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Eternal Sonata PS3 Version, Extras Confirmed
Just last week the unique RPG Eternal Sonata was confirmed for a PlayStation 3 launch. IGN is now reporting that even though PS3 roleplaying fans will have to wait until next year for the game, they're going to get numerous extras as a consolation prize. "New events are being added, to help give players a deeper understanding of the storyline. The game will also feature new playable characters. Crescendo and Serenade, who played a major role in the 360 version's storyline but were not playable, will now be able to take part in battle. Crescendo makes use of a mace and shield. Serenade is all about her heart-shaped staff ... Bandai Namco is also working a costume system that will allow you to freely change your characters' costumes. Accompanying this is an increase in costume variations."
See, all that extra capacity does have a use right now. No more waiting required.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
With Xbox live, I am sure the developers could make a nice chunk of change if the made the extras available on XBL for $10 or so. Unless, of course, they are already being paid off by Sony to have the extras "Exclusive" Although maybe it would take too much effort to make the patch for the XBOX to make it worth it...
I was really bummed out at first when I saw that this was only on the 360 because I really wanted to play this, but am not going to buy a Microsoft system for any reason. This is great that they are porting it. I love Chopin. He is my favorite classical composer by far, and has been for years. Anything to make an awakening and remember good ole classical music is a good thing. I even wrote a journal about it. I recently just downloaded his complete works from Bittorrent and am finding some little treasures I didn't know existed. Chopin is such an amazing composer. It is seriously such a tragedy that he died at 39 years old.
On another note, the game got some really good reviews, so anything to add to the PS3's sad library right now will make me really happy.
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I used to hate JRPGs too, but I got used to them, and now I actually like them. I had to, as the whole turn-based/party based RPG genre died for PC, and I just can't play the action RPGs.
I really hate JRPGs. I find them too linear and lacking in the "RPG" part. When I play a JRPG, it feels like it's just a movie with some interactive (but meaningless in the scope of the game) elements. Like someone developed a story and said "okay, let's throw in a few random fights and some minor and meaningless generic character stats stuff to break things up and stuff them between the scenes".
Well, with a few exceptions western RPGs are semi-linear as well. The only option you get are either to have a "evil" ending or "good" ending (KOTOR). Rarely is there a truly open ended game. Being non linear means your often doing uninteresting fed ex quests instead of uninteresting "run to X place, kill Y monster" you find in jRPGs. For every truly good non linear game (Torment, Fallout) you get a dozen fed ex games (morrow wind, Icewindale, etc..). They each have their strong points. jRPGs usually have a more interesting story despite having no latitude in guiding that story. Their fun and the mechanics are varied. cRPGS often are ad&d clones. Some cRPGs have strong memorable stories. Most have fairly bland ones. For instance Oblivion has a dull story. The whole draw was the sand box not story or game mechanics.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
It's unfortunate that turn-based has to also mean "pointless". I mean, the battles and actions you take have little impact to anything and you have almost no input into your character development. That might be fun for some, but it bugs me. Turn-based on the PC was far more creative, if you can count games like Fallout in the mix.
Final Fantasy games are beautiful and have reasonable storylines, I suppose -- but I'd much rather just watch all the cut-scenes together than waste my time "playing" them.
I guess I would compare JRPGs (the ones I have been exposed to, anyway) to Top 40 pop charts. Shiny, pretty people singing peppy, well-produced, successful, popular music . . . but the music is still vapid, meaningless and cheesecake-like. While I might bop my head to a good Top 40 pop tune, I wouldn't sit down and pour through an entire album.
I understand that some people are JRPG fanatics. No slight against them, intended. I think there are a lot of people like myself who enjoy one aspect of them, but find that they just fall too flat to draw us in.
I played the demo of Sonata when it dropped to X-Box Live Marketplace and was just blown away by the music. The big sell point on the game for me however was a little feature tucked away in the settings menus that allowed you to assign other controllers to the other party members for combat, making the game coop. So once I get off work I will swing by my local game shop, grab a copy and then invite a couple friends over to play through it. Congrats to the PS3 for getting this title added to their library but I am really surprised that the Wii doesn't have it.
"To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable."
As long as they actually use it for content rather than "just because we can". A good example is Heavenly Sword. They said they FILLED the DISC and even stated there was 10 gigs of Audio on the disc, yet there is MUCH LESS content, than Oblivion (which fits on a DVD9).
You know, the Final Fantasy series, while linear, was much more interesting in the 2d era. You had to (gasp) make decisions about the composition of your party, and the characters had (shudder) classes with (scream) specialties. Final Fantasy 7 was just too much of a blockbuster.
FF 6 was the beginning of the end, where you could teach any character any spell. They've pretty much been going in that mold since then in terms of gameplay. What really did the genre in, though, was Final Fantasy Fucking Seven, and its "oh look, we can" full-motion video cutscenes, gameplay-generic characters, obscure, and inscrutable non-plot.
All stories are linear because our lives are linear.
Oblivion was a step back from Morrowind, because Oblivion led you by the nose from the very first step. You didn't even know the plot of Morrowind until a few hours into playing it, but it most certainly had a main plot.
Torment was only "nonlinear" at the start in that it gave you a choice of what order to play some of the factions in.
I've yet to find a JRPG that doesn't make me want to choke the ever-living crap out of the whiny, bratty main actors.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Howard notes: "Drive speed matters more to me [than capacity], and Blu-ray is slower", with EGM revealing that "the PS3 Oblivion team compensated for the slower drive by duplicating data across the Blu-ray disc, making it faster to find and load."
Source: http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2007/01/ps3_oblivion_seeing_double_to.php
Obviously this isn't an ideal situation as you'd rather have both fast seek times and lots of space, but I also agree with you that developers shouldn't just fill up their discs for stupid reasons like copy protections or just to say "hey it's full!"
Of course they can fill up their discs with crap all they want, just don't brag about it and make it sound like the game wouldn't work on platform X because of that reason.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
You're talking about something which is very interesting and compelling, but which should no longer properly be called an RPG. Interactive movie might be more appropriate. The term "RPG" has come to stand for the system of statistics, attributes and combat which most RPGs have in common, but which is merely a set of rules imposed upon informal "let's pretend" games to give them more gamelike, structured qualities. I don't know what you'd call this.
Oblivion is one of the few modern games that has a right to call itself an RPG. It allows you pretend you're a character in an alternate universe, affording you the a portion of the freedom that you would have in a pen and paper RPG. While not as popular as what you prefer, it is a proper RPG.
I hate going on about terms and how they replace each other, occluding the concepts behind the original term, but here, it's true. Most people associate "RPG" more readily with games which have very shallow role-playing: as much as Doom or GTA.
The PS3 version is shipping with extra content because Sony won't allow them to ship otherwise. Games that ship simultaneously are given more leeway; but if the 360 version ships first, the game must contain features that set the ps3 version apart. It doesn't take much thought to see why this is a very smart tactic. I don't know of any examples of PS3 SKUs shipping first off the top of my head, but you'll see Microsoft doing the same thing.
If a game fits on DVD, you can be sure that a game + 5% added assets can also be made to fit on DVD. And note that amount of content/gameplay != amount of assets; if I add a ton of new content, it may reuse lots of existing assets (as in the case of making a character playable). If I had to guess, the bulk of new assets will be new audio.
One non-linear jRPG is the SaGa series. They have a small niche here in the U.S. but in Japan I believe it has a respectable following. The latest non-remake in the U.S was "Unlimited SaGa" and I believed it had very disappointing sales. It was one of my favorite games to play. I spent about 25 hours for each of the 7 characters to beat.
Every geek has some sort of website, programming or computer project. Here's mine: www.youtasteit.com . What's yours?
Wait, what about FF5 where any character could take on any job? The last FF with solid classes was FF4; at least FF6 had some unique abilities for each character. (Mmm, Sabin`s Blitz)
The real question is how many from that list will remain exclusive. Already you can play some of them (like Bioshock) on a PC. But some of those titles (again Bioshock) will probably end up on other platforms, like the PS3... yes you might be playing some titles in a year or two, but really if you have enough other games to go through in the meantime it's not such a hardship. I still myself have not played through Half Life 2, waiting for the Orange Box now.
If you want to buy a PS3 they have exclusives of their own that look really good and unique, like Ratchet & Clank and Little Big Planet. Or even Haze, if you prefer FPS shooters... so it's not like taking an anti-360 stance will lock you out of as many games as it would seem.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... in the 360's Japanese coffin. Don't get me wrong, I love my 360, but clearly MS needed something big to bring some attention to itself in the Japanese marketplace. Eternal Sonata is a solid game (based on the demo I played), and certainly would've sold a few boxes in Japan. But losing this exclusive is just one more nail in the already-shut coffin that is the Xbox in Japan...
Well, most PS3 ports have souped-down graphics, but you've got the right general idea.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
I'm not. Well, I dislike Microsoft, but I could get over that. And I want to get over it, because the 360 has a nice collection of games. However, there are two reasons why I won't buy one:
Why? People constantly say that we "consumers" should vote with our wallets. If we want our world to improve, it's obvious that we should support positive action, as well as good products. Frankly, games are a luxury. I don't need them to survive. How is it silly to base your purchases, especially of a non-essential item like a console, on how a company behaves, as well as on the product itself?
In FFX if you had the time you can teach everyone the same magic, skills and strength although their weapons are different. I do prefer the active turn base which you got in FF6 (US FF3) although it was configurable over just turn-base. Personally I never liked FF8 although I did like FF7 (there very few "full-motion cut-scenes" that I noticed) although I never had the time to play FF9 since it came out very late in the PS1's life. Still what one person likes another may agree or disagree on and this is fine by me.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
ABS (Active Battle System) actually came out in FF4/FF2US.
If cliches hurt the story then most jrpgs fail badly in that respect. The stories are often so clicheed you can predict a plot turn up to five hours in advance just because you know the big organization is ALWAYS evil or that any number of actions necessary to awaken an ancient evil (e.g. collect eight gems) WILL be performed. Characters are pretty much by the numbers and often alike in their roles and development (main hero that's either upbeat or emo and always wielding a sword, shy girl with healing spells that's somehow critical for the saving/destruction of the world and several other templates). There's a big list of RPG clichees out there and dozens of them apply to every jrpg.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.