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Oh, no. Oh no, no. Oh God no.
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Apr 29, 2016 02:42
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HGH posted:Oh boy, this game. I notice there's not nearly enough hate towards one Mr. Motoru Toriyama, AKA that loving maniac who kept forcing Lightning on us. He was highly involved in this trainwreck. I railed on Toriyama for a while over this game, but as much as I hate to admit it, Tabata's fingerprints are all over it as well. If Type-0 is anything to go by, he's really into convoluted metaphysical time-travel stuff that's even more incomprehensible than average for JRPG's, and he's not exactly a saint either when it comes to creepy material. I hope he reins it in for FFXV, at least.
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Apr 29, 2016 16:03
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I try find some comfort in telling myself that this game was released around SE's design nadir (for reference, the original FFXIV came out only a few months beforehand - the one that nearly sank the company for good) and they've been reversing course on all these awful trends ever since. You could even see that in FFXIII, which was a reeking trainwreck in its first installment and clawed its way up to "still ridiculous, but pretty good" by Lightning Returns. It doesn't save the Parasite Eve franchise, though. It's such a shame, because Aya was always one of the best female protagonists in the business. She got her JRPG heroine start in a loving evening gown and still took command of the situation. She clowned nearly every wannabe male hero that wandered into her line of sight. She read a monster's mind after burning it to death and mocked its dying thoughts. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 03:58 on May 2, 2016 |
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May 2, 2016 03:54
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DOOP posted:this is awful I don't think it's going to do much to him, we already know he's bomb-proof.
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May 2, 2016 04:10
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Koorisch posted:So when did the whole trend of crappy games start anyways, when they became Square-Enix? They suffered a gradual exodus of talent/calcification of upper-tier management that left addled chumps like Motomu Toriyama and Tetsuya Nomura in the top seats with no direction, no oversight, and no understanding of what made their games good or bad. For the better part of a decade this resulted in slipups like the disastrous FFXIV rollout, Toriyama turning their games into his own neverending harem anime, and Nomura somehow spending 8 years on FFXV without ever doing a lick of actual work. They barely pulled back from the brink with FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, and since then it seems like they've been taking things more cautiously, raking in cash with their F2P ventures and sinking it into smaller niche projects with developers who are at least willing to do the work. Tabata's got issues but he's been much better at actually making games than Nomura ever was, and Nomura's since been shunted off to stick with KH3 and the FF7 remake, neither of which will probably come out within the lifespan of the planet.
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May 2, 2016 17:27
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Canemacar posted:So can anyone give me the rundown on whats up with Toriyama? I don't really keep up with game dev drama, but based on the comments here, it sounds juicy. There's nothing really "up" with him, he's just a creep who stuck around SE long enough to be given seniority and all the terrible power that implies. He's been around at least since FFVII (he wrote the Honey Bee Inn scenario, unsurprisingly).
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May 2, 2016 18:38
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Air is lava! posted:I wouldn't want them to go bankrupt. Last I heard (which was a year or so ago) they were posting record profits quarter after quarter. Record Keeper alone is like a slot machine perched over their heads and stuck on all sevens.
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May 2, 2016 21:10
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PE1-era Aya Brea watched a megalomaniac mitochondrial mezzosoprano reanimate a T-Rex skeleton with cellular goo, and her reaction was to sigh in disgust and run up to it with sidearm in hand. PE3-era Aya Brea is easily distracted by towels.
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May 3, 2016 18:43
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HR12345 posted:I know people joke how the producers involved have a huge crush on Lightning, but have they ever actually gone on record and said so? Or is that just the only way we can reason the FF13 trilogy? It's Motomu Toriyama in particular, and he became kind of infamous for literally bringing roses to (I think) the Lightning Returns premiere. Guy's a bit weird.
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May 3, 2016 20:12
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Tae posted:Uh, what. You're judging a game that no one knows about other than Luna telling armed soldiers to gently caress off and staring down Leviathon one on one. Yeah, Lunafreya definitely comes off as a standard princess archetype but she's been well-served by her appearances in the trailers. I was won over when a room full of armed guards leveled their rifles at her just because she stood up from a chair, and her expression was all "oh, this is adorable."
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May 4, 2016 21:12
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Y-Hat posted:Yeah, that second part of my post was a comparison. Yes, they're more concerned with mobile games, which is why they took their profit windfalls and invested it in a sequel to Nier and an FF7 remake.
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May 5, 2016 01:58
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PE1 and PE2-era Aya Brea snapped her pistol up at everything from giant three-headed dogs to masses of slime to a grossly pregnant mutant opera singer to a five-story tall cyborg monster with a flamethrower for a tongue. PE3-era Aya Brea struggles to raise her gun like her arms just fell asleep.
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May 6, 2016 13:51
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Geostomp posted:Correction, she was designed to be what most of the FFVII fanboys think Cloud was. The whole point of his character was that he was not actually the generic stoic action hero he appeared to be. Lightning is based on a deliberately a shallow front for a character. Combine that with her creator having an obsessive crush on her and you can see why we get something as annoying as a fanfic character. She became something amazing by Lightning Returns, though, as she held on to her dour deadpan even as the world around her became unsustainably stupid.
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May 8, 2016 16:09
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Speedball posted:And PE2 had that cackling ape-cyborg guy with the psycho machete, also very memorable. No. 9 was sort of a dud, in my opinion. He has only three appearances in PE2 and the game's main plot was so oblique that it was tough to get a good sense of his agenda - the game's real villains aren't the creepy monsters but a mostly-unseen group of financiers who are only known by secondhand conversation and phone calls. The whole game's one long mop-up operation after their dastardly plans mostly imploded, which is pretty cool in itself but doesn't make for memorable villains.
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May 8, 2016 19:33
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Superstring posted:In most games you absolutely know who the antagonist is after that amount of time though? Not really. A villain, sure, but it's super common for the primary antagonist to sit in the shadows for any length of time.
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May 8, 2016 21:07
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The PE2 illustration was one of the backsplash images used in the otherwise inoffensive strategy guide. Thus was young Oxxidation's first glimpse at anime boob.
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May 9, 2016 20:45
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Way back when Other M first came out I remember thinking that, if they really wanted to do the whole "Samus is reliant on another NPC to get poo poo done" thing, it might have been cool if her suit got hit with some kind of virus that locked down all her powers when the latest space station-destroying shitshow happened, and had to be remotely debugged by one of the surviving technical staff in the labyrinth's underbelly. That'd mean Samus would still be the more competent and assertive of the duo, but reliant on this terrified, paranoid computer geek trying to run dxdiag on techno-organic birdmonster armor before the monsters hammering on their door came in for lunch. Weapon and item unlocks could be tied to breakthroughs in the debugging process, Samus' objectives could be related to strengthening the signal/getting closer to the technician to bail them out, etc etc. It's all just dust in the wind now, in any case.
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May 12, 2016 18:56
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Danaru posted:Or when Dollis leaps out of a helicopter, catches on fire, and does a falling throw to get Aya the plot weapon to kill the supergod mitochondrial demon baby Or when Dollis and Aya are scavenging Chinatown for supplies, come across a locked door, and Dollis just rolls his eyes and draws his .45-caliber skeleton key.
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May 14, 2016 06:40
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Junkozeyne posted:I get the feeling that most of the "Toriyama wants to desperately bone Lightning" comes from http://www.p4rgaming.com/motomu-toriyama-admits-he-wants-to-marry-lightning/ and http://www.p4rgaming.com/motomu-toriyama-frustrated-by-girlfriend-refusing-to-dress-up-as-lightning-for-the-third-time/ which are satire. He even said "Personally, I kind of feel like a father walking his beloved daughter down the flowery aisle – it’s both happy but also lonely to see her go." Yes, nothing weird about that statement at all.
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May 15, 2016 02:54
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Tabata probably bears a lot of the responsibility for the Proper Noun overdose and reams of datalogs. Type-0 was the same way, though most of the datalog information in there is totally unnecessary for the understanding of the game's plot (it breaks down the number and approximate weight of the enemy army's battleships, for example).
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May 15, 2016 17:00
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Speedball posted:Aya Brea. Good Cop. Contacts backup, reports to the home office, and the only reason she goes it alone into the danger zones is because everyone else explodes into flames. Aya's devotion to procedure is one of the best things about her in the original PE. She calls for backup, she supports her staff, she keeps reporting to HQ as long as she has an HQ left, and she always calls out a warning before pulling the trigger on anything humanoid. She's a cop first and a JRPG heroine second. Not a very realistic cop, especially for the NYPD, but you know, nothing's perfect.
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May 16, 2016 22:30
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And Japan hated Other M anyway, so he might have overshot the mark a bit.
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May 18, 2016 14:49
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At one point he accidentally stumbles across one of the game's main villains and his split-second reaction is to try and jam a knife in his face. He only failed because of the presence of an equally competent bodyguard. If Stocke was the protagonist of every JRPG then most of them would be less than two hours long.
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May 19, 2016 18:31
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MonsieurChoc posted:So what you guys are saying is that the next attempt at reviving Parasite Eve should be directed by Yoko Taro? The sort of crazed bullshit we saw in PE1's last act isn't too far from his oeuvre, really.
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May 22, 2016 17:04
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Nowe and PE3-era Aya are bad in different ways. Nowe's a dunce with too much agency, which resulted in him raining terror and destruction around the globe by charging off on his own and blundering into every villainous plan possible along the way. Aya is a muttering lump of mush with no agency at all, which results in the rest of the cast just bailing her out and trading her back and forth like a questionably attired doll.
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May 22, 2016 20:27
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The first act of TR2013 consisted of Lara getting the absolute poo poo kicked out of her by the elements, wild animals, gravity, and strong burly men, and then it changed gears to a more straightforward run-and-gun. Rise of the Tomb Raider has less abuse of Lara, but ten times the tedious daddy issues.
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May 23, 2016 05:39
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Tae posted:This is the same group that celebrates Nier 2, a franchise that had no right in any financial reason to get made. Or Drakengard 3 for that matter. Nier had a strong cult following and some mysterious lunatic in SE acting as a patron to its developer. PE3 was either ignored or loathed and its development team re-entered SE's churn of other titles a long time ago.
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May 23, 2016 16:29
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Cathode Raymond posted:Are you implying military support in this game is unlikable compared to the other games? Because I'll have you know that SWAT officer Txomin Eo has a very sympathetic backstory, and just wait till we meet Lance Corporal Sherbid Trumkully and Specialist Mople Deledactika. PE2's military support is just a curve-breaker. They're one of the only military backup units in media history who just show up, put the enemy down, establish an organized base camp, and then continue to be helpful and deferential for the remainder of the story. Turns out that if a shambling abomination can be killed by an assault rifle, then fifty assault rifles are going to gently caress it up even worse.
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May 24, 2016 13:38
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Y-Hat posted:"The Queen of Spanish Harlem" sounds like the title of a reggaeton song. It's the wrong district, though. Aya actually fought the Queen in Lower Chelsea.
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May 25, 2016 13:44
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Geostomp posted:That game was written by fairly people who realized that a superpowered game character who is kills monsters is probably going to be pretty good at it and not a fragile flower for creepy insecure nerds to wank over. "I shot down an animated T-Rex skeleton and blew up the next stage of evolution by detonating an aircraft carrier. But no, please, keep trying to intimidate me."
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May 27, 2016 05:22
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More specifically, at the end of Lightning Returns Lightning kills God and reboots the universe. FFXIII 2.0 turns out to be our world. The series ends with her getting off a train in the French countryside.
Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 15:44 on May 31, 2016 |
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May 31, 2016 14:25
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It bears mentioning that in PE2, Kyle spent pretty much every minute onscreen getting dunked on by Aya. Just kept strutting around pulling the "mysterious secret agent" schtick and Aya's all "oh my God, I don't care, just keep behind me if you don't want to get shot."
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May 31, 2016 20:59
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AradoBalanga posted:So in this version of New York: The New York subway is borderline-eldritch already, I don't blame SE too much for giving up on trying to understand it.
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Jun 7, 2016 04:33
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This is definitely giving off the distinct vibe of dark-age SE's "develop a bunch of pretty cutscenes and then haphazardly splice them together at the last second to meet a deadline" approach.
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Jun 8, 2016 19:09
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I liked Maeda in PE1. I liked him a lot. I was in mourning when I saw this bit for the first time.
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Jun 9, 2016 05:03
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Speedball posted:Oh god, he's Ish from The Magic Circle. He clearly learned his lesson by Lightning Returns, if nothing else. But more and more PE3's excesses are looking like Toriyama's doing, rather than Tabata's. Crisis Core and Type-0 got stupid but they were nowhere near as sloppy or grody as this.
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Jun 10, 2016 22:39
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bman in 2288 posted:My eyes have been glazing over each update anyways, this game is that frustrating to me to even read. Should I try harder to concentrate on the ending, or should I glaze over that, too? You'll probably be able to get the bullet points from the posts that follow anyway. It's worth noting that when PE3 was first released, I knew almost nothing about it except for one particular twist in the ending and that was enough to drop it permanently into my poo poo list. I didn't know about the hacked-up script, or the broken gameplay, or the moaning, or Maeda the Creep. That one little bit of plot still poisoned everything.
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Jun 24, 2016 17:38
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Mokinokaro posted:NGE is actually very simple once you know that all the Biblical references are there just to look cool. The director himself admitted it. EVA had plenty of philosophizing (and the stuff about the endings is more memetic than true) but it was about straightforward, relatable subjects like depression and the reluctance to connect for other people if it meant making yourself vulnerable to them. Under all the gaudy Gnostic imagery, most of the show was in service to those themes. The problem with this kind of JRPG nonsense, and SE is especially bad about it, is an obsession with metaphysics coupled with total ignorance of the subject. Motomu Toriyama and Tetsuya Nomura in particular are kind of infamous for it - look at the Kingdom Hearts games, which go on about "light" and "darkness" and "hearts" and "memories" and "dreams" but don't bother to define or understand what any of those things are while intentionally avoiding any of the more prosaic definitions for every term. The best we can glean is that light is generically good, darkness is generically bad, hearts are somehow your souls and memories and generic life-essence along with whatever else the plot wants them to be, and dreams are apparently weird spirit dimensions with their own hearts and light and darkness and it all becomes this candy-colored ouroboros of poorly-explained bullshit even before time travel gets involved. Meanwhile, Toriyama's godly pantheon in FFXIII made no loving sense, his use of time travel in XIII-2 made less loving sense, and it wasn't until Lightning Returns when he pulled out of his tailspin by just going "fine, the gods are stupid and time's broken, Rapture everything by stabbing it to death." Then there's Third Birthday, which is doing the same bullshit with time and souls and DNA and evolution, and once again the writers seem to be using their own, faintly insane definitions of those terms without ever bothering to explain them to their poor audience. And none of it is relatable or interesting, it's just Mad Libs: Flowery Speeches edition.
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Jun 28, 2016 13:28
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Accordion Man posted:Square should really stop making games. They can keep publishing them, because they're a not bad publisher, but they've been such a bad developer in recent years and this game is the nadir. They've had plenty of good times with FFXIV and their mobile department but their AAA development has not fared well. FFXV is going to be their make-or-break point, I think, and it's not looking too promising so far.
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Jun 28, 2016 19:17
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Renoistic posted:The fact that the director of this game, Tabata, who also worked on Type-0 which has its own share of uncomfortable issues, is the director of FFXV doesn't inspire much confidence in the product. Though to be absolutely fair, he didn't write any of the games, and to take over the reigns after Nomura's insanity must have been a nightmare. Type 0 had some skeevy stuff but it really wasn't a patch on this one. The worst of it was spying on your adult teacher undressing to find her secret spy tattoo, which was safely ridiculous and completely optional. I don't even think you got any particularly good rewards out of it.
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Jun 28, 2016 21:16
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