this is for Arac-
Oh, forgive me kind sir, or shall I say kind gentleman for identifying my erronous usage of grammar. May I inquire that we settle over a cup of fine tea derived from the great country of China. Then. only then can we settle this despicable subject that seems to be at hand. Forgive me if I ever offended thoust divine pride. I was only sharing my deepest thoughts on the matter of the exquisit story of FFVII and why it is popular.
…Most. Idiotic. Sarcasm. EVER. But yeah, Omega’s got it down.
Back to the topic, I think that FFIX had a pretty good story. Simply because of the way the characters were presented and how their backstories were told.
…You know, I really wanna hear Percival’s reaction to that attempt at Old English. >.>
Cloud: The Internet is a written medium. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to take the medium seriously, which includes caring enough about the language to write properly. Grammar and spelling make it easier to figure out what anybody’s talking about; and yes, if you use words like “u r” people, at least on these boards, will generally assume that you’re childish, ignorant, lazy, or just stupid.
Of course if English is your second language, or you have dyslexia (both of which have occurred on these boards) you at least have an excuse. But we can’t know that.
its not skuul we can type how we want lolololol heal plz
Don’t mind me.
I will say this in Cloud’s defense: At least he uses periods. maybe not CORRECTLY at times, but that’s still a hell of a leap from some of the other people I’ve seen posting around here lately.
Yeah, I would too.
This thread inspired me to pick up FFX again. I’m off to capture monsters!
I played FFX with dear sister watching, and never before had I noticed how gay the blitzball playeres acted. I’m not tryin gto be offensive. They acted GAY. Really.
OK guys sorry about the bad grammer, but who friggin cares. I am starting to think you guys are all my old english teachers. I have never seen a group of people so strict on verbal usage. And the whole english thing. that was just a joke. I’m not really english. Geshhhhhh
For example?
As Cid said, we care. However, I disagree with not being a native speaker serving as an excuse.
These threads about ‘What (Game Name) has the best (Attribute)?’ are generally pointless to begin with, and are usually nothing more than flaming grounds for fanboys to flaunt their favorite games and blast anyone who doesn’t agree with them word for word.
Kinda reminds me of <a href=http://www.bobandgeorge.com/Subcomics/Paint/Archive/Comic101.png>this</a>.
One of the best examples I can think of:
Tidus, after getting thrown off the Al Bhed ship by Sin in the beginning, drifts across the aters, unconsciopus,s taying alive somehow. The next time he wakes up, the first thing he sees? A beautiful island beach, inhabited by five to six big, burly, half-naked men squatting, limbering up, and waving energetically to him with big smiles on their faces, telling him to come join them.
Maybe it’s me, but that’s just… yeah.
No, it’s not just you. When you put it like that it certainly does look like it… interesting.
Okay, you’re right. The reason I stopped playing a game was because the story was bad, but not that bad.
Sadly, I’m not exaggerating in the least. Do you know how many restarts it took for the opening twenty minutes alone to make sense? It’s not a hard scene. Not a lot happens. It’s the present, and you fight bad guys in front of a monsatery. That’s it. It became complicated because instead of just writing the scenes in where they belong, we have an entire flurry of poorly articulated flashback transitions throughout the game. Flashbacks are good when they’re well defined and have a purpose. FFT’s didn’t, whatsoever. It took over ten hours for the opening scene to be put into context because the writers decided to take a SINGLE battle from smack in the middle of the game and stick it at the beginning for no reason.
So you fight alongside Gafgarion and Agrias for five minutes, then they vanish and you’re fighting thieves in a city. Then you enter a random city and your dad dies in the castle with you there. Then you meet a guy in a field and he asks you to save his Marquis. So you listen to him and then a few hours of gasp steady-but-useless plot begin.
The story IS half decent, for a tRPG, when it’s put together and read beginning to end. The problem is that you have to re-write it in order for it to work because the original writing is trash.
I have to go now, but I might post more later, if I feel like it. Who knows.
What you are complaining about is a very common method in storytelling. Just because a scene doesn’t make absolute sense immediately doesn’t mean it’s bad. You see the guy fighting and then you go into a flashback. You can figure out it’s a flashback because of him and Delita, the dialogue “So you were alive…” followed by the blackening screen and the transition to a new location with a younger-looking character is blatantly obvious. I personally would have made the scene two or three lines longer to clarify the transition, but it’s nowhere as bad as you make it to be. And just to take a jab at you, how the hell is this any worse than FF8’s Laguna?
I might add that it’s a complete segment dedicated to the past, after which you never see any other flashback again. The only two transitions between past and present are at the beginning and ending of Chapter 1, not a “flurry of poorly articulated flashback transitions throughout the game”. Everything from Chapter 2 onwards is in perfect chronological order.
If you are calling Chapter 1 useless, you completely missed the point. It sets the entire mood for the game, the contrast between the classes and the different views and values from each side which are the major factor in the rest of the story, it shows Ramza’s ignorance which he has to overcome and the reason for which Delita became the way he was. It’s probably the most content-heavy part of the game.
Cloud, I’ve decided to fix your response to me, since, as I said, I won’t respond otherwise until your English is better. Please, consider this a learning experience. My corrections are in bold, usage errors are underlined, and things that aren’t even real words are in italics.
- You forgot a comma, chummer.
- Forgive you for identifying your erroneous usage of grammar? Don’t you mean I should forgive you for using it? I identified it.
Other such attempts at making fun of me asking you to speak like a middle schooler, at least, will be dealt with similarly.
EDIT: Oh, and I’m sorry, but I couldn’t resist doing this one, too:
Now, as for the FFT thing, I think Hades, you are going a little bit overboard now, and that that is a little unfair. I largely agree that the story was pretty poorly told, and could’ve been a lot better, but you’re giving it much less credit than it deserves.
And just to take a jab at you, how the hell is this any worse than FF8’s Laguna?
In FF8 the flashbacks were clearly defined. They were separated from the rest of the game in a way that Ramza’s father’s death (etc.) wasn’t.
If you are calling Chapter 1 useless
Irrelevant. I’m not. I’m calling the opening scenes and certain other scenes in the game incomprehensible and purposeless. A story shouldn’t have as many scenes that not only could’ve, but should’ve been omitted as FFT did. Chapter one was a good third of the game. It obviously wasn’t all bad, and it also obviously didn’t contain every bad part of the story.
It sets the entire mood for the game, the contrast between the classes and the different views and values from each side which are the major factor in the rest of the story, it shows Ramza’s ignorance which he has to overcome and the reason for which Delita became the way he was. It’s probably the most content-heavy part of the game.
Exactly. If it is absolutely critical for any part of the game to be clear and easy to understand, it’s Chapter one, especially the opening scenes.
Let me ask you something. Why not start with the battle in Gariland, make it the in-game tutorial, and do the Monastery battle where it would occur chronologically? What does flashing back for such a huge chunk of the game accomplish? It doesn’t set anything up that couldn’t have been set up with a lot less confusion and a great deal more coherance.
I might add that it’s a complete segment dedicated to the past, after which you never see any other flashback again. The only two transitions between past and present are at the beginning and ending of Chapter 1, not a “flurry of poorly articulated flashback transitions throughout the game”.
Wrong. Not only were there flashbacks in the other chapters, there were many flashbacks within the primary flashback. This is approximately where the line between usefulness and intellectual bullying lies. When a writer’s goal shifts from conveying information to confusing the reader to boost his own ego, the story suffers for it. I am not making this up. It’s a well known phenomenon that a huge number of writers see their work as a contest with the reader, and I’d definately apply it here to FFT. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single story as simple as FFT’s that was made so complex by the PHRASING of it, especially when the phrasing didn’t add to the effect whatsoever.
Have you ever seen “The Sand Lot?” Because I feel like making an analogy. In it, a bunch of kids lose a Babe Ruth signed ball in a backyard with a HUGE dog in it. They come up with the most ridiculous scenarios to get it back and every one of them fails. Eventually, someone just goes in and takes the ball, and that’s how they end up getting it back. FFT’s story is EXACTLY like that. It could’ve been told chronologically in the simplest, most obvious way possible and the game wouldn’t have suffered AT ALL. This goes back to the FIRST thing I said: Complexity isn’t always good. It also goes back to the last thing I said: FFT was probably butchered by an intellectual bully.
I say again, the story wasn’t necessarily bad, but the writing made it bad.
clod sux skwal 4-ever p:unch:: p:unch:: p:unch::
I dunno. I actually thought all the flashbacks and forwards made the story a lot more interesting. It made you think rather than spoonfeeding you everything. I’m going to have to disagree with you there.
Until you get to the town with Elone, you have absolutely no way of knowing that you are in the past, and even then you can only figure it out because Kiros comments that Julia married Rinoa’s father. Yes, you know when you switch from one character to another, but you have absolutely no goddamn idea of who these people are, why you are controlling them or overall what the fuck was going on until MUCH latter into the game. That’s a lot more confusing in my opinion.
Balbanes’ death could have been a bit better defined, that’s true. Now elaborate on that (etc.). You can’t because there is no other transition.
It’s a game, there are limitations to consider. Since unlike normal RPGs, you just can’t make a long dungeon to ensure the player gets enough fighting (And lets face it, 99% of games treat fighting as something you have to fill a quota for, which is a fundamental problem of the genre I’m not going to discuss), you need to add a number of battles. I personally prefer a five-second segment in which two characters say “You go this way, I go this way, we’ll crush them” than simply being thrown into the battlefield unannounced.
And stop adding adjectives just for the heck of it, there are no incomprehensible scenes. Give me an example in which you can’t tell exactly what’s going on by thinking for half a second.
Because that way you set the initial stone in one of the main themes of the story, deceit and untruth. In the opening you are introduced to an alleged hero, Delita, and an alleged criminal, Ramza and told that maybe things aren’t quite as they seemed. You then see a scene in which the criminal is fighting alongside knights to defend someone who is captured by the hero, which evidences that in fact there is something amiss. Then you go into the origins of these two characters. That way you ensure that the player will pay much more attention to the development of those two.
Complexity doesn’t necessarily mean good, but it doesn’t necessarily mean bad either. Just because you have to stop and think for a second about what’s going on doesn’t mean the writing is badly done, you evidently just don’t like that kind of narrative. If you didn’t understand it, that’s your problem, because I did.
There is ONE flashback within Chapter One, Balbanes’ death. After Chapter 1, There is NO.OTHER.FLASHBACK.ANYWHERE.ELSE. Mention ONE. I’ve went through the game a hundred times, I KNOW what I’m talking about.
The only game I know that even deserves to be labeled as such a confusing piece is Xenogears, FFT doesn’t even begin to compare in that area. Once again, there’s one segment in the entire game dedicated to the past, one five minute scene inside of it and the other three quarters of the game are in perfect chronological order. So far you’ve only mentioned chronological issues.
I believe that FFT’s story would have suffered great deal under a more obvious phrasing. The difference between one guy silently pushing forward with a suicidal campaign under the tacit notion of “I am doing this because I believe it is right” and that of a guy proudly announcing that he fights for the sake of justice and goodwill is drastic. It’s the same message delivered in a subtle manner, versus a corny formula that has been done five thousand times.
You think that kind of storytelling is too confusing, fine. But that’s your opinion, I happen to like this kind of narrative.