Since when did we argue in this thread? Sheesh.
Nert said:
I've been pleasantly surprised with storytelling in games lately, actually. Ghost Trick and Botanicula do a lot of wonderful storytelling through expressive animations and bizarre sound effects, for example. Then you have innovative things like Bastion's narration system and Journey's storytelling through environmental design and mechanics instead of words. I do agree that most higher budget games could benefit from a "less is more" approach.
Oh man, I keep forgetting to listen to the Botanicula soundtrack; thanks for reminding me. Those seem to be the exceptions in a wide array of games. Stuff like Ghost Trick is more of a narrative-focused game where the storytelling is based in text. A lot of care and attention to detail is placed into making the models animate well and tell the player a story behind the character animating. Then you have some games where it's mostly gibberish and while you can't understand what's being said, actions, clever animations, and body language speak ever so louder than words.
Meanwhile, other games whether high budget or low budget use dialogue more than body language or character animations to tell its story or to tell the audience what the character is like. It ends up turning into a lecture or a text dump. Sometimes the dialogue sounds like it's waffling through the plot or the character growth and as a result it sounds meaningless. There's little room for silly animations or nice animations on behalf of the character to add levity or contextual meaning to the situation. Storytelling in this fashion is utterly boring to me. A lot of RPGs fall victim to this, which is strange to me given that in the past, they concentrated on animations more often. Now it seems like there's more of a fixation on facial expressions and while that's all fine and dandy, it isn't enough. Language does not stop at the mouth or the face. Language involves the entire body.
But while I'm doing my playthrough of Final Fantasy IV in the anniversary thread, even though I don't like the game much, I can't help but to feel that one of the best things in that game are the animations a little bit. They aren't
outstanding by any means, but scenes like this:
I’ve always liked this scene. Again, I’m dismayed that the DS version didn’t have anything like this. So basically, Haddock told the dwarf nurses to fix the ship and put mystic silver, and he made Cena start doing some of the work. Cena pleads for the others to stop Haddock from taking him away from spectating but to no avail. He lazes around and Haddock watches him like a hawk, presumably yelling at him. And then for some reason, the nurses are running around trying to learn how to fix the airship and one falls off the bridge. Haddock doesn’t notice for a while because he’s yelling at Cena until he turns around and sees. Then everyone tries to help the poor dwarf nurse up.
Do you see how much story is told just by the freaking animations alone?! This is called good scene direction. You do not need pages and pages and pages of dialogue to tell your story. You don’t need 10-minute cutscenes featuring a monologue or characters talking back and forth to expand some stuff in a story or to symbolize a change in a character. Character animations and sprite animations in detail are things I cherish very much when it comes to storytelling in games, and there aren’t a lot of games that have that anymore. People seem to want to make (barely) interactive movies more than games, I guess, and rely a
ton on dialogue rather than pretending that the game part of the game is probably just as important. Hm.
And even the 1000 Words cutscene in Final Fantasy X-2 have given me enough story and enough things to put 2 and 2 together so I could come up with the entire picture myself; it was probably the best cutscene in that entire game. I hate it when the story spoonfeeds me with lengthy dialogue segments where I feel like the characters say nothing or don't ever give me insight into their behaviours or their personalities. And they seem to lack contextual body language a lot, which communicates far more about the character than dialogue ever could. All of this fixation of facial expressions and yet nothing's going into body animations. It's annoying and it adds to the unbelievability of the character.
Gravijah kept telling me to play Journey and I didn't listen cuz I was waiting for the collection. >.>
Heck,
Tales of Xillia has this chicken dance animation that I find neat (this is just a sidequest cutscene in Japanese; no spoilers outside of in-game costume spoilers but there are only 4 costumes in that game anyway; heck, I use the same costume for Milla because it's a million times better than her default/the palette swap of the default).
At least with silent protagonists in the past, you sometimes could rely on the character's animations to help tell the story rather than mostly relying on the dialogue of other characters. I praise The Wind Waker's, Skyward Sword's, Classic Sonic in Generations', Suikoden's (well, mostly 3 scenes) and Suikoden II's animations (TWO silent characters including the protagonist and they are handled so damn well due to their animations
alone) so much because they tell me so much about the silent protags through multiple frames of animation alone.
(
Oh, lol, I found this old post of mine saying almost the same thing. In the same breath I kind of imply that voice acting has ruined some talking protags for me.)
WillyFive said:
The problem with the Werehog was not that it was a werehog, but that it was poor gameplay. Polish and more development time would have fixed that.
I... sorta understand this, but perhaps better direction/a better plan to go about it would have helped too. The major problems were: lack of speed, framerate drops, and shitty balancing; why oh why did SEGA poorly balance the Werehog?
When you level the Werehog up a lot, it's workable and easy to do stages in a very short amount of time. But at the beginning when the balancing's weird, it shouldn't take the player half an hour to finish a stage in a Sonic game. At all. Yes, you may avoid some of the enemies and pull switches when you aren't getting attacked and swarmed, but those damn bees especially in parts where you
have to fight them? Having to grind the Werehog for a while to get through things quickly?
No Sega, no.
