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wizard on a water slide posted:I'm willing to bet very few contemporary/pre-launch reviewers got to the 2nd disc of Xenogears before writing their review I remember Gamepro savaged it and got a lot of blowback even all the way back then. Half my early literary education came from those awful magazines. Memories~
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Nov 21, 2016 21:38
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frank.club posted:I think you just don't like games I like games! I like plenty of games! I just don't think Xenogears was well written. Now if you'll excuse me, my cousin-wife and I are about to get our pirate submarine thrown across the desert by our friend's split personality because he got really sad today.
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Nov 21, 2016 21:40
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That poo poo owned. I wish your split personality would throw a sandsubmarine on you.
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Nov 21, 2016 21:42
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frank.club posted:I think you just don't like games Xenogears is not a good game. Sometimes it turns out the reason we liked a thing is because we were children with no taste or frame of reference. Much like early MMOs!
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Nov 21, 2016 21:44
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Check his post count... and disengage with the troll
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Nov 21, 2016 21:44
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frank.club posted:Check his post count... and disengage with the troll it's really not that controversial of an opinion also I have ~6,000 fewer posts than you and we started posting the same year I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here, other than "I spend 30% more of my time on SomethingAwful than Forums Poster Mirthless" Mirthless fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Nov 21, 2016 |
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Nov 21, 2016 21:45
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TFW you get trolled by a guy having a different opinion than you on the PSX JRPG Xenogears.
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Nov 21, 2016 22:00
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Nanomashoes posted:TFW you get trolled by a guy having a different opinion than you on the PSX JRPG Xenogears. TFW Nanomashoes cheerleads a guy for doing a better job trolling this thread than they did.
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Nov 21, 2016 22:02
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g0lbez posted:I'm the other guy Thirded But the game ends after the Galbadia Garden attack. That is the end of the game. disjoe fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Nov 21, 2016 |
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Nov 21, 2016 22:04
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Xenogears wasn't a great game but I'm glad I got to experience it because of how batshit it is. It's certainly... something.
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Nov 21, 2016 22:06
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Jokes and backbiting aside, Xenogears won a lot of accolades at release because that was Squaresoft's time to shine and most JRPG's that went on for more than one disc were greeted by wild applause anyway. Even disregarding that, it's still an interesting and ambitious mishmash of basically every high-profile anime/mecha trope of the nineties, and that plus the way it pushed Evangelion's incoherent Gnostic iconography to the hilt gave it a unique aesthetic that still stands out today. I still think it fell flat because it never really gelled any of those different examples of homage together. People are still divided on Eva's quality, but good or bad it's still pretty simplistic at heart - the robots and Christian symbols are just window dressing for a great big soap opera about depression and the pain of connecting with others. Xenogears has a little bit of that, but it also has fantasy animal-people racism, and pseudo-Buddhist ideas of reincarnation, and guns that shoot piloted robots as bullets, and whatever the hell ChuChu was, and fantasy Nazis, and critiques of the Church, etc, etc, etc, culminating in a boss fight against the actual Demiurge after which you chat with the actual God. It makes the story compellingly weird while it holds together, but it doesn't hold together for long, and I don't blame a lot of people who find it tedious (me included). It's 70+ hours of pointing at a plot element, going "this thing came from something else!" and then moving on without doing anything with it.
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Nov 21, 2016 22:13
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Oxxidation posted:Jokes and backbiting aside, Xenogears won a lot of accolades at release because that was Squaresoft's time to shine and most JRPG's that went on for more than one disc were greeted by wild applause anyway. Even disregarding that, it's still an interesting and ambitious mishmash of basically every high-profile anime/mecha trope of the nineties, and that plus the way it pushed Evangelion's incoherent Gnostic iconography to the hilt gave it a unique aesthetic that still stands out today. A big part of why none of this stuff gelled together is that the last act feels rushed as gently caress, incomplete, and kept introducing things for us to be concerned with well past the supposed point of no return was reached hours before. In a world where game designers have unlimited time to dedicate to every project, and gamers themselves are patient and understanding with regards to game development delays and setbacks, the last disc of Xenogears would have gone plot point by plot point, connecting them and resolving them by necessary. I think the LEAD UP to Disc 2 was fine, even as absurd as it was, because it still felt like I was being set up for some sort of amazing if not ridiculous conclusion. The game would also be 300 hours long, maybe. Instead, well, we got what we got. It's hard to go back to try and play through today (for myself anyway), but I'm glad that we got it. It's very much a product of the time and of Square at its peak. Seriously. The Playstation 1 and 2 years of Square/Square-Enix will never be seen by any developer, Japanese or otherwise, ever again. They released JRPGs, Action RPGs, Tactical RPGs, Brawlers, Fighting Games, a goddamn SHMUP. Nobody out there quite had what Square had in its heyday, it wasn't all good, but it was definitely earnest.
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Nov 21, 2016 22:28
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Really, we all need to look inside our hearts and accept that X-2 is the best. Not only does it have the best combat, but it hits the ground running. No 20 hour tutorial like other FF games. You have 6 different dresspheres within the first half hour of playing. That's better than what some FFs do for the entire game. And you're immediately given the choice of where to go and what to do. The NG+ system makes it the most replayable of all FF games. And having complete control of 3 characters really opens up potential for combat complexity. It's really the most fun game of all.
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Nov 21, 2016 23:01
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the combat in ffx-2 fuckin soooooooooox
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Nov 21, 2016 23:02
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Writing going to hell in the last quarter of the game seems to be a common occurence in JRPGs.
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Nov 21, 2016 23:04
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Super No Vacancy posted:the combat in ffx-2 fuckin soooooooooox No, it owns.
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Nov 22, 2016 00:06
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Nanomashoes posted:It has a huge, mostly open world that feels real. There's tons of sidequests and optional content, secret areas, etc. The plot is actually good, even though the main character is kind of lame, the combat is the same as any other Final Fantasy but with the ability to remove the busywork, which is good.  He's a (moronic) everyman stapled to the actual protagonist,
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Nov 22, 2016 00:14
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GreyjoyBastard posted:One of the biggest problems with FF12 is that too many people seem to think Vaan is the main character. I got the impression throughout FFXII that Ashe was supposed to be the main protagonist and somebody at Squenix objected at the last minute and insisted on putting Vaan in to keep boys invested or some poo poo He really is just terrible
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Nov 22, 2016 00:29
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Mirthless posted:I got the impression throughout FFXII that Ashe was supposed to be the main protagonist and somebody at Squenix objected at the last minute and insisted on putting Vaan in to keep boys invested or some poo poo It was Basch but yes, and it's suspected to be one of the reasons why Matsuno quit/was fired.
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Nov 22, 2016 00:32
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Xenogears was ballsy enough to remove a character from your party randomly (like literally randomly based on how certain parts of that world worked) 3/4 through the game which sucked since she was one I used up to that point.
Eggplant Squire fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Nov 22, 2016 |
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Nov 22, 2016 00:36
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rip elly she was a better waifu than tifa
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Nov 22, 2016 00:54
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fivegears4reverse posted:A big part of why none of this stuff gelled together is that the last act feels rushed as gently caress, incomplete, and kept introducing things for us to be concerned with well past the supposed point of no return was reached hours before. See, I can't agree with this premise because I don't think it's reasonable to believe that "if only it'd had more time!" is a panacea to every poorly written/plotted game. Sometimes a bad script is just a bad script and the best thing it could have had was an editor telling them less is loving more. Focus.
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Nov 22, 2016 00:59
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All the 2D fantasies are pretty theatrical, now that i think about it, 6 is just the only one that hangs a lampshade on it. The tile sets with their illusion of 3d space work like stage flats, and the characters always take up the same small fraction of the screen so the designers tend to fill out scenes with a lot of minor characters, backdrops, superfluous architecture, etc. To me they have some of the same appeal of a Jodorowsky movie, exploring these hyper stylized and dense fantasy zones from a certain remove while listening to melodramatic tunes.
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Nov 22, 2016 01:05
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There's a universe where Jodorowsky directed Spirits Within and none of us get to see it
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Nov 22, 2016 01:10
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There's a universe where George Lucas hired Square to do the effects in the prequels
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Nov 22, 2016 01:12
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Also to the guy who brought this up earlier, since we are talking about FF: TSW, the Square-Enix merger was actually happening before TSW bombed in theaters, and TSW threw a wrench into it and almost prevented it from happening entirely. I think it ended up being renegotiated much more favorably to Enix after that happened. There's a guy who posts here named Sunning who posted a huge, excellent writeup about the S-E merger politics in the past. Also I played Xenogears for the first time in ~2008 and found the plot and dungeons to be an uninteresting, overwrought slog, though I really enjoyed the mechs and combat system. Chillgamesh fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Nov 22, 2016 |
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Nov 22, 2016 01:14
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Radish posted:Xenogears was ballsy enough to remove a character from your party randomly (like literally randomly based on how certain parts of that world worked) 3/4 through the game which sucked since she was one I used up to that point. To be fair, Emeralda is basically meant to be a replacement for her in gameplay but way better. Captain Oblivious posted:See, I can't agree with this premise because I don't think it's reasonable to believe that "if only it'd had more time!" is a panacea to every poorly written/plotted game. Sometimes a bad script is just a bad script and the best thing it could have had was an editor telling them less is loving more. Focus. I don't normally disagree but to be fair to Xenogears, it did get it's funding slashed in half and diverted to Final Fantasy VIII instead. A game I actually dislike more than Xenogears though obviously everyone has Final Fantasies they like and dislike. Xenosaga is absolutely an example of needing an editor to tell the development team that less is more though. Selenephos fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Nov 22, 2016 |
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Nov 22, 2016 07:20
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precision posted:There's a universe where George Lucas hired Square to do the effects in the prequels Truly the darkest timeline
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Nov 22, 2016 08:30
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i enjoyed parts of ff8, but there were some bits that were completely unapproachable and fell flat emotionally. like the fact that there's a super advanced civilization hiding just out of sight of the world of the "modern" world with spaceships and robots and everything. or that monsters you fight all come from the moon. or the fact that everyone were osananajimi. or the romance between the two leads. or whatever the gently caress time compression meant, some kind of instrumentality probs xenogears was much more out there from start to end, but many elements came together quite well individually, and in the end some did so collectively. eternal war between regular nations as manipulated by an evil superadvanced civilization in a floating city state trying to revive a demiurge and live forever. actual motivations for characters to behave like a bunch of rpg murderhobos. and a much better romance between fei and elly
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Nov 22, 2016 08:32
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gigglefeimer posted:Really, we all need to look inside our hearts and accept that X-2 is the best. Not only does it have the best combat, but it hits the ground running. No 20 hour tutorial like other FF games. You have 6 different dresspheres within the first half hour of playing. That's better than what some FFs do for the entire game. And you're immediately given the choice of where to go and what to do. The NG+ system makes it the most replayable of all FF games. And having complete control of 3 characters really opens up potential for combat complexity. It's really the most fun game of all. You know I actually believed this until recently and then I played it again and the battle system is muuuuch worse than I remembered. I just remembered the fun endgame combos and not the fact that 90% of the jobs had the same abilities, the chain system was sorta broken, and "you can go anywheeeere" combined with permanent missables just meaning that you're gonna have to revisit every single location in the world 5 times throughout the game to see everything FF13's combat is really a distillation of what made FFX-2 combat work, and people hated it because of the automation but that speed of combat only works with automation. I should play FF13-2, I already have it on Steam but every time I boot it up I very quickly decide to stop playing
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Nov 22, 2016 09:04
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Heaven Spacey posted:Also to the guy who brought this up earlier, since we are talking about FF: TSW, the Square-Enix merger was actually happening before TSW bombed in theaters, and TSW threw a wrench into it and almost prevented it from happening entirely. I think it ended up being renegotiated much more favorably to Enix after that happened. There's a guy who posts here named Sunning who posted a huge, excellent writeup about the S-E merger politics in the past. Sunning is like a square enix historian and his posts need to be collected into a book
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Nov 22, 2016 09:07
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THE AWESOME GHOST posted:Sunning is like a square enix historian and his posts need to be collected into a book Sunning is one of the most knowledgeable posters in Games when it comes to the actual business and historical side of the modern videogames industry, if not the most knowledgeable, period. I certainly learn a lot from his posts around here.
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Nov 22, 2016 09:42
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Panic! at Nabisco posted:Also, Matsuno is working on another game. It's on Kickstarter. It's...it looks really bad. To be more specific, he was supposed to be collaborating with a small indie dev in California to make a tactics RPG called Unsung Story, except Playdek somehow managed to squander 600k in Kickstarter money and no longer have the funds or timeline to continue development on the game but they'll totally get right back on it after they release some other shovelware to build more capital  But hey, now he's working on a mobage with Cygames! http://www.siliconera.com/2016/08/21/cygames-announces-smartphone-strategy-game-lost-order-developed-platinum-games/ At least this game will come out... no word on an English translation though. Granblue Fantasy and Shadowverse are in English at least
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Nov 22, 2016 10:05
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The main character of Xenogears got tricked into eating human flesh by his mentor and wasn't even mad about it.
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Nov 22, 2016 11:25
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It seems to keep getting lost but seriously go and play FF14 it's the best single-player FF game I've played that just happens to have other people kicking around. (Pray return)
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Nov 22, 2016 12:30
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THE AWESOME GHOST posted:You know I actually believed this until recently and then I played it again and the battle system is muuuuch worse than I remembered. Don't know where you're getting the whole "90% of jobs had the same abilities" from. There's a ton of different abilities, and that's a good thing. There's a lot of nuance you'll miss out on though if you don't experiment with everything. I like the whole revisiting angle too, seeing the effects of your past actions. XIII is just X-2 with all the fun sucked out of it. It sacrifices nuance and complexity for the sake of speed and streamlining the experience. Not being able to micromanage battles just kills it for me.
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Nov 22, 2016 15:29
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Plus, 13 has combat that's largely meaningless. In the first chunk of the game you have a limit to how much you can level up and you level up pretty much every three fights. The sphere grid knock-off is a joke, because it offers no branching paths or any actual choices and literally just makes it take longer to get your stat increases. loving Pokemon has a better level up system than FFXIII. FFX-2, combat mechanics as a positive or no, has combat that actively fuels another element of gameplay, the job system, which rewards players with new skills, better stats, and all that jazz to the jobs they are using. Every job needs to be leveled up as well, so this means that even if you have to backtrack or explore an earlier zone, you can swap in a low-level job and still benefit from the experience while the battles are rendered piss easy by your other, stronger jobs. Like, all that stuff is good. FFX-2 is the inverse 13 in that the gameplay is solid but the stuff that surrounds, bridges and propells that gameplay is loving awful.
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Nov 22, 2016 15:40
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I personally found FFXIII unplayable. I heard it gets good eventually but I made it about 5 hours in and threw in the towel, the amount of time spent in cinematics was ridiculous and I didn't like the linear dungeons at all.
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Nov 22, 2016 17:14
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THE AWESOME GHOST posted:You know I actually believed this until recently and then I played it again and the battle system is muuuuch worse than I remembered. Play the opening bit of 13-2 that has Lightning, watch a video of the boss fight where the correct solution is "Yell at Hope through time and space", play some chronobind, and watch the amazing ending on youtube. Do this with crazy chocobo on loop and you're really only missing out on some quality Liam O'Brien scenery chewing and moogle throwing. Then go straight to Lightning Returns because it's easily the best game of the three.
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Nov 23, 2016 09:34
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Mirthless posted:I personally found FFXIII unplayable. I heard it gets good eventually but I made it about 5 hours in and threw in the towel, the amount of time spent in cinematics was ridiculous and I didn't like the linear dungeons at all. It never gets good. You eventually make it to a big empty area where you can do quasi-FF12 style hunts. At this point the player is so loving bored that this shake up of routine is mistakenly embraced as emergent gameplay or something. Later you realize its just tedious in a different way.
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Nov 23, 2016 15:50
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