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Not to defend this fully since there was no tutorial to indicate this, but you can hold the Circle button to skip cutscenes.
Really?!? Wow. That sure would have been nice to know! How did you figure it out?
Games like Breath of Fire 3 & 4 are still a couple of the best-looking JRPGs ever. Trails from Zero / Trails to Azure look better than any of the Trails of Cold Steel games, despite (or rather, because of) the latter switching to stiffly-animated 3D models. Trails through Daybreak is just just finally starting to have as good a graphical style as the Trails series did a decade ago when it used 2D sprites.
Yes, BoF 3 has been my go-to example of doing it right for a long time now. Look at how much better Ryu, Nina, Garr and all the rest look compared to the ugly, blocky horrors that its better-known contemporary, Final Fantasy VII, tried to pass off as "human." But that was on a platform that didn't have the hardware to do 3D human bodies well. Even FFVIII's lauded realism doesn't hold up *particularly* well with age.
I think the thing that really threw me was the campfire scene. Early on, in the first dungeon, Seign and Nowa are sitting around a campfire talking. The fire is a beautiful particle emitter that's throwing off dynamic lighting, casting flickering lights that are reflected by the stone in complex, very modern PBR shading. And then we have these two blobs of blocky pixels sitting there feeling _completely_ out of place in that scene, especially because they don't light properly at all, due to being flat squares as far as the 3D renderer knows. It just looked really, *really* bad.
And that's already where you took the wrong turn. Not the same but reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever, a game that came out years after it should have, and people hold it to standards of the late release. Including but not limited to ignoring that "modernising" the game would have tkane even more time. That said, more to this case, I'm pretty sure that for everyone who wants all the QOL features, there's one who DOESN'T want them (Hi, it me, I'm doesn't).
Your opinion. Perfectly fine for you to have an opinion, whether it's that or any other opinion. But other people have other opinions. Whether the game *is* or *is not* good, is not for you to decide for everyone. Nor is it for anyone else to decide for you whether it is or not.
You may not have heard of it, but Octopath Traveller made WAVES. Besides, there have always been games like this but they have really poppep much much more since that. I could give you a bunch of game names but it would take time to sift through my library & wishlist. Plus it's mostly indies so not too different from this but I know people generally don't think to highly of indies despite them doing some heavy lifting for an industry that firmly sits on its fat ass full of microtransactions and season passes, right on the backs of shooters, shooters, more shooters, even more shooters, yet even more shooters, and The Legend of Zelda. So, you know, indies should get more respect overall.
You're not seeing the forest for all the trees. It's a deliberate design choice. What you perceive as some imaginary punch in your face has been a staple feature in gaming ever since. Hiding stuff where the sun won't shine, I mean camera won't swing. You get the idea. Leaving stuff to your imagination and desire to eplore on your own is kind of a virtue that got lost in the see of map pop ups and pings that everyone pretends to hate when Assassin's Creed makes you climb that next bloody tower and don't they friggin DARE to hold the players' hands! But also devs are total jerks if they don't give every collectible and other item their very own in-game guide PLUS a huge billboard that says TREASURE HERE WINK WINK. Because as everyone knows, nobody talks to non quest npc that all of course have to have that yellow exclamation mark over their head and if you don't get all the deets in the quest log then F THOSE DEVS, like seriously who do they think they are making their game and making people talk to npcs just to pile up the neceesary clues for the course of action. Yes I am being super duper sarcastic but if it's any consolation, this isn't about you personally, this is gamers in general (even worse if it's Gamers™ though).
tl;dr: design choices, they are made for a reason. I'm just thinking of Grandia for example, I never had issues with the game but just now googling camera stuff to be sure I see A LOT of people acting like the camera personally attacked them. It's hilarious honestly. Makes me want to yell all the move shouts at people. "V SLASH!" "GO! GO! PUFFY!"
That's video game logic for ya. That's why your charactes can die (or pass out/get incapacitated/whatever) in battle as often as they want but if it's in a cutscene you can only hope they get revived in another or it's the end of that road.
Depending on how you look at things, this is probably the same for every game to at least some extent. I'd have to have played the game to know or judge whether or not how much on purpose that is. But from the top of my head I would say it's a good thing. Games making people all powerful heroes to satisfy their power fantasies...maybe not for you, but it is also pretty boring to me. Not being the driving force in a universe could mean many different things, like trying to make you realise that small things can make a difference, or that you don't have to be THE great hero to do good, and so much more.
Same, but with your comment. The following paragraph may feel counter intuitive, but since I haven't seen it all myself I'm going with what you said, that there's no "debate" over his actions and whatnot. Aka I'm just guessing the following bad example does not apply here.
You're looking too much at the surface of things. It's one of my main gripes with asian devs, that there is always some super genocidal lunatic but they're trying to make me feel for them because they have a point here or there...
No. Just. No.
In Final Fantasy War of the Visions the character closest to wearing a nazi uniform (Barale, look him up if you want) is talking about his lack of desire to kill right after obliteration a town because they *wanted* to fight. And that's just one example. And whether or not you've heard this sentence before but, "You don't hand it to the nazis". Of course this is just a sentence, not one of the laws of physics that always apply to everything (considering normal conditions on our planet, etc). Like, nobody complained about that in The Big Lebowski because it was just a punchline.
Suikoden II didn't have much of a "debate" over Luca either, or Jowy. iirc they even skipped past that for reasons. Though the bottom line is that both tragically had the same goal but thought to reach them via diametrically opposed paths. I have a headcanon version of Suikoden II where Jowy never parts with the group. It works perfectly without it. If Konami wants to hire me writing it I'm all ears, even if it's just for something like NG+ with an alternate story or whatever. You don't have to change much of the main story but you have so much potential for other scenes.
As for Marisa, is she so wrong? If you're a guardian of something etc you can't just give that kind of stuff to everyone just because "that would be fair", it's a ridiculous take that's neither here nor there, but just to drive the point home, imagine giving world altering powers to power hungry genocidal lunatics. You know, the main plot of most of these good vs bad stories revolve around one crazy mofo tampering with powers they don't understand/can't handle and the whole friggin world suffers because of them. Not gonna "debate" about this more because it would go all over the place. Just remember Spider Man. Great Power, great responsibility. That's also why you shouldn't give a bunny metamorphical powers, it's just whacky, or looney, if you will.
Part of this is probably going to get touched on in the story DLCs. For the rest I would also attribute this to the paradox of handholding. You're not supposed to have everything served to you in easily digestible bits...or actually, you are. Because you're getting the characters served on a silver platter. Right in your face. But you are again looking for the wrong clues, forest and trees you know. The characters are/seem to be rather condensed instead of giving everyone an info dump side story about how important (or not) they are where and why and whatnot.
I think that's where I agree the most with you. But characters have different qualities, some just aren't that good, but it's not about everyone being the greatest, or sometimews not even great at something. That's something that many games these days forget though, especially all the gacha games with their predatory business models. You would probably get the most out of these kinds of things if you treat every character as a flavour bit. I usually play with the characters I like the most, not the ones who are best. Every jerk will play with the best team, do I want to play like everybody else or do *I* want to play the game the way *I* like? If I just follow the next best guide and tier lists, why not let some AI run the game for me or why play the game in the first place when I can just watch a playthrough?
Most of your stuff is a more a peeve than an objective problem. You should just accept that you have an opinion that does not lose worth just because it's not "objective". Proclaiming one's opinion is an objective truth is silly to say the least. That said, one thing that's very very JP dev, is bring foreign terminology, nomenclature or other stuff into the mix. It's a typical quirk, or trope if you will, personally I'm a fan of literary/linguistic additions for funsies. You know how funny it is to me that Hauser in Suikoden II is basically the only black dude and the name is probably a German lent one? Haus = house. Or games like Einhänder, Herzog, Panzer Dragoon, Ehrgeiz, just to name a few.
That again is your view. Nothing more to say about it than I have earlier, ie for everyone thinking your way there is probably one if no more who are on the opposite side of the fence. You see it this way, other people see it differently. Neither yours nor my opinions trumps anybody else's, obvious trolls and the like aside.
Gawd I hope I didn't mess up the formatting here, if you find typos you can keep them. Edit: I only messed up one quote, WOOHOO!
Your first mistake is taking for granted that that mess of a game "should have" been released at all. 😛
I'm pretty sure that the ratio of people who *do* want to waste additional hours slogging through unskippable cutscenes and animations, long loading screens, and slow menus to those who *don't* want to lose all that time is nowhere near 1:1!
"Perfectly fine for you to have an opinion," he says, before proceeding to attempt to tear apart every opinion I stated. Huh.
A bit of effort put into polishing their games would go a long way towards getting indies that respect. Look at the indie games that *do* get a lot of respect; they get it because of the high degree of attention to detail their developers put in!
It's a *bad* design choice, one that developers have known is bad for a long time now.
Where did I say that? Please don't put words in my mouth.
...huh? What are you even talking about? And why does it have nothing to do with the subject at hand? My complaint is that the locked camera actively impedes the "desire to explore on your own," since you can literally only look exactly where the developers point your view. Is that not the precise opposite of exploring on your own?
And as early as Final Fantasy V, game developers have been pretty self-aware about that particular bit of video game logic. FFV predates Suikoden by 12 years, so what's the developers' excuse here?
Fair enough, but at least some degree of illusion of choice has basically been table stakes for RPGs ever since Deus Ex. It's kind of surprising how well they made JC Denton able to make choices that *feel* meaningful even though barely anything you can do actually has any significant impact on the plot. Here, the only meaningful choice is something that's not signposted in any way until all of a sudden you get blindsided with the bad ending because you didn't realize you were on a deadline.
I actually agree with you, with the point you're making here. Let evil villains be evil villains! But that's not the point I was making; the problem I have is that the idea that's actually good is the *exclusive* province of the villains, with no good guy anywhere seeing the obvious benefits in what Aldric is trying to accomplish, and one of your main "heroes" taking the severely evil position that the benefits of magic should be kept away from the general public. Having that put on the characters that are supposed to represent me in this story honestly made me feel dirty.
And who appointed her a guardian? By what authority? What right do these self-proclaimed Guardians have to act as gatekeepers of magic in the first place?
Not too hard to imagine; just look at history. This game — the early parts in particular — have enough parallels to the setup of WWII that I think it's a worthwhile analogy. The Nazis *did* have world-altering powers, like the machine gun, the Panzer, and the fighter plane. They were defeated because their opponents had them too! Even in matters of warfare, democratizing and dispersing power rather than keeping it concentrated in a few hands always seems to lead to the best outcomes.
Maybe I was just spoiled by Mass Effect, but its Codex was a brilliant mechanic for dealing with this issue. Any lore you care to know about the galaxy, its inhabitants, and the issues you're dealing with, was all right there for you to look up at any time, on your own time and at your own pace rather than having to insert it into the story proper as an annoying infodump of a cutscene that you have to sit through (or skip).
I hear you. But again, the thing you're picking up on isn't really my objection. The problem I have is with lyrics that you can tell are supposed to be meaningful English, but are incomprehensible due to poor pronunciation and sound mixing. Much like the game's lore, it feels like there's something there that I'm supposed to be able to understand but it's just out of reach, and that bugs me.
So you mentioned The Big Lebowski earlier, and now you literally wrap up with a "that's just like, your opinion, man"? 🤣
As an examplary fact for this case, the game does not have many QoL features.
Period. Fact.
You having a problem with it, and I don't, those are two opposing views. The impending judgement of the game or its aspects are opinions.
I have given you plenty of viewpoints, perspectives. Gave you plenty of examples. And yet, because you keep mistaking your opinions as facts you took everything I said as an attack on you simply because I said things that you disagree with. I really don't know how much clearer I can tell you that you're allowed to have your opnion, just as much as I am and everyone else is. Neither of our opinions is the gold standard. Just because I say for example that I think a free camera isn't necessary, doesn't mean that you are not allowed to think it is.
To make one point more clear, you are not speaking for everyone else, I am not either. I tried to take the somewhat diplomatic approach by saying there's possibly a 50/50 ratio. I might be wrong. You might be wrong. We might both be wrong! Big whoop. Being wrong isn't the end of the world.
But what can be said with 100% certainty, is that the number of people who want/ed a game more reminiscent of Suikoden, is not zero. Likewise, the number of people who want/ed a more modern take is not zero either. Fact is, no matter which path the devs had taken, there would be people disappointed.