What Games Are You Playing?
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Aion
Time-Traveller
Played Wild Arms 5 for a few hours yesterday. I hadn't played a game for awhile, not since randomly stopping playing Lunar 2 20 hours in, so I had the required motivation to have a look at my unplayed NTSC copy.
I've said this before but a lot of what's wrong with anime is also wrong with the JRPG genre. The most obvious issue is how JRPGs are aimed at kids, with little to no content that adults can relate to. The dialogue of WA4-5 is at the level adequate for a 10 year old and leaves me feeling cold towards the cast. Far too many times have I seen stories involving a young male wanting to become a man, setting off on a journey across the world in the hope of doing so, and the story of WA5 is a dumbed down version of what I've seen before. There's the trademark mystical girl that falls from the sky and can only remember her name, there's the love interest that tags along with the heroic lead to keep him from doing too many stupid things and I'm sure it won't be too long before a gang of unique looking baddies appear to stand in the way of the heroes quest.
It's a shame the story is so poor when the gameplay is great. Like WA4, WA5 mixes platform elements with the exploration side and SRPG elements with the combat side to great effect. It's a lot more fun to play than a lot of RPGs. The problem is that it's hard to find the motivation to keep playing a JRPG with kiddy rubbish in the place of the story...
The WA series truly has fallen from the greatness of the original. The original had none of the kiddy crap that weighs down WA4-5 - it actually had quite a dark story, with a prologue that was quite moving emotionally. I can only assume that a completely different development team worked on WA4-5 when the story quality has dropped from great to the level that only a child could accept.
Hopefully I'll be able to play WA5 to the end. I tried to play WA4 a few months back and ended up dropping it before the 10 hour mark. This time around I might be able to manage because there's none of the low budget 'cut-scenes' that involve drawings handling the convesations. The real test will come when the baddies are introduced - the group of baddies in WA4 were so bad that it was impossible to take them seriously. Time will tell.
I've said this before but a lot of what's wrong with anime is also wrong with the JRPG genre. The most obvious issue is how JRPGs are aimed at kids, with little to no content that adults can relate to. The dialogue of WA4-5 is at the level adequate for a 10 year old and leaves me feeling cold towards the cast. Far too many times have I seen stories involving a young male wanting to become a man, setting off on a journey across the world in the hope of doing so, and the story of WA5 is a dumbed down version of what I've seen before. There's the trademark mystical girl that falls from the sky and can only remember her name, there's the love interest that tags along with the heroic lead to keep him from doing too many stupid things and I'm sure it won't be too long before a gang of unique looking baddies appear to stand in the way of the heroes quest.
It's a shame the story is so poor when the gameplay is great. Like WA4, WA5 mixes platform elements with the exploration side and SRPG elements with the combat side to great effect. It's a lot more fun to play than a lot of RPGs. The problem is that it's hard to find the motivation to keep playing a JRPG with kiddy rubbish in the place of the story...
The WA series truly has fallen from the greatness of the original. The original had none of the kiddy crap that weighs down WA4-5 - it actually had quite a dark story, with a prologue that was quite moving emotionally. I can only assume that a completely different development team worked on WA4-5 when the story quality has dropped from great to the level that only a child could accept.
Hopefully I'll be able to play WA5 to the end. I tried to play WA4 a few months back and ended up dropping it before the 10 hour mark. This time around I might be able to manage because there's none of the low budget 'cut-scenes' that involve drawings handling the convesations. The real test will come when the baddies are introduced - the group of baddies in WA4 were so bad that it was impossible to take them seriously. Time will tell.
Aion said:
Looks like the games only missing the "hero's village burns down to the ground" cliche. I read in a review that the kiddy stuff gets really stupid at one point when the party forgive some guy for killing hundreds just because he said he was sorry, which is just weird IMO. Have you tried any of the Shin Megami Tensei games? The storys in those games are anything but kiddie or stereotypical.
Sounds like it making up for the story with the gameplay though, which I wish more jRPGs would do these days. Now it seems like jRPGs put so much focus on the story the gameplay suffers a lot - FF12 is a good example of this IMO. I'm playing FF4 right now and I'm having more fun with it than any current-gen console jRPG, which is pretty good for a remake. The storyline is just plain silly at times, but its fun and it has great gameplay too, so I'm defenatly not complaining.[/spoiler]
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chaos
The Boss
completed rock band 2 mostly on hard on drums, songs from nighmare level I had to use medium though. It took me a while to finish this. I've got a few games I still need to finish (folklore, mirror's edge and need for speed undercover) I'm pretty sure it will take me the rest of the year to finish those.
Aion
Time-Traveller
Eggn0g said:
That doesn't surprise me at all. The lead character, Dean, has already ran around informing everyone that anything is possible if they try and argued with others about matters he's totally ignorant about. A character being forgiven for killing more men than he can count in a story that follows such a main character isn't shocking. I read posts by posters on GameFAQS saying that the dialogue is so bad that, at a later point in the story, the characters refer to a metaphorical wall between two races as a real, physical wall.
WA5 is still better than WA4 in terms of story, though. It has a near enough identical gameplay system to WA5, but WA4 has such an awful story that many people drop it just because of that. It was bad just having to deal with a group of immature children talk about how evil adults are and how they ruined the world as they, a heroic group of brats, fought to save the world from the adults...but it was made worse when the utterly bizarre group of elite badies, ranging from puppets to the undead, made their enterance. Whoever wrote that junk deserves to be shot.
Switching back to WA5, I played it for a couple more hours last night. There's still been no plot established outside of Dean helping the girl who fell from the sky, Avril, find Johnny Appleseed - the only name she remembered after crashing into the earth. Rather than getting right into the thick of things, the story so far has involved Dean traveling between towns and stopping bad things happening, mixed together with a dungeon or two. Ironically, the game has probably been more enjoyable so far because the story hasn't had the chance to ruin the experience up to yet.
As for the gameplay, like I said before it's very good - nothing has really changed from WA4. I do have a couple of complaints, though, the first being the WA5 world map, which works the same way as travel in dungeons (the camera stays the same) and is a pain to get around on. It's also very misty because the developers wanted to hide the shimmering (like FFXII's developers made everything blurry to hide it). I would've much rather had a PS1 style birds-eye view map... It's too bad that PS2 RPGs tend to feature maps where you move between locations by selecting the location from a menu or WA5's MMORPG style. I'm also not very happy about how easy the battles have been so far - I expect to be pushed more in games that use a SRPG style battle system.
Overall, I like WA5 a hell of a lot more than WA4, but it's far from a perfect RPG with its kiddy story. The lead character looks cooler, WA5 actually has proper cut-scenes and not just low budget 'picture conversations' and it's been much more bearable as a result of the story not yet having been explained. I *think* I might just be able to actually finish it...I'm not holding my breath when I've dropped pretty much every JRPG I've played over the last few years, mind.
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As for your story vs. gameplay comment, I'm only able to love JRPGs with well written stories and likeable characters. I hold the Suikoden series, which offer fun yet very easy gameplay, in high regard because 3/5 of the Suikoden games feature the sort of wonderful stories that nearly every other JRPG lacks.
As for the SMT / DDS / Persona games, I tried played DDS1 and dropped it after something like 10 hours. It bored me to tears, forcing me to spend 2-3 hours in bland dungeons, with random battles occurring every few seconds, and providing little to no plot in return. There was no balance between dungeon crawling and plot. I dropped Nocturne after 5 or so hours for the same reasons.
I liked Persona 3 a hell of a lot more than the other SMT titles. I played it for 80 hours before the poor story got to me and my motivation to continue vanished. P3 annoyed me because it had a great concept, great characters and some nice ideas but seemed to have been lazily made. I was fed up of seeing the same scene at the school gates, the same graphics inside the school and the same graphics everywhere else after 80 hours. And then, when it turned out the story wasn't ever building up to anything and had just been dragged out, I lost all my drive and couldn't find what was needed to get me to finish it.
The same sort of thing happened with FFXII: I played that for 100 hours before dropping it. The story, like P3's, had a lot of potential, yet it failed because of poor character development, confusing dialogue and a political story that wasn't clearly explained. Instead of playing it for the story I found myself playing it for the unique MMORPG gameplay, and that started to became boring after 100 hours. FFXII would've been truly great if it had had better writing, and that's true when said about pretty much every JRPG out there.
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Got round to carrying on with a few of my games which are yet to show "The End" or "Fin" to me, and as such, completed Ninja Gaiden 2 a couple days back. Got a good sense of satisfaction for doing so too, specially with the 5 bosses right at the end, 2 in a row then 3 in a row.
Moved onto Empire Earth 3 now my main PC is running, though graphically its kinda lacking much in the way of power, and planning to finish off Naruto: Rise of a Ninja, so that i can start Broken Bond when i get it(obviously intending to go through it story wise).
Moved onto Empire Earth 3 now my main PC is running, though graphically its kinda lacking much in the way of power, and planning to finish off Naruto: Rise of a Ninja, so that i can start Broken Bond when i get it(obviously intending to go through it story wise).
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Aion
Time-Traveller
Still playing WA5. I'm 18 hours in and my characters are at around level 32.
As flawed (and badly written) as WA5 is, it's very easy to play it for hours. The platform style gameplay, with lots of puzzles blocking the way, keeps the gamelay as interesting as I've come to expect WA games to be and the HEX battle system prevents of battles from turning dull and brainless. The gameplay has saved WA5 from being just another JRPG.
That said, WA4 did have very, very similar gameplay and I hated that. The story of WA5 is at the very least more interesting than WA4's 'story' (not that that's hard), thanks in no small part to the story not having advanced in 18 hours beyond a team of people searching for someone called Johnny Appleseed and not being as in your face as the terrible WA4 'story'. And, unlike with the the entire WA4 cast, I actually kinda like nearly all the WA5 cast, even if they are mostly cardboard cutouts and fail to come across as real people.
My main issues with the game so far are...
:: The sloooooooooooooooooow pacing. Even though there's been a ton of chatter, including lots about climbing over walls, the plot has barely advanced since the start in the first 18 hours. I'm still trying to figure out if this is a bad thing after WA4.
:: WA5 has a lot more bosses than most JRPGs - there's usually two in each dungeon. It's just too bad that only a couple have challenged me and I've only died once. I want more challenge out of a game with a SRPG bstyle battle system.
:: It's pissing me off how I have to keep pressing the search button on the world map in order to see chests. The game hasn't so far offered any help in finding them and random battles make looking rather frustrating.
:: The towns are tiny and, for once in a JRPG, you can't walk into strangers houses and steal their ****. There aren't even a lot of towns in the game - there's only been four up to yet.
:: Although I do think the graphics are good enough for a PS2 game, a lack effort was put into creating expressions and mannerisms for each character. In every cut-scene Dean moves his finger under his nose - a serious flaw if ever there was one.
:: The dialogue. A metaphorical wall is not a real one and shouldn't be talked about as real constantly in order to allow 5 year olds to play. This game seriously needed a decent writter and/or a better translation.
:: The cut-scenes are often far too wodden. There was a scene where a father found his daughter dead, with his son in law holding a gun, and the father calmly had a conversation about it in front of her corpse. That sort of thing takes away from the story.
As flawed (and badly written) as WA5 is, it's very easy to play it for hours. The platform style gameplay, with lots of puzzles blocking the way, keeps the gamelay as interesting as I've come to expect WA games to be and the HEX battle system prevents of battles from turning dull and brainless. The gameplay has saved WA5 from being just another JRPG.
That said, WA4 did have very, very similar gameplay and I hated that. The story of WA5 is at the very least more interesting than WA4's 'story' (not that that's hard), thanks in no small part to the story not having advanced in 18 hours beyond a team of people searching for someone called Johnny Appleseed and not being as in your face as the terrible WA4 'story'. And, unlike with the the entire WA4 cast, I actually kinda like nearly all the WA5 cast, even if they are mostly cardboard cutouts and fail to come across as real people.
My main issues with the game so far are...
:: The sloooooooooooooooooow pacing. Even though there's been a ton of chatter, including lots about climbing over walls, the plot has barely advanced since the start in the first 18 hours. I'm still trying to figure out if this is a bad thing after WA4.
:: WA5 has a lot more bosses than most JRPGs - there's usually two in each dungeon. It's just too bad that only a couple have challenged me and I've only died once. I want more challenge out of a game with a SRPG bstyle battle system.
:: It's pissing me off how I have to keep pressing the search button on the world map in order to see chests. The game hasn't so far offered any help in finding them and random battles make looking rather frustrating.
:: The towns are tiny and, for once in a JRPG, you can't walk into strangers houses and steal their ****. There aren't even a lot of towns in the game - there's only been four up to yet.
:: Although I do think the graphics are good enough for a PS2 game, a lack effort was put into creating expressions and mannerisms for each character. In every cut-scene Dean moves his finger under his nose - a serious flaw if ever there was one.
:: The dialogue. A metaphorical wall is not a real one and shouldn't be talked about as real constantly in order to allow 5 year olds to play. This game seriously needed a decent writter and/or a better translation.
:: The cut-scenes are often far too wodden. There was a scene where a father found his daughter dead, with his son in law holding a gun, and the father calmly had a conversation about it in front of her corpse. That sort of thing takes away from the story.
CitizenGeek
Guild Member
I'm still playing Pokémon Pearl. It's just starting to get compelling again :]
fabio de lunatico
Claymore
Still making my way through Persona 4. It's easily the best JRPG I've played since... well, Persona 3. At this point I'd say it's even better than its predecessor, especially in terms of the story.
Aion
Time-Traveller
It ain't difficult to beat a weak story that lasted nearly a year (in-game) just because it needed to in order for the gameplay to work. Unless the concept sucked, I find it hard to imagine P4 having a worse story.
Without knowing anything about P4, it being a dark tale with a rural setting makes me think of When They Cry. I hope it's as creepy and interesting as that.
Without knowing anything about P4, it being a dark tale with a rural setting makes me think of When They Cry. I hope it's as creepy and interesting as that.
Aion
Time-Traveller
WA5 update: I'm starting to lose interest 36-7 hours in. I've just got Asgard and can't seem to find the motivation required to continue. The easy (still only died once, and that was because I was stupid enough to put 3 characters on the same hex) gameplay has become old and, as I predicted, the story is getting worse as more plot details are revealed - I enjoyed it more when the gang were simply moving from village to village in search of Mr. Appleseed. The 'Ice Queen' stuff isn't doing anything for me, and it isn't clicking either since I don't understand why the ruler of both humans and the Veruni only cares for the Veruni.
Right now I'm going through as many of the sidequests as I can. I'll probably do a few more puzzle boxes after that...if I can find them on a world map that's awakward to find anything on.
I'm not quite sure why I'm bothering to update when I'm seemingly the only person on this lifeless forum to have played WA5 but there we go.
Right now I'm going through as many of the sidequests as I can. I'll probably do a few more puzzle boxes after that...if I can find them on a world map that's awakward to find anything on.
I'm not quite sure why I'm bothering to update when I'm seemingly the only person on this lifeless forum to have played WA5 but there we go.
theunderfiend
Brigade Leader
Started replaying Dynasty Warriors Gundam
theunderfiend
Brigade Leader
Original mode at the moment but I am yet to play Jerids version. Still I usually find these games quite easy so tell me where you are stuck and I shall see what I can do
At present, got back into Fable 2 now that the new content is available as DLC, completed it though, but still pretty decent. Also working on Resident Evil again as the Demo is released on friday for Resi 5(wooo!). Of course still working my way through Persona 4 when i get the chance, extremely addictive when i do start, takes a lot to get me off it.