@treave
I
will not comment too extensively (Will save against elitist rant urge: phailed) have produced a Wall of Text on what you wrote as I agree with most of what you said. I merely view it from a different perspective.
treave said:
Mrowak said:
To be honest, I don't really see it that way. Let's start with, say, Final Fantasy 7. Insipid love story, yes, baaaaaww Aeris dies, Sephiroth best villain ever!!!1!, yeah. It wasn't a very good Final Fantasy by any standards, even Final Fantasy ones. But if it sold, it was because people liked it. And if people like it, you can't blame designers for following suit. Many older jRPG fans mark FF7 as the start of the decline, rather than something to love and praise. We can get into that later, there's other stuff to bitch about right now.
No problems here. People are by nature morons (all people including myself - I am a firm believer that only through education and constant drive for self-perfection one can rise above the constraints of their own idiocy). People will buy what they like. If they like insipid emo stories they will buy them. Not necessarily because there is not better stuff out there - they are morons after all and so even if they knew there was sth different they will not test it because they only buy what they want. And what you want is x>5/10 times not what you need - on emotional, educational and social levels.
Now the developers or rather their marketing department noticed that you can earn by supplying people with what they want. That's fair enough - a basic rule of capitalism. But at the same somehow they barred the progress the introduction of new creative elements. Genuinely creative that is - not in the vein "I know let's combine a rabbit and a girl and we have rabbit girls or a man and a hawk and we have hawkmen". The reason for this is that "people might not like it". - see Square Enix or Bioware games.
I don't know about you but I have utmost respect for people who at least strive to do sth new or sth polished. Hence the games as TWitcher in spite of their many flaws (e.g. clunky combat) are always high in my book solely because they strive for greater world believability (in lore, the way characters behave, the way world reacts to your actions) whereas great many jRPGs (not all!!!) and wRPGs of these days simply do not try to do so (they will tell you that but on closer inspection it will turn out they fail - because they meant to fail - not because of unintentional errors). My diagnosis is - lazy design directed at what people want.
So it is not people's fault they get what they get. It is the fault of the designers that go for easy, lazy route that mediocre jap games showed them.
They do have their flaws, but attacking art-direction, of all things, still boils down to a subjective "Michelangelo is better than Japanese video-game art!" argument. Not that I'm saying you were attacking it, but it seems to be a stickler in this topic to fall back on hair, shoulder pads, belts and zippers. And no one's said those games were perfect either.
Perhaps I was too biased in saying "
it is jap games that contributed majorly to the decline". I should have said -
jap animu style is to blame for all attrocities that were inflicted on us. The only real problem is - I cannot. It is my conviction that there is nothing inherently wrong in japanese animations that should force them into being ridiculous and silly. All the same silly hair, shoulder pads, belts and zippers are the marks of negative influence yes, at least to me. I will need to think through argumentation for what I mean here so allow me to ellaborate on that some time later. One thing I can say to you now though - "
silly japanese style which is all too often misapplied and misemployed with quirkiness for the sake of quirkiness is the thing that prevents them anime based games from reaching the greatness of their BEST (by codex standards) western counterparts".
"
Actually, it would depend on which consoletard you pointed it out to. It may come as a surprise but consoletards are not a homogenous hivemind. There are those who love shooters, there are those who love moe crap like Idolmaster, there are the jRPG fanatics, the sports game fans, the Wii crowd - they may overlap but there
are distinct groups.
Point out anime games to grimdark Gears of War shooter fans and you will get snorts of derision at that "weeaboo faggotry". Anime-style games will only apply to anime fans. Most anime fans will lap up anything anime. Just like most self-proclaimed RPG fans will lap up Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect.
No disagreement here. Though it's (not) funny how ignorant people are about their own entertainment.
Think of it this way - let's pigeonhole all anime-styled games into one genre. Pretend for one instance that anime styles don't burn out your eyes or something. Then, within that one genre, anime games, the only difference you can find will be gameplay, plot and the like.
Anime style does not burn my eyes by default. It is its silly to moronic implementation that I yearn to purge with fire. From stupid art-design that denies reason (overornamental clothes, bikini armour, rabbit girls, walking shrooms etc) to lazy, childish or simply idiotic approach towards any theme and subject matter that is supposed to be more "mature".
You want cutesy art design in your game? Fine. You want it also to tackle serious issues? Well that's going to be harder. Not impossible, depending on your angle but definitely harder with the art direction you assumed. Much much harder. If you succeed I will personally take your product and say: "here motherfuckers is TEH BEST GAME EVAR". Here P:Torment is a great example- ok it didn't have cutsy art - rather it was eccentrict but perfectly tailored for the world it supported. And if you botch the job, if you're going to be juvenile, inane and stupid prepare for HELL! - this is a reaction I would like to see in everyone approaching such game. Not, "uh oh, yeah this is stupid but...". No buts. No excuses. Because when a medium is supposed to be serious it must be serious all the way. Otherwise you end up being cheesy or at best juvenile about things that by definition ought not to be childish.
I will not be surprised to find that amongst that group, you have a majority liking mainstream, mass-marketed games, and a minority playing classics, oldies, and only the really good ones (hithar RPGCodex!), and who are discerning enough to tell that many of the mainstream games aren't up to par.
After all this rambling, what I'm saying is that:
1) I do not believe the flaws you mentioned for Japanese games are inherent to the Japanese and have never existed in Western games before the Decline.
I do not believe they are inherent in them either. You could easily address them if there was will. However, there is no will because they worked before. Note "worked" as in they were good enough for the people not to throw their games away, not "worked" as in they were perfect and there is nothing to improve in them. Also note here: I focus on world consistency in the context of those flaws because this is the major gripe I personally have with jap games.
Hell, even jap animation isn't innately stupid. That is to say, when you reduce it to its main principles, before you add all panty-shots, corniness, quirky just to seem creative, not to be truly innovative etc. which is predominant and became something of their trademark here in the west. Bad fame is bad.
2) Even amongst "consoletards", there are people who can discern between a good console game and a bad console game. This applies to all groups of people, including anime fans. As usual, the discerning crowd are a minority. (inb4allanimeisshit)
Clarification: when using term "consoltard" I mean a person who owns a console and takes everything the hype throws at them uncritically. Other than that we are in agreement.
3) It therefore stands to reason that discerning ability and cognitive dissonance is not something exclusive to anime-game liking consoletards. It even applies to the Codex - just look at the hordes of people claiming The Witcher is the best RPG since Arcanum.
For the reasons mentioned above I take the Witcher's not so quite successful attempt at being an RPG than any japanese game - even SMT:Nocturne. If the latter strived to be as consistent as TWitcher, Planescape or Arcanum without being hamfisted about it I could reconsider it. Well KalosKagathos's lp will show if it improves later on.
4) Finally, you really do have problems suspending your disbelief - the hallmark of a beat-em-up is its action. Not its plot. The Codex usually comes down hard on anyone saying they couldn't enjoy PST because the combat is total shit, despite the plot - but we still acclaim it as fitting of codex high :monocle: standards. There are even pages of justifications that the combat in PST really isn't as bad as it seems, that if you think it's bad you just don't know how to play it, etc. Sounds familiar.
Here we misunderstand each other. I have no problem playing beat'em ups. They are awesome and I don't care at the least about their story as long as they provide interesting enemies to... well... beat up. At least so long as nobody approaches me at tries to point me out how awesome the story is - no one at the Codex did that, to my relief - I will not criticise them for being good for what they are. Yet, I will verbally steamroll any design decision taken from say DMC 3 mindlessly and applied to a game that hypes itself up as "grimdark, mature" as these two words and DMC 3 are mutually exclusive (unless by grimdark you mean architecture and colour pallate).
Also combat in PS:T is utter shithe but the game is still awesome beyond belief - that is hivemind's consensus. It would be more awesome with ToE combat, but hell you can't have everything.
One last thing: could you highlight to me what exactly do you mean by "suspension of disbelief". I would like your opinion on that - just for sake of supporting my own arguments better.
to pinpoint similarities.
, setting (hurt by cutesy art-design... and probably many other things) are visceral elements that serve as an excuse for overlooking critical flaws in everything (combat, art-style + more). In effect we get vicious circle of warped logic. Even the Great gods of cCaos could not think of anything as twisted and evil as that.
:elitist_scum: 
