In response to “The Battleship Final Fantasy” from The Escapist Forum: “FFIV has such risible convolutions because these betrayals and deaths and family ties justify the constant rotation of the party roster. They vary gameplay. It’s one thing to face down challenges with a Dark Knight and a Dragoon; it’s something quite different with a Paladin, two kid magicians and an old wizard. The plot serves merely to explain why the player has one set of options rather than another.”
I think this is salient. Recent Final Fantasy games have pretty much destroyed the link between narrative and gameplay, with all characters able to learn all skills/abilities. Party makeup ceases to have any real meaning because everything is customizable to the point where the arrival or departure of a character never hits you where it hurts – in the battle sequences.
Chrono Trigger was great because party choice impacted the type of elemental damage you could do, and because of the team-up combo techs you could do. You chose a team primarily to deal with the enemies at hand, and were rewarded for / reminded of that choice because each character would weigh in with personalized dialog at key story segments. Chrono Cross was a horrible middling mess because there were a billion characters that didn’t play any significant, individual role (aside from having different stereotypical ‘accents’).
When play (battle) and story are casually disconnected, the whole thing feels like a giant discombobulated waste of time.
You’ve made some fairly intelligent points, but it seems that you wrote this from the perspective of someone who really didn’t like the games. I must say that FFVII (which is superior than the rest) does everything fairly well. Story was engaging, characters were deep and different, and the gameplay did exactly what it was supposed to! Let’s not forget that we’re talking about a turn based RPG. It’s built to be slow and organized. The ultimate weapons are just supposed to make killing things easier, so it HAS to be difficult to get.
Let’s a look at the big title Fallout 3. Other than being an RPG, Fallout shares little with Final Fantasy. The story is pretty dull, there are no cutscenes, there is no particular good or bad guys you get to play or deal with. But the best weapons of the game are still somewhat difficult to get to (unless you’re a low level character) and do nothing more than make killing things easier.
The problem with Final Fantasy is that it’s losing the only thing that made it really stand out. While FFIV and VII were fantastically written (yes, they were improbable but what do you expect from a game called “Final Fantasy”?) the rest of the series has been an exercise in the ludicrous and bland. But these new final fantastys are trying to improve on the gameplay mechanics that have always been lacking, so I suggest we give this one a chance before we all jump ship.
– Rogue 09
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In response to “Hippocratic Game Design” from The Escapist Forum: I’m also a diehard handheld gamer rather than a console/PC gamer. Although a lot of this has to do with not really liking TV/most of my family not having a TV, it’s also because of the pick up and play atmosphere you find with most handheld gaming.
You’re not going to find too many ultra-deep storylines and full voice acting games on the DS: people would be bored silly if they had to wait and watch cutscene after cutscene. But in return, you’re not going to find many games that need more than a few minutes to get to the heart of gameplay. Even most RPGs on the DS allow you to skip cutscenes/fast forward through dialogue/etc. Gameplay, not anything else, is at the heart of most handheld ventures (after all, who’s going to place graphics/sound at the top of a handheld’s priorities vs. a console?).
– Akas
I think the great thing about handhelds now is that not only can they be the a sort of “comfort gaming” experience, but they can also have some pretty “hardcore” games such as Legend of Zelda or Chrono Trigger. They’ve got the best of both worlds.
In some respects, the Xbox 360 and the PS3 can also have both emotionally intensive games and less involving ones, especially with Xbox Live Arcade and the PSN store. They can never match a handheld, though, in terms of its ability to be such a pick-up-and-play device.
– zoozilla
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In response to “The Slot-1 Secret” from The Escapist Forum: It’s quite disheartening to know that we, the hardcore crowd, are to blame for Nintendo shunning us. Ever since E3, we’ve been condoning Nintendo for selling out to the casual crowd, when in reality they were snubbing us as thieves. I’m very much anti-piracy: we live in a capitalist society that ideally rewards good producers with profits. With piracy, we’re giving a big “fuck you” to good developers such as Konami and Intelligent Systems who are losing money in appeasing the hardcore crowd.
I currently own a DS lite and have no plans to upgrade. If Nintendo wants to nip this problem in the bud, they have to capitalize off flash carts. They should sell compatible flash carts for the lite so we don’t feel burned when the DSi crowd can instantly buy and download the newest games steam-style.
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In response to “Public Speaking with Nintendo” from The Escapist Forum: A truly entertaining article. I have enough trouble answering my phone in public, I couldn’t imagine yelling at my handheld.
Personally, I think every DS game that includes voice commands should have some manual equivalent. I understand that Phantom Hourglass is supposed to be novel because it doesn’t use the buttons and only has touchscreen and vocal controls, but that could alienate alot of gamers who play their DS’s on busses or trains. Would it have been hard to designate one of the face buttons or D-pad to replace the voice commands?
That question isn’t retorical actually, I’ve never played Phantom Hourglass so I’m not 100% sure how the voice commands work 😛
– Graham
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