The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings, what do these three have in common? They're all movie trilogies whose sequels (Matrix Revolutions, Dead Man's Chest, The Two Towers) received major criticism, usually to the tune of, "while good, not as revolutionary as its predecessor." These sequels, while good, were graded harsher, because they brought nothing new to the table; they didn't appear as revolutionary as the first in the series, yet they were usually technically and narratively superior (ignoring The Matrix). Basically sequels get a bad rap.
The same rule applies in video games; expansion packs and sequels never receive as high of review ratings because they don't, or should I say, cannot revolutionize the genre in the same fashion as the original. Thanks to these views sequels are a rarity, especially in the realm of RPG's. It boggles my mind why, after devoting so much time and resources to creating these vast and detailed worlds such as those that appear in the final fantasy games, and after spending hours getting the player to get to know the characters involved, that they abandon it all every single game. Of the RPG's I've played, I can only come up with three that have sequels or expansions that carry their worlds on. These three are: Final Fantasy X-2 a game nearly universally reviled for its dress-up system and sequel nature, Neverwinter Nights 2 Mask of the Betrayer an expansion that all but ignores the narrative it is expanding upon, and Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3 FES an expansion/sequel that was only recently announced to have an American release. For those who are taking score, I loved FFX-2, it filled in major gaps in FFX's narrative and allowed Yuna to develop over the two years between the games, a design decision that almost all avoid; I'm having a great time with Mask of the Betrayer right now, it fixes all of my major qualms with NWN2, though I do wish it did more with the narrative from NWN2; and Persona 3 gave me a full cathartic experience that all but eliminated my fear of death and allowed me to overcome what I have felt were some major flaws in my character. I cannot describe how happy I am that one of the RPG's that I felt has made the most significant strides in creative a cohesive narrative with the player is getting an expansion.
Also, very tired, might be a little sick, that's a huge paragraph. So to sum up:
Why the fuck are RPG developers not making more sequels!?
FFX-2 wasn't a bad game, you're just afraid of it because the color pink is in it.
I loved Persona 3.
PERSONA 3 FES COMING TO AMERICA!!!
Showing posts with label Persona 3. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Persona 3. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
I Am HYPOCRITES Master of Contradiction!!!
Today I received the first "packet" of entries for UPS' literary magazine published every semester, Crosscurrents. Within this packet there were four poems and one short story. From the time I have spent in UPS' creative writing department I have learned that most of the campus, and almost all of the professors, hate fiction that uses supernatural or "Romantic" elements in them. So when this short story mentioned orcs and ogres I was quite taken aback. Here at UPS, "the Harvard of the West" someone actually submitted a short story piece that included fantasy creatures/races. Now here's why I say that I'm a hypocrite. I love fantasy elements in stories, hell, the farther away from reality you can take me, the happier I'll be reading your story; yet when I found out that there were orcs and ogres in this short story I immediately cringed and prepared myself for the worst. The simple fact that this short story had fantastical elements made me assume that it was going to be, for lack of a better term, terrible.
I've often noticed the same sort of double-standard with my views on gaming culture; I like to talk about games, and would preferably decorate my room with gaming posters, but if I meet someone who has done so, when they start to talk about video games with me, I immediately push them away. I assume that they're too geeky to want to hang around with. All of this while I have daily conversations about Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a game that epitomizes gaming culture (MARIO VS SONIC), with my roommate.
The worst part is that I have yet to be proven wrong.
The short story, while a great effort on the writer's part and I applaud their courage for submitting it (I have yet to submit anything myself, even anonymously), was not good at all. It didn't make me question anything, I didn't want to know who any of the characters were, or even what was happening. Worst of all, those fantastical elements were entirely unnecessary for the larger story, and even if they were they were never explained, the author neglects to mention what an Orc or an Ogre is at all, I can only assume that they meant it in Tolkienian fashion.
Even the people I have pushed away (albeit not entirely intentionally), have for the most part turned out to be people I actually would not enjoy hanging out with (or whose voice grates at my very soul).
Yet I still hate this part about me and feel that this tendency to push away those who start to resemble me too much is one of the worst parts of who I am at the moment. I wish I could fully embrace my nerdiness; walk into a lecture hall dressed as Mario with a Final Fantasy ringtone one my cellphone. I hate that I feel awkward and nervous about expressing who I truly am. Hell, even on my date on VD I managed to never say a thing about video games, and they only dominate a good sixty-percent of my life. Why? I was afraid that the girl would think I was a nerd, which is what I am.
Why am I so afraid to say I'm a nerd in public? Why do I hate talking to store clerks while buying video games enough that I almost solely buy online? Why can I talk about video games nonstop with my roommates or on this blog, yet in class I'll never even bring them up with my classmates? The answer is I'm afraid. I'm afraid to commit wholly to something, to reveal a bit of who I truly am.
This summer and winter break I had, at the very least, bi-weekly café trips with my mother where we would sit down and talk for sometimes as long as three hours. These discussions were so frequent that in order to keep them going I had to start delving into more and more personal subjects, and by the end I was talking about some of my greatest fears within half-an-hour of that first cup of coffee. To be able to talk like that helped me sort out how I felt about myself a lot, and it's led (with more than a little help from my Persona 3 catharsis) to massive improvements within myself as a human being. I mean for god's sake the guy who has never even held a girl's hand outside of a classroom was able to ask someone he barely knew the name of, out on a whim. That's the kind of change that I've gone through in the last year (not-even), and these discussions were a major part of that change. I'm still growing as a person, still looking to improve myself, and while I wish I had started earlier, I'm very happy with the person I see myself becoming before I graduate next year.
I've often noticed the same sort of double-standard with my views on gaming culture; I like to talk about games, and would preferably decorate my room with gaming posters, but if I meet someone who has done so, when they start to talk about video games with me, I immediately push them away. I assume that they're too geeky to want to hang around with. All of this while I have daily conversations about Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a game that epitomizes gaming culture (MARIO VS SONIC), with my roommate.
The worst part is that I have yet to be proven wrong.
The short story, while a great effort on the writer's part and I applaud their courage for submitting it (I have yet to submit anything myself, even anonymously), was not good at all. It didn't make me question anything, I didn't want to know who any of the characters were, or even what was happening. Worst of all, those fantastical elements were entirely unnecessary for the larger story, and even if they were they were never explained, the author neglects to mention what an Orc or an Ogre is at all, I can only assume that they meant it in Tolkienian fashion.
Even the people I have pushed away (albeit not entirely intentionally), have for the most part turned out to be people I actually would not enjoy hanging out with (or whose voice grates at my very soul).
Yet I still hate this part about me and feel that this tendency to push away those who start to resemble me too much is one of the worst parts of who I am at the moment. I wish I could fully embrace my nerdiness; walk into a lecture hall dressed as Mario with a Final Fantasy ringtone one my cellphone. I hate that I feel awkward and nervous about expressing who I truly am. Hell, even on my date on VD I managed to never say a thing about video games, and they only dominate a good sixty-percent of my life. Why? I was afraid that the girl would think I was a nerd, which is what I am.
Why am I so afraid to say I'm a nerd in public? Why do I hate talking to store clerks while buying video games enough that I almost solely buy online? Why can I talk about video games nonstop with my roommates or on this blog, yet in class I'll never even bring them up with my classmates? The answer is I'm afraid. I'm afraid to commit wholly to something, to reveal a bit of who I truly am.
This summer and winter break I had, at the very least, bi-weekly café trips with my mother where we would sit down and talk for sometimes as long as three hours. These discussions were so frequent that in order to keep them going I had to start delving into more and more personal subjects, and by the end I was talking about some of my greatest fears within half-an-hour of that first cup of coffee. To be able to talk like that helped me sort out how I felt about myself a lot, and it's led (with more than a little help from my Persona 3 catharsis) to massive improvements within myself as a human being. I mean for god's sake the guy who has never even held a girl's hand outside of a classroom was able to ask someone he barely knew the name of, out on a whim. That's the kind of change that I've gone through in the last year (not-even), and these discussions were a major part of that change. I'm still growing as a person, still looking to improve myself, and while I wish I had started earlier, I'm very happy with the person I see myself becoming before I graduate next year.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
I Really Hate Valentine's Day
Thanks to my very best friend Valentine's Day, love in all of it's many forms, has been on my mind lately. While I have many, very powerful feelings on the subject personally, I don't really want to share them with the internet, so instead I'm going discuss love in video games.
Love is brought up in video games fairly often, especially within the RPG genre, but for the most part it is a very superficial love, cute and pink and with as much substance as those words imply. Actually, one of the first RPG's ever, Dragon Quest for the NES is a perfect example. In Dragon Quest it was the players goal to save the princess and then defeat the evil dragon king/emperor. After rescuing the princess she would give you an item literally called "her love" (replace "her" with the princess' actual name which I forgot), that could tell you how much experience you had left to level up and if I remember right let you save anywhere in the game (a very handy feature for that game). That was it, she had never met you before, you rescue her and then Whoom, she's in love with you. She has, I think, one line to that extent. While recent titles have had slightly more complex relationships (see the link in my last post), they are still quite simple. Even Persona 3, one of my favorite games, which had enough complex topics covered in it that I had an actual cathartic experience (which actually led to my date on VD which led to this discussion), had simple, woo the girl and then forget about her once she's fallen for you mechanics.
It's not just love either, friendship dynamics are almost entirely non-existant. Take Neverwinter Nights 2 for example. NWN2 is a game that prides itself on it's companion dynamics (it's a feature on the back of the box), but outside of one or two scenes that occur once you get enough companion points (by agreeing with your allies in the dialogue), there is nothing. I long for a game that creates a true companion experience, one where your allies have their own personalities and respond dynamically to the players words and actions. What I want most of all is real relationships, friendships that take a dozen of, "Mega RPG#34's 80 hours of gameplay", to foster. I want soulmates to find that are not obvious from the first cutscene.
Of course all of this wishing isn't really doing anything. Games are really much better described as simulations, so one has to simulate these interpersonal dynamics, figure out ways in order for specific hard-coded events occur from player chosen actions. Even more difficult is the writing for these things, it's not easy to make a relationship that gradually gains strength, it's much less difficult to hop on a train and have two best friends lie conveniently in the only open booth (cough*HarryPotter*cough). In my latest, and by far most ambitious project, a full campaign module for Neverwinter Nights 2, I intend to tackle this difficulty in gaming. I know that I can do a better job than Neverwinter Nights 2, it had a good start, but the designers just seemed to forget about that part of the game a third of the way through, but trying to top something with a more complex dynamic such as Ico will be a difficult test (and one that I probably won't pass, but I have to try). Probably the hardest part will be trying to figure out how to simulate the tactile experience of relationships. Ico had the magnificent aspect of the boy and Yorda holding hands, but in the NWN2 engine I can't recreate that, so I'm going to have to somehow use fade-outs and dialogue to create that physical aspect, and no I don't mean sex. Human relationships, especially romantic ones are full of body language and tactile events, I mean you can literally tell if two people are a couple by the fact that they hold hands (more true for new couples than "older" ones). This is something I have no chance of even simulating in the NWN2 game engine, so I'm going to have to imply that it's being simulated, a really awkward and difficult task to surmount.
On a slightly different subject a surprisingly large number of people have had very strong reactions to my last post, particularly my thoughts on my "date". Some of these reactions have been simple and informed, "perhaps she had a hard day at work and just wasn't all there" to the mind boggling "somehow I was a bad person for finding her boring after being the one to ask her out?" (Sorry Amanda, but I just don't get it, how was I supposed to know if she was boring or not without asking her out?). Let me make one thing clear here, I'm not burning any bridges. What I mean is that I wasn't the one to end the date, she did (had some kind of meeting with her housemates or something apparently) and I'm not avoiding her or anything, if she were to show any indications of wanting to go on another date then I would be just fine with that. Of course none of that means I may find her anymore attractive (outside of physicality), but I may understand a bit more of why I wasn't that interested in her.
I realized after some thought that I really like strong, aggressive women. I like women who want to win. These are traits that female gamers tend to have, which outside of sharing one of my biggest hobbies/interests, makes them very attractive to me. Unfortunately these are also "male" traits that most women don't share, so I'm looking for a particularly rare type of woman. Add in that I'm quite a bit shallow (though there are some interesting studies on why men care more about physical features more than women) and I refuse to date anyone I think is stupider than me. That last one is a biggie, since I'm a pretentious asshole with wayyy too much pride, I think I'm a genius, and thus I can only date another genius. So I'm looking for a physically attractive, intellectual, female gamer, yeah...
P.S. Next post I'll try and have less asides, maybe I'll just remove the parenthesis keys off my keyboard...
Love is brought up in video games fairly often, especially within the RPG genre, but for the most part it is a very superficial love, cute and pink and with as much substance as those words imply. Actually, one of the first RPG's ever, Dragon Quest for the NES is a perfect example. In Dragon Quest it was the players goal to save the princess and then defeat the evil dragon king/emperor. After rescuing the princess she would give you an item literally called "her love" (replace "her" with the princess' actual name which I forgot), that could tell you how much experience you had left to level up and if I remember right let you save anywhere in the game (a very handy feature for that game). That was it, she had never met you before, you rescue her and then Whoom, she's in love with you. She has, I think, one line to that extent. While recent titles have had slightly more complex relationships (see the link in my last post), they are still quite simple. Even Persona 3, one of my favorite games, which had enough complex topics covered in it that I had an actual cathartic experience (which actually led to my date on VD which led to this discussion), had simple, woo the girl and then forget about her once she's fallen for you mechanics.
It's not just love either, friendship dynamics are almost entirely non-existant. Take Neverwinter Nights 2 for example. NWN2 is a game that prides itself on it's companion dynamics (it's a feature on the back of the box), but outside of one or two scenes that occur once you get enough companion points (by agreeing with your allies in the dialogue), there is nothing. I long for a game that creates a true companion experience, one where your allies have their own personalities and respond dynamically to the players words and actions. What I want most of all is real relationships, friendships that take a dozen of, "Mega RPG#34's 80 hours of gameplay", to foster. I want soulmates to find that are not obvious from the first cutscene.
Of course all of this wishing isn't really doing anything. Games are really much better described as simulations, so one has to simulate these interpersonal dynamics, figure out ways in order for specific hard-coded events occur from player chosen actions. Even more difficult is the writing for these things, it's not easy to make a relationship that gradually gains strength, it's much less difficult to hop on a train and have two best friends lie conveniently in the only open booth (cough*HarryPotter*cough). In my latest, and by far most ambitious project, a full campaign module for Neverwinter Nights 2, I intend to tackle this difficulty in gaming. I know that I can do a better job than Neverwinter Nights 2, it had a good start, but the designers just seemed to forget about that part of the game a third of the way through, but trying to top something with a more complex dynamic such as Ico will be a difficult test (and one that I probably won't pass, but I have to try). Probably the hardest part will be trying to figure out how to simulate the tactile experience of relationships. Ico had the magnificent aspect of the boy and Yorda holding hands, but in the NWN2 engine I can't recreate that, so I'm going to have to somehow use fade-outs and dialogue to create that physical aspect, and no I don't mean sex. Human relationships, especially romantic ones are full of body language and tactile events, I mean you can literally tell if two people are a couple by the fact that they hold hands (more true for new couples than "older" ones). This is something I have no chance of even simulating in the NWN2 game engine, so I'm going to have to imply that it's being simulated, a really awkward and difficult task to surmount.
On a slightly different subject a surprisingly large number of people have had very strong reactions to my last post, particularly my thoughts on my "date". Some of these reactions have been simple and informed, "perhaps she had a hard day at work and just wasn't all there" to the mind boggling "somehow I was a bad person for finding her boring after being the one to ask her out?" (Sorry Amanda, but I just don't get it, how was I supposed to know if she was boring or not without asking her out?). Let me make one thing clear here, I'm not burning any bridges. What I mean is that I wasn't the one to end the date, she did (had some kind of meeting with her housemates or something apparently) and I'm not avoiding her or anything, if she were to show any indications of wanting to go on another date then I would be just fine with that. Of course none of that means I may find her anymore attractive (outside of physicality), but I may understand a bit more of why I wasn't that interested in her.
I realized after some thought that I really like strong, aggressive women. I like women who want to win. These are traits that female gamers tend to have, which outside of sharing one of my biggest hobbies/interests, makes them very attractive to me. Unfortunately these are also "male" traits that most women don't share, so I'm looking for a particularly rare type of woman. Add in that I'm quite a bit shallow (though there are some interesting studies on why men care more about physical features more than women) and I refuse to date anyone I think is stupider than me. That last one is a biggie, since I'm a pretentious asshole with wayyy too much pride, I think I'm a genius, and thus I can only date another genius. So I'm looking for a physically attractive, intellectual, female gamer, yeah...
P.S. Next post I'll try and have less asides, maybe I'll just remove the parenthesis keys off my keyboard...
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