GameSpot 2005 genre awards

It's cool to see the game in action while listening the review. Also, people who can't read now have a chance to hear a review.

Anyway, don't whine about something that is given.

 

In the future all reviews will be FPS-style imagery of burgers and fries flying at you. The more burgers and fries, the BETTER THE GAME AWESOME DUDES!!!

What are you, Tintin's brother?

Here's a excerpt from the Eurogamer review of DQ8:

- which is presented as a good thing.

 

For j adventure games, I am normally impressed with their good aesthetics, but I somehow get a deja vu feeling whenever I play one. It does have some RPG trappings, but these are not any deeper or different from the RPG conventions that many other genres now seem to prefer under the pretense of gameplay depth.

That particular editor as mentioned only exclusively reviews these games, so to say that she may be biased is an understatement. And most of all, the feeling I get from these awards is that it is one inevitable event that clocks in every year like the bastard brother-in-law holiday visits wanting nothing but unwarranted attention, makes me heady with all the conceit.

 

I don't mind playing an JRPG here and there, but i have no idea how any adult can play a bunch of them.

Anywho, how was DQ8 compared to the piece of shit DQ7? I had hopes for a good game with crappy combat after loving Dragon Warrior 3 & 4 but DQ7 was one of the worst Playstation RPGs i've ever touched.

 

Final Fantasy didn't require any speed, as it's turn based too. Anyway, I think it's a good thing. If I wanted something more challenging or with more adrenaline, I would play a strategy game or an FPS or platformer.

DQ8 is nice. Nothing special, nothing to die for, it's not the messiah, but it's a good and enjoyable game.

 

It did. It wasn't a true TB system (talking about that active battle system), it was more of a slow real time where it takes some time, usually 5-10 seconds, to recharge for a next attack.

 

Depends on which FF you are taslkin' about. Some are 100% full fledge turn based combat. Others are the ABS which VD just described.

 

It wasn't real time, as both players and enemies take turns. But instead of showing action points, they translated that into a filling bar. But I always used the "wait" system (the game waits for my input, after a recharge bar fills).

 

I'm pretty sure thats FFX, which had authentic (if rather simple) TB combat. I thought the combat was the best part of that game, which they then ripped out and replaced with an ABS "navigate the menu race" in FFX-2. That game pretty much made me swear off jRPGs for the rest of my life.

 

FF X was the only that had true "turn based" combat system, all others have the "Active Battle Timer" system.

 

Strangely enough, FFX was the only (non-FFTactics) FF game whose battle system I enjoyed. I also never finished it, because the game was stupid. And then my PS2 broke.

 

I enjoyed Dragon Quest VIII when I first started playing it, but after about the 14-hour mark, I've been losing interest quickly. I haven't touched in in several weeks now.

One of my biggest gripes about the game is that it many aspects of the game were deliberately designed in the "old school" tradition simply for the sake of being "old school."

Now I'm not one of the often-griped about "ADHD kids who first started playing RPGs with Final Fantasy VII." I cut my teeth on the same "old school" games as many people here did. I have fond memories of my C-64 and Wasteland, Bard's Tale I - III, Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Ultima IV, Might and Magic I, and The Magic Candle. Around that same time, I was also playing the original Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and Ultima III on my NES. I loved Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System, and I battled through Phantasy Star 2 and its two sequels on the Genesis.

However, I don't actually enjoy playing any of these games now, in 2006. Game design has evolved over the past 20 years along with the graphical capabilities of gaming hardware. I find most of the above games to be too tedious and repetitive to play now. It just isn't that fun to fight the same palette-swapped monsters, accompanied by the same 30-second-loop of battle music for hours on end. Good UI design is not a luxury; it's a necessity, and I get very annoyed dealing with clunky UIs very quickly. Dragon Quest VIII certainly looks like a modern game, but it feels too much like games of 15-20 years ago to be fun. It has a huge world to explore, but the joy of exploration is ruined by the unwelcome interruption of a random battle every 15-30 seconds of walking. And a lot of the "random" battles aren't just pushovers, either. Unless you've done a lot of extra levelling up (which always feels like a chore), you're often in need of healing after most battles. Where I left off, it took me so long to reach the next dungeon that I'd already used up 3/4 of my characters' magic points getting there. I've started to dread travelling anywhere, because the combat is so intrusive.

Imagine you are a game designer, but somehow, in this imaginary world, computer/console RPGs had never been invented. Imagine that part of your pitch for the game's design included "and when you are wandering around outside between towns or in a dungeon, but not in towns or areas where a cutscene will unfold, every 15-45 seconds the screen will twist up (or blur, pixelate, rotate, zoom in, whatever) and load a completely different mode of gameplay where the player's characters line up on one side of the screen, and the monsters line up on the other side, and they each take turns attacking each other. If the player wins, his characters do a little victory dance, and then the combat engine unloads and the player continues exploring. This sequence will occur roughly five hundred times during the course of the average playthrough of the game."

People would think you were nuts, and rightly so. It's a boneheaded design that has plagued this genre for almost twenty years. Switching back and forth between the "world exploration" engine and the "battle" engine is a detriment to the player's immersion in the game. I played about 24 hours into Tales of Symphonia before I got too bored to care anymore (and that took me over a year to get in 24 hours of game time), and I'd racked up nearly 300 combat encounters. And I wasn't even halfway through the game. Random assortments of monsters popping out of thin air at random intervals is a stupid and contrived idea that makes absolutely no sense in the logic of the game world. I'm certain that the idea came from the old D&D game's concept of "wandering monsters" where the DM would roll dice every so often to determine of an encounter occurred, and then on another table to see what monster it was. But even then, it wasn't intended that the monsters just pop out of thin air, and a lot of DMs never actually used the tables for anything other than inspiration. Any "random" encounters in my games were "random" only in the sense that they weren't directly related to the plot, but they were always planned by me. Perhaps early game systems lacked the processing power to represent severals monsters on the main game map, but there isn't any excuse on any system made in the past 10 years.

Simply for the sake of "tradition," Dragon Quest VIII makes you go to an inn to rest and heal, and go to a church (and endure a couple screens of dialogue every time) to save your game. This gets really tedious really quick. Yes, it helps that you learn spells very early to escape from a dungeon and to teleport back to a town, but it's still a dumb system. Even Save Points are better. Unless I have a good 4-hour chunk of time to sit down with the game, I can't make any progress, as I have to fully retreat back to town every time I want to save. And then it takes half an hour fight my way back to the dungeon. Ugh.

I think many RPGs are held back from reaching their full potential as they are too constrained by the genre and its contrivances. But that's a rant for another time.

 

Heh, that's great I will steal it.

 

Since I'm a cultural barbarian, (read: Australian) does anyone with a more enlightened viewpoint want to explain the Japanese penchant for imitation and emulation? Why do cartoon and graphical styles all have to be so similar? Why does everything have to involve effiminate teenage boys driving giant robots? Why do all "RPGs" have to follow the same formula of an interchangeable 3 person party and eliminate the tactical significance of positioning?

Obviously, you could probably draw the same comparisons to the "cultural" output of North America, with Hollywood movies all following the same formulae, but I'm interested in any cultural precedent in Japan that encourages direct imitation or "traditionalism" to any large degree, if at all.

 

Well from my take it seens they like the combat aspect of RPGs, from what I read the first Final Fantasy games were brutal in combat, when they come to the US they had to tone down the dificulty.

As for art direction ... well I take they use young people because its easier to justify story direction as character build that of some older character (but not always the case, in one FF game you start as a married blackguard character) and its true that jRPGs rarely allow character creation prefering the idea of a constructed story (pretty much a interactive novel) over character creation ... as for the rest, that is simply not true that its about "robots" and the cartoon "anime" art direction can easy be exaplained since originaly cRPGs were 2d and the art direction favored the classic anime over "realistic" since I take it was far easier to find artists that had anime background.

Besides they are still made for people in japan, if the public acepts the anime outlook they have little reason to change, also note that with 3d they moved away from "anime" and into "realistic".

 

I think Mount & Blade and also Minions of Mirth were very nice RPGs released this year. Oh wait, Mount & Blade isnt still finished, is it?

Avernum 4 then. Must it be for the PC?

Geneforge 3.

And of course Guild Wars

 

Guild Wars probably deserves an award for having the nicest idea with the dumbest possible people executing the design award. That game defined flawed execution. It's a great idea, having a coop CRPG with a massive online user base.. BUT.. The missions suck, the character system is awful, and once you hit the end of the story, there's little else to do. Even then, you have the problem with areas respawning the same level critters in the same exact spot with a lowered return of experience each time you level up.

Honestly, Sacred kicks the fucking shit out of Guild Wars.

The character system is leaps and bounds above Guild Wars. Instead of the lame ass deck of cards style spell system Guild Wars has where you absolutely have to pick your spells before you leave town and can never change them, Sacred has a spell system where you can swap them out on the fly. Not only that, but you can level up the skills and adjust the level of those spells to fit your build.

Sacred's classes are a hell of a lot better, even though Guild Wars has that dual class thing. Why? There's a lot of variety of builds in every class Sacred has. There's not so much that with Guild Wars. Starting off as the warrior class in Guild Wars and then picking elementalist as the secondary is just asking to get screwed. Picking a secondary class doesn't affect your starting stats at all, so you're going to be hosed when it comes to actually casting spells with a build like that.

Meanwhile, in Sacred, most every class has both spells and melee type attacks. The only exceptions are the Gladiator and the Battlemage, which are either devoted to melee or devoted to spells. The Wood Elf, Seraphim, Dwarf, Daemon, Vampiress, and Dark Elf classes can all be built as a melee focused character, spell flinger, or a hybrid of the two. All of which are fairly balanced with one another in terms of usefulness. In fact, even if you focus on melee weapons, there's a large diversity of styles based on the combat arts you focus on and the weapons you use for those builds.

Sacred also handles respawning monsters and new areas significantly better. Guild Wars, any time you enter an area, it respawns everything with the same level and the same spot. Once you're a certain level, you get zero experience for killing monsters, but you still have to kill them because they fucking attack you. You pretty much have to kill them just to get them to stop annoying you. In Sacred, they respawn randomly in an area once you enter the area and they adjust the level of the monsters according to your level with a level cap for the area. Once you get beyond that cap, the monsters will actually leave you alone while you're travelling through really low level areas. And, even if you do kill them, you never get zero experience. You'll always get some token amount of experience. Best of all, there are even item bonuses that automatically kill those monsters when they come on the screen for you.

All around, Guild Wars is just poorly done.

 

Which is a better buy: Sacred or Diablo 2? They're about the same price and online play isn't an issue. The first Diablo kind of bored me, I love Fate, and DS very much bored me, just for comparison's sake.

I know it's off-topic, but Saint brought up Sacred and I'm going shopping tomorrow.

 

Sacred kick's Diablo 2 to the curb. Sacred has everything D2 has and ten times more and does it better to boot.

 

Sacred is really dull and boring...and i wonder how it has so many fans here.

I think Fate is much better, but it doesn't have much longevity (but at least i played to the end, where in Sacred i must have played 6 hours or so...)

 

Don't buy either. Action RPGs don't need any encouragement.

 

You can only simply hammer X early in the game. Later game enemies can be very challenging. The most notable issue is that Jessica's hit points and defence don't go up at the same rate as Yangus's and the hero's. Angelo is very frail when it comes to hit points, but he at least has good defence. If 3+ enemies decide to gang up on Jessica, she's toast.

One strategy I do against fast enemies is have Jessica, the most agile (and 1st mover), cast accelerate. This gives Angelo enough speed to cast the defence up spell on the party (forgot the name) so they can survive the coming onslaught of up to 8 enemies. On turn 2, I heal if necessary and psyche up. Turn 3 is the annihilation turn. :twisted:

The only people who can get away with X hammering are the grinders who have stupidly high levels. Not me...

 

Correction, BAD Action RPGs don't need any encouragement. 90% of them are bad or mediocre and shouldn't be bought.

 

Correction squared. Action RPGs are overdone and don't need any encouragement whatsoever.
As are Adventure-RPGs with an undesireably elaborate plot where being able to not follow it ascends to a praiseworthy feature.

 

Give this man a medal!