lucablight said:
If FFXIII and Final fantasy Gaiden came out at the same time which one would you be playing?
Me? Final Fantasy Gaiden. That's not to say I won't play FF13, and it isn't to say that I won't (probably) enjoy it. But everything about Gaiden is appealing to me more right now.
tokkun said:
Personally I have fairly negative connotations with older first-person dungeon crawlers - Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Ultima, those really shitty sections in Fester's Quest - of endless rectangular corridors with the same boring textures and easily becoming turned around and lost.
I have played some first person RPGs I liked a lot; Anachronox and Fallout 3 were both great. The thing is that both of those games had immersive graphics, environmental variety, and a lot of wide-open spaces so you weren't being subjected to extremely repetitive corridors.
When you're not animating an onscreen character, the environments are the only thing the player has to look at, the importance of making the world visually stimulating to the player seems to get a lot more important. Now, I've watched the short teaser videos, and while they're colorful, I'm seeing a lot of corridors and not many small environmental details. It's still early, we haven't seen much, and it may be that the final game will have a lot of visual variety. But given that this is a DS game, I'm remaining somewhat pessimistic.
It's funny, because the kind of first person games you hate are the kinds I absolutely love, and the kind you love are the sort I hate. The first person games with huge wide-open spaces? I find them completely stressful to play... not enjoyable at all (nevermind that they do a poor job imitating a real first person perspective, since it's like you're wearing restrictive blinders in them). But the corridor based first person games were some of my most enjoyable gaming experiences -- in those, I find the exploration fun and immersive rather than stiffling and oppressive like in the wide open ones; I find the labyrinths in them wonderful to wander through and figure out. Games like Phantasy Star and Shining the Holy Ark and Shining in the Darkness and Shin Megami Tensei I and II all the way on up through the Etrian Odyssey games... that's what I love.
Varna said:
Also DS games are DIRT CHEAP. I bought Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Etrian Odyssey I/II, Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy IV for about $90.
True. It definitely beats 60$ a game.
velvet_nitemare said:
... can't think of anything more terrible than only getting handheld SMT games this gen.
velvet_nitemare said:
Same thing as Zero SMT games that catch my interest.
How sad. :/
Near said:
Because some of us actually prefer gaming without bending our neck for 50+ hours. I don't play RPGs in very small chunks like some of you dudes in here seem to be implying. I sit through and play for a couple hours when I can, I don't pick up and play for 10-30 mins and put it down.
I'm all for sitting down on my couch in front of the HDTV and playing a game for a three or four hour block when I can. But the way my life and my days are structured at this point in my life, it's just not as feasible as it used to be. I almost never have time in the mornings before I get breakfast, go to the gym, and go to work. After I get home for work, I have a few hours before I go to sleep. So I basically have to always be willing to commit that block of time, in full (setting aside other commitments like talking to friends, eating dinner, reading the news, and so on), to gaming, and when that's the mentality, it almost feels more like an obligation than a relaxing thing to do for fun. So just like Segata, I really just have a huge span of time on the weekends, and I typically have social obligations on at least one of the two days.
I can do that time commitment, but honestly, it's harder to do that with as many games as I used to play. So I can mainly only get myself into that mentality with the very best of the best games, and any even slightly average stuff, if it's of a significant length, I just can't commit to it.
With a portable game, I can play it for a few hours here and there throughout the day even before I get home -- 5 minutes while stuck in traffic, 10 minutes here and there whne I've got some downtime at work, an hour during my lunch break. By the time I've gotten home from work, I've already done a decent amount of gaming during the day, and believe it or not, that makes it a LOT easier to slide right into the gaming mode after a stressful day. It's also nice that it comes with a bit more freedom because I don't have to do this chained to one spot, sitting on my couch, after I've spent the whole day at a desk. I can play lying in bed, I can play in a comfy chair in my library, I can play while preparing dinner in the kitchen. Ducky analogized it to reading a book; I think that's right. It also comes with the freedom not just to play whenever I want, but to stop playing whenever I want -- unlike with most home console games, where you don't have that freedom, the convenience of sleep mode on portable systems makes it much more relaxing because I know that if I get bored or tired or decide I want to do something else, I'm not locked into that time commitment I made earlier; I can stop whenever, and that helps me enjoy the gaming more. So I'm gaming in long chunks of time and short chunks. It's both.
I get that some people live totally different lifestyles and have 10 hours free every day to stay chained in front of a television, but it's surprising to me that so many people can't see why portables are appealing. Especially for people like myself... I've been gaming for so long, and that's probably one factor in contributing to me just not caring about the overall graphical experience
that much. It's a great thing to have! And when I play those (increasingly infrequent) home console games that really grab and hold my attention for a long span of time, I can definitely appreciate lush visuals and well realized artwork. But it's not a huge deal for me, and I'm also fine and can easily appreciate more scaled down visuals.
As far as bending a neck or squinting my eyes or getting hand cramps... I see these complaints so often from people. I dunno! None of them have ever been an issue for me. Because I can shift my body position any way I want when using a portable (just like using a laptop computer versus a desktop), I'm pretty much always in a comfortable position, and the eye stuff's never been a problem for me. The screen may be smaller, but it's not a dozen feet away, either.
Hopefully this helps you see where some people are coming from.
ZephyrFate said:
I don't know how you can prefer Persona to the other SMT games, but regardless Persona 5 should wait until after SMT4 comes out.
Almost makes me want to go through the effort of digging up the eye roll gif.
