I thought there was a lot more to the main character this time. The problem is everybody skips the story in GTA so they don’t bother really making one. The best part of video games now a days is that a lot of them are like playable movies. The problem is that some of them are $60 movies. Games like Alan Wake and Gears of War, even the Halo universe have stories of a calibre of old school RPG status. That’s why I played RPGs when I was younger, I’ve always enjoyed a good story (it’s why I tell so many). But a lot of AAA titles these days have admirably woven storylines along an intricate timeline of events, characters and locations. I stopped playing console games when RPG’s didn’t interest me anymore. As soon as I realized great story wasn’t restricted to RPGs anymore I was right back in playing new games.
Are RPG’s too long? Not really. I enjoyed the length they were on, say, PS1 and PS2. I don’t really play a lot of them anymore. I agree with the “a good game is never too long, and bad ones never end”.
I don’t think that they are too long in general, it depends on the game I suppose. If they are dragging a story out to death, it needn’t be so long. If it just a long, but full and interesting game, then that is just peachy. I like long JRPG kind of games, even if they get formulaic. They were among the first games I was introduced to in me toddler years, and its comfortable.
I spent 90 hours on Persona 4, and maybe 70 on Persona 3, and while I admit those are pretty lengthy times I was never really bored with either game.
But not every RPG can pull off that kind of length, nor should they really aspire to. Another recent RPG favorite of mine is Bowser’s Inside Story which is maybe 20 hours, and that’s just fine. A game should only be as long as it has to be.
Finished, Nope, And the only things I can comment on was that a) I now know how one can royally fuck up a HP/LP system (ala SaGa) b) I now know how one can royally fuck up a reaction augmented combat system (ala Mario RPGs) c) Magic was worthless in your hands but god help you if you have to face down any enemy with it thanks to everyone having Shining Force amounts of HP d) You get to fly around in the loving Fifth Angel from EVA e) I really want to say that the Magical Girl Healer Type got tentacle raped at the start of the game but something tells me that this game isn’t nearly that creative (plus it was more like a tentacle grope than anything) and f) Apparently if I want Healing Magic all I need to do is roll around in a swamp (tentacle rape seems optional) then get splashed by some other water from the very same cave.
Apparently there was a story, plot, characters, music, and so on but I can’t seem to remember a lick of it, I think there was some dude who shot your party out of the air with a bow and arrow, and that there was a sewer level you had to visit four times when aside from the last trip your party was just visiting purely for the sake of killing time, and that every dungeon was about two floors too long (or rooms if it was just one floor), also I sorta recall the Obi-Wan character not dying three or four times (it was getting so silly that if the game were any longer he probably would’ve turned up alive again somehow only to die off all TRAGIC like again), also also as I type this I recall that the Darth Vader character shows up during the ending sequence despite the fact that I ICED his sad ass.
Other than that though it was at least a fairly good looking Genesis RPG circa 1990.
I would say that it depends on the reason why the RPG is so long. If it is because the RPG takes so long to perform actions such as attacks or the menus being slow, then I often get bored with them. This shows up more often in 8-bit RPGs where the systems were not always very quick with dialogue or animations. I am one of the types of people who just likes to choose “attack, attack, attack” unless the characters are low on HP and need a spell or healing item.
Dragon Warrior I was simple enough only having one character so it wasn’t too slow, but when you get to Dragon Warrior II it’s annoying to have to choose the exact enemies for each individual character to attack. No mindless grinding, you actually have to sit through and pay attention to every fight. I haven’t played III and IV yet, but if I remember right from reading walkthroughs III is similar to II and IV has one character you can can control while the rest in your party have free will (so not as annoying but you have less control over what happens).
Final Fantasy I, IIj and IIIj on NES are also quite slow. I & IIj still have the inconvenience of not redirecting attacks that Dragon Warrior II has. Final Fantasy IIIj is the first game to fix this issue, but the animations are still pretty slow. I like to buy the real cartridges of NES and Famicom turn-based RPGs, but seem to get better enjoyment out of them by playing them on an emulator where I can play them at 2x speed.
There is a difference between a game with many random encounters but has a good quick battle system (Beyond the Beyond for Playstation comes to mind), and a game that is simply just slow because it can be. I think the NES traditional RPG impatience comes from being used to newer RPGs over the years that have all the nice features that spoil us.
TGC, I think the original poster was talking about more recent rpgs that for one reason or other are too long, often artificially so. You can control your characters in Dragon Quest IV, though it might have automatic scripts for party members (I rarely use these). Oh, and welcome.
The irony of this post can be found in the post directly above it.
That said, it isn’t just about the gameplay (although that too can become a massive time-waster, see also PSX era FFs), but the walls of text that ramble on without coming to a conclusive point or cutscenes that exists solely to have an in-game airship assume the same flight path as a Star Wars TIE fighter, nevermind when the very things they keep beating you over the head with turns out to be a bigger lie than the cake. In total, a great deal of RPG plots can be summed up entirely in one sentence (for instance FFX; “A young star Bliztball player is whisked from his home when a walking natural disaster named Sin crashes his party and he ends up in the land of Spira where he is thrown around until he ends up in Besaid where he joins a Summoner’s entourage to fight Sin and get home, fall in love with said Summoner despite the fact that she is doomed, fight other Summoners and some random douchebag who’s trying to steal his Summoner away from him, and to watch Sin wreck up the place every so often only to find out that everything was a lie (including his home and himself) and that its really about getting on board an airship to get inside Sin and resolve his daddy issues once and for all.” or Beyond the Beyond; “An unassuming boy sets off on a quest to save his homeland, his surrogate father, and the world from an evil empire powered by an evil wizard powered by ancient evil and to claim his birthright as the Legendary Hero along with his sidekick dragon, his surrogate father’s friend’s daughter, his surrogate father’s friend’s daughter’s brother who is like him but with enough darkness in his heart to be turned to the dark side, his country’s greatest living cursed hero (who can’t even lift a pillar), his country’s prince/cousin, a summoner turned yellow blob monster thingy, a pirate, and a royal monk of some other kingdom that gets destroyed by the empire’s technological monstrosity that can destroy whole kingdoms but is insignificant next to the power of the Light Force and dragons, though the party must first overcome such trials as rescuing the magical girl from a giant squid, rescuing the prince and his hero bodyguard, uncursing that hero guy, wasting time in a sewer, learning that the magic village elder is sitting on a hill next to the town until you complete ten different fetch quests, growing a beanstalk, taking said beanstalk up to a castle in the sky and talking to a deity who can zap you to a hill where the guy who can uncurse your hero is sitting on, proving to the neighboring kingdom that you really do have a guy who can lift a pillar and that they need a new chancellor, taking back the homeland, not rescuing your surrogate father or the magical girl’s brother, crushing the empire, not rescuing your surrogate father again, promoting, taking down the empire’s new dreadnoughtstar, to ride around in NGE’s 5th Angel, to getting your dragon back after it heals itself from getting shot down by a guy with a bow and arrow, finding out that you are the son of some other knight (who is the greatest, who eloped with and knocked up the princess, and who chucks himself down a pit after his shotgun wife who was accidentally knocked down into it by your surrogate dad during the battle) and getting his sword (and you thought it was going to be legendary too or a lightsaber at least), to rescuing (or not bother to) the magical girl’s brother from the dark side of the Light Force, to finally throwdown with the big bad who is in fact the ancient guardian of the ancient evil and also distantly related to you and get saved by your not dead yet surrogate old man and watch him get not saved yet again.” (and I really embellished that last one)).
To cut a long story short (too late), most RPG plots are no more complicated than a typical action title’s plot (like say the MMZ series) but takes at least 30 hours to cover the same amount of ground due to all the predictable fake out bullshit, droning monologues, gasping as dramatically as possible at everything, boss fights that exists solely to be unwinnable, recovering from amnesia, and fetch quests. And when you cut all that stuff out you’re left with hours of uninterpreted grinding and tapping confirm.
So yes, I feel that RPGs are way too long for what they really are.
I agree with your last paragraph about RPGs, but its worth noting that there are a few companies trying to break that trend, like Bioware. The reason so many games are so short nowadays is because of how much padding is getting cut from the quality titles.
Sadly, some companies, especially the Japanese, seem to think padding is GREAT. A prime example is the upcoming Xenoblade and its massive score on Famitsu, where it is praised as having so much to do other than the game, that you forget about the original story! Capcom also is a big fan of backtracking, as even its most recent titles are filled with recycled, contrived bullshit.
Speaking of length, at 35 hours I’m now at the next-to-last section of La Pucelle. For me this has been a somewhat short game, not just because of the longer games I’ve played but because the story has almost no pointless sidequests- it’s surprisingly straightforward. But I don’t mind because I really enjoyed it (well it has a couple of things that piss me off but that’s for another thread.) My problem now is: do I go on to finish the story or do I try to get the optional areas? Normally I do the latter, but I hear you need to level up to the hundreds to do so -_- . Unless of course, it turns out the Final Boss is itself level 100 or so, like the last one in Phantom Brave (my highest level character right now is about 50.) Can anyone tell me?
From what I’ve seen of Xenoblade thus far, if the bulk of the content comes from exploring the environments looking for chests to swag, secrets to find, multiple paths to take, and general breezing on through, and not from slogging through random encounters or endless grinding for that one rare material needed for the platinum achievement (although Wii games aren’t usually inclined for such things) then I can still get behind that (since some fields look ridiculously spectacular). Basically, to me, it comes down to whether the game is more like Secret of Mana or DQVIII rather than FFXII.
But I can just as easily (if not more so) see it having though things as well. sigh
Yes I was only talking about the NES versions of the Dragon Warrior games. I always like trying to play through the original forms of the games to see them for what they were when they were created. Even if they are slow I feel it is an accomplishment to sit through them all the way to the end.
I always thought that the backtracking and fetch quests were what JRPGs were all about. That along with dialogue style storytelling. I always thought it was fun how they could make a single area change enough when you go back to it that it seems like a brand new location. Games like Suikoden II have so many events that are unlocked at different times during the story that many times if you go back to an old area there is something new to find there. The idea of never knowing what you might find somewhere adds a sense of exploration that makes fetch quests and backtracking acceptable. But it also helps if they make it convenient instead of such a pain. Conveniences I know of off the top of my head: Final Fantasy airships, Suikoden teleportation, Beyond the Beyond light orbs and flying, Pokemon flying to different towns using a bird. It’s easy to go back to old places in RPGs like those and complete the side quests. It is harder to tolerate when you have to do it all on foot or by boat when enemies appear on the water. I would agree with that. Dragon Warrior II has a lot of backtracking and there is nothing you can do to stop the enemy encounters everywhere you go. The whole game is on foot and by boat. Luckily I am at the last area and just need to power up my character levels.
Strategy RPGs like Vandal-Hearts are exempt from this as they just keep moving forward and you never revisit the old areas. Newer games in this genre do allow backtracking but only for optional level gaining purposes.
The action RPGs are probably the ones that nobody really gets frustrated with the length for. Since you are always finding new weapons, exploring new dungeons and get to feel all the action it doesn’t get as tiresome.
Its really bad in games like the Lufia series where you’re running through an alternating series of regions, dungeons, and caves wherein order to pass through the cave to the next region you must first solve the problems facing the current region which usually involve fetching something from the local dungeon then you get to pass through the cave and do it all over again.
Another is Beyond the Beyond where you spend a loving third of the game amidst a loving series of fetch quests in the effort to turn one of your characters into something other than dead weight. Especially since most quests involve killing time to hang out with old buddies while waiting to meet the king (which inevitably goes badly on account of the curse and the usual chancellor issues), meeting the queen who gives you a legend and a magic bean for your troubles (thankfully you’re not expected to fetch any cows beforehand), going to a magic village that tells you to gently caress off because their elder is too busy sitting around on the hill to waste his time breaking your curse, going through a six floor dungeon filled with switch puzzles and enemy encounters able to wipe 90% of your max HP in one shot on average just to get a vase, going through a valley filled with more puzzles (grapple here to cross gorge type) and enemies that spam magic capable of hitting your entire party for about 60% of your HP per shot just to get to a town where you can part the sea to get to an island dungeon, going through a six floor island dungeon with the same enemies from the valley but now in swarms of 5 or 6 per encounter instead of 1 or 2 (and their magic is most likely still doing 50-60% of damage to your HP per shot), traps bleeding your MP away, utter darkness save for the one title area around you, puzzles involving getting a statue to follow you to its proper place without it barricading your passage to the next floor or forcing you back down a floor (mercifully, or unfortunately, the only puzzle in the game that shuts off random encounters while you’re in the middle of solving the puzzle), and a boss fight (and laughable one too given the fact that there’s only one of it and it has only double the HP of any given enemy in the dungeon and favors only single target attacks over group attacks) just for some water for your vase and bean, then its all the way back to the place where you got the vase where you plant the bean in the vase full of water to grow a five floor beanstalk (where you have to grab water and beeline it to plants to grow ladders to the next area and hope you don’t run into any encounters, and is mercifully the only dungeon in the game that remembers what you’ve already done) to get to a six floor tower (that you have to loop around to raise or lower alternating blocks) to get a hammer, to go back to the start of the tower, to climb to the top floor again, to talk to god and have him remind you of the plot before he zaps you down to the top of the hill where that magic village elder is sitting around and have him finally remove the status effect plaguing one of your five party members (then your party will consist of at most two front-line fighters, one healer, and two poo poo mages), where the elder then proceeds to once again remind you of the plot, where you get to go all the way back to that one kingdom (fortunately there is a shortcut that opens up at that point) and its lovely sewers to finally lift that pillar and fight the chancellor in the game’s second boss fight (which is still a joke compared to all that you’ve been through up until that point).
La Pucelle bonus content is about as unforgiving as Disgaea bonus content. We’re talking hours upon hours of grinding different areas of your character/equipment to beat Level 200/500/1000 enemies. 20 of them in a row if you want the best title.
Short answer: Fuck, no. I did it, but I’m a sick bastard, just finish the game and get over it. And then go play a better game, like Soul Nomad.
That said, being able to take on a Level 100 enemy is probably a good example of what you’ll need to beat the regular boss.
Seraphim: Thanks for the info. For some reason the Gamefaqs guide I downloaded doesn’t describe the last part, probably because if you level up to take on the optional sections the regular ending would be a cakewalk.
For what it’s worth, here’s what I did: created a second file save, used a Codebreaker to give everyone maximum level (9999!!) there and then just smashed my way through the cave of trials and then the second Dark Shrine. To Optional Boss Baal’s credit, he lasted several rounds against my party even that way, and even managed to kill one of them before I snuffed him out! (I was busy killing his sub-bosses first though.)
Now I’m going to use the OTHER file to beat the game the regular way. IF that fails I’ll just used the uberleveled one instead. Oh, and no, I haven’t done Hel- I mean The “Dark World”. I know how to get there, I just never bothered. Is it worth it? (I did get Dark World items on the shops and was disappointed about how they weren’t THAT great. A joke on the players, I presume.
The Dark World kind of IS the bonus content, Bhaal is just a stepping stone. There’s two stages to completing the Dark World: One is to kill an Overlord, which gives Prier the Demon Lord title and allows her to purify Boss-class enemies (Like Bhaal) and the second one is to kill TWENTY Lv 200 Overlords and at least one Lv 500 Overlord in a single run through DW, which gets her the Demon Overlord title and the Fission Mailed-style ending. I actually got a full team of Bhaals to grind my characters on before doing the marathon run. Just to clear, you don’t actually need to get past Lv 1000 to pull that off. Equipment bonuses outweight level stats past Lv 100. I could one-shot Bhaal easily at Lv 500.
Worth it? Nah.
Oh, and DW items ARE very good, you just need to know which are the good ones. The titles they have make a huge difference, and leveling the right one can get you skyrocketing stats.