Something I Don't Get About Indie Creators

[Xarpho's Return]

That was the point in the game where I was getting pretty over it.

I feel like a map of fully interconnected areas was planned but things got cut somewhere along the way.

 

[skykiii]

That was the point in the game where I was getting pretty over it.

With or without Bennett Foddy?

...........

With all the Earthbound criticism in this thread, part of me wonders if its a case of resentment due to overexposure.

I kinda get it, but I'm coming from a different angle: I legit bought Earthbound when it was new. Despite magazine reviews I somehow felt it would be a game I liked (and my feelings were spot on), so to me a lot of people who only latched on because Earthbound became some sort of cult darling are just fakers, like Shadow the Hedgehog.

Also there's the "so many indie RPGs are basically just Earthbound" issue--I legit got recommended a trailer for a game called Oddity, which literally looks like its just Earthbound.

It's sort of a similar deal with Mega Man clones. One clone is nice. A million is "okay this is played out, please find a different game to take inspiration from (might I recommend Solstice or Equinox?)"

 

[Grub]

With or without Bennett Foddy?

I don't understand. I looked that name up because I thought it was some character from the game but it's some game developer so I'm kind of confused.

With all the Earthbound criticism in this thread, part of me wonders if its a case of resentment due to overexposure.

I played it for the first time around the same time I played most of the other snes rpgs I played for the first time back in the late 90's - early 2000's and I found it just as annoying then as the last time I tried to replay it a few years ago. If it makes you feel any better I don't really like Chrono Trigger very much either. The music and art are pretty great but I find the game itself to be kind of meh.

I kinda get it, but I'm coming from a different angle: I legit bought Earthbound when it was new. Despite magazine reviews I somehow felt it would be a game I liked (and my feelings were spot on), so to me a lot of people who only latched on because Earthbound became some sort of cult darling are just fakers, like Shadow the Hedgehog.

I do get why people like it. It is trippy and weird. I just find the gameplay to be more annoying than fun mostly. I'm kind of weird with jrpgs I care less about the story and more about the gameplay.

It's sort of a similar deal with Mega Man clones. One clone is nice. A million is "okay this is played out, please find a different game to take inspiration from (might I recommend Solstice or Equinox?)"

I haven't actually played very many Megaman clones. The only one I can really think of off the top of my head is that Bucky O'Hare nes game and that one's actually pretty fun. I know there's some Gunvolt series that's supposed to be a Megaman clone and but I've never played them. I did try some roguelike Megaman game but it got boring quick.

 

[skykiii]

I don't understand. I looked that name up because I thought it was some character from the game but it's some game developer so I'm kind of confused.

There's a game called "Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy." It was kind of a meme for awhile. Basically my autism always adds "... with Bennett Foddy" whenever I see someone say "getting over it."

If it makes you feel any better I don't really like Chrono Trigger very much either. The music and art are pretty great but I find the game itself to be kind of meh.

That's fine, and to be honest I didn't have an issue with your criticisms--they make sense to me, they're just not things I was bothered by.

I'm kind of weird with jrpgs I care less about the story and more about the gameplay.

I'm sort of the same way. I've often advocated JRPGs were the best during the 8-bit era because, among other things, back then they demanded more active engagement. Here's a reddit post I made where I explain my perspective a bit.

One thing that does not help though is I feel like if you're gonna make me interact with the story in order to hear it, you should also make it amazing and not something I could get from just watching an anime. I can sometimes enjoy a basic or not-exactly-original story (the Ys games for example) but they either have to be really fun to play or else have some other aspect that makes me willing to forgive. It helps if they're not that long, too.

I haven't actually played very many Megaman clones.

I tried one that was like, "Legend of the [Something] Witch" and it was okay. There's also one called Mega Gal, which was also okay but the sense of humor grated on me right off the bat.

Thing with Megaman is that there's already so many games in the actual series there isn't much point in cloning it--tho I do like things like Mega Man Unlimited.

If one is going to clone anything from Mega Man, it should be the Legends series. Once again I'm going with the theme of "it should be cloned because there's not many games like it."

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I legit got recommended a trailer for a game called Oddity, which literally looks like its just Earthbound.

That was literally called "Mother 4" based after misunderstanding some Itoi quote and later renamed the game to avoid legal issues.

The original release date passed over ten years ago (winter 2014) and it's the usual story—drama, developer spergouts, claims of two different games being developed simultaneously. At some point the plot/premise was leaked.

 

[Nameless One]

"Basically my autism always adds-"

 

[Grub]

One thing that does not help though is I feel like if you're gonna make me interact with the story in order to hear it, you should also make it amazing and not something I could get from just watching an anime

I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels that jrpg stories are trash anime tier stories

 

[skykiii]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels that jrpg stories are trash anime tier stories

Is that really an unpopular stance?

 

[Grub]

Is that really an unpopular stance?

I dunno. The majority of time I see anything about jrpgs they're talking about the story. A lot of jrpgs are barely games and any gameplay exists pretty much as a vehicle for cutscenes and story exposition. Whenever I see complaints about jrpgs the complaints are typically about having to actually play the game too much to get to the next story event. I mean the most common complaints about retro jrpgs are too many enemy encounters and having to fuck around and explore without much guidance. Those two things are the majority of the gameplay in a jrpg.

 

[skykiii]

I dunno. The majority of time I see anything about jrpgs they're talking about the story. A lot of jrpgs are barely games and any gameplay exists pretty much as a vehicle for cutscenes and story exposition. Whenever I see complaints about jrpgs the complaints are typically about having to actually play the game too much to get to the next story event. I mean the most common complaints about retro jrpgs are too many enemy encounters and having to fuck around and explore without much guidance. Those two things are the majority of the gameplay in a jrpg.

The JRPG fanbase has always struck me as a bit retarded on that front. I recall once, on some forum a long time ago, saying how I wish more JRPGs had actual gameplay and people got offended.

One of my memories is with a fan of Chrono Cross (not Trigger, Cross). I mentioned I found the gameplay absolutely horrid... and the guy went after me because "you're not allowed to criticize JRPGs for anything but their story!" Yes, seriously.

And yet... well as we've said, most of the time JRPG stories aren't even that good. Even games that are considered classics of the genre rarely are above something you'd find in a mid-tier anime.

 

[Pokemon Conquistador]

JRPGs didn't get horribly bad until Final Fantasy decided that the player wasn't really necessary for the game and basically had it play itself. FF also began to disappear up its own butthole, offering fanservice, fights that were just lots of flashy crap with horrid editing, nonsensical plots, and casts that consisted of schoolkids and J-Pop singers. That's when I bowed out. The genre may have become even worse today.

 

[Agarathium1066]

The JRPG fanbase has always struck me as a bit retarded on that front. I recall once, on some forum a long time ago, saying how I wish more JRPGs had actual gameplay and people got offended.

Way too many games, JRPGs especially, outright forget to let YOU do shit. Even if its through your character they just want you to watch or stare in slack jawed awe of things in a cutscene. Some of my favorite JRPGs from the past were ones that let you actually do things. You could win that 'supposed to lose' fight if you really were a sweatlord. Sure it would generally still continue on in some way but the game would acknowledge what you did.

Too often now you just don't get to fight you just watch people get their ass handed to them in a cutscene. They don't want it to be a game they want it to be a movie.

 

[Cryogonal2]

At some point the plot/premise was leaked.

Really?

 

[Grub]

The JRPG fanbase has always struck me as a bit retarded on that front. I recall once, on some forum a long time ago, saying how I wish more JRPGs had actual gameplay and people got offended.

These are likely the same people that give games bad reviews if they don't have auto battle, or fast travel or quest markers and shit like that.

One of my memories is with a fan of Chrono Cross (not Trigger, Cross). I mentioned I found the gameplay absolutely horrid... and the guy went after me because "you're not allowed to criticize JRPGs for anything but their story!" Yes, seriously.

And yet... well as we've said, most of the time JRPG stories aren't even that good. Even games that are considered classics of the genre rarely are above something you'd find in a mid-tier anime.

I feel like a lot of people have conflated reading numbers and choosing things in menus with reading a book. They just can't see reading and making decisions as gameplay so when they sit and watch a 20 minute cutscene and read dialog it's the same for them as sitting through 20 minutes of battles and dungeon crawling because they're just sitting their reading either way, except one of them doesn't have narrative direction being fed to them so they find it boring and don't care about it.

This is why you get all these weird pseudo real time/turn based combat systems these days because it's the only way people like that can feel like they're playing a game.

JRPGs didn't get horribly bad until Final Fantasy decided that the player wasn't really necessary for the game and basically had it play itself. FF also began to disappear up its own butthole, offering fanservice, fights that were just lots of flashy crap with horrid editing, nonsensical plots, and casts that consisted of schoolkids and J-Pop singers. That's when I bowed out. The genre may have become even worse today.

I find I tend to prefer Dragon Quest to Final Fantasy these days. Except for FFV. I prefer the light hearted but sometimes surprisingly dark small vignette style fairy tale stories that Dragon Quest has over the edgy try hard anime shit Final Fantasy does. Dragon Quest games usually have better exploration as well. Though FFV's job system still beats the ones in Dragon Quest.

Way too many games, JRPGs especially, outright forget to let YOU do shit. Even if its through your character they just want you to watch or stare in slack jawed awe of things in a cutscene. Some of my favorite JRPGs from the past were ones that let you actually do things. You could win that 'supposed to lose' fight if you really were a sweatlord. Sure it would generally still continue on in some way but the game would acknowledge what you did.

Too often now you just don't get to fight you just watch people get their ass handed to them in a cutscene. They don't want it to be a game they want it to be a movie

This really started getting out of hand with the ps2 era. I still remember renting Xenosaga 2 and spending like 18 hours on it over the course of the rental but probably only like 3 of those hours was actual play time while the rest was just half hour to 45 minute cutscenes. I regretted renting it. It felt like a waste of a rental.

 

[skykiii]

I'm glad myself, @Grub , @Agarathium1066 , and @Pokemon Conquistador are having a blast bitching about JRPGs.

But I just remembered that even when they try to do gameplay, nowadays they tend to fuck it up horribly and I've made rants about that before. (particularly due to an Idea Factory game called Mary Skelter).

But to summarize the common sins of modern JRPG Gameplay (when they even have gameplay):

1. A tendency to misunderstand why things worked, and therefore a constant stream of fixing what isn't broken.

2. Adding "mechanics" that are nothing more than just adding additional steps to what should be a simple action. (Picking "Fight" now asks you to choose whether you're going to pick light, medium, or heavy, each being stronger but less likely to hit, meaning you're going to pick "medium" each time).

3. Making it so each piece of equipment affects a ton of different numbers but not giving you any clear idea what those numbers actually do.

4. Adding "equipment improvement systems" which--as Spoony pointed out so long ago--go back to being an example of the first point. Ideally, when you find a new sword, you should be excited at the prospect and want to play with it to see what it's like, but nowadays you're often in a catch-22 of "wait, I just spent a lot of a rare resource upgrading the sword I already had, which is now equal or better," with the end result being that you feel like you just fucked up--it's the video game equivalent of fixing your computer only to learn the next day that a friend went and bought you a new one.

5. Levelling up often takes several levels to even feel like you gained anything.

6. Lots of attempts to "add strategy" to combat (like the ever-famous "this element is weak to that element") end up resulting in gameplay where all you do is the same thing each combat round.

7. Having too many mechanics that are never explained and which lead to that "did I fuck up?" or "am I missing out by not interacting with this?" feeling.

8. Boss battles that require you to absolutely understand the combat, which you absolutely won't and will need to look up a guide.

EDIT: 9 . Related to number five, all upgrades feel so incremental that you have to sink a lot of time or resources into them to even feel a palpable difference. Used to be, getting a better sword meant you saw immediate payout.

EDIT: 10. There being too many moving parts to keep up with. In particular this is why I don't play SMT games. Oh, there's recruitable monsters, but they gain new abilities as they level up, but you meet new monsters who might be better if you level them, or you can fuse two monsters which has a random chance of giving you a great new monster but mostly gives you crap, and if you want to get the most out of this game you either need to spend thousands of hours testing everything and seeing in-depth how it works, or just buy the strategy guide.

I could probably list more, but in general for me JRPGs these days tend to either be "crap story but I can at least play it" or "its an unplayable mess."

EDIT: I call this stuff, "Chrono Cross Syndrome." Even though its a PS1 game, for me Chrono Cross was patient zero for having too many gameplay ideas that someone should have said "no" to and which made playing it a pain in the ass.

 

[LightDragonman1]

I guess now would be a bad time to say that the JRPGs I have played I’ve almost all enjoyed? Though they can be a bit counting to get into, I admit.

Guess when you play them for so long, you start to see the cracks in them.

 

[skykiii]

I guess now would be a bad time to say that the JRPGs I have played I’ve almost all enjoyed? Though they can be a bit counting to get into, I admit.

Guess when you play them for so long, you start to see the cracks in them.

Don't let us get you down.

I have my frustrations, but its only because I used to be a major fan and still carry a torch to some degree. Most of my bitching is because I want this genre to get better, not sink into a malaise. Same deal with horror games.

Just recently I watched a friend play Trails of Cold Steel and I was absolutely floored that it actually looked like a good game, and now I'm gonna take a chance and try out Trails in the Sky.

The way I tend to feel about JRPGs tho, is "The NES has the JRPGs my head likes"--because of the afformentioned gameplay stuff (see also that reddit post I linked to earlier)--"but the SNES is the JRPGs my heart likes." (Sometimes with a dash of PS1, tho from a personal perspective the PS1 was when I started to grow apart from the genre and instead began reading books more).

 

[Agarathium1066]

I guess now would be a bad time to say that the JRPGs I have played I’ve almost all enjoyed? Though they can be a bit counting to get into, I admit.

Guess when you play them for so long, you start to see the cracks in them.

I've enjoyed a number of games that I would say weren't stellar or had serious flaws in them. It's the continual piling on of more and more bad choices as the genre continues that causes the issue for me. I think it depends on how you view it or what you like out of them really, some might just fail miserably on what they tried to bring before despite claiming their aim was otherwise.

Shit I'm sure someone will think my opinions are bunk because I like the Tales series and Symphonia has a big place in my heart.

 

[ApearFruit]

Hey, remember when this thread was supposed to be about indie creators? Anyways, my issue with some of them (especially modern ones) is that the shit they make isn't all that indistinct from what we see the industry making on an average basis.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

Hey, remember when this thread was supposed to be about indie creators? Anyways, my issue with some of them (especially modern ones) is that the shit they make isn't all that indistinct from what we see the industry making on an average basis.

they should make a stellar blade beach volleyball game thats also a jrpg at the same time