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Post by Deleted on May 22, 2020 21:39:53 GMT -5
I meant to comment on Radiata Stories. Yeah, it has a plot, but the game definitely loses it for quite a bit of time. It feels pretty meandering. It's also one of the first real disappointments I had from tri-Ace. It's not terrible, but I thought even Star Ocean 3 was better overall, despite the massive difficulty spike and incredibly dumb plot twist. Oh, hey, yeah, talk about dumb writing. That was... uh, weird. I'm of the opinion that story can matter, but it doesn't have to. It really depends on the genre. You can even have a platformer or fighting game have a great story, but in the end I don't know if it matters too much there. It's kinda like folks wanting a better story out of Castlevania. Nah, I don't care, just give me a flimsy excuse to go beat down Dracula and I'm good. In that case, the story should be more to drive the atmosphere than anything. I will say, though, that I think there are works of writing (or artistry, anything, really) where they're long and obtuse and "deep", and they get critical acclaim. I'm sure some deserve it, but I do think some critics enjoy being the only ones that "get it", as opposed to the lowly plebs that just aren't sophisticated enough to understand. I'm reminded many years ago of a segment 60 Minutes did on an art display/auction, and one of the paintings was a blank canvas with a red dot in the middle. Another just spelled "RAT" down the center repeatedly. These things sold for crazy money, and I think it was mostly to assuage the ego of the buyers more than anything. To his credit, Morley Safer flat out said he didn't get it either. The Star Ocean 3 thing is the result of plot twists being overvalued in games writing, particularly around that time. Coming up with plot twist that's both genuinely surprising and not completely idiotic is a really fine line to thread, because the more sense it makes, the easier it is to see coming, unless an author is just that sneaky. As for the last part, a lot of it has to do with art critics (including the more self-serious film critics) constructing elaborate theories and schools of criticism that may place a very specific aspect of art above all others or pretend to be able to fit all of art into some narrow analytic grid. The more popular of those notions are taught in schools, which means that even artists who take them a bit too seriously can get lost in them and produce works that only mean anything or have any sort of value to people who fully subscribe to said notions. A big thing among critics, for example, is art that comments on art (or that they believe comments on art). Which is why you could just write the word "NOTHING" on a canvas and it would probably fascinate some of those people. Is it really nothing, if it says it is? Can nothingness be self-aware? Or if it's intended to declare the canvas below as nothing, does it not paradoxically become something, the media for a message? You could could go on and on, if you like those sorts of pointless thought games. Ultimately, while some of it is down to simple pretension, I wonder if certain critics don't just come up with those theories because they get bored of the subject matters their entire professional lives are built around. As a side note, plot twists are overrated. It's the writing equivalent to a jump scare. I get it in detective novels and their ilk, where it makes sense to keep the audience guessing as to 'whodunnit,' but anticipation, empathetic characters, and deep introspection are way more interesting (and difficult) to pull off.
The problem is that now it pervades everything. People hating on trailers for showing too much despite studies showing that more information (to a point) leads to more enjoyment. But no one wants to enjoy a movie. They want to be shocked, wowed, awed, and gripped instead. And now we have Michael Bay and M. Night. Great.
It's even in academic writing. My students don't really understand a "thesis" anymore because they want the reader to be lead on the same journey they had in discovery. They want their "discovery" to be surprising, even if it's merely arguing for the same old things we've known for years. The result though is that it leads to confusion, because research/analysis papers aren't whodunnits! (And they're nowhere near as provocative and enlightened as they think they are.)
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Post by Xeogred on May 22, 2020 21:47:39 GMT -5
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Post by toei on May 22, 2020 21:57:45 GMT -5
@opwuaioc I agree. Plot twists are impressive when you're a kid or a teenager, but eventually, you mostly get over them (unless they're just incredibly effective, which is very rare). Also, a plot twist only works once. It's funny to me that a few movies tried to reproduce the Fight Club plot twist; the only way it can work at all is if the viewer hasn't seen that movie first.
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Post by Sarge on May 22, 2020 23:50:40 GMT -5
That being said, I liked the plot twist in KOTOR.
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Post by Ex on May 23, 2020 0:18:58 GMT -5
I enjoy believable plot twists. Deus ex machina styled ones not so much.
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Post by anayo on Jun 3, 2020 11:15:23 GMT -5
I think you can only say that in the Air Force. For some reason airmen can use the title “sir” with both NCOs and officers. But if you called an Army drill sergeant “sir”, he would say, “Don’t call me sir, I work for a living.” (same goes for “ma’am” and female pronouns). They take the delineation between enlisted and officers very seriously. If someone in uniform disregards that it would be a huge faux pas. Incidentally, one other detail that amused me in Opposing Force was that the protagonist just happens to be carrying night vision goggles. I told an active duty friend about it. His response was, “Oh yeah sure I totally just carry night vision goggles around with me all the time. Sounds legit.” Issuing equipment is a huge deal, especially expensive night vision goggles (or NODs, night obervation device). The troop in question would have to sign something to take the NODs from his unit’s supply and he’d be on the hook if something happened to it. It’s not unheard of for Private So-and-So to drop his NODs during field training and for the whole unit to sweep every inch of the field until 4 in the morning to find the NODs and turn them back in. The liability of a lowly corporal carrying NODs during a daytime mission seemed like flippant video game logic to me. I wasn’t indignant or anything over the lack of authenticity, it was just a weird situation that made me laugh. I really liked Opposing Force. The science fiction stuff was so creative and fun that I didn’t care about the wooden dialog. I just needed an example to show that it’s possible for video game dialog to be wooden even if gamers don’t perceive that it’s wooden. I don’t want to fixate on military customs and courtesies like that’s the end all be all of quality writing. All I meant by that was professional writers customarily research these details first. If a story was supposed to take place in the deep south, but none of the locals spoke with a drawl, and they said stuff like “youse guys” and “fuggedaboutit”, it would be apparent that the writers had not done their homework. If people in the 21st century didn’t buy games for their storytelling, I don’t think studios would go to the trouble of planning, storyboarding, voice recording, etc. in order to bring their game’s interactivity to a screeching halt with lengthy expository interludes full of scripted dialog, camera cuts, etc. under the self-congratulatory pretense that the setting, cast, or plot matter enough to warrant any of this. The time, effort, and money that goes into making video games adorn the trappings of films now rivals the cost of actual films. 21st century gamers expect that now. But gamers adulate plots that would be “eh okay” as movies or books. True, we have mediocre movies and books also, but if you were to implement that same mediocre story into a game, it’s like that would magically turn it into a masterpiece. We’re in HRG’s retro section so I can’t bring up the contemporary examples I want to (remind me in 2023), but one prominent example I can mention here is Panzer Dragoon Saga. PDS’s story is not a bonus side dish. It’s the main course. Which I find odd because PDS’s story is awful. PDS’s story has a lot of stuff that doesn’t work for me, like a central conflict that meanders and character motivations that don’t make any sense. But the most bewildering thing is when the game ends and the hero breaks the fourth wall, turning to the camera and going on a soliloquy about how you, the player, are actually God. Then he thanks you for supernaturally guiding him to complete the game. Putting to words how bad this is feels as daunting as writing a geometric proof for a single point in space. I suppose the best I can do is that this twist hearkens to the “it was all a dream” cliche. In the world of movies or books this would be a lazy, uninspired, cheap trick. Yet retro gamers praise the storytelling in Panzer Dragoon Saga. In 2004, when I first played Halo: Combat Evolved, I thought that game had such an original premise. I later read Ringworld and Starship Troopers and realized that game commits wholesale appropriation of the ideas of Larry Niven and Robert Heinlein. But it’s hard to talk about the very concepts of “appropriation of someone else’s ideas” or “cliche” without a knowledge of what has come before. From the tiny body of knowledge I formed in my amateurish efforts to learn to write fiction stories, I don’t see this “awareness of what came before” in game writing. That devil-may-care attitude felt charming to me when Contra on NES could straight up plagiarize Arnold Schwarzenegger posing with a rifle in his “Predator” movie poster. But now that games are more or less trying to be movies, and have the technology and capital to do so, it feels like wasted potential to me. It’s possible I’m just wringing my hands over things that don’t matter to most people. But I believe - naively, perhaps - that if the culture of video game development prioritized writing standards closer to that of novels or films, using the same craftsmanship standards as those fields and ditching the “it’s just a video game” mentality, then gamers would notice something had improved, even if these very gamers lacked the background to articulate exactly what had changed. I daresay even outsiders who didn’t ordinarily play games would warm up to this and gaming as a whole would benefit from it.
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Post by toei on Jun 3, 2020 12:32:19 GMT -5
anayo The story in Panzer Dragoon Saga wasn't ever anything special, and I don't know anyone (even online) who was particularly impressed by it. Most of the praise I've heard were about the setting and battle system. There's nothing wrong with that bit at the end, though, at all. "It was all a dream!" wasn't lame the first time someone did it, it became lame through overuse, and either way, it's a false equivalence. Acknowledging the player's role in a videogame is not the same as saying "none of this really happened", it's saying "this happened in part because of you". Every medium for fiction will question itself through metafiction at some point, and videogames had to acknowledge the player's involvement to do so, because it's the basis of the medium. Earthbound did something similar by addressing you directly in the final battle; an obscure SNES RPG called Dragon Squadron Danzarb had the protagonist turning towards the screen and yelling at you at the end for irresponsibly enjoying all their pains and struggles (it's the best part of the game, if only for how bold and unexpected it was for a game to chastise the player in 1994). And Panzer Dragoon Saga doesn't even take it that far; it doesn't position its fourth-wall-breaking as a plot twist at all. It just uses it as a slightly more involved version of the traditional "...and thank you for playing!" that usually appears in the end credits. It's a really weird, unimportant thing to get mad about. I agree with your point about the derivatiness of videogame writing, particularly in AAA Western games. The least inspired game designers literally describe ideas for games as "this Blade Runner-type thing, but with Terminators...", in the same way that the worst kind of indie game developers go "I WANNA MAKE MORE CASTLEVANIA". But even if I find it all a bit sad, the ability to actually "live" / play through a certain universe or story that only existed in a traditional medium before justifies the existence of these games, provided they do it well.
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Post by Ex on Jun 3, 2020 12:35:55 GMT -5
But now that games are more or less trying to be movies, and have the technology and capital to do so, it feels like wasted potential to me. Well, not all video games are trying to be movies. Some video games do attempt to be cinematic experiences. Especially AAA showboat action-adventures. I agree in general that video games could use better writing. But again I think that comparing video games to novels and films isn't a fair comparison. Novels and films aren't constrained by having to write a narrative that acts as a conduit for an interactive experience that lasts hours and hours. Also if you're looking for good writing in video games, you should be playing quality adventure games, not FPS or third person shooters. Adventure games are structured entirely around their story, rather than structuring their story around killing lots of stuff. Don't get me wrong. I'd like to see video games in general mature in their themes and tonal disposition. I'd like to play a JRPG like Persona, but instead of focusing on the lives of high school kids, it's about middle aged and retired folks.
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Post by toei on Jun 3, 2020 12:54:25 GMT -5
Ex I know it sounds like a joke, but something like Persona in a retirement home might actually be legit, especially since the supernatural aspect would allow the protagonists to overcome their physical limitations. And since Persona likes to get into the heads of its characters (literally), there'd be a lot there to explore. Regrets, pride, family, entire lives. But that's a very uncommercial idea.
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Post by Ex on Jun 3, 2020 12:58:58 GMT -5
I know it sounds like a joke, but something like Persona in a retirement home might actually be legit, especially since the supernatural aspect would allow the protagonists to overcome their physical limitations. And since Persona likes to get into the heads of its characters (literally), there'd a lot there to explore. Regrets, pride, family, entire lives to explore. But that's very uncommercial idea. Indeed, it'd be interesting. I was serious about the idea. I'd like to see Japanese RPGs that star mature adults instead of high school kids, with plots that harbor the expected gravitas actual adults deal with. Maybe there isn't a commercial demographic for this though, I don't know. I'd buy it.
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