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Newer games are slower (or is it just JRPGs?)
Why do games these days have long and flashy animations for everything? This is especially annoying in JRPGs, when I just want to navigate my way quickly into menus and get through boring turn-based battles as quickly as possible in order to move the plot along.
Also, more and more text to say the same thing. Such as:
Ash found Great Ball!
being changed to
Michael found the Great Ball!
followed immediately by
Michael obtained the Great Ball.
And after a while it feels like all I'm doing, as a player, is shuttling the characters around between cutscenes, FMVs, and various other scripted events.
Do we really need that pretty swirl effect every time, when a simple 16-bit (or 8-bit) screen-swallowing effect will do, and be less painful to tolerate?
Do we really need to see a slow-mo of the character's hand-motions casting a lightning spell, every single time, or can we please just get an abbreviated representation of it, and get the damn thunderbolt over with so that we can see a quick and pretty bang and then move onto seeing how much damage it did and thinking about what to do next?
A partial pass is given to JRPGs that let me skip part of the animations. (Alternatively, ones that leave me with the area music while battling.)
A full pass is given to JRPGs that let me turn them off entirely.
Comments
Um...You seem to be using Pokèmon as an example. It has pretty consistently moved faster with each generation.
That is... better than the first. Grammatically correct.
And Pokemon does let you skip most animations, other than the getting-into-battle ones, which are used to disguise the game's loading.
Actually, Final Fantasy VII was my premiere example.
And later Final Fantasy games such as FFX also have annoyingly long animations for no good reason. You still have those long-winded battle swirls, those preparatory shots showing off the characters' and enemies designs from various angles, and those long attack animations.
Pokémon is a relatively poor example of what I'm saying, though it still has some of it, such as featuring both attacker and defender anmations in Pokémon XD rather than just a single animation in the original games.
This game also uses breaking screens to disguise loading.
The animations are there for like... game balance, IIRC.
(reposted from my previous post since this was edited in later)
And later Final Fantasy games such as FFX also have annoyingly long animations for no good reason. You still have those long-winded battle swirls, those preparatory shots showing off the characters' and enemies designs from various angles, and those long attack animations.
Pokémon is a relatively poor example of what I'm saying, though it still has some of it, such as featuring both attacker and defender anmations in Pokémon XD rather than just a single animation in the original games.
I'd say FFXIII/-2 are the fastest games in the series since the casting animations have to be real time or you'll die mid-attack. The longest is either Vanille's Death or Hope's [insert name of Hope's Full ATB here]
Though XII did have the Quickenings (which you needed to watch since you could chain) and Summon Limit Breaks.
Unchain Blades Exxiv (the most recent game I own) doesn't have long animations either, just the "UNCHAIN!" screen and a 3-8 second animation.
I think most long winded animations are either there to (as Nova said) hide loading or because of poor design.
It's only really JRPGs that are slow at all compared to older games. And even then it's mostly only a problem in SRPGs, which usually let you turn off battle animations anyway.
Yeah, a lot of active-time RPG's used animations as a way to give you breathing room to input commands, though admittedly FF7 took that and went "hey, let's have higher-level attacks that last like a minute each!"
The title of this thread should instead be "modern JRPGs are slower."
FFX and -2 have options to shorten certain in-battle animations. Which is good, because lol having to sit through about a minute of Knights of the Crap in FF7
I thought this would be about fps.
^^ You still need to watch stuff like the Holy casting and the Aeon overdrives in X-2.
Meh, nothing wrong with long attack animations, provided you can just skip 'em with a button press/turn them off per unit and they place style/serial attacks over charging animations/flashy explosions and smoke.
Example of over a minute, but the glorious brutality makes it all worth it:
@Kraken: Good point, i've tweaked it now.
Anyway, my take on flashy casting animations is that they should be unskippable the first time, but after that, leave them skippable. ESPECIALLY if they're fifteen seconds or longer.
FF7 had summons that would take over a 1 minute to complete
I've recently played King's Field (II in Japan). Holy shiiiiit is that SLOW! Demon's Souls and Dark Souls really stepped it up, lemme tell you.
A far lesser example, but Rainslick Precipice 3 felt really slow compared to Zeboyd's previous RPG's. It was just loaded with unnecessary long pauses that didn't serve any purpose before and after every action in battle.
Like, not the action order thing, but after that's stopped to let someone do their queued action, it had these long stretches of blank time on either side of the relevant bit.
Compare to Breath of Death or Cthulhu Saves the World, where fights would usually last about 10-15 seconds because things would happen immediately.