You already have the suspend your sense of belief to really think that you will actually beat a computer in say a FPS where it can aim perfectly, or a fighting game where they can simply react to any move you might do. For example you can play the training mode in Soul Calibur and you'll quickly realize that the computer can guard counter every move you ever do forever, but of course they don't do that in the real game. Even on the super duper hard setting they give up after a while, even though they can do it forever on the training mode. Shin Akuma in various Street Fighter incarnations counters almost every move perfectly. You throw a fireball, he'll jump kick you. You jump kick him, he'll dragon punch, and the only way to beat him is hit him with moves that he isn't programmed to counter. There's no reason why the computer can't play like that aside from it'd make a very boring game when you repeatedly get owned by a computer.
If by being smart means 'better at a game' the AI is already a super genius. If by smart means 'flailing your hands around while pretending to do something before losing to a human player', then whatever that creates the best sense of illusion works the best. If it's a bunch of if/else statements, why not? There's no reason any fancy technique will get you a fancier loser.
If the question is 'what is your favorite color?' and you guessed 'blue' and it was right, that just meant someone picked a poor choice for a secret question. Doesn't sound like a security breach or any fancy social engineering is required. The quoted part made it sound like suppose we have the same question (what is your favorite color?), they'll eventually say something like 'sorry red was wrong because the answer is blue', and then you call next time and say it's blue. That to me sounds pretty improbable.
I find that highly unlikely. Let's say the only thing you need to reset password is the name. How would you possibly ever get this information no matter how many times you called? Do you call them and say hi I'm the owner of this ID but I'm not sure what name I wrote down?
I have a hard time believing whoever at tech support would be so unprofessional that they'd give you identifying information needed to reset something when you cannot produce it. For example in EverQuest the tech support seems to use the first credit card used on the account to determine password resets for hacked accounts. I've never heard of anyone ever able to convince them to give the first credit card number used on the said account no matter how often you call. If you don't know the CC number, they simply won't reset it for you. Maybe you can find out some other interesting info about the account, but they should never give you the info that'd reset the account just because you pester them long enough.
Was it because it cost roughly twice of any game that's ever been developed? Or maybe cartridges cost $40 more than CDs? No, it's because whoever sold it thought this is the right place to maximize profit. They may be right or wrong, and history seems to indicate $100 is probably the wrong price to sell a popular game. But really it's not our problem whether games are priced right or wrong. If they're priced wrong the publisher eventually pays for that mistake. If $30 gets you more profit than $60, eventually someone will notice this and start selling them at $30. The fact it's not happening suggests selling at $60 might be a good idea after all.
For most games I assume it's because it's some game that first came up with the idea of whatever. But Warcraft does not have anything innovative in the first 2 games unless you count a quasi-story as innovative. It may have been popular but from the innovation point of view, it contributed roughly nothing to the RTS genre. If you're to pick a RTS game that really revolutionized the genre it has to be Starcraft, which is not Warcraft in space. So here Warcraft seems to get a pass due to its massive sales and popularity. That's fine but then where's the Pokemons and Final Fantasies? It seems to me Warcraft is only on there probably because whoever made this list actually plays Warcraft but not Pokemon, even though the two games are very similar: massive sales and popularity and not much contribution in terms of innovation to the genre. Which is fine. No one says a great game has to come up with something no one else thought of before. But don't bend the rules just to get your favorite game inducted.
There's nothing to experience when the choices are so stupid that it doesn't add anything. I don't know of a single person who thought choosing the 'get lock up in a box forever' choice in Breath of Fire 3 was a good idea.
Let's say you have a choice of losing character A or character B. This means both characters have be at least comparablely important, and the loss of either is felt throughout the rest of the game in non gameplay terms. Offhand, I can't even remember a RPG where the loss of any character has an impact beyond the first 5 minutes after the said character died. The classic example of an important character death would be Aeris in FF7, and it's not clear the heroes even remembered she ever existed once Cloud dropped her into the water. And if the choice was between losing Tifa or Aeris for the rest of the game, the only difference would be who gets dropped in the water in the CG. At this point you might as well treat your nonlinear choices as a matter of gameplay. Here Aeris would win out over Tifa every time because her limit breaks infinitely more useful.
Nonlinearity implies all paths needs to have significant consequences. It is not clear to me most RPGs even have significant consequences for your actions when there's only one path to choose, let alone two or more.
The reason why most plots are linear is because nonlinearity simply does not make much sense in the context of most games. Take your typical Square infinite loop choices, i.e. an example from Chrono Trigger:
Marle: Crono, let's save the world! Yes/No? While answer = no, repeat question until answer = yes
Now really, what kind of additional experience do you get by being able to say no? Do you see Lavos blow up the world and then the game telling you sorry, that was the wrong choice? Does that even add anything? In Breath of Fire 3, you can choose to either fight the Goddess or get locked up in a box for the rest of your life. Here you're allowed to make that choice and the game basically tells you 'whoa that was dumb, you lose!' and then you get to go through the same 30 minutes unskippable sequence again if you want to answer differently. If the choice is so dumb that no one would possibly ever want to go on the other path, then it might as well be a single choice.
Now if in Chrono Trigger when you choose to not save the world, the story shifts to Magus, who continues his plan to summon Lavos to 600 AD and now his plan won't be messed up by the heroes because they quit. Then it might make sense to have the choice to give up. If you give people the choice to branch, there has to be meaningful content on either side of the branch.
And even if there is content, it's hard to balance it so that they're at least both attractive. Let's say you're on your generic journey to stop the world from being destroyed, and some random town asks you fix their bridge and put your world saving quest on hold. So you want to make this nonlinear and actually a choice. So what's the drawback for not saving the town? Maybe another town gets nuked while you're doing this? Maybe some guy on your party decide you're a fool and leave the party forever? Maybe the boss actually becomes more powerful since you're slacking and the final fight is now twice as hard?
But then what do you get back for giving that up? More insight on a character's past? A piece of inexplicably powerful item? No matter how careful you are, you'll usually end up with one choice that is still better than the other, so that choice will get picked as the 'right' one anyway.
The profit model of a MMORPG is very different from the average console game which I think is what's being discussed here. You can afford to take bigger losses at the start because you get a source of continous profit. This is not possible with the average game. If I don't recoup my costs after 1 year for my RPG/FPS/sports game/whatever, then it's almost certain I'll never recover my costs, that is if anyone's even still selling my game.
A game is not entitled to make money due to some intrinsic 'goodness' value. If I spent a billion dollar to make the greatest game ever, I would expect to lose money on this because I don't think you can physically sell enough copies to make up the development cost. This means even the greatest game ever is not worth spending a billion dollar on it. If you make a really cool game that no one bought, maybe it's not as cool as you thought it was.
It seems to be just saying gaming companies work people too much, so if you work less it must be better! While I understand overworking hurts productivity, at some point addition by subtraction has to fail. If it's really such a great idea for programmer to work 8 or 6 or 4 hours a day while stll making a great game, someone would've done that by now. The fact that there hasn't been much success from not working much on the gaming industry seems to suggest that working really hard at least works. And if working less really is better, what's stopping someone from doing it here?
I'm not even sure how the standard of living is relevant. It applies to every job equally. You gain due to the lower standard of living, yes, but you also lose some things, like living in a foreign country you're not familiar with. It's not like outsourcing is some always benficial action to do. You win some but you also lose some. If not, all companies can just pack up and resume operations in China!
When Lavos is awakened at the ocean palace, he is extra hard, harder than his normal self by far. While normally his 'destruction rains from heavens' attack would do under 100 damage to a party of level ** with Moon Armors/Prism Dresses, this version of Lavos can actually harm a party of level ** characters. He still has the same HP/defense as the normal Lavos though, so you could kill him quickly.
The classic 'autolose' battle usually involves some guy who was supposed to be too powerful for you to handle. But then you've to ask the question: why doesn't that guy kill you? Suikoden 3 comes to mind where there's something like 5 or 6 battles you're supposed to lose against Luc (you could win them but it has no effect on the outcome), and after a while you wonder why this guy who can cast a spell that instant kills your party always failed to actually kill your party, and it's not like you're falling into some elaborate scheme he's setting up. It is clear that your party is in the way of whatever he's planning, and yet despite his considerable powers he always fails to kill you.
Another problem is that a lot of the auto-lose battles isn't actually very easy to lose, which is brought up in a lot of examples where people thought they could win so they kept trying. But I'll give two examples where you can't win but it looks like you can still fight. In Skies of Arcadia, you cannot win the first fight against Ramirez (all attacks miss him) but you can actually keep up with his damage output quite easily by burning through crystals. Problem is that the game expects you to burn through consumables anyway to all boss fights (far more efficient than actually using MP) so you might be thinking you're supposed to just survive for X turns. Of course eventually you give up and let him kill you but you might have tried for a while before quitting. In Grandia 2, when you first fight Malfice he's immune to damage and cannot be canceled, but again, his damage output is not higher than any other boss and can easily be outhealed.
And the annoying thing is that later when you fight them, they pretty much have identical stats minus the invincibility, and you could've beaten them even when you're supposed to lose to them if they're not somehow totally invulnerable. At least give some explanation, like in Star Ocean 2 there's 2 or 3 autolose battles that involves the Wiseman but at least they tell you that you cannot harm them because they're protected by anti-matter shields or something. Therefore it actually makes sense that they stay at the same power when you do get your antimatter weapons that can break through their shields.
The 3D era happened to coincide with the era of the strategy guides where companies realize that you can make a lot of money selling those. But who needs a strategy guide if the game isn't specifically built around it? The stupid minigames and whatnot of the more recent FFs is not a function of the technology itself. If FF4 required you to get 5 pink tails before you can fight Zeromus it'd be just as dumb and boring.
For what it's worth, you can probably beat FF10 in under 30 hours if you don't bother with the especially time consuming minigames. I don't think the overall time it takes to finish a FF has changed signifciantly but there is certainly a lot more distraction along the way.
You need gameplay to fill the "X hours of gameplay" quota that seems to be imposed on all RPGs now. However you can't spend 50 hours or whatever X is doing cool stuff because if you do cool stuff for 50 hours at some point it becomes not-so-cool.
As long as people have the mentality that a 10 hour game somehow isn't 'worth it' even if it does everything to perfection, you'll always need some stuff to fill in the obligatory gameplay quota. Whether this is done by starting out as a loser, mazes, fetch quests, mini games, or all of the above is a matter of game design.
Why would a RPG that works like say, the intro part of Lufia 1 where you start out at level 90 with all the best equipment in the game ready to own the last boss be bad? When I played Lufia 2 which is supposed to explain how those awesome ultra-powerful guys came from via the standard X hours of gameplay, I didn't feel any more attached to my party of 4 than just playing the intro. In fact I think it actually managed to dispel the mystique that first you thought you had these great guys that have stats that actually fit the description of a hero, and then you find out in Lufia 2 that they're just your average RPG losers who managed to got to level 90 after going in a circle leveling up for 50 hours.
Why would it be bad if you play a RPG that has a format like say, Street Fighter 2? You would start as Ryu, level 90 martial artist ready to join the tournament, fight the 7 particpants in a RPG system, and then the last 4 bosses? It didn't add anything to Street Fighter 2 if you knew Ryu was hitting a punchbag for 20 hours before he learned how to use the Shoryuken, so why is it a necessity in a RPG?
I remember buying a guidebook for Fire Emblem 4 that showing you how to beat the game. In the final battle, where the only person who can attack Julius without commiting suicide is Julia, but the guidebook shows a picture of a level 12 Julia (max is 30) attacking Julius which means even whoever wrote the guide book neglected to level her up and is about to get killed. This isn't too surprising since unless you knew Julia was the only person who can hit Julius you would never have a reason to level her up. Or you can just throw everyone at Julius and probably kill him somehow and lose 20 guys, and the game will remind you that you totally sucked when you do beat the game with a F survival rating, because you never leveled up the useless character when you had the chance!
As opposed to difficulty. For difficulty based stuff, I can accept some games are just plain hard. The ones that bother me is the ones that don't give you any way out of it, and kick you while you're down. For example, in the Megaman Zero series you used to miss the EX Skills if you suck (need an A rating to obtain them), so if you suck you don't get the moves that makes the game easier and you're basically stuck. Gradius V for PS2 is like that too. You unlock unlimited credits after 15 hours of gameplay, but that's only while playing the game, so if you die 15 minutes into the game at the third stage, it gets boring pretty quickly to try to fill your quota of 60 game overs before you can even have a shot at beating the game. It's one thing that you can suck at a game and have a hard time. It's another that things get progressively worse the more you suck. In Gradius V if you could half an hour before dying, at least you won't be as frustrated with repeatedly dying compared to lasting only 15 minutes so you'll hit your unlimited credits easier.
A counter example of a good difficulty wall would be Shining Force Neo. In the 3 Trials of Light the Demons bosses all do some insane amount of damage compared to anything you may have fought before (heck even some of the random stuff before them is insanely hard), but you can save basically anywhere. The game has a ton of customization so if one combo doesn't work you can always try another. And if you still can't beat it you can do the tried and true level up approach.
It's one thing to say (insert game) is the bestest game ever, how come it didn't say X milion like (whatever)? You can blame the masses being dumb or whatever for this, and that's fine. Competition is never supposed to be fair.
But if your bestest game ever didn't even sell enough to be profitable, maybe it's not as good as you think it is.
They may be desirable traits in a good game, but their presence along does not guaranteed a good game. If you look at a Zelda game, it is never going to be original enough such that the story doesn't involve a hero named Link and a princess named Zelda and a villian named Ganon. It is never going to be innovative enough that the game won't involve some kind of combat with a sword, arrow, boomerang, and a random grab-bag of tools. However there's far more to a good game than just having an original idea or an innovative feature. Doing a boring feature, like hitting something with a sword, but doing it extremely well, is what separates a good game from a normal one.
Most purist fans of Megaman series consider X4 to be the pinnacle of Megaman goodness and it is certainly a far better game than any Megaman game that came before it in terms of polish, X or original. You can say the games after X4 are a failure because they failed to meet the bar set by X4 but they're still solid good old Megaman games. Battle Networks is probably the most successful of the Megaman franchise in terms of sales and I view it the same way as Yugioh, World of Warcraft, or Pokemon: they're not games I, as a purist of the genre, would say is good, but who am I to tell the makers that their best selling title is no good? It may not be a game I appreciate but they certainly figured out something in BN that makes it profitable.
The Z series is also quite good and again its only shortcoming was the last Z game (Z4) failed to set the bar set by Z3, which is expected because the Z series was supposed to end with Z3.
Ashe and Vaan's voices are nothing special, just like their role in the story. The game intentionally misleads you into thinking they're supposed to be the main characters, but they are not. The whole story would've been just fine if the whole party just consisted of Balthier and Basch, and they drag the princess out of the airship whenever they need to pick up something only a descendent of the Dynast-King could (Treaty-Blade and Sword of Kings). Vaan's role, similar to Penelo, is to serve as the player's eyes, nothing more.
All the guys from the Archdeus Empire have the British accident, which I assume is done to give them a distinctive flavor.
Out of the characters who mattered, I thought they did a good job with the voices. Cid and Balthier are just downright awesome.
Didn't Google object having Microsoft put their own site as default search engine of IE7?
Of course, Google lost that one too, though in this case, as I understand it, there is no way to ever get the top spot from the ones Google wants their stuff at the top, whereas you could configure IE7 to use another search engine.
Oops, Excalibur 2 is from FF9. I go through RPG very fast and you'd not even come close to hitting the required time in anything that remotely resembles normal play. I believe you'd have to do things like opening the PSX up to skip CG movies because you'll lose an hour of time if you actually have to watch all of them.
All the games since about the PSX era has been about selling strategy guides. Some just do it more blatantly than others. For example, you need to get to the last dungeon in under 12 hours to get Excalibur 2. There is no reason anyone would ever attempt something like this without knowing there's a reward, unless you're in some contest to see how fast you can beat the game. There's plenty of analogous examples in all genres of gaming. FF12 is a pretty good example of shameless strategy guide selling, but overall it's still a good game.
I'd say the Judges are more like the Inner Sanctum guards or whatever those special Imperial agents are. None of the five judges fit any of the Star Wars personality except maybe Bergan. Also Daifacted Nethicite = Death Star, and Mist = The Force.
Both stories have the Imperial Senate dissolved too!
Ashe has some fighting experience but clearly 3 of those imperial guys was too much for her to handle. It is clearly implied Vossler and Basch, presumably the strongest warriors in Dalmasca, are supposed to be keeping her protected at all times. The game has some obvious parallels to Star Wars and Ashe is indeed quite similar to Princess Leia. She can pick up a blaster rifle and shoot a Stormtrooper but that doesn't mean she's supposed to be doing bulk of the fighting.
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You already have the suspend your sense of belief to really think that you will actually beat a computer in say a FPS where it can aim perfectly, or a fighting game where they can simply react to any move you might do. For example you can play the training mode in Soul Calibur and you'll quickly realize that the computer can guard counter every move you ever do forever, but of course they don't do that in the real game. Even on the super duper hard setting they give up after a while, even though they can do it forever on the training mode. Shin Akuma in various Street Fighter incarnations counters almost every move perfectly. You throw a fireball, he'll jump kick you. You jump kick him, he'll dragon punch, and the only way to beat him is hit him with moves that he isn't programmed to counter. There's no reason why the computer can't play like that aside from it'd make a very boring game when you repeatedly get owned by a computer.
If by being smart means 'better at a game' the AI is already a super genius. If by smart means 'flailing your hands around while pretending to do something before losing to a human player', then whatever that creates the best sense of illusion works the best. If it's a bunch of if/else statements, why not? There's no reason any fancy technique will get you a fancier loser.
If the question is 'what is your favorite color?' and you guessed 'blue' and it was right, that just meant someone picked a poor choice for a secret question. Doesn't sound like a security breach or any fancy social engineering is required. The quoted part made it sound like suppose we have the same question (what is your favorite color?), they'll eventually say something like 'sorry red was wrong because the answer is blue', and then you call next time and say it's blue. That to me sounds pretty improbable.
I find that highly unlikely. Let's say the only thing you need to reset password is the name. How would you possibly ever get this information no matter how many times you called? Do you call them and say hi I'm the owner of this ID but I'm not sure what name I wrote down?
I have a hard time believing whoever at tech support would be so unprofessional that they'd give you identifying information needed to reset something when you cannot produce it. For example in EverQuest the tech support seems to use the first credit card used on the account to determine password resets for hacked accounts. I've never heard of anyone ever able to convince them to give the first credit card number used on the said account no matter how often you call. If you don't know the CC number, they simply won't reset it for you. Maybe you can find out some other interesting info about the account, but they should never give you the info that'd reset the account just because you pester them long enough.
Was it because it cost roughly twice of any game that's ever been developed? Or maybe cartridges cost $40 more than CDs? No, it's because whoever sold it thought this is the right place to maximize profit. They may be right or wrong, and history seems to indicate $100 is probably the wrong price to sell a popular game. But really it's not our problem whether games are priced right or wrong. If they're priced wrong the publisher eventually pays for that mistake. If $30 gets you more profit than $60, eventually someone will notice this and start selling them at $30. The fact it's not happening suggests selling at $60 might be a good idea after all.
For most games I assume it's because it's some game that first came up with the idea of whatever. But Warcraft does not have anything innovative in the first 2 games unless you count a quasi-story as innovative. It may have been popular but from the innovation point of view, it contributed roughly nothing to the RTS genre. If you're to pick a RTS game that really revolutionized the genre it has to be Starcraft, which is not Warcraft in space. So here Warcraft seems to get a pass due to its massive sales and popularity. That's fine but then where's the Pokemons and Final Fantasies? It seems to me Warcraft is only on there probably because whoever made this list actually plays Warcraft but not Pokemon, even though the two games are very similar: massive sales and popularity and not much contribution in terms of innovation to the genre. Which is fine. No one says a great game has to come up with something no one else thought of before. But don't bend the rules just to get your favorite game inducted.
There's nothing to experience when the choices are so stupid that it doesn't add anything. I don't know of a single person who thought choosing the 'get lock up in a box forever' choice in Breath of Fire 3 was a good idea.
Let's say you have a choice of losing character A or character B. This means both characters have be at least comparablely important, and the loss of either is felt throughout the rest of the game in non gameplay terms. Offhand, I can't even remember a RPG where the loss of any character has an impact beyond the first 5 minutes after the said character died. The classic example of an important character death would be Aeris in FF7, and it's not clear the heroes even remembered she ever existed once Cloud dropped her into the water. And if the choice was between losing Tifa or Aeris for the rest of the game, the only difference would be who gets dropped in the water in the CG. At this point you might as well treat your nonlinear choices as a matter of gameplay. Here Aeris would win out over Tifa every time because her limit breaks infinitely more useful.
Nonlinearity implies all paths needs to have significant consequences. It is not clear to me most RPGs even have significant consequences for your actions when there's only one path to choose, let alone two or more.
The reason why most plots are linear is because nonlinearity simply does not make much sense in the context of most games. Take your typical Square infinite loop choices, i.e. an example from Chrono Trigger:
Marle: Crono, let's save the world! Yes/No?
While answer = no, repeat question until answer = yes
Now really, what kind of additional experience do you get by being able to say no? Do you see Lavos blow up the world and then the game telling you sorry, that was the wrong choice? Does that even add anything? In Breath of Fire 3, you can choose to either fight the Goddess or get locked up in a box for the rest of your life. Here you're allowed to make that choice and the game basically tells you 'whoa that was dumb, you lose!' and then you get to go through the same 30 minutes unskippable sequence again if you want to answer differently. If the choice is so dumb that no one would possibly ever want to go on the other path, then it might as well be a single choice.
Now if in Chrono Trigger when you choose to not save the world, the story shifts to Magus, who continues his plan to summon Lavos to 600 AD and now his plan won't be messed up by the heroes because they quit. Then it might make sense to have the choice to give up. If you give people the choice to branch, there has to be meaningful content on either side of the branch.
And even if there is content, it's hard to balance it so that they're at least both attractive. Let's say you're on your generic journey to stop the world from being destroyed, and some random town asks you fix their bridge and put your world saving quest on hold. So you want to make this nonlinear and actually a choice. So what's the drawback for not saving the town? Maybe another town gets nuked while you're doing this? Maybe some guy on your party decide you're a fool and leave the party forever? Maybe the boss actually becomes more powerful since you're slacking and the final fight is now twice as hard?
But then what do you get back for giving that up? More insight on a character's past? A piece of inexplicably powerful item? No matter how careful you are, you'll usually end up with one choice that is still better than the other, so that choice will get picked as the 'right' one anyway.
The profit model of a MMORPG is very different from the average console game which I think is what's being discussed here. You can afford to take bigger losses at the start because you get a source of continous profit. This is not possible with the average game. If I don't recoup my costs after 1 year for my RPG/FPS/sports game/whatever, then it's almost certain I'll never recover my costs, that is if anyone's even still selling my game.
A game is not entitled to make money due to some intrinsic 'goodness' value. If I spent a billion dollar to make the greatest game ever, I would expect to lose money on this because I don't think you can physically sell enough copies to make up the development cost. This means even the greatest game ever is not worth spending a billion dollar on it. If you make a really cool game that no one bought, maybe it's not as cool as you thought it was.
It seems to be just saying gaming companies work people too much, so if you work less it must be better! While I understand overworking hurts productivity, at some point addition by subtraction has to fail. If it's really such a great idea for programmer to work 8 or 6 or 4 hours a day while stll making a great game, someone would've done that by now. The fact that there hasn't been much success from not working much on the gaming industry seems to suggest that working really hard at least works. And if working less really is better, what's stopping someone from doing it here?
I'm not even sure how the standard of living is relevant. It applies to every job equally. You gain due to the lower standard of living, yes, but you also lose some things, like living in a foreign country you're not familiar with. It's not like outsourcing is some always benficial action to do. You win some but you also lose some. If not, all companies can just pack up and resume operations in China!
When Lavos is awakened at the ocean palace, he is extra hard, harder than his normal self by far. While normally his 'destruction rains from heavens' attack would do under 100 damage to a party of level ** with Moon Armors/Prism Dresses, this version of Lavos can actually harm a party of level ** characters. He still has the same HP/defense as the normal Lavos though, so you could kill him quickly.
The classic 'autolose' battle usually involves some guy who was supposed to be too powerful for you to handle. But then you've to ask the question: why doesn't that guy kill you? Suikoden 3 comes to mind where there's something like 5 or 6 battles you're supposed to lose against Luc (you could win them but it has no effect on the outcome), and after a while you wonder why this guy who can cast a spell that instant kills your party always failed to actually kill your party, and it's not like you're falling into some elaborate scheme he's setting up. It is clear that your party is in the way of whatever he's planning, and yet despite his considerable powers he always fails to kill you.
Another problem is that a lot of the auto-lose battles isn't actually very easy to lose, which is brought up in a lot of examples where people thought they could win so they kept trying. But I'll give two examples where you can't win but it looks like you can still fight. In Skies of Arcadia, you cannot win the first fight against Ramirez (all attacks miss him) but you can actually keep up with his damage output quite easily by burning through crystals. Problem is that the game expects you to burn through consumables anyway to all boss fights (far more efficient than actually using MP) so you might be thinking you're supposed to just survive for X turns. Of course eventually you give up and let him kill you but you might have tried for a while before quitting. In Grandia 2, when you first fight Malfice he's immune to damage and cannot be canceled, but again, his damage output is not higher than any other boss and can easily be outhealed.
And the annoying thing is that later when you fight them, they pretty much have identical stats minus the invincibility, and you could've beaten them even when you're supposed to lose to them if they're not somehow totally invulnerable. At least give some explanation, like in Star Ocean 2 there's 2 or 3 autolose battles that involves the Wiseman but at least they tell you that you cannot harm them because they're protected by anti-matter shields or something. Therefore it actually makes sense that they stay at the same power when you do get your antimatter weapons that can break through their shields.
The 3D era happened to coincide with the era of the strategy guides where companies realize that you can make a lot of money selling those. But who needs a strategy guide if the game isn't specifically built around it? The stupid minigames and whatnot of the more recent FFs is not a function of the technology itself. If FF4 required you to get 5 pink tails before you can fight Zeromus it'd be just as dumb and boring. For what it's worth, you can probably beat FF10 in under 30 hours if you don't bother with the especially time consuming minigames. I don't think the overall time it takes to finish a FF has changed signifciantly but there is certainly a lot more distraction along the way.
You need gameplay to fill the "X hours of gameplay" quota that seems to be imposed on all RPGs now. However you can't spend 50 hours or whatever X is doing cool stuff because if you do cool stuff for 50 hours at some point it becomes not-so-cool.
As long as people have the mentality that a 10 hour game somehow isn't 'worth it' even if it does everything to perfection, you'll always need some stuff to fill in the obligatory gameplay quota. Whether this is done by starting out as a loser, mazes, fetch quests, mini games, or all of the above is a matter of game design.
Why would a RPG that works like say, the intro part of Lufia 1 where you start out at level 90 with all the best equipment in the game ready to own the last boss be bad? When I played Lufia 2 which is supposed to explain how those awesome ultra-powerful guys came from via the standard X hours of gameplay, I didn't feel any more attached to my party of 4 than just playing the intro. In fact I think it actually managed to dispel the mystique that first you thought you had these great guys that have stats that actually fit the description of a hero, and then you find out in Lufia 2 that they're just your average RPG losers who managed to got to level 90 after going in a circle leveling up for 50 hours.
Why would it be bad if you play a RPG that has a format like say, Street Fighter 2? You would start as Ryu, level 90 martial artist ready to join the tournament, fight the 7 particpants in a RPG system, and then the last 4 bosses? It didn't add anything to Street Fighter 2 if you knew Ryu was hitting a punchbag for 20 hours before he learned how to use the Shoryuken, so why is it a necessity in a RPG?
I remember buying a guidebook for Fire Emblem 4 that showing you how to beat the game. In the final battle, where the only person who can attack Julius without commiting suicide is Julia, but the guidebook shows a picture of a level 12 Julia (max is 30) attacking Julius which means even whoever wrote the guide book neglected to level her up and is about to get killed. This isn't too surprising since unless you knew Julia was the only person who can hit Julius you would never have a reason to level her up. Or you can just throw everyone at Julius and probably kill him somehow and lose 20 guys, and the game will remind you that you totally sucked when you do beat the game with a F survival rating, because you never leveled up the useless character when you had the chance!
As opposed to difficulty. For difficulty based stuff, I can accept some games are just plain hard. The ones that bother me is the ones that don't give you any way out of it, and kick you while you're down. For example, in the Megaman Zero series you used to miss the EX Skills if you suck (need an A rating to obtain them), so if you suck you don't get the moves that makes the game easier and you're basically stuck. Gradius V for PS2 is like that too. You unlock unlimited credits after 15 hours of gameplay, but that's only while playing the game, so if you die 15 minutes into the game at the third stage, it gets boring pretty quickly to try to fill your quota of 60 game overs before you can even have a shot at beating the game. It's one thing that you can suck at a game and have a hard time. It's another that things get progressively worse the more you suck. In Gradius V if you could half an hour before dying, at least you won't be as frustrated with repeatedly dying compared to lasting only 15 minutes so you'll hit your unlimited credits easier.
A counter example of a good difficulty wall would be Shining Force Neo. In the 3 Trials of Light the Demons bosses all do some insane amount of damage compared to anything you may have fought before (heck even some of the random stuff before them is insanely hard), but you can save basically anywhere. The game has a ton of customization so if one combo doesn't work you can always try another. And if you still can't beat it you can do the tried and true level up approach.
It's one thing to say (insert game) is the bestest game ever, how come it didn't say X milion like (whatever)? You can blame the masses being dumb or whatever for this, and that's fine. Competition is never supposed to be fair.
But if your bestest game ever didn't even sell enough to be profitable, maybe it's not as good as you think it is.
They may be desirable traits in a good game, but their presence along does not guaranteed a good game. If you look at a Zelda game, it is never going to be original enough such that the story doesn't involve a hero named Link and a princess named Zelda and a villian named Ganon. It is never going to be innovative enough that the game won't involve some kind of combat with a sword, arrow, boomerang, and a random grab-bag of tools. However there's far more to a good game than just having an original idea or an innovative feature. Doing a boring feature, like hitting something with a sword, but doing it extremely well, is what separates a good game from a normal one.
Most purist fans of Megaman series consider X4 to be the pinnacle of Megaman goodness and it is certainly a far better game than any Megaman game that came before it in terms of polish, X or original. You can say the games after X4 are a failure because they failed to meet the bar set by X4 but they're still solid good old Megaman games. Battle Networks is probably the most successful of the Megaman franchise in terms of sales and I view it the same way as Yugioh, World of Warcraft, or Pokemon: they're not games I, as a purist of the genre, would say is good, but who am I to tell the makers that their best selling title is no good? It may not be a game I appreciate but they certainly figured out something in BN that makes it profitable.
The Z series is also quite good and again its only shortcoming was the last Z game (Z4) failed to set the bar set by Z3, which is expected because the Z series was supposed to end with Z3.
Ashe and Vaan's voices are nothing special, just like their role in the story. The game intentionally misleads you into thinking they're supposed to be the main characters, but they are not. The whole story would've been just fine if the whole party just consisted of Balthier and Basch, and they drag the princess out of the airship whenever they need to pick up something only a descendent of the Dynast-King could (Treaty-Blade and Sword of Kings). Vaan's role, similar to Penelo, is to serve as the player's eyes, nothing more.
All the guys from the Archdeus Empire have the British accident, which I assume is done to give them a distinctive flavor.
Out of the characters who mattered, I thought they did a good job with the voices. Cid and Balthier are just downright awesome.
Didn't Google object having Microsoft put their own site as default search engine of IE7?
Of course, Google lost that one too, though in this case, as I understand it, there is no way to ever get the top spot from the ones Google wants their stuff at the top, whereas you could configure IE7 to use another search engine.
Oops, Excalibur 2 is from FF9. I go through RPG very fast and you'd not even come close to hitting the required time in anything that remotely resembles normal play. I believe you'd have to do things like opening the PSX up to skip CG movies because you'll lose an hour of time if you actually have to watch all of them.
All the games since about the PSX era has been about selling strategy guides. Some just do it more blatantly than others. For example, you need to get to the last dungeon in under 12 hours to get Excalibur 2. There is no reason anyone would ever attempt something like this without knowing there's a reward, unless you're in some contest to see how fast you can beat the game. There's plenty of analogous examples in all genres of gaming. FF12 is a pretty good example of shameless strategy guide selling, but overall it's still a good game.
I'd say the Judges are more like the Inner Sanctum guards or whatever those special Imperial agents are. None of the five judges fit any of the Star Wars personality except maybe Bergan. Also Daifacted Nethicite = Death Star, and Mist = The Force.
Both stories have the Imperial Senate dissolved too!
Ashe has some fighting experience but clearly 3 of those imperial guys was too much for her to handle. It is clearly implied Vossler and Basch, presumably the strongest warriors in Dalmasca, are supposed to be keeping her protected at all times. The game has some obvious parallels to Star Wars and Ashe is indeed quite similar to Princess Leia. She can pick up a blaster rifle and shoot a Stormtrooper but that doesn't mean she's supposed to be doing bulk of the fighting.