RPGs are better in 2D. Discuss!

Excuse me, I think my eyes need to commit hari kari.

well, not anyMORE. Home Movies was great, but that's not running anymore...

ps. fuck u if u disagree

Dan you need a new keyboard.

I live 8 feet away from you.

Do you two, like, live together?

That should read: Jon, tell me RPGs to play! (besides Nethack, I <3 Nethack obv), I will play them and FF3 and resolve this dispute by SCIENCE.

I was thinking about it maore this weekend, how it seems like the SNES and PSone platforms have carried a disproportionate number of the most lauded RPG/adventure titles to date (and I realize my generational handicap at work, though keep in mind I also never personally owned or lived anywhere with either console until about 2000). More polygons, more voice-overs = more reasons NOT to identify with a character.

I didn't have as much trouble with Baldur's Gate games or the Fallout series in the whole "masking effect" sense because those games also let you have a greater degree of control over your actions and persona. Making your own moral choices vs. aesthetic choices, it's a videogame! No difference! See Black & White (gah).

If I can CHOOSE exactly what my pseudorealistic fantasy self gets to looks like or what they do with their lives, that circumvents the need for the masking effect.

If I'm stuck with some douchebag avatar whose destiny is welded to the results of a strings command then at least make him/her/it abstracted enough to appeal to more than Gwen Stefani's dancing troupe.

My two absolute favorite timewasters since getting into videogames again: Katamari Damacy and Minish Cap. Apparently I really love the idea of being a tiny person clad all in green with a dumb looking hat on.

-- TOMBOT (pete...), February 23rd, 2005.

I tried to get started on FFTA this morning and froze up in exasperation at the "name yourself" screen. Like, can I get a game where I am NOT some kind of androgynous Aryan pussywillow and all my friends have stupid-ass unisex monikers? Seriously I think Kirby, who is a PINK BUBBLE, is more heroic than this nymph of the lilypads they want me to pretend I am here. I even restarted, tried to name him/her/it AGAIN, and got stuck once more because looking at that stupid little face gave me a brain fart. ARRRGH.

-- TOMBOT (maybe.name.i...), February 23rd, 2005.

I renamed RAMZA to HANSEL which helped things a bit (he's so hot right now) but I don't know if I'll be picking that up again for a while because now that I'm into it FFTA is SO MUCH BETTER.
The pixel graphics on the DS are so much nicer than the crappy rendered 3D terrain maps from the PS version.

After a little bit of soul-searching I realized what my REAL problem was with playing as a tow-headed milquetoast with no athletic ability or fashion sense and named my FFTA character "Tom." Tom of CLAN SUPERBAD.

More on that topic I realized this morning that FFT/FFTA should really just be renamed "Final Fantasy: Human Resources Management," I mean I'm only a few hours in and I already feel like I should be putting together Training And Orientation For New Hires packets or some shit. "Take him down the hall, get his badge made up, issue him a White Staff, Leather Garb and send him on a Level 1 Dispatch." WHY IS IT FUN?

-- TOMBOT (bes...), February 25th, 2005.

This has happened with games of any genre, but especially with RPGs where it'd take away from narrative and/or gameplay development.

What about Uncanny Valley problems? Does nobody have as big an issue with this as I do?
The one side being Dead Or Alive Volleyball/Xenosaga, which make me feel ill (though I hold out hope for the Xenosaga remakes for the DS; lower resolution: a balm in gilead) because I'm kinda disturbed about the designers & their presumed target audience.
The other side being Dead Or Alive/Vice City, big rendered meat-maps moving around in totally unnatural ways that cause me to get goosebumps in the bad way. When you're wrapped up in gameplay the action is usually abstracted enough that it isn't completey bad goosebumps, but when the end of every fight or mission is essentially a cutscene it gets just plain icky.

I'm totally in the minority on this one, aren't I? I think Battlegrounds II looks like shit, too.

I can't think of a single game where the "prettyness" or polygonal nature of the graphics detracted from the game for me; it's always been deficiencies in gameplay. I see the argument that people are sacrificing gameplay for graphics but I don't completely buy it in the sense that once someone pushes through a graphical barrier, someone else is usually right behind them developing a similarly-pretty game that's actually fun to play.

3D graphics rob you of the creation of the characters and the world in your mind, because they are already realized, albeit imperfectly. Where I forgave and even embraced the ridiculous, jerky movements of the victory dance in FFI, for example, I found myself so much more critical of the movements in the 3D RPGs, because they pretended to be beyond that, to be more.

I know it's not a game, but Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is another good example of this phenomenon.

I like 3D games, and at times they've really awed me, but I love 2D ones. I think eventually they will find their way out of the valley, and that good games can be made from within it when they don't use the graphics as so much of a crutch, but deep in my heart part of me will always prefer the SNES era because the graphics were just good enough to stimulate your imagination, but not so good (or so "good") that it rendered your imagination useless.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance = Gameboy Advance.

FFTA is a completely different games based on the ps1 original rather than a port. it's not really as good either.

This is exactly what McCloud talks about when he describes the "masking effect" in comics. Note that with very few exceptions, protagonists and their motives are almost always portrayed in much less detail than the villains. This has the nice effect of alienating the audience from the villain, and avoiding similar cognitive hiccups with the hero.

It also brings up a completely impertinent point about Osamu Tezuka's works - he really likes to feature antiheroes who defy the masking effect in order to get you to empathize with them! cf. certain characters wearing sunglasses all the time cropping up again and again.

When I first played Earthbound (at age 9, I think), I named Ness after me, and Paula after my brother (just to insult him). It got awkward when I realized that they fell in love in the game.

-- C('ing on)urt1sss (curtis.stephens@gmail.com), February 2nd, 2005 5:12 PM. (Curtis Stephens)