it wasn’t at all odd, once you consider that the same team had been making the same damn plot over and over since Final Fantasy tactics. It’s not at all sane: it’s twisted, half-explained lunacy which they actually don’t put too much thought into and makes little sense as things go on. The characters rarely if ever explain how they or the events they see fit into things, and the writing is stilted and confusing.
It all may make sense to the writers, but they don’t communicate their vision very well. To be fair to them, it’s even how people who all share the same aristocratic culture might well talk and communicate. But that doesn’t fill the audience it at all. Secondly, there’s an unfortunately tendency for the characters to become extremely flat. Ramza in Tactics, the whole bloody cast in FF12. And while Balthier’s coolness almost makes up for the entire rest of the cast, there was simply a lot of wasted potential. (Vaan looks and acts like a Aladdin’s retarded, effeminate boytoy cousin, and has almost no role in the entire game. Ditto with Penelo.)
balthier, of course, is basically Han Solo’s younger brother, who makes up for the uncoolness of being a younger brother by being slightly darker in spirit.
So because the controller both used for each first-person shooter uses the two thumbsticks means that the control scheme is the exact same? Clearly we’re using two different definitions here.
Dunno. I wasn’t at all confused. It’s politics. Some people want to rule the world, some people want to save their country, simple stuff. No nonsensical “the dream zanarkand, created from the collective unconscious of the…” oooookay. Sure, there’s some stuff in there about the desire of men to become gods via technology/nuclear power/whatever, but that’s…again, pretty straightforward stuff. I understand the desire for power/rule and/or immortality. I don’t understand what the deal was in FFX at all, because it was a generic save-the-world-from-the-evil-that-makes-no-sense plot.
I could get behind this, if it were remotely different from FFX, which is invariably what the people who hate on FF12’s plot hold up as their favorite FF ever.
Vaan was there exclusively to be the “player agent/identifier” for the aforementioned 14 year old boy demographic. It’s almost as if they’re afraid to make a game that doesn’t have a 17 year old protagonist (because, really, Ashe should have been the main character.). But yeah. I just tend to forget about Vaan and Penelo because they were such nonevents. They weren’t actually irritating, unlike virtually the entire FFX cast except Auron, but they were… as you say, flat.
I thought Ashe/Basch/Fran/Balthier made a pretty entertaining party though, with comparatively unusual personalities and motivations. For an FF game, anyway.
I’m not saying anything about “EXACT” same. I am saying they are fundamentally the same, which cannot be said for JRPGs.
Compare the concept of:
All FPS games use two sticks to aim and shoot.
vs
Some JRPGs are menu driven while others are performed completely/almost completely in realtime
It’s a question of scope. I’m not saying all FPS games are IDENTICAL in control, but they have much greater similarity than appears in JRPGs, so it seems strange to criticize JRPGs for “not innovating” in terms of game mechanics.
This. I was shocked when I first played Fable to realize that it was a Peter Molyneux creation and not a Japanese game- since the protagonist is clearly a kid, and looks more or less like a kid with grey hair and battle scars when you finish it. Incidentally, Fable is also the only RPG I’ve ever enjoyed so much that when I finished it I immediately restarted and played through it as an evil character.
The British game development industry is weird. Every few years it produces something truly revolutionary (Elite, Grand Theft Auto III, Starfox/Starwing, Goldeneye, pretty much every game ever released by Psygnosis, etc.) but for the most part it just sort of sits there, not doing much of anything. Porting old Amiga games to the iPhone now, probably.
Actually… no. I usually wouldn’t say this, but you are definitely wrong here. FFX may have had a few odd ideas not usually found in American culture, but things were basically explained step-by-step. I wouldn’t say it’s plot was very goodm, and they didn’t provide any sort of fundamental explanation for how the magic/tech worked, but they did give at least a one-level explanation of what was going on.
FF12 left half the plot unknown until long after the middle of the game, and even then failed to adequately show most of the character’s motivations. To this day, I have no idea whether they meant Vayne to be fundamentally a good man in a bad situation, a man with mistaken idals, evil and power-hungry, a little crazy but no less dangerous for it, or just acting semi-randomly. The story is onscure and not explained well, and the writers clearly twisted things to provide boss fights when convenient.
I’ll take your word for it, but to this day, I have no clue why anything in FFX worked the way it did. Sin? The big bad monster that you can’t kill? Until the party kills it? I mean… huh?
I don’t really think the controller issue is relevant - I’d tend to assume that same platform entries use the same control scheme. I’m not here to draw comparisons between PC Modern Warfare 2 and Xbox Modern Warfare 2. I’m here to compare Xbox MW2 to Halo2, or PC MW2 to Wolfenstein or Crysis. Since the JRPG side of the discussion is confined to consoles (for all useful purposes) there’s really no reason to complicate with cross platform conventions.
Design philosophy, for me, is often more of a theoretical than a practical, and at the very least, is not what I’m looking for here - you don’t discuss design philosophy when you’re trying to talk about ‘components’ of games. I’m really trying to get to technical terms here - the control scheme is how the user interfaces with the game. Controls his actions. That’s relatively uniform throughout FPS titles, for example. They’ve established a set of conventions that are used more or less throughout the genre. There’s no such thing in the JRPG space.
Actually, that was really clear. I mean, that was pretty much the one thing which was really super-clear.
It was killable before because what they had previously been doing was actually re-energizing it. “Sin” was just the prison of the spirit of Yu Yevon, a sort of life support system he used to eternally get his revenge (one suspects he was not really coherent by this point). Nobody was killing it before because they jsut attacked the shell, or sued the Final Summon spell.
The Final Summoning spell was a nasty little trick played by Bevelle. It let them “kill” Sin through making a new Aeon, but also handed Yu Yevon new life on a platter. The body of Sin was formed basically from the spirits of the dead murdered by Bevelle in ancient times (note that in FF10, when you die and aren’t Sent, you stick around and take the form of a monster - just like any bits broken from Sin turned into). The upshot was that Yu Yevon’s overriding purpose of protecting Zanarkand remained - it was a just a dreamworld inhabited by the dead or never-alive spirits. And Bevelle played aloing because it let them have total power.
However, while Yu Yevon was setting the goals, Jecht was partly in charge of Sin’s moment-to-moment actions. He communicated with Auron (who was able to enter the Dream of Zanarkand as a dead man) and they hatched a plan to end the cycle. Auron brought the ever-cheerful Tidus to the real world (notably, Jecht was almost certainly the one who gave him a living body and dumping him right into Yuna’s company). The party together was able to penetrate Sin’s core, defeat Jecht, and force Yu Yevon to emerge. Only then could Sin be beaten.
Of course, I shoudl say that I saw things a bit different from you. I also saw Tidus at first as being a childish “standard JRPG hero”. I later changed my mind. Actually, I think making him the way they did was subtle and actually really likable. Tidus is basically absolutely iron-willed, but he’s so good-natured it’s easy to forget. Even the cheezy, badly-acted “laughiing scene” takes on a huge new meaning when you realize that the reason Auron and Jecht wanted Tidus was so that he and Yuna could choose what to do. They believed the pair would opt to end the cycle and bring real hope back to the world. Sure, it’s a kindly, even sweet theme - but it is a good one.
No no no. I mean, the reason that everyone had had to resort to the whole “i commit suicide to defeat Sin” thing was because they hadn’t been able to kill it any other way.
There’s the scene relative early on where a whole bunch of folks get together a bunch of cannons and other powerful equipment and effective ambush Sin, and it’s just a case of “Oh, no biggie. I shrug you off and then kick your asses” but when the party comes along later, you have a little brawl on top of an airship, and go us! We win!
Never made any sense to me at all.
I’m not seeing how Tidus and Yuna “choosing what to do” is a big deal either? Unless you’re saying that his blind stubbornness turned out to be right, so good on him?
I should add though, kudos, because that is STILL the most coherent explanation for this game that ANYONE has ever been able to give me, even if it does handwave an awful, awful lot of stuff. (Jecht ‘contacting’ Auron, Auron somehow being ‘special’ amoung Unsent in not being a monster, Tidus getting a body (A wizard did it) and well, I still think the metaphysics of it are a mess.)
Yes, the metaphysics aren’t shown, but everything is foreshadowed and shoudn’t be surprising. They showed that several other very dangerous people kept their humanity after death, that Sin was able to create creatures, that it was sometimes not attacking or pressing its attacks against the party, and so forth. There are things they don’t show, but I don’t demand a total and complete timeline.
I think people get confused on FFX because the party oftentimes themselves aren’t sure what’s happening. They begin to realize they’ve been lied to, but they can’t be sure what is really going on behind the scenes. For the meantime, they proceed with their original plan. Things aren’t really explained until meeting (and kicking the shapely undead buttocks of) Yunalesca. But it does make sense when things click into place.
I guess I just have problems with the metaphysical handwave. When the whole premise of the game is built on it (Built on several, actually.), it gets a little bothersome.
And I really do have an issue with the kind of story where the protagonist is the stubborn sort who does things in denial of fate and it turns out that he’s RIGHT. And that all the other supposedly intelligent people who tried everything they could in the past were wrong just because they didn’t TRY HARD ENOUGH. It’s irrational, but I loathe it.