Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
from what i remember
the start of the game has you awakening, from being thrown down into a pit and landing on top of a pile of corpses that were there to be incinerated alongside you
and then you go out and you have to fight a bunch of evil creatures who are trying to kill everything
and then you actually fail to save them, and everyone dies
and then the first quest you get outside involves an elf being beaten and then lying on the ground, only nobody is willing to lift a finger to help because everyone hates elves
Bright and cheerful fantasy!
I think Alex was talking about visual aesthetic rather than narrative. Mirai Nikki has a bright and vibrant aesthetic which serves in contrasted to the loads of fuckery going on.
Bright? Yes. Cheerful? No.
then
World of Warcraft
Blue Dragon
TOR
Pokemon
a lot of others that people tell me are bright and cheery but i haven't played
man
Kingdoms of Amalur was so fun to play
that i completely overlooked how cynical the game is
From what I played it felt like Baby's First Elder Scrolls.
it feels nothing like TES
it's more like WoW
The combat system was far more dynamic than either of those.
yeah, but the hotkeys and everything were more like WoW than TES
I think that's kind of a given in faggy anime animes, although not always. It's less common in Western media, which is why KoA gives me reason to pause for a bit, and consider what they were going for. The easiest way to do this would be to play the game, but then again I've just shelled out on some books and Tales of Symphonia, so it'll have to wait (if I ever play it).
All the same, it just seems kind of weird to me that they'd get an established writer and place the WoW aesthetic over the top of it. From what I've heard, the core gameplay is pretty easily abusable and most of the features I saw advertised were based around the epic heroic combat stuff you could do.
I've also heard it compared to Fable, although I've played that particular game. What allowed Fable to work, I think, is how it pointed at itself, laughed, and revelled in its own cliche -- right down to having a "hero academy", as though a hero is a technical job rather than an inherently democratic social descriptor.
^^True. As was the progression from area to area.
It might just be my inherent bias against traditional western fantasy games lately.
I'd like to play KoA someday, but I'm going to wait until it's 20 bucks.
also malk and alex why can't i see your avatars
yep
fable 2 had nothing of the sort
the writing is good
sort of like, what would happen if you got an established novel writer, then paired him together with a decent game designer and said "Okay, look, we want you to write a good story in the context of a video game" and he was like "Lol okay"
if you're looking at the game to provide challenging gameplay, though, you're going to be disappointed
it's not that type of game
it's very much a 'you're the hero and you can do wtf ever' sorta game
and that
because it's too expensive here
^^^^ I don't think there are many traditional Western fantasy games out there at the moment, at least for a particular definition of "traditional". I'm not really sure what it means, 'cause it's different for different people. One person will tell you that Skyrim is highly traditional for its relationship to foundational, first-person PC dungeon crawlers, but others take the team-based combat of Baldur's Gate as traditional. Then you've got stuff like The Witcher and its sequel, which aren't exactly traditional in a gaming sense, but heavily, heavily traditional in a folklore sense.
It's a pretty difficult definition to pin down, but what I kind of just don't feel as though there are traditional Western fantasy games out on the market. Again, though, this could come down to my bias in favour of history and how fantasy games tend to emulate post-Gygax fantasy rather than folklore. I don't exactly have the most unbiased perspective.
Actually, it's kind of funny. Japanese fantasy games based on European concepts don't often feel the need to mix the fundamental concepts of much of the folklore up because it's exotic to them. So sometimes, a Japanese fantasy game will actually capture the "feel" I'm after more successfully, being something between a fairy tale and a work of contemporary fantasy.
^^ I really appreciated the original Fable for its whimsy, so it's sad to see that it's been lost. It cracked a good collective joke at its own genre while ironically being pretty broken itself, at least in some ways. That sort of just made it a more complete product, though.
-Set in totally-not-medieval-Europe
-Elves and dwarves and whatever
-Magic is a thing (how common it is varies)
i liked fable 2
^^ Right, in a narrative sense. But what about in a mechanical sense? There's some reasonable diversity in RPG mechanics, from the single-character, real-time gameplay of Skyrim to the hybrid-style turn-based team combat of Dragon Age. Both of these might be considered "traditional", but they're a world apart in terms of actual game experience.
^ Unfortunately, I haven't really played it. It looks interesting, though, and as far as I gather it actually takes a step a moves into the Renaissance. More fantasy games should do that, I think.
well
guns are just beginning to exist
but the game's more of a traditional fantasy
you start off as a penniless urchin, and then your sister (who you might have actually come to like, as she's been given some characterization) is killed and you're shot off a tower, and you barely survive, and you're carted off to live as a gypsy until you're in your late teens, and then you get to go around and collect the other Heroes, because Heroes is a title and they're reborn, and then you get to kill the big evil dude, only you're too late and he's already killed a lot of people building his big evil towermabob, and then BAM you can choose to get your dog back or resurrect all those people or get a berjillion gold.
^^ But it's not just character building alone. There's a lot of different ways to deal with the "requirements" of an RPG. As noted, games like Dragon Age try to deliver the experience of a full D&D party; games like Skyrim aim to be more dungeon-crawly.
^ im getting my damned dog back
Except that those other things aren't actually requirements of an RPG.
Sorry, I'm derailing into my belief that the concept of genres is (partially) bullshit. I'll start a different thread for that when I'm not on my phone.
I'm just tired of elves and dwarves.
Or rather tired of hippie elves and miner dwarves.
if you get your dog back
you can also get your wife/husband back
he killed my wife ;-;
^^^ No, but they're traditional expectations, and that's what our current shenanigans are about.
^ when your dog kills your wife
is the biggest tragedy
That sounds about right.
^^^^ *CHK* she killed my dog *CHK* da-dadaDAAA! | "mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmkay."
There's also the fact that JRPGs have tended to focus more on story than setting details, which is more consistent with how fairy tales work--plot focus, and just enough setting to hold the plot in place.
Yeah, JRPGs do work on a significant level of base assumption, and it's a part of the endearment factor for me.