Cloral wrote: It also feels stupid when there are set 'levels' dotting the world. It makes it feel really fake.
That's one of the problems I thought they addressed well in Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. There weren't ever any "levels," since the entire game was a dungeon... even when you reached a "town," you never really thought of it as a town, just as a short rest stop on your marathon climb upwards.
The story may not have been super-complicated, but they way the gameplay mechanics and the story blurred together into one cohesive experience made it one of the most believable RPGs I've played.
Anyway, yes, it bugs me when every town you come to just happens to have a highly dangerous cave/temple/forest just a short walk away.
DarkDragoonX wrote:Anyway, yes, it bugs me when every town you come to just happens to have a highly dangerous cave/temple/forest just a short walk away.
[center]...Not forgetting that something from that highly dangerous cave/temple/forest is causing a dreadful calamity in the settlement that only you can sort out, despite the town having at least five very muscly men who could do the job just as well as you.
Another thing: Tiny little barriers, like fences. I fail to see why a character cannot traverse a fence, or walk between two trees, pick their way through a bush or walk around a man in your way. If it is a role playing game, why make it so narrow that you can't walk over small barriers. Yes, it would make the map larger, but in the case of a town, surely walls would do the trick? In the case of a forest, at least some annoying bear could pop out once you reached the limit of the map to prevent you from going further.
About the characters never speaking thing - I agree that, being an RPG, you can't have the character saying things for you, but something more than nothing at all, like Bauldur's Gate and the Forgotten Realms games, as you said, by giving you large choices. I find it odd how Pokemon patronises itself when, in the Ship in Red/Blue, a sailor even asks you a question, and upon no response, he says "Ah, ze strong, silent type!" - For some reason that's always been in my memory of the game.[/center]
For me, It's all about the story. Either,
A) It's predictable, Some incredibly powerful being is trying to bring back an ancient evil god or something and you are the only one who can stop it.
B) When the game is over that's it. There's nothing more to do, that story won't change.
Here's another one: Palette-swapped enemies. You just know that Slime or Bat is going to have a bigger brother somewhere in the world named Better Slime or Elder Bat or something. This gets even more ludicrous in games with time travel, because the monsters in the past are usually these recolored upgrades. What, did they get wimpier as time went on?
Carcer, the bear idea wouldn't work, mainly due to the fact that if you can destroy the Evil Zombie of Infinite Power, then you could probably handle North America's biggest black bear. No, rather, I think that a variety of devices could be used, such as really large pitfalls, steep hills, and thick foliage. Maybe burnable.
Then again, I think we all understand that a tree is a symbol for thick foliage. Just like a town is smaller on a larger map. It's all symbolistic.
The original Baldur's Gate did an EXCELLENT job of allowing you to raom the world with as few constraints as possible. Every explorable area in the game had exits along every edge of the map, and when there WERE obstacles, they were always realistic... huge boulders, dense forest groves, deep rivers, etc. In Baldur's Gate (and for those of you who don't know, I'm talking about the PC game, not the crappy console hack-n'-slash), you never felt irrationally boxed-in.
In fact, every Infinity Engine game did a good job with that, and the Fallout games were excellent about it, too. Computer RPGs seem to be much more realistic about that kind of thing than console RPGs, really. I wonder why?
vegeta1215 wrote:I'm currently in a "I hate random battle RPGs" mood right now: I like RPGs where you can see your enemies and choose to engage them or not. Whether you stand a chance against the bosses in games like that is all up to how you react to those enemies. It's a shame I'm in such a mood though, cause I heard Skies of Arcadia is great, but that it is plagued by many many random battles.
Get the Gamecube Skies of Arcadia Legends, it pretty much slices the random encounter rate by half, or three-quarters. Or something. It's a lot less tedious, anyway.
My pet hates in RPGs?
Boss 'kill-all' attacks
Enemies that give you a fortune when defeated and yet clearly had nowhere to store it all
Games that insist upon using the Final Fantasy II style of levelling-up (IE: You have to attack your own team in an attempt to get their HP up)
Random battles
Those bloody 'YAY! WE WON!' poses that look gay
Towns consisting of around 8 houses
Bad dialogue
Cliched baddies
...and, finally...
THE COMPLETE LACK OF NEW GAME +. I LOVE New Game +! More games with New Game +!
Oh, indeed. I love "New Game +"'s ... Though they're a bit cheap. Obviously.
Towns consisting of around 8 houses
Y'know, I'll never quite understand that. o.o In ToS, Hima, consisted of ONE HOUSE.
JUST.. ONE... HOUSE! 😱 And many, many,
many more than one person to occupy that house. :sweat: Ugh... It always seems like there are more people than the town could support.
I also really hate those Boss-One-Hit-KO moves. They're so cheap. Kefka from FF6 had an attack (If you could call it that) which roughly reduced all your characters to 1 HP automatically. ... That ****.
Darth Marsden wrote:Get the Gamecube Skies of Arcadia Legends, it pretty much slices the random encounter rate by half, or three-quarters. Or something. It's a lot less tedious, anyway.
I meant to say Skies of Arcadia Legends for Gamecube, because I don't have a Dreamcast to play the original.
But have you played SOA Legends yourself? I read that the random encounter rate isn't much better than what it was for the original.
vegeta1215 wrote:I meant to say Skies of Arcadia Legends for Gamecube, because I dont' have a Dreamcast to play the original. But have you played SOA Legends yourself? I read that the random encounter rate isn't any better than what it was for the original.
I've had both versions of the game, and it does seem to me that the random encounter rate has been cut down a bit for the Gamecube version, although it's possible I'm just hallucinating. Unfortunately, my gripe with Skies of Arcadia comes from the battles themselves... they go too damn slowly. When it takes your character 10 seconds to perform a normal attack, it drives me nuts.
I'm gonna have to quickly agree with the person who said the Japanese makeChristian-type stuff evil. ToS is an example but it's a great game, I don't hate it at all, but I'm thinking about Xenogears. If I understand, Fei is on his way to becoming the slayer of the Christian God, yes? Well the man in black told him to and he seemed evil, but does that mean that guy is evil or God is evil? And can someone tell me yes or no, is Fei gonna fight and kill God in this game? 😞😞😞
We need to make an RPG that kills buhda if that's the case...;_;
I don't think the RPGs mentioned make God or christianity out to be evil, but the leaders of those in faith are out for their own selfish gain or those mentioned worship a false/evil god unknowingly(which they usually are), which conveys the message that the line between good and evil isn't always straight, and that even religion isn't safe from those distinctions.
DarkDragoonX wrote:I've had both versions of the game, and it does seem to me that the random encounter rate has been cut down a bit for the Gamecube version, although it's possible I'm just hallucinating. Unfortunately, my gripe with Skies of Arcadia comes from the battles themselves... they go too damn slowly. When it takes your character 10 seconds to perform a normal attack, it drives me nuts.
Yeah, the battles take entirely too long. When I was playing Final Fantasy I, I could literally just hold down the attack button and do nothing else. Wizzed through the battles and made them much more bareable.
Oh! Another major gripe of mine - Crappy endings. This goes double for Skies of Arcadia, which was the most cheese-infested thing I've ever been forced to sit through, and I've watched every single Arnold 'I was in Terminator, you know' Schwartzenegor movie.
If I've just spent god-knows-how-much of my life playing through a game, I want an ending that makes it all worthwhile. I want to be amazed. I don't want to see the Happy Little Tree elves suddenly appear and make everything better, nor do I wish to see the lead character suddenly realise "Hey - you know what? That babe who's been after me all through the game is actually kinda hot". I want to be reassured that my wasted month was, in fact well spent, and I want to be satisfied that my 30-40ish pounds were well spent. Failure is not acceptable.
so what exactly do you look in a ending darth, you never did specify in your post.
DarkFlameWolf wrote:so what exactly do you look for in a ending Darth, you never did specify in your post.
Didn't I? Huh. I guess I just stated what I
didn't look for.
What I look for in an ending is, smply put, something that makes you think "That was totally worth it". A well-written script, good voice-acting (if applicable), believable character reactions and a safisfying end to the story are what I, and really ANY, videogame player expect from a really great ending. We've invested time and money in these games and at the end we want to be reassured that it was all worthwhile. This applies twice as much to RPGs, as the story is, literally, the most important part of the game and it needs to end well.
Okay, in the rpg I am making in rm2k3, the ending depends on what you do over the course of the game. Do no sidequests and you'll get the middle of the road ending, not entirely satisfying, but it works. Do a bunch of good-based sidequests and you'll get the best ending and the most happy one. Do a bunch of evil-based sidequests and you'll get the evil ending and the most sad one. If you decided to do ALL sidequests, both good and evil, it'll come out with the good ending being the one you'll see since there are more good sidequests than evil. So it all depends on what extra stuff you want to do in the game and what aspect each sidequest you do is. For example, save a town from a dragon and you get some good points added to your ending score. Make an assassination attempt and it'll be an evil sidequest.
I think the most important aspect in an ending is closure. The ending should resolve the story to a point where the player can walk away from it feeling satisfied. FF4 did a good job of this - it showed what happened to all the characters as a result of the events of the story. It wasn't flashy and didn't have any special effects, but it did what it needed to. And this puts it above many later endings in my book.
DarkFlameWolf wrote:Okay, in the rpg I am making in rm2k3, the ending depends on what you do over the course of the game. Do no sidequests and you'll get the middle of the road ending, not entirely satisfying, but it works. Do a bunch of good-based sidequests and you'll get the best ending and the most happy one. Do a bunch of evil-based sidequests and you'll get the evil ending and the most sad one. If you decided to do ALL sidequests, both good and evil, it'll come out with the good ending being the one you'll see since there are more good sidequests than evil. So it all depends on what extra stuff you want to do in the game and what aspect each sidequest you do is. For example, save a town from a dragon and you get some good points added to your ending score. Make an assassination attempt and it'll be an evil sidequest.
Oo, evil sidequests. I guess we all know what I'll be doing. :evil grin:
I like the ideas you're throwing up, Wolf. It's certainly an interesting take, and I'm REALLY looking forward to it. The only thing I'm concerned about is that I'm going to want to see all 3 endings and I won't really want to play through the whole game three times in order to do so. Minor niggle. Sounds great otherwise.
With regards to closure Cloral, you don't tend to get that much in this sequel-mad empire we live in, which is why I never really mentioned it. It's a valid point and I wish more developers really would close off every loophole, but this then means that they have to create an all-new title, which the big-wigs are loath to do.
One way of having closure AND a sequel is to do it the Final Fantasy way. Another is to set your sequel in the far future, or just make a prequel. Although I'd rather companies take the plunge and make original titles, if they have to make sequels I wish they'd follow those ideas rather then use the old 'Oh dear, <Generic Evil Bad-Guy> has risen from the dead - let's get the old gang together and go kill him again' approach they seem to do. But I'm going off the point. Closure = Good.