I really dislike the idea that in order to be knowledgeable on games, you must have played every game. There are certainly gaps in my lexicon, and I keep quiet about them because there's nothing more I loathe than someone agape, demanding of me, "you never played [that]?! How are you a game journalist" and blah blah blah.
I never thought I'd pull that one on someone else, but when I found out my friend, talented fellow writer Kirk Hamilton, had never played Final Fantasy VII I was pretty much like dude wtf is yr prob fix this now bro (yes, that's kind of how we talk to each other).
Fortunately, rather than tell me to step the eff off, Kirk agreed to launch into a letter series with me which he's running over at Paste Magazine, where he is games editor. In part one, we discuss initial perceptions from his fresh perspective, and in part two, we discuss a bit about the characters and why abstraction makes the world feel real [edit: part 3 is also up] -- follow official index here!)
I know it's tempting to think of FFVII as something that's "been done", but it's fascinating to see an adult gamer discover it for the first time, independent of the climate in which it was originally released, divorced from the fanboyism. I also think everyone who was an FFVII teen should endeavor to replay the game as an adult, as I'm doing -- ideas on who we are now and where we came from help illuminate why a game where everyone had giant hair made a genuine emotional impact on an entire generation.
And for both of us it's making us consider the state of RPGs in 2011, what Westernization has done, and what we might have lost in the march toward streamlined design and better graphics.
23 comments:
Cool beans! I always think about doing something similar when I go on a retro-trip to play a game I never got round to. Looking forward to reading the full series! :)
Wait, so don't play Half-Life 1 & 2 for the first time? Play FFVII for the first time instead? Priorities are hard.
I think this is kind of neat doing a game journal, but there is a point that I strongly disagree with.
WRPG's are not at the centre of RPG streamlining, as your post implies at the end. Consoles are. RPG streamlining started back in the mid-90's with console JRPG's. The first major RPG that I remember being streamlined was Breath of Fire. This is hardly a Western title, nor is it WRPG-influenced. And FFVII is one of those streamlined RPG's.
That gripe aside, I hope your friend has fun and fewer computer crashes than I did playing FFVII (lost my hard drive 3/4 of the way through the game). And tell him not to play it along side a hardcore RPG if he's into that sort of thing. I did that, playing it alongside Daggerfall and it completely ruined the (FF VII) experience for me.
The idea of re-playing FF7 as an adult scares me a bit. When I was 12 it was this AMAZING MASTERPIECE OF STORYTELLING. I suspect if I went back to it now the plot would seem a bit rubbish and the writing would drive me as mad as the writing in most games does now. Which would be a terrible shame for my rose-tinted memories.
Wondering what came of you and Kirk's reflection on RPGs and the current state.
I had forgotten many of the little story touches mentioned in the letters, but the images are as evocative as ever. I believe FF7's aesthetic is timeless, inhabiting a strange and brief transitional period between the more sophisticated JRPGs of the SNES era and the modern 3D game environment. It's colorful, chunky, abstract enough to make the details really sing. More was communicated in a single prerendered background than in entire hours of inane FF13 cutscenes.
I hadn't thought about "westernization" until I read this, although, I do admit that during my recent play of Dragon Age 2, it felt very similar to when I played FFXII a few years ago, which in retrospect felt very much not like an jRPG at all. I do remember missing the 7, 8, and 9 era.
All I have currently is a PC. but I will try to find a way to replay VII.
Love the insight Kirk had at the end of the third entry when talking about the rough edges of the game:
"Would FFXIII seriously have benefited from having some broke-ass non-combat gameplay inserted just to change things up?"
I know he was asking that semi-rhetorically, but I my immediate response was actually an emphatic "Yes!" Anything to counterbalance the antiseptic design of the game would have at least been interesting.
Anyway, great idea, and great series. Can't wait for the next entry.
This is an interesting series, though I don't seem to agree with most of the findings.
I bought FF7 on release date. I had already been an electronic and tabletop RPG player for nearly a decade by that point.
I enjoyed it. But I have never had the love for the game so many do. Even then I was like "Its alright. I had fun".
Nothing about the game whatsoever was a revelation or amazing.
The basic cast archetype and story seemed lifted hole hog from Phantasy Star 2. (Sword wielding agent of major planetary government rebels alongside gun wielding guy who lost family, thief in it mostly for fun, altered humanoid healer girl who dies to another altered humanoid halfway through, planet is in danger or destroyed due to large spaceborn object.)
When I compared what FF7 did to what games like the Ultima series had done years beforehand it just came up short, like the JRPG genre usually does.
(When you get a game for Christmas 88 that gives you free reign over an entire world, where time passes, day and night matters, you can solve things any way you want, the NPCs almost all have personalities you glean from your own discussions with them, clocks tick, pianos can be played, and in general IT FEELS LIKE A REAL WORLD YOU GET TO SAVE, the average JRPG with its massively constrained generic stories full of characters seemingly designed by committee to cater to obvious otaku fetishes just can't hold up at all.)
Not to say FF7 was BAD. It was OK. Its not the best of its franchise (FFTactics or 6 wins here), or even its subgenre (Phantasy Star 4 kills it), or even its era (Fallout 2 is probably the best electronic RPG ever made.), but it was fun enough to finish.
Something I certainly can't say about most of the Sony era main FFs. 7 was the last one I could be arsed to finish. 8 was just DREADFUL in every single possible way (Quistis being awesome wasn't anywhere near enough to save it.), 9 I didn't even bother with, 10 just got tedious after a point, 10-2 lasted about an hour before I was totally skeeved by it, and 12 was decent but like Disgaea 3 I spent so much time goofing off I tired of it but felt I got good fun out of it all.
I guess I am just not the target audience for the Sony era JRPG. I was in my early 20s for them, growing up in the late 90s with the Commodore 64, NES, and Genesis in the house (and loving the C64 the most of all 3.), I liked more of the RPGs where you make your own party and go explore a world where you basically write your own stories and don't have long boring plots you have no control over that seemed to be written for Japanese Otaku.
(Where you almost always have a love triangle, and usually end up with the girl next door type. Also religion is always evil, and anyone over 23 is an old useless fart. Bleh.)
I just don't get the love for this game. I kind of hope maybe your series will help me understand.
Edit: Meant to say late 80s-early 90s for when I got into RPGs. Too much typing I guess.
Though I am still REALLY curious to understand why people love this game so much.
I would play Final Fantasy if it was as good as Monty Oum's machinima videos :D
@Rufus
I generally preferred WRPG's to JRPG's, too, but there is a keen difference between the two. JRPG's put more focus into story and artwork of the world than interacting with the world itself.
I think it was Kirk that was commenting on how every potion in Oblivion looked the same...well, any potion you found out in the world in FF VII did, too. There just wasn't a billion of them.
That isn't to say that character interactions weren't canned, because they mostly were. But JRPG's are more focused on the parties and the backstories and how that fits into the world, not how you can work and interact with the world and where you and your profession actually fit in.
Character growth in JRPG's generally comes down to your stats and your character backstories. Role depth rarely goes beyond tank, healer, summoner, offensive caster and sneaky SOB who is hard to hit but doesn't necessarily do the best damage (aka a Thief without skills).
WRPGs tend to focus much more on your profession and how you can use that to navigate the world and finish the game. Character development is based more on your stats and chosen skillset and less on story, so it's often based on how you want to play the game, not how the developer wants you to play it.
There are JRPG exceptions like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactices, but I find these few and far between.
It really depends on what you want; with JRPG's, the developers are more interested in infusing art into the game than gameplay. As a result, the stories are deeper but the gameplay suffers. WRPG's focus more on gameplay, and the stories often suffer as a result.
If you put much emphasis on story, then JRPG's kind of do a better job of that. They're often uncenventional, so you can at least be surprised by a few of them. Western RPG's, not so much. But there might be surprising gameplay mechanics that you never thought of.
@Player_1
Story suffers in Western RPGs? Planescape:Torment, BG2, Jade Empire, KOTOR 2, Mass Effect 2, VtM: Bloodlines - all of these are examples of some of the best writing/storytelling in gaming. The only JRPGs I've played that I would really consider putting in that company are the Persona games.
I found the part about "abstraction" in the second part really interesting because that's exactly the term I thought of to describe why I find the visuals of some older games much more evocative than a lot of newer ones (even when playing them for the first time ever).
In a lot of older games everything is so abstract it's easy to buy that what you're seeing isn't what "actually" happened, so your imagination fills things in and make everything much more grandiose. In newer games the visual bar is high enough that what's there is intended to be what "really" happened, so the developer essentially has to do all the work your imagination does with a lot a older games, which is a tall order.
@Sean: Shhh!!! I'm pandering to keep the JRPG fansboys quiet.
But you did call it wrong with Jade Empire (traditional RPG story), Mass Effect 2 (race against time), and KOTOR 2 (soap opera).
Just because your character can be a dick doesn't make the story better :P
This is pretty interesting. I'm actually in the middle of a Final Fantasy 9 playthrough on my PSP (it has been many, many years since I played it), and there is so much that I am noticing now (being 26 instead of 15).
FF9 is gorgeous. There is a lot of love put into the graphics, into the character sprites, into the narrative, into the battle system, into...well, every nook and cranny of the game. While FF7 is my favorite FF, FF9 is likely the most well made and well rounded game. They did not cut corners in it. Square seemed to have learned from whatever mistakes they made in FF7/FF8 and fixed them in FF9. I was a bit worried I would not be taken in by the plot, but truth be told, I am spending more time with it than I am with Red Dead Redemption (my first playthrough of RDR).
I also recently had a playthrough of the first Breath of Fire on the SNES. It had been probably 13 or so years since I last touched that game. It was never a perfect game, but I found myself looking forward to playing it on a daily basis. Its story is minimalist, but there is enough there for your imagination to fill in the rest.
Fallout 3 had me excited to improve my character, to see what is still out in the Capital Wasteland waiting to be discovered. FF9 has me excited to improve my characters, delve more into the plot, and explore the world. There is a deep culture that is present in both Fallout 3 and FF9, but somehow, FF9 seems to make it come alive better.
In many ways, western RPGs have come to rival if not surpass Japanese RPGs. In other ways, Japanese RPGs always seem to maintain this certain something that always makes me excited to play them.
@Player_1 I said best writing/storytelling, not necessarily cleverest or most original :-p Jade Empire does have a very trad story, but it's very well told. Same for ME2's main plot, but some of the character plots, which are a massive chunk of the game, transcend that (Mordin/Samara/Thane).
KOTOR 2 - just ... what? Do you mean space opera? Even if you do, it's not. At all.
@Sean:
A story is more than storytelling. I won't deny that Mass Effect 2 or Jade Empire are well told, but they're also unoriginal. Mass Effect even goes into the territory of plagiarism. Read the Revelation Space series by Alistair Reynolds, you'll understand.
However, KOTOR 2? Excellent storytelling? No. Not a chance.
It's the most original story of the three, but it's also the most unnecessarily convoluted. I found it to be very much like a mid-90's Square or Enix RPG in both how the story was fleshed out as well as the pacing, actually.
Hence the soap opera label. The story didn't even really cut to the chase until the last quarter of the game, and the question was often coming up, is this a self-discovery story or is it a stop the bad guy story, or is it both? That equates to lack of writing direction. KOTOR 1 was concise; you needed to stop the bad guy and get your marbles together. KOTOR 2 goes off in far too many directions and leaves you wondering wtf you're actually doing. That's really bad storytelling. Even worse, is that conceptually, it's just a dragged out version of the story from the first game. It was clear that Obsidian had a hell of a story to tell, but they just didn't know how to tell it, they compeltely dropped the ball. And many critics would actually agree with me on this point. In fact, the story telling was so bad that it overshadowed the superior gameplay and character evolution; I have beaten KOTOR 4 times because I enjoy going back to that world. I couldn't care less about KOTOR 2.
A story is not just composed of how it is told. It includes the plot depth, concepts and the depth of each character. WRPG's definitely have solid storytelling, but the story depth has been rapidly going downhill in favour of things on the side, like guilds and sidequests because it's all about your story blah blah blah. At the end of the day, the story of the game is the main quest, not joe blow's career as a dragon slayer.
JRPG devs aren't doing this; They're fleshing out the main quest to create a more satisfying experience - at least from a story perspective. I mean, Fallout 3 didn't feel complete until I finished Broken Steel. Which I had to buy. NOT COOL. Oblivion left on a cliffhanger and realy didn't develop Martin's character very well. He was just a story object that was poorly fleshed out.
Most JRPGs aren't doing this. There are fewer loose ends if any and I have yet to see a developer essentially charge you for the end of your story.
I played FF7 back in 1997, having been a big fan of SNES-era RPGs, and I didn't like it. I thought the much-praised graphics were ugly, I didn't like Cloud at all, the translation was written by people who clearly couldn't pass a high school English course, the entire story for about 2/3 of the game consisted of "Chase After Sephiroth", the plot itself was nearly incomprehensible, and many of the members of your party lie to and keep secrets from the player.
If you've never played FF7, seriously, don't bother. It's not great. It's not even good. Final Fantasy 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10 are all much better games than 7 is, and I've never understood just what it is that people see in it. (Maybe if I played it with a retranslation patch? I think I remember that one exists for the PC version, which I don't own...)
I have no good reason to get a PSP, except that FFVII on a handheld has been something I've wanted since I was seven. Thus I keep trying to come up with an excuse to get one.
Final Fantasy VII was the first RPG I've ever played, and became my favourite gaming experience.
Any real RPG fan must have this game, but I also recommend it to anyone not familiar with RPGs.
Final Fantasy VII was the first RPG I've ever played, and became my favourite gaming experience.
Any real RPG fan must have this game, but I also recommend it to anyone not familiar with RPGs.
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[blog]: Space Strategy Games Sector
Well stated. I have been trying to get my girlfriend to catch up on Final Fantasy X recently... That one is probably one of my favorites!
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