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[daniels]

FF12 Basch

 

[legacyzero]

FFXII shoulda been all Balthier

Nope.

Baltheir is awesome, sure. But Basch fits SQUARELY into the main role, even with Vaan in the game. He has the story to back it up, too. Fuckin Vann..

However, I would have taken Baltheir over Vaan any day.

FF12 Basch

DAMN RIGHT SON

 

[Laughing Banana]

HOW CAN YOU HATE GUY?????????



To each their own but I still think XII is X. While XII lacked in several departments, in the areas it got RIGHT, it excelled. X to me was simply a good game throughout.

Guy is somewhat more tolerable than the others, true, but then again the game makers in the vain hope of perhaps wanting to be 'edgy' gives him one of the most exaggerated background story ever. I rolled my eyes silly when they explained the reason behind his phobia.

 

[TetraGenesis]

I almost didn't buy TLOU because I thought you played as Ellie based on the cover. Would have killed the purchase for me.

You're a bad person and you should feel bad.

 

[Prototype Viktor]

Street Fighter
Man I've always hated Men and Ryu. Mike/Balrog should have been the main
Character

 

[Beelzebufo]

Street Fighter
Man I've always hated Men and Ryu. Mike/Balrog should have been the main
Character

The scumbag boxer?

 

[Prototype Viktor]

The scumbag boxer?

Yes it would have been interesting if they had to make a story around him for the movies they later made

 

[eXistor]

Good to see the first few posts were correct: FFXII is the first one that springs to mind to me as well. Vaan and Penelo shouldn't have even been in the game, they detract from an otherwise magnificent game.

 

[Count of Monte Sawed-Off]

GTAV would have been such a tighter story if they'd cut out Franklin.

Every NPC in Silent Hill 1 is a more interesting character than Harry.

Yeah, Franklin didn't really add much to the story, and if anything was a detriment. Not that he was a bad character or anything, Rockstar just never really fit him into where the story was going in any meaningful way.

And I kind of liked Vaan, he was just kind of there and wasn't nearly as annoying as many JRPG characters are, and plus towards the end

Spoiler

he stabs the fuck out of Vayne.

 

[AlwaysPlaying]

Banjo Kazooie - Nuts 'N' Bolts. I've not played it myself, but I've heard that a lot of people like it. But after years of no Banjo Kazooie games after the Rare/MS buyout, having him show up in a game about building cars certainly didn't go down well with a lot of the fans, who wanted a platformer.

Loved Banjo, and this indeed crushed my hopes. That and conker will always be in my wish list for one day release.

 

[Lightning Lord]

FFXII shoulda been all Balthier

First game that came to mind. Would have preferred Balthier or Ashe over Vaan.

 

[RedSwirl]

Recently I've felt like Mortal Kombat needs to transition to Scorpion being the main character.

 

[magnifico]

MGS 2- fuck Raiden.

Final Fantasy X- fuck Tidus.

Final Fantasy XII- fuck Vahn, and Penelo for that matter.

EDIT: I see we're all on the same page.

All this... the worst thing was MGS2 and FFX came out around the same time and my friends and I thought how awful it was that these 2 main characters were almost identical and wondered if square and konami were conspiring against us and punishing us for something.

 

[Dysun]

MGS4 - Should have been Solid Snake and not Old Snake. I get that Kojima wanted it to be the end for Snake, and no take-backs this time but it didn't really add much to the story and could have easily been replaced with Snake coming to terms with the Foxdie bio-bomb, and not retcon that out of the plot at the 11th hour.

 

[thefil]

Pretty much all games.

I guess The Walking Dead S1 had an interesting and appropriate main character.

 

[Astral Dog]

i dont think mgs 2 is a good example, the game is based around the protagonist and that was the point, in fact i think it was a good twist at the time.
And Bayonetta its an awesome game just like it is, what would be the point of making the game even more similar to DMC? its sad that the playable character has to be male and have certain features to sell, because we need more games like Bayonetta, not less.

 

[Ra1den]

MGS1, MGS3, and MGS4 should have starred Raiden.

 

[Shig]

Any direct game sequel where the protagonist from the previous title is no longer the protagonist or no longer in the game. This is just a subjective view for me like if the sequel to TLOU did not have Joel and replaced him with Ellie. I would give that game a miss.

I feel it's actually something more series should do ASAP. Look at Resident Evil 2, because they established a different cast right away, they really expanded the base of main protagonists the series could play with. If it was Chris and Jill again, the expectation would be that those two would be the stars of every game in the series, ad perpetuum.

I think it'd be great if Last of Us 2/3 just moved onto other bands of survivors entirely, and created the dynamic of a varied cast of "main" characters that approach the story from different viewpoints and whose paths could intersect and intertwine in future titles.

 

[DiipuSurotu]

FFVIII -> Laguna
FFIX -> Vivi
FFX -> Yuna
FFXII -> Ashe/Basch/Balthier (ensemble cast)
FFXIII -> Class Zero (ensemble cast)

 

[HK-47]

Guy is somewhat more tolerable than the others, true, but then again the game makers in the vain hope of perhaps wanting to be 'edgy' gives him one of the most exaggerated background story ever. I rolled my eyes silly when they explained the reason behind his phobia.

It's Tales. Everything ends up being eye rolling

 

[Gator86]

There was a point to MGS2 ?

Spoiler

You mean the "brilliant" game about an AI system designed to censor the net that decides the best course of action to test his net-censoring abilities is to sink two tankers , one filled with oil , the other filled with marines, so he can frame Solid Snake for the deed ... Then allows a mentally unstable cowboy with split personality disorder to hijack some badass nuclear super weapon for the next part of their very elaborate plan. Already very credible as a setup.

They that AI proceed to spend the next couple of years building a bogus facility that doesn't clean Manhattan bay, instead they use it to build a gigantic battleship underneath. Then they try to coax a fringe group of terrorists into hijacking the facility, to capture the president and to gain nuclear capacity. But it's all part of their "brilliant" plan, of course.

Now they can finally test their net-censoring prowess by coaxing Raiden, an unstable recruit with personal problems, into completing a mission, by the power of ... a Colonel Cambell AI that has the gift of being able to say "Raiden, you must complete your mission" to motivate raiden, and with the help of his naggy girlfriend .

To test the boy's progress , they hire... A fat man ... on rollerskates to put live bombs all over the place, bombs which can blow everything apart if the young recruit fail. But the recruit manages to disarm the bombs, mainly because of Pliskin's involvement, although he was not "featured" in the simulation. That's right ,he would have failed without Pliskin... But let's ignore that.

In the end , their plan is a "resounding success". I mean, it's of no consequence that the president is killed during the mission , the big shell is destroyed and the oil gets spilled back into Manhattan bay , that Arsenal Gear crashes into Manhattan (hope your net censor program works, cause you got some heavy censoring to make everyone in New York forget about that ship that blew up half the town) . Remember how the revelation that the US had been developing REX created a huge international incident ? Now the US will have to explain to the whole world how they were developing a gigantic nuclear submarine city and it got hijacked by terrorists ? But the mission is clearly a success , because AI Cambell managed to make a recruit finish his mission by giving him basic orders like "Raiden, you must disarm the bombs". Clearly, this will help tremendously in terms of building the program's ability to "create context" and censor the net. Clearly, MGS2 is the pinnacle of video game storytelling , a subtle masterpiece of coherence and brilliance that is the equivalent of the best works of modern and antique literature.

There's a reason why the events of MGS2 aren't really mentioned in the rest of the series, and why Kojima ran back to the 60s and back to Big Boss's tale after MGS2... He had no idea how to salvage that plot. And as much as he tried to do something coherent with MGS4, the harm was done and imho, the modern day timeline was forever altered out or relevance due mostly to MGS2's nonsensical plot.

But alas, I'll give credit where it's due. The sheer surrealism of the premise, setup and exposition creates an interesting feeling in regards to how the players feels. You question what you are experiencing, if any of this is real, trying to find meaning to it all. In that regards, the game does feel post-modern, an an experiment about what it feels to be a gamer, playing a character and being coaxed into achieving something, forced to continue, not really knowing who you are, why you are fighting and so on. As an experiment, it works, especially the end sequences where reality starts to fall apart, and honestly, if the game would have ended being a VR simulation all along, it would have been a great game, but the fact it's actually part of the canon of a series that prides itself on it's storytelling really bugs me to no end.

Sinking a tanker, destroying half of Manhattan, doing all of this would have made sense if it was Raiden being strapped into a VR chair experience a "Solid Snake simulation". Sadly, Kojima didn't want to make sense, so he made the events happen in his real canon story, which imho destroys the canon's integrity... Well, it was the first step in destroying the integrity (we got signing mechs more advanced than Ray in the 70s nowadays).

It's always amazing to see people talk about MGS2 because of how insanely idiotic it all was. An absolute disaster aside from the gameplay.