Legion said:
I'm still wondering what exactly happened between the release of Xenogears and Xenosaga that caused this attention to detail to suddenly drop out of sight as if nonexistent. Each area of Xenosaga has approximately the same amount of ambient light, stale and often "dead" enviroments.
I agree entirely. Xenosaga consisted mostly of cold, sterile, metal environments with little personality. I certainly hope that's not what our living areas look like in the future! Xenosaga's cover is blown, however, when you reach the Kukai foundation. This is supposed to be a 20th-century European style town, and yet it feels just as dead as the numerous space ships, construction facilities, space stations, etc. that you explore in the rest of the game! It was very disappointing. Xenosaga managed to lose the "I'm exploring a real town and interacting with real inhabitants" feeling that Xenogears mastered so well. Xenosaga 2 improved this a lot, but it still falls short of the precedent Xenogears set 6 years ago.
All in all my greatest beef with the Xenosaga beastiary, characters and weaponry lies in their relative assumed or known power. The Gnosis by their description are quite uber - infact to the point of being almost Godlike on certain occassions - and yet all one has to do is use the Hilbert Effect (a ludicrously overpowered technique in and of itself) followed by the deployment of conventional weaponry to kill them. Huh? Its almost the equivalent of killing Superman by throwing Kryptonite paint on him and busting a cap in his ass. The story writers have made the gnosis so ludicrously powerly and so numerous that any successful attempt to kill them would appear equally ridiculous and necessarily so. The best example of this has to be humanity's intergalatic equivalent to the Orkin man's bug spray: the Damerung's subspace sonic wave cannon the Rhine Maiden. If any scene in the game got a "WTF?!" response from me it was when the Deus Ex Machine Damerung appears, plays cosmic repo man and clears the solar system of Gnosis with one massive blast.
This is another great point. The Gnosis were pretty silly looking, and looked even goofier the way they would hobble around clumsily, yet they are supposed to be the ultimate threat to man's position in the universe. The fact that you can whup them without breaking a sweat once Kos-Mos joins you doesn't help the illusion, either. The Gnosis completely lacked that feeling of "woooooOOOAHHH SHIT!" that you'd get when you ran into, for example, your first metroid, one of the weapons in FF7, an alien in one of the Alien movies, etc. The sad thing is, you can tell this is exactly what they were trying for with the Gnosis. They just failed miserably at it.
To be honest Japanese voice actors are often considerably better at conveying proper inflection. I'm not quite sure what explains this phenomenon but I can pose to you several examples: Xenosaga, Star Ocean III, and Grandia I/II. Proper inflection can go a long way towards mending the mindnumbing nature of poorly spoken dialogue. Take into consideration Dracula's insipid rant at the end of Castlevanian SOTN; "What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets!" All this achieved was cementing my desire to kill him. I imagine though when Malraux spoke those same words they sounded far more inspired.
I never realized the Japanese voice acting was superior (although that's certainly not hard to believe). I wish games would give you the choice between Japanese and English voices. Even if I would need to read the subtitles, I think this would be a great idea.
However, I think the pacing of the conversations is just as much of an issue as the inflection. Star Ocean 3 and Radiata Stories are the examples that stand out the most, although it seems that most RPGs suffer from this to some extent. In these games, there is a very awkward pause in between each line spoken. It feels more like someone reading the lines off the screen to you than an actual conversation. It gets especially ridiculous when one character is intterupting another, yet there is nearly a 1 second gap in between their lines. When you hear something like:
"I wish we could help her but . . ."
[1 second gap]
"BUT NOTHING!"
it completely kills the effect. I guess what bothers me most is the fact that this is a minor technical issue to solve, and it damages the suspension of disbelief so much, yet there is so little attention paid to the quality of spoken dialogue scenes that nobody has bothered to fix it yet.
You might wish to extend this complaint to incorporate obligatory cute critters as well. I spent half of Xenogears wondering what compelled the developers of Xenogears to include Chu Chu and the other half kicking ass with her as she was apparently the most powerful "gear" in the game.
Ah yes, Chu Chu. Quite possibly the most annoying character ever conceived.
Xenogears spoilers I did like the plot development about how the Chu Chus were the dominant life form before the Eldridge landed and humans took over, and about how they had genetic limiters inserted to keep them from being a threat, and were almost completely exterminated. However, I wanted to stab Chu Chu in the face whenever she opened her mouth, and the scene with giant Chu Chu on the cross has to be one of the most ridiculous moments in RPG history.
End spoilers
Can you list some more "obligatory cute critters" from RPGs though? I am having trouble thinking of more, possibly because my hatred of Chu Chu burns so strongly that every other example is trivial in contrast. I will gladly include this cliche if it is common enough, though.
Did SOIII have a plot? I must have missed it.
That's exactly my point. SO3 had one of the worst, most nonsensical, and slowest-moving plots in RPG history, and yet it felt the need to shove its poor excuse of a plot in your face at every opportunity with some of the most banal dialogue scenes I've ever seen. You practically get these "plot development sequences" every time Fayt wants to tell you he decided to go take a dump and Cliff wants to tell you what he had for breakfast.
This problem is the most prominent in SO3 and Radiata Stories (stupid Tri Ace), but I think it is becoming a problem in a lot of recent RPGs. These games have painfully cliched or nonexistant plots, yet they try to make their empty shell of a plot the centerpiece of the whole game.
I wouldn't call Shadows Hearts or Xenosaga brilliant in any respect.
I wouldn't either, by any stretch of the imagination. It just seems like these are the two most common counter-examples that come up whenever there is a discussion over whether RPGs are dying.
