characters being effectively the same, but I've already played Tactics and comming from that the job system in 5 doesn't really wow anymore. The problem with the game is everything else. I remember the job system, I remember that there's only four playable characters (which is a good thing) and I remember the name of one of them. That's it. So I sort of get why you would rank the game highly, but it just didn't offer what I was looking for (which, importantly, other entries in the series did).
lolplatypus: Games are largely a visual medium and in general "show, don't tell" applies. Lots of text in dialog can be fine, lots of text describing what the player should see on the screen is not. In other words: Planescape Torment's writing is not good.
dtgreene: What about interactive fiction games, where the text is *all* you have? (Consider games like Colossal Cave or Zork, for example.)
One concept for a game where your thought wouldn't work as is is an adventure game where the main character is blind; since the main character can't see, the game does not provide any visual indication of what's happening.
LootHunter: I think you missed the point. Descriptions describe what the player should see, because the game doesn't/can't show that. So the problem is not in the writing, but in design or game engine.
Hence "largely". As graphic fidelity evolved, so did where I draw the line. It's different for text adventures and it's different for a game that deliberately choses not to graphically show something. For example, I also quite like Sunless Sea, a game that maybe could depict certain events visually, but choses not to and offers text instead.
However if my character walks into a bar and there's clearly a burning dude in the middle and then the game
tells me that there's a burning dude in the middle, none of this applies. I've already noticed this. And maybe I'm in the minority, but shit like that instantly kills any form of immersion for me. Writing doesn't become good just because there's a lot of it and in my opinion that game had quite a few occurences of "less would have been more".
lolplatypus: No narratively driven game without permadeath should have failstates resulting in a game over screen.
dtgreene: Would you rather have failstates that result in a softlock, possibly one that isn't obvious until many hours later?
Or, would you rather have failstates that crash the game?
I'd rather have no failstates whatsoever.
If I play a storydriven game and see a game over screen, it means a few things. For starters, the story is over. The hero failed. From a narrative standpoint reloading a save is basically cheating. Ignoring that, going forward I now know that the game is at least difficult enough for me to die. So from that point on saving becomes a constant concern. I should be immersed in the experience, but there's a layer of obvious game design I have to mentally deal with for the rest of the game, basically taking me right out of the experience. And the tenser and high-stakes the narrative, the more this usually applies.
There's a mod for Fallout 3 where you can't die (bar some extreme occurences like getting completely torn apart by a rocket). The way this works is by constantly refreshing a single save slot every minute or so in the background and replacing the game over screen with loading that save,
but on doing so severely wounding your character, removing half your inventory and scattering it across vendors, thus simulating the character being left for dead and robbed of their valuables. So my character can actually have setbacks in their story and it's the same I am experiencing as a player, instead of creating a disconnect between story and gameplay with every single game over screen.
lolplatypus: DLC and microtransactions are a good thing.
LootHunter: Those are not good or bad thing by themselves. It's how developer/publisher use them.
Yeah, I think I have to agree here.
lolplatypus: Not mainstream unpopular, but potentially on Gog: in general, modern games are
a lot better than the classics. It's easy to put on rose-tinted glasses when Doom is all you remember, but grab a magazine from when the Amiga was still around and look at
all the releases.
LootHunter: Grab a Steam client and browse all games in the store.XD
True, but at that point we're comparing like for like, instead of bemoaning the bad games of today while pointing at the undoubtedly great stuff of the past.
toxicTom: For the same reason I prefer detailed and dialogue where only key sentences have voice-over over full voice over in many cases. Reading is just faster... (I'm also not fond of audio books - they're a test of patience for me).
Curiously I feel similarly and with very few exceptions I prefer games not to have any voice over, at all - but I hate reading and love audiobooks. :>
Engerek01: I hated both
Witcher 1 and 2. Yeah, I'm going to agree with you on that one.
