What TFU2 reminds me of is a child of about 7 or so who had seen some good action movie and was trying to play it out from his memory a week later. He doesn't remember any of the talking, the plot of the movie, or why he should like the protagonist but he does like to run around the room ranting, raving, and reenacting the glorious fight scenes. People like George in the game industry don't realize that small deliberate movements have the potential to be more meaningful than the most over the top bullshit in TFU2. Take a look at other games such as Mass Effect 1 & 2 ( I hate to compare TFU to ME but it's my best example ) they never had something that pulled me out of the game experience...not once. I took one good look at videos on youtube and turned my nose up at it...the bottom line is that TFU wasn't ~as~ geared toward the kids, but when George got the marketing numbers back he had a small seizure and went on a splurge. South Park got it right when they showed him raping the Clone Trooper and Spielberg raping Indie. My childhood memories will never be the same because these shit stains will always come to my mind as a smelly afterthought.
Force Unleashed 2 Is Too Much
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
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It also tends to play into it that the most "awesome" things are just setpieces designed to happen no matter what and completely ignore the whole game aspect. Plus giant bosses tend to be not nearly as powerful as their size suggests because of the no-gamer-left-behind policy so they don't play much differently from fighting a regularly sized dude who's tagged as "the boss".
made some great points, which is far better than just bashing the Star Wars fandom like he did before
altho I'll admit, at my age I've already grown past Star Wars somewhat to the point where me playing FU2 was just to experience some momentary (and yes, very brief moments) of the Star Wars universe before returning the game back to Blockbuster
not exactly delving back into it all again 100% nor am I totally taking it too seriously, just getting what enjoyment I can out of this childhood fandom. guess this is one of the few things in life where I've learned to somewhat move on from haha...can't say that for some other things (like my ex, altho a part of me wonders the same for Yahtzee)
altho I'll admit, at my age I've already grown past Star Wars somewhat to the point where me playing FU2 was just to experience some momentary (and yes, very brief moments) of the Star Wars universe before returning the game back to Blockbuster
not exactly delving back into it all again 100% nor am I totally taking it too seriously, just getting what enjoyment I can out of this childhood fandom. guess this is one of the few things in life where I've learned to somewhat move on from haha...can't say that for some other things (like my ex, altho a part of me wonders the same for Yahtzee)
I completely agree with Yahtzee on this point. Willing suspension of disbelief can only go so far. Another example is the ridiculous assassin chase sequence in Attack of the Clones - the sheer mind-numbing implausibility of the sequence causes it to lose any and all tension (to paraphrase Mr. Plinkett's analysis), no matter how "awesome" it may be.
I think the operative word is "restraint". All good musicians know that playing fast, or playing loud, or playing at all are not as important as the times you play slow, or quiet, or not at all. Without contrast, nothing stands out. I ranted about this last week with the Dragon Age: Origins "Sacred Ashes" trailer. The trailer was about a group of hyperconfident, snarky badasses with superheroic acrobatic abilities that laughed in the face of dragons. A far cry from the game itself where they turned out to be flawed, vulnerable human beings with hopes and dreams, who had to struggle for what they got. Sorry, maybe it's my parents' immigrant work-ethic, but I don't empathize with heroes who get victory handed to them (Harry Potter in Book 1). I prefer heroes who have to struggle and sacrifice to succeed (Harry Potter in Book 7).
This. To paraphrase Tycho of Penny Arcade, I'm more interested in the smugglers, pilots, bounty hunters, rebels and crime lords trying to survive in a universe wracked by an endless holy war between two sects of insane super-powered warrior monks, than those lunatics themselves.Sir John the Net Knight said:
If coinciding with the original Star Wars, Starkiller was meant to fail just like Halo Reach. Those guys were meant to fail. So it doesn't make any sense to have a good ending. Why? it is not like Starkiller is continued to the original Star Wars movie. And if he did, wouldn't that take away any potential of Luke Skywalker?Yahtzee Croshaw said:
I am so at awe by the analogy Yahtzee made at the end between the Indiana Jones movies. Being a fan of that series, I was never able to put my finger on why the Crystal skull bothered me so much, but I think this is why it did. The realism compared to the realism of Last Crusade that's so great. I do remember the feelings in both the tank scene and the jeeps scene. One made your heart race abit and the other made you think something is wrong about it at the very least.
HAHAHA! I can't wait.Yahtzee Croshaw said:
This kinda thing reminds me of Dragonball Z, probably because it's the worst offender. Every new season upped the ante by, literally, not figuratively, upping the bad guy's "powerlevel" until "IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND" ceased to even be a staple of the show because it was a laughably low number.
That big thing what beat up a rancor like it was a gerbil.... Jesus, what the hell. I only need to take on look at that, and I can accede that there truly IS a peak to the mountain of awesome where a step further brings us down, a crest where up is impossible.
Things have to seem ever so slightly believable or else the audience will lose all grasp of perspective. Sure, for some people a never ending upward ramp is what they want, but for them we have several dozen crappy inexplicable anime series with 16 seasons each.
That big thing what beat up a rancor like it was a gerbil.... Jesus, what the hell. I only need to take on look at that, and I can accede that there truly IS a peak to the mountain of awesome where a step further brings us down, a crest where up is impossible.
Things have to seem ever so slightly believable or else the audience will lose all grasp of perspective. Sure, for some people a never ending upward ramp is what they want, but for them we have several dozen crappy inexplicable anime series with 16 seasons each.
Another good article, and I really agree with a lot of your points. Things that are too flashy and ridiculous often end up being less cool and harder to take seriously, and the kind of one-upmanship you described has definitely been hurting action scenes for a while.
I think that the problem with a God of War style giant boss is that you only really deal with tiny pieces of it and then finish it in some ridiculous cinematic event that' not even close to anything you can do in normal gameplay. My favorite giant boss fights are actually the Arms Forts in Armored Core: For Answer, which really forced you to fight entirely unique enemies at least 100 times your size in normal gameplay. You never felt that the task was completely impossible, but at the same time you felt a very real sense of how dangerous they were and had to spend time selecting your strategy and equipment instead of fighting them the same way you did other enemies. The game had a ton of problems, but those fights really redefined what I think of when I think of giant bosses.
I think that the problem with a God of War style giant boss is that you only really deal with tiny pieces of it and then finish it in some ridiculous cinematic event that' not even close to anything you can do in normal gameplay. My favorite giant boss fights are actually the Arms Forts in Armored Core: For Answer, which really forced you to fight entirely unique enemies at least 100 times your size in normal gameplay. You never felt that the task was completely impossible, but at the same time you felt a very real sense of how dangerous they were and had to spend time selecting your strategy and equipment instead of fighting them the same way you did other enemies. The game had a ton of problems, but those fights really redefined what I think of when I think of giant bosses.
Caliostro said:
You really seem to be talking about anime in too broad a sense. There is a tremendous amount of variety in anime and anime is by no means any one thing. It's many things. I'm pretty sure that even Yahtzee would agree with me on this one. And if you are describing Dragonball and Naruto as realistically inclined then I really can't say that I agree with you. For example in the very first episode of Naruto the very first thing we see is a giant demon fox and in Dragonball we have things like dinosaurs that still exist for no apparent reason and cars that you can carry around in tiny capsules. If you want realistically inclined then I would suggest titles like Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and Monster. Now THOSE are realistically inclined.
But on the other hand I pretty much agree with you about the handling of the Star Wars Universe. In recent years George Lucas and those who work under him have been doing WAY too much retconning. What really bugs me about The Force Unleashed II is the apparent total lack of respect it has for established Star Wars canon. News Flash to the people at LucasArts: Characters like Juno Eclipse and Rahm Kota are at best nothing but footnotes in the Star Wars timeline. Please stop trying to go back in time and establish otherwise. And complaints like this one are just the tip of the iceberg. But then again consistency really doesn't seem to be George Lucas's strong point. For example Leland Chee, the person in charge of maintaining the Star Wars continuity database called Holocron, at one point outright stated that George Lucas's view of the Star Wars expanded universe was "constantly evolving".
I really sorry to say, but this is one of the main reasons that I've recently been starting to lose interest in Star Wars related stuff.
Yeah but in saints row 2 it was the little things that made it funny, like when you first walk off the prison boat and stumble across and old lady throwing a pimp face first into a lamppost. Its not realistic, or even physically possible, but at least you can comprehend the physics involved. Whereas what Yahtzee here is talking about is something like Just Cause 2 where you can stand on top a jet fighter at top speed 10 miles above a tropical island, place a lump of c4 on it, cleanly jump off, pull a parachute out of your arse then detonate the c4. There are so many things that should not work in that situation yet on screen it just happens and expects you to go along. And although the whole point of just cause is that you can do amazing nonsensical stunts I find the game demands far too much willing disbelief. If you clear out a whole military base in Just Cause 2 it looses all meaning because you used massive regenerating health, a rapid fire rocket launcher, a pouch of infinite parachutes that don't catch on anything and a grappling hook that is infinitely strong while somehow being unable to tear your arm clean off in the process. You didn't win a fight, you used an atom bomb to mow your lawn.Azaraxzealot said:
As usual another excellent article that isnt meant for mere laughs but to actually change the industry, a true observation of human fallacies.
Yahtzee Croshaw is the John Stewart of Gaming, give it a couple more years and I see Yahtzee leaving the simple internet media and branching out into the public's eye.
Yahtzee Croshaw is the John Stewart of Gaming, give it a couple more years and I see Yahtzee leaving the simple internet media and branching out into the public's eye.
Yahtzee, im with you all the way on this one.
This is where i get bored in games.Mr Companion said:
I look forward to that day. Yahtzee was the main reason I got into this site, and I've found it to be an incredibly insightful and respectful appreciation of gaming culture. And in Yahtzee's case, with lots of swears.Jiveturkey124 said:
OT: I can't agree with Yahtzee more. Movies and video games are supposed to be about telling a story, either with compelling settings and characters in the former, or engaging gameplay and environmental immersion in the latter. This is why I'm such a huge Myst fanboy. It's so simple. As Douglas Adams put it "A beautiful void". There's nothing there! At least, not at first glance. Play the series and (think of it what you will) there's an incredibly deep narrative being told through such simple mechanisms.
But then, games like these, God of War, Dante's Inferno (a travesty on so many levels), and other over-the-top-robot-punching-dragon spectacles, you lose all meaning in terms of theme, mood, atmosphere, plot, characterization, and all other literary merits. I see video games as like interactive novels, or movies. If we want video games to be considered art, like these, we need to lay off the video game equivalent of a strip club. All looks, not touching, and expensive.
YZ, does have a very valid point. Also to add is, empathy. You can't relate as much as to Kratos, compared to a Heavy Rain character. Well Gran Turismo 5 is coming out tomorrow, so try relating to a Bugatti Veyron going 400km/h!
Almost sounds like a coopted statement based on Stalin's "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million, a statistic." line. Makes sense though, and it's not like anyone is going to spend time trying to make 10 million sundaes.
It made sense in Shadow of the Colossus. In some games, like Force Unleashed, it was just "HOLY SH*T!" for holy sh*t's sake. That gets old fast, and it robs actually powerful moments of their appeal. I thought it was a pretty simple concept.Bobic said:
You misunderstood me.A1 said:
Yes, I know anime is very broad, I watch a lot of it myself. But anime series tend to fall prey to this, particularly "run on series", or series that are "stretched" past their original script (e.g.: Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Dragonball, to a lesser extent, and despite remaining quite good, Rurouni Kenshi...etc). Anime already tends to start off on more loose interpretations of reality, and "run-on"/"never ending" series inevitably fall prey to power scaling... And an anime that started a "a bit over the top" quickly degenerates into "ridiculous super powers world-ending abominations".
Naruto is a good example. The ninjas in Naruto start out as your typical pop culture ninja: super fast, very strong, and with quite a few "tricks" up their sleeve. You had one of two "titans", but that was it.
...Halfway through the series we're dealing with monsters that can plough through an entire city in a hit, summon sand tsunamis and assorted monsters the size of mountains, to say nothing of Itachi and the Akatsuki freaks...
Dragonball is another text book example. You start with "bordering on super human" fighters, who are considered the very elite. Songoku is some sort of super human being for his capacities, and all the other "very strong" opponents he finds tend to be conquerors or leaders of armies of some kind. And these are the very, absolute, elite best. Mostly they can punch people through a wall or two, and a leap a few duzen extra feet in the air. At one point, Goku is considered some kind of absurdly rare "chosen one" for his capacity to shoot a basic fire ball (the Kamehameha).
Things quickly spin out of control after the Piccollo saga, and by the middle of DragonBall Z we're reached a ridiculous level of fighting where artists just decided "fuck it" and fights are essentially invisible, and everyone that can't fire a fireball without thinking is some kind of retarded failure.
By the depressingly bad ending of DragonBall GT, anyone that can't destroy an entire planet with a punch on a bad day is not even worth mentioning as anything other than comic relief.
It's the whole reason I've taken to watching animes that come with a predetermined beginning, middle and end. First, because the story is far more "focused", with basically no fillers, and second because there's a lower chance of running into absurd power scaling.
That said, you mixed up the "realistic" part. Things don't have to be realistic, they have to be coherent. Lightsabers aren't "realistic", but they make sense in the universe. Being able to pull down a Star Destroyer, which, by the way, is roughly a mile long by roughly 0.6 miles wide star ship that carries around an army, with pin point precision without even moving is not.
The problem isn't being realistic or not, it's when the world defines it's own realism, then fucks it right up in favour of giving everyone super powers.
Let me break this to you, from one one former fan to another: George Lucas is a hack.A1 said:
Yes, I said that. George Lucas by himself is a clueless fucking hack. He has some good ideas, but he hasn't the slightest idea what to do with them. His original 3 movies become the gold they did because he was constantly riddled by technical limitations and a team that constantly criticized his insanity. These people kept him in check. These people went away after the first 3 movies, and were substituted by brown nosing fucks who were afraid to tell Georgy "...Yeah, this is a bad idea". On top of that, the original Star Wars were such a colossal hit that George became the prodigal "golden boy" of movie making. Nobody dared criticize him, and he somehow got the idea that he owed it all to himself... And that he could write... And didn't really need anyone else...
To top it all off, Georgy went from "underdog" to "monopoly guy". He went from being the guy with ideas nobody gave a chance to, to one of the big boys that could do anything he wanted, no matter how stupid... He developed a taste for money, and lost his interest in artistic integrity and the like...
The result is what you see today: A creatively bankrupt franchise milking old whore.
To me, Star Wars is Episodes IV, V and VI. With maybe some room for Kyle Katarn and the Jedi Knight series, and the first KOTOR. Everything else I've personally relayed to the garbage bin of "half baked fanfic author masturbation".
True, but there's a difference between very slow creatures that you'd have to spend your time on working to get tot he one weakpoint that can take out the monster. The beasts he spoke of are fast. And really, c'mon, the beast that Starkiller had to face was four times larger than a Rancor! And put one extra umph to the Rancor's size and it's approximately the size of the Colossus's. So, really....Bobic said:
So too much is too much. If you can destroy a Star Destroyer with the force alone, then there's something wrong with this picture. Never overpower the individual that's suppose to be your uber power. And yes, I know, time's changed, which means "NOW" if Starkiller is that strong and actually a part of the series, then Skywalker will eventually be ten times as powerful. Think about that...