Comments on: Editorial: Fool escapades of the week

By: Breaka666

Breaka666 — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:12:02 +0000

@NooB & EvilPaul – lazy ain’t the word. incompetent would be more suitable. that was a lack of direction from Toriyama was all.

@Darth – when you say traditional what do you mean? from what I’ve heard the battle system was fairly unique.

@Lane – couldn’t agree more, especially when I see gems like Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm and Valkyria Chronicles.

By: SiliconNooB

SiliconNooB — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:10:55 +0000

It wasn’t a mistranslation, they have stated that they can’t do towns on multiple occasions, but I always read the claim as “we can, we’re just too bone lazy to do so”.

By: evilpaul

evilpaul — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 06:43:29 +0000

Mario RPG was a pretty fun 16-bit RPG! I don’t know how well it holds up today, but I liked it at the time. I think it may be in Virtual Console for people with Wiis that missed it.

The whole “we can’t do HD towns” thing from Toriyama in FF13 I find utterly vexing. Was it some poorly translated interview or something? To do architecture you can literally copy and paste shit everyone else has done. Need some people to do NPC duty of “go down the hole outside town; kill monster at the bottom; bring me the legendary MacGuffin”? Tell the dev team to pirate a copy of the popular 3D people modeling software and apply medieval/futuristic scifi/generic anime clothing as needed. Aside from wanting to make a *literally* linear game I’m not sure what the problem is.

By: SiliconNooB

SiliconNooB — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:43:56 +0000

@Lane: Resonance of Fate looked half way decent (though that was mainly art style IMO). Lost Odyssey also looked quite good, and made Last Remnant’s use of UE3 look like the proper wank that it was.

-My only complaint about the Last Remnant battle system was the wild spikes in difficulty, which made it feel like the 1980′s throwback that all Kawazu’s games turn out being.

By: SiliconNooB

SiliconNooB — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:33:15 +0000

-People forget that SE are the one JRPG developer not able to code towns in HD, I think that fairly qualifies them as inept.

By: Lane

Lane — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:04:22 +0000

No, Japanese games routinely mess up their engines. Even native East Asian engines are crappy compared to the Western ones. I don’t know what it is, but find me a Japanese RPG that looks half as good as a Western game and I’ll shit you a gold brick. Aion comes the closest, and although the actual armor textures and stuff are well-designed, in motion, the graphics just never look quite as good as a Western game.

This is and of itself is not a problem. If more JRPGs went the way of Tales of Vesperia and just used cel-shaded graphics, I think that’d work better. Japan does animation really, really well, better than Western studios. But computer graphics just aren’t their fortre. A stylized-looking Last Remnant with a revamped control scheme that is not so “deep menu-based” would’ve made the game playable, maybe even fun.

Seriously, Japan, it’s 2010. Deep-menu based systems were a necessity 20 years ago. Not now. We’ve got more than six buttons on controllers now.

By: darthgibblet

darthgibblet — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:31:41 +0000

To be fair, I get the impression that Last Remnant is more the outlier than the norm in terms of SE’s coding ability. Say what you will about FFXIII, the game looked freaking gorgeous.

Also, @Breaka: I played Chrono Trigger for the first time last year (DS version) and it does hold up pretty well. I don’t have the nostalgia everybody else does for the game, but it if you’re ever in the market for a traditional, not overly-long JRPG, I’d recommend it.

By: Breaka666

Breaka666 — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:36:09 +0000

Oh right, Last Remnant. considering that they we’re using technology that they weren’t familiar with I kinda overlooked that little fiasco. but yeah, damn, that was a mess up.

@Oyashiro – far too many new games in my backlog. maybe if I become rich and can buy whatever I want I’ll try it out.

By: SiliconNooB

SiliconNooB — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:06:15 +0000

There was also Tales of Phantasia, Terranigma, and Star Ocean. All were impressive in one way or another for 16bit JRPGs, I guess it depends on what you define as great …

By: DanChiSao

DanChiSao — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:13:26 +0000

@Lane I think Mario RPG and Lufia II were both pretty good RPGs that came out later. Neither were on the level of Chrono Trigger, which was the last great 16-bit RPG.