Final Fantasy VII: Kind Of REDACTED In Retrospect

Lamp's post is good and interesting!

I love Minsc a lot too but I'm not reading the rest of this thread for fear of BGII spoilers, still haven't got around to playing it cos I haven't OCD'd on BGI quite enough.

GP, I think that is kind of exactly what BG2 did...?

BG2 & David Warner's Irenicus is what finally made realize the importance of great voice acting in anglophone games, and the how great it was when you had a classically trained actor in the role.

Actually, David Warner and Paul Darrow both highlighted how greatly improved genre entertainment can be with classically trained actor types, as opposed to whatever cheap stringer a casting director or voice-over studio found living around Vancouver/L.A.

Of course, I encountered both actors at an age when I could finally appreciate what they brought to the game, as it were.

Yeah I mean people def def have hugely different thresholds for this, it's a totally personal thing! Some people are happy to make stories around stairscumming in roguelikes, some people want animated cutscenes to feel involved, whatever - I was just positioning the games on a spectrum?

all game voices should be by billy west

and ron perlman

BuuuuuuUUUuuuut SEEEEEpiroooooooooth.....

One thing I do want to mention, which may or may not be obvious, is that I find my personal enjoyment of a game to jump by several levels when there are actual characters & dialogue. I offer up the contrast of BG2 and the Icewind Dale games; ID1 & 2 had better technology and an equivalent story, but it was due to the characterization, dialogue, and attendant voice-acting that puts BG2(and its predecessor of Planescape) as some of the greatest rpg/computer/video games ever made.

One of the criticisms of this I've read goes along the lines of "oh you can just make a story for your characters, why should you actually need somebody to talk it out," which always seemed like bullshit to me; if I wanted to do that, I'd write up dialogue for when the lego men on my desk got sick and tired and decided to declare war on a toy dalek. It's a 6-parter, but I could have edited it down into a real 'crackling' 4-parter.

Final Fantasy VII: Kind of Retarded in Retrospect: A Baldur's Gate II Thread

I'm just butthurt because when I played BGII about 8 years ago, it was the first non-JRPG I had ever played, and it confused the hell out of me. I quit after a few hours.

This FFVII thread is making me want to reinstall it!

I actually first entered the world of rpgs thru the game that helped spark jprgs: Ultima III(a.k.a. the NES 'Ultima'). I played mainly pc rpgs for years(w/ the exception of some nes games) and it wasn't really until i played ffvii in 1999 that i got to get the feel for how jrpgs worked. I was used to stuff like Ultimas IV - VII and a Half.

And now it's interesting to see what happens when americans deliberately make jrpgs, see 'Anachronax' and all the summons in 'Planescape'. (they even tip their hand to the FF series in the game thank-yous)

Do the BG games hold up today if I've never played them? I think i'm in the mood for a good rpg

No, they don't, unless you're really into generic D&D environments and rulesets.

the writing is still great

The graphics are sketchy nowadays but I still like the storyline a lot.

I'm just butthurt because when I played BGII about 8 years ago, it was the first non-JRPG I had ever played, and it confused the hell out of me. I quit after a few hours.

yah i had a pretty similar history w/the game so i d/l (ðôíòõ peace) bg1+2+expansions and started playing bg1 last nite. its... okay so far but tbh im not feeling the interface that much and the layout seems really clunky compared to say nwn. makes u pine for blue menus

i guess basically it seems okay but i shoudve just d/l nwn2 or morrowind i think?

nwn2 isn't as good as nwn1 and I can't imagine playing Morrowind

this reminds me that i used to play might & magic iv: clouds of XEEN on the pc, and all i remember is that there were these teleportation portals where you had to type codes to get where you wanted to go, and if you typed XEEN it would take you instantly to the last boss, who would kill you. i always wondered if you could just grind for hours and hours and then kill XEEN without going anywhere in the actual game.

were already so far o/t i guess it doesnt matter but ime nwn1 is the pinnacle of these games. y/n??

on the first computer i ever put together myself i played one of the ad&d games with a desert setting that was pretty dope i cant remember the name tho woulda been like 95/6. i also sorta played bg and planescape: incalculable, so morrowind is no good?

was clouds of xeen the one with the darkside of xeen expansion? i played that for like ~20 hours of random quests, went looking for the main quest, got immediately killed, forgot about it entirely

I rank Planescape: Torment, NWN1, BG2 and KOTOR1 all about the same; I would replay any of these games in a heartbeat (and have done so with all of them).

never played Planescape, I'd love to give it a (console) go sometime.
Did anyone do Jade Empire? Is it worth it?

Planescape never came out for console.

Jade Empire was fun but nowhere near the league of these other games, IMO.

i have KOTOR on xbawks but whenever i have tried to play it, it crashes when i try to exit the opening area

Yeh, i know there was no planescape console game, it's just that i have no interest in returning to pc gaming these days.

i think that's the one, tom.

i remember getting pretty far in the ad&d game that came out for sega genesis, until it lost my save file, forcing me to go back to playing eternal champions or whatever.

so im pretty sure the game i was thinking of upthread was a ravensloft game for pc. it was fun but comparing that and eye of the beholder (so awful) to the saturn/snes jap ish from that era western games feel so sweaty and stupid and cruel

nwn is the only pc rpg ive really "got" i think. still im going to give bg a chance

the ad&d megadrive/genesis game - WARRIORS OF THE ETERNAL SUN? i finished that. you had to go to one hidden square behind a hidden door in a more or less random dungeon and a guy was behind it and said "oh hey! i want to trade with you guys! guess that means you win the game!" it was dreadful.

it was the only videogame rpg my ex-RL rpg player brother ever played, i think. then i saved over his save file in a sort of involuntarily spasm of brattiness when i was ten or whatever and he never went back to it. otoh in retrospect it certainly seems like a favour

yeah, that must have been the one.

Forks, if you liked Fallout, you gotta go for Planescape someday. The writing is really leagues above what passes for it in most video games, even today.

Man this thread has gotten off-topic! I do wonder if FF VII had gotten a remake on DS or whatever I'd give it more slack, but I still don't think it's as replayable or as worth going back to as the SNES-era games. I can't see all the endless re-trekking, loading, cutscenes and summons being tolerable today, but then it was the last Final Fantasy I've really played.

A remake with an option for skipping through summons would convince me to play through it again.

Honestly, i've played FF VII so many times by now that when i now start to replay it... it's not that it doesn't hold up, it's just that I've done it all like 50 times.
and I don't care about graphics so am going to check out games that for some reason passed by me - BG, NWN, and Fallout

Chris Avellone once wrote about how Planescape was to take your standard Fallout/Bioware isometric engine, and create an entire game around the express purpose of delivering narrative. Not combat, not graphic, not customizability, the main point of the whole enterprise was constructed entirely around the story. And it showed.

Oh yeah, and Sheena Easton voices the hot lead chick.

Really.

meanwhile, we live in such times that all these guys(game creators and whatnot) can be your myspace friends.

don't those nerds know that Facebook is the new cool
fucking gamers

LOL I am going to try to friend Sheena Easton and tell her I loved her work on Planescape.

"Not combat, not graphic, not customizability, the main point of the whole enterprise was constructed entirely around the story. "

see, this is kind of a retarded design strategy

planescape totally earns points for effort, but, eh, still —

see, this is kind of a retarded design strategy

haha i just finished a game that had this goal! i dont think its retarded altho it can be... problematic? idk the best way to describe it but the games i make are way more about ways 2 approach narrative than abt mechanics

weird, i thought planescape was terrific and i thought nwn1 looked and played like shit and had a lame story, never finished it

I thought they were both great examples of different game design philosophy.

I remember, in I think nwn2, it took forever to destroy boxes
my friend and i stopped playing after a couple of hours because of how much that annoyed us

I just finished downloading Fallout 1 and 2
am excited to get home from class so i can play them for the first time

Sheena Easton's myspace doesn't seem to be all that functional, but here's Chris's:

www.myspace.com/SicilianChris

and here's Feargus's

www.myspace.com/the_fudd

Be sure to get the fan patches for FO1 & 2. They help correct a lot of problem.

As great a creative force as Black Isle was, place had some QA issues.

So, if I wanted a next-gen console for rpgs, which one should i get?

DS err, nothin'

haha

kingfish theres a new star ocean coming out for xbox thats supposed to be pretty good. still its pretty much an open qn right now :(

love the FFVII story line