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| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
I would have agreed with you up until maybe last year or the year before. Have you played those three games I mentioned? They're easily as interesting and involved as FF3 or Chrono Trigger. Come to think of it, FF3 was really just one major plot with a lot of little side plots - much like Oblivion.
I think the old-school RPGs felt more "epic" because they tended to drag on at times on account of all the random battles. I mean, if you finished one in 50 hours, a good 40 of them were just battles and dungeon crawls. But in retrospect, what sucked even more than the random battles and left you feeling empty at the end was the fact that there was no character development whatsoever for the protagonist. Hell, in some of the games like Chrono and the BoF series, you are quite literally a mute. But even in the slightly newer FFVII-style games, you were still cast into a very specific role, which meant no replay value at all.
In the modern PC RPGs, you still follow the same basic storyline but parts of the game and the dialog change based on how you've played so far. And where allies are involved, they're controlled by an AI, you don't have to issue commands. These are good things - they give some level of personality to the game and to the character you control. It's less like watching a really long movie and more like... well, actually being a participant.
And yes, the new-fangled ones probably have less plot development than the old-school games, but this isn't just a couple of guys drawing sprites and spewing dialog text anymore. That may have passed muster 15 years ago, but today you need graphic artists and animators and composers and actors and hundreds of man-hours just to "program" five minutes of gameplay. It's getting better as some of the off-the-shelf game engines (Unreal, Gamebryo) mature and developers don't have to spend as much time on the implementation details, but even if the acting itself was done by a computer, you'd still have to contend with space limitations.
It's just not feasible today to produce something at the same quality level as Fallout 3 with a storyline as long and convoluted as Final Fantasy VII. Some of the MMORPGs approximate this, but those suffer from the rather obvious deficiency of having no actual central plot. I'm sure we'll get there eventually - in order to leap forward you sometimes have to take a few steps back.
/longofftopicrant |
<3!!!
So im not the only one who defends ff3+ct as the all time greatest rpgs!!!!
I gave up on squaresoft after ffX for ps2(loved ff8 on my pc by the way) . Always wondered if I was missing out on the online version or anything released afterwards. But I couldn't afford the time that random battles took from my life any longer LOL and I did begin to see too much repetition, or maybe I grew up and was not impressed with the storylines any longer.
FFVII was NOT convoluted!!! it was enticing, intriguiging and the first rpg where the death of a playable characted was both shocking and unexpected!!!!
Kefka for best villain EVER!!!
Final Sephiroth battle for best armageddon battle music EVER!!!!
/endnostalgia
not ignoring the thread...
buy the xbox 360!!!its much cheaper.
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"I don't judge anyone except myself; you shouldn't either."
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