What RPG are you playing right now?

[Zing]

I recently finished Mega Man Legends, and the ending credits mention Breath of Fire III. I've been meaning to play that series for a while, and I was in the mood for some really basic RPG gaming, so I started up the first Breath of Fire.

The NPC dialog reminds me of Secret of Mana, which I suppose is not surprising, since the games share two important qualities: Ted Woolsey and a shortage of ROM space for text. The NPCs say very little, and hints on where you are to go next are usually only mentioned a single time and contained in a single sentence. I find that I have to really focus on what the NPCs say, and try to remember every little bit of info, otherwise I have no idea what is going on or where I should go next. What would in more modern games be a few minutes of dialog or a cutscene is here a single line of dialog. Large parts of the plot and hours of game time are contained in a few lines of text.

I am at a point in the game where the plot has become quite intricate, with nested quests and a chain of at least four locations to visit. There were probably three lines of text, total, explaining what to do, and I am still not quite clear. I often feel like I am just stumbling onto the next plot point. I assume the original Japanese version was a bit more coherent.

[Gamerforlife]

Hurricane Sandy got me out of work today and tomorrow, so I've finally started putting some effort into Xenoblade Chronicles. I like it so far, although the voice acting is really annoying. Reyn has established that every single group of monsters we've encountered were a "bunch of jokers," so I don't know why he has to keep driving the point into the ground.

Ugh, I HATED the combat dialog in that game. Get used to it, it only gets worse. Though you might find it more tolerable if you turn the Japanese language option on like I did. It's somehow less annoying when it's just gibberish in a language you don't understand.

[SteveyMajors]

Ugh, I HATED the combat dialog in that game. Get used to it, it only gets worse. Though you might find it more tolerable if you turn the Japanese language option on like I did. It's somehow less annoying when it's just gibberish in a language you don't understand.

This is a big improvement. Thanks for the tip! There are so many games with those silly little quips. I don't know why developers bother putting them in. I would imagine the repetitiveness would bother them more than it bothers any player, considering they work on the games for so long.

[Ack]

So I have finally begun playing through Super Mario RPG.

[Xeogred]

My first RPG, haha. I enjoy going back to that one.

[MrPopo]

I'm midway through BG2. I cleaned out every quest I could before Spellhold, and now I'm in the labyrinth. Now that I've figured out all the buff spells and the debuffs the fights have been pretty fun. Of course, now I'm not looking forward to having a low level party again when I play Icewind Dale.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

I just beat Star Ocean 3. AWESOME. That final dungeon was AWESOME. The final boss, in gameplay terms, was AWESOME. Super tough, but not cheap. I ended up stunlocking him because his attacks kill in just one or two hits.

I love how Tri-Ace games make you master them before you have a chance. There's so much to them. Battle system was so much fun. The action is better than most action games, and the added management of party members and RPG mechanics made it really interesting. This is what an Action RPG should be, really.

The only thing I didn't like was the story. It started out with great potential for a space opera, and then weird stuff happened and it kept getting weirder. Some moments were utterly awesome (like firing a symbological lightning cannon while riding a dragon) but as a whole the writing was pretty haphazard. I can just imagine the writers sitting around eating sushi and asking, "What haven't we done yet, hyperspace? Medieval politics? Morality of genetic engineering? MMORPG addiction???"

[MrPopo]

"What haven't we done yet, hyperspace? Medieval politics? Morality of genetic engineering? MMORPG addiction???"

There's a bit of a mindfuck when you explore the consequences of being able to create a universe inside an MMO. Let's say you develop a perfect computer simulation for a universe, so that the NPCs inside are sentient and have no notion that they're an artificial construct. Logic dictates that we have no reason to believe that we are not ourselves part of a computer simulation. It's turtles all the way down for the 21st century.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

That's right, we could all be brains in a vat. The main arguments against a situation like that would be that the universe is too well-designed and coherent to have been created by a person with similar mental powers to ours. Invoking God -an actual all-knowing God - makes sense at that point. It also occurred to me that maybe the menus in the game aren't abstractions like they usually are.

That is, the every character in the Eternal Sphere actually uses menus and save points in their daily lives! Eating a steak can really heal your wounds! That's all they've ever known, so they would never even mention it. If that's the case, SO3 is the most realistic game ever. It is a perfect simulation of its own universe

Funny thing about that ending. It was pretty ambitious and it's lots of fun to explore philosophically, but it's also totally a cop-out. I was really hoping the story with symbological genetics and (legitimate) 4-dimensional aliens would continue. Or maybe just an old-school well written space opera. It's fun to talk about, but as a drama it wasn't very satisfying. I got the Maria ending and that wasn't very satisfying either. Then I watched the other endings on youtube...

Luther wants to destroy the universe for what he sees as a perfectly good reason - his video game can now kill him and his family if it wants to. He's about to die. So why does he start laughing maniacally? Why does he have angel wings? That's not a very good time to use old anime stereotypes

It also raises a lot of questions. Where does the new universe exist, if not in someone's computer? Why didn't Cliff ask "Maybe you're a video game too, dummy! Maybe everyone's laughing at you while they're playing Sims!" Maybe someone is laughing at me because I am a video game character talking about how meta it is that a video game character is actually in a video game in the video game, in the video game that I'm playing.

[MrPopo]

That's right, we could all be brains in a vat. The main arguments against a situation like that would be that the universe is too well-designed and coherent to have been created by a person with similar mental powers to ours. Invoking God -an actual all-knowing God - makes sense at that point. It also occurred to me that maybe the menus in the game aren't abstractions like they usually are.

Not even brains in a vat. Just raw data. And there's no need for an actual design like you're thinking. If you have a sufficiently powerful computer you can give it a physics engine and the initial conditions for the big bang and let the simulation run its course.