BudokaiMR2 said:
Y2Kev said:
It's not so much that JRPGs are rated unfairly vs. other JRPGs, it's that a lack of technical perfection is used to beat down a game unfairly instead of the reviewer actually describing what he liked or did not like about the game. The Eurogamer review commented on by duckroll in the early thread at least states a number of legitimate arguments-- author feels the pace is a bit screwy and things are a little disjointed, but the battles are fun and strategic.
It just seems like technical issues are being scapegoated here so that the media can beat down on another game and then whine six months later about the staleness of the genre.
Yeah I understand this, but it is not just some conspiracy against JRPGs.
I'm really not sure that Kev is incorrect at all in what he's saying. When you have the editor in chief of 1up saying (perhaps with some hyperbole) that Fable 2 has more innovation than the last ten years of Final Fantasy, and all that innovation is... pretty small bore (you can buy stuff? you can create a meaningless "relationship" with generic characters lacking in any personality/history at all?), that's fine. But then along comes a game from the same company behind Final Fantasy which is filled to the brim with genuine gameplay innovations and it gets hammered over the dumbest stuff. So maybe Kev is correct.
-Kh- said:
But I don't see the games in the same way I used to do it years ago. I just can't believe how MS would let such a flawed and faulty product get through. This game clearly needs at least 6 more months of development. [...]
Oh, christ, this stuff is getting ridiculous.
There are three technical issues in the game: loading, texture pop-in, and slowdown in battle. The loading, with install, is just short of instant -- you're talking a couple seconds. Nothing to anyone who lived through the PSX. The texture loading takes... oh, gosh, a second and a half? And the framerate only drops in battle when actions are being performed. Battles are
turn-based, incidentally, so it has no negative impact on the gameplay (and in fact enhances it since it makes critical triggers a lot more doable). That's it. That's the extent of the game's horrible technical problems. I haven't tried the game without installing, so I'll concede that it may be much worse like that -- but if it is,
do the fucking install. It takes up 6 gigs of a 20 gig hard drive and 3 minutes of your precious time (now that you've gotten one of those fancy jobs and all) prior to playing.
Clearly you never played Mass Effect, Fable 2, or Fallout 3, which are all littered with gamebreaking bugs and glitches where you can get stuck in walls or the game locks up and needs to be reset, and not to mention that they all have loading issues, slowdown, and texture load issues of their own. The framerate positively craters in Fable every time you have lots of enemies -- and that's a real-time game! Did you try its online co-op mode (you know, the one where player 2 doesn't even have rudimentary camera control)? Mass Effect has plenty of loading and it's notorious for its texture pop-in.
It's fine to note that there are some technical problems with the game. But people need to stop blowing this stuff ridiculously out of proportion and acting like it's a case of Square totally bungling the development, or a case of "easterners just can't use western middleware."
-Kh- said:
Sorry, I'm just a game tester that nitpicks on everything in a game and gets upset when a game is passed with numerous issues.
I think I take my job too seriously compared to my workmates who just enjoy getting paid for playing games.
You're a game tester? Don't they pay you people about as much as assembly line workers in a Honduran clothing factory?
