This guy links my essay and starts a shitstorm:
https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584338440Anonymous wrote:>>584330320
The Japs cannot innovate. JRPG games really are just VNs with some simple menu turn based slapped on them to avoid being too obvious. Want RPG elements? Go play CRPGs. Want great gameplay and combat system? Go play western isometric or tactical turn based games like XCOM (old and reboot). You won't find either in JRPG. For fuck's sake, the hottest recent JRPGs are DQXI, P5R, and SMTV and they are all babby-tier shit with styles over substance. You want something """""tactical"""""? We have waifufaggy shit like FE3H and Disgaea 6 as the reps.
15 years since I wrote that essay. Still getting linked. Anyone else writing about games who can say this? And is it a stretch to imagine it will still be getting linked 15 years from now?
https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584350323Anonymous wrote:I don't know what's worse, twitterscum and redditors posting Icycalm's rants to get (You)s or squareniggers and a bunch of other people who don't care about the genre either trying to make some half baked apologies.
https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584340529Anonymous wrote:I'm legit still waiting for Japanese devs' take on XCom or Divinity OS. I'm tired of every SRPG or tactical RPG from Japan being marching to your enemy's face and stabbing him with sword / axe / spear / etc., instead of getting to do shit like summoning an earthen wall to block a chokepoint or blowing the floor beneath your enemy and see him plunge to his death. Japanese devs are creatively bankrupt and keep churning out clones of 1990's tactics games like FFT or Tactics Ogre. The fact that weebs are getting hyped for Triangle Strategy means Jap devs will continue to play it safe.
https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584346987Anonymous wrote:>>584346675
Pacing exists, if the only thing you can do in the game is combat and the rest sucks, it eventually gets old. Also why not just make a dungeon crawler if all you want is to walk around and fight endlessly? Sounds like an excuse for how those games are straight tedious and LAZY, because that's what they come across as, fucking lazy. Just throw some mobs around areas, recolor them and whatever and the game almost feels like a soulless mathematical equation shat by a robot.
>"oh no villager was attacked getting water"
people who want their games to be interesting, rather than the town just being a deposit of dull NPCs, and games that feature large worlds to actually feel like worlds inhabit by people and not just "an area where I fight mobs nonstop" which is a way less ambitious proposal, I like dungeon crawlers but when your enormous overworld feels like a basic bitch dungeon it's a waste
https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584347901Anonymous wrote:>>584347504
That was just one example of the complete lack of detail some JRPGs have in their worlds. You say it is uninteresting to have a NPC encounter, I say the barren overworld, completely devoid of any signal of civilization makes them repetitive and bland. Anywhere you are, be it a desert, a forest, a cave, a field right outside of a town, a riverside field, etc, it all behaves the same exact manner, you walk around, you encounter and have to fight mobs nonstop, how is this not repetitive as fuck and lazy? Because that's what it is, the game follows a very strict formula.
The issue is that they don't feel like worlds with actual people in it, because you don't even encounter anything besides monsters outside of the designated_NPC_areas known as towns/villages. You know in the real world people do travel from place to place, if you entered a cave and could rescue some guy who went there to gather shrooms or whatever, then have a tid bit of dialogue it would break the monotony that those games are with repetitive combat encounters and nothing to be found besides chests with shit loot.
https://arch.b4k.co/v/thread/584330320/#584349575Anonymous wrote:>>584348742
Fiction and a fantasy world still needs to have coherence. A little village with enormous ogres right outside of it is a stupid concept if you think 2 seconds about it. You are making excuses for those games to be lazily designed. The fact nobody can travel right outside of a village would make the village a pretty shitty place to be, don't they engage in trading with the other parts of civilization? Is that small village self sufficient in absolutely everything? The more you think about it, the more stupid it is, don't try to justify it because it defies basic common sense. Are the farmers in that village able to fend off the endless respawning monstrosities that are right outside of the village door?
>the player characters are notoriously exceptions from the norm of people within them
this is just you saying it's okay for shit to be stupid because hey it's a game, it's fantasy!! No it isn't, retarded shit is still retarded and fiction is not supposed to lack logic and coherence
There's also the issue of pacing. You know that purely gameplay driven games still have things to offer the player besides combat, right? Even the action game darling Devil May Cry 1 on the PS2 had some puzzles and shit to break the pace of the combat. Quite some JRPGs miss this detail, and when you venture outside of the safe_zone AKA the towns, be prepared for sameyness always.
Also having a more detailed and more interesting to explore overworld would make for better gameplay. When your entire gameplay is to walk fight walk wight walk fight, it kinda sucks.
A game with large overworld, lots of towns caves and different environments behaving as a dungeon crawler is stupid, it's the issue. A dungeon crawler operates on the logic that the party is in some place far away from civilization therefore you have to fight your way through tons of monsters puzzles etc does make sense. A world where a little village has dangerous mobs right outside doesn't.