I don't think the modern stuff in AC is inherently a bad idea, they just did a pretty bad job with it. They could have made it work for the series. As it is now though it's good they've cut it out.
Games that wasted a perfectly good premise/plot
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Castlevania Bloodlines was going to have two more characters you can play as. A ninja that pretty much played like Ryu Hayabusa, and some dwarf type character with a mace. How awesome would have been to see a ninja be playable in a Castlevania game. I am satisfied with what we got. Bloodlines is still an awesome game and my personal favorite in the franchise.
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I'd try to explain it based on my understanding but realized I don't care enough to defend the series anymore.
No with ODST, kind of with Reach.
The ODST live action trailer is blatantly misleading. The game isn't a gritty war drama. You are not on battlefields half the game and instead are trapped behind enemy lines, looking for your squad and a way to get out. It has a pretty heavy noir atmosphere thanks to the setting and music, but the mystery aspect could have used some work. As you explore you find remnants of battles your squad participated in, which trigger flash back missions. You get to see the city fall gradually through them as the city gets more and more damaged and the human military presence dwindles in each successive mission. The fact that most of the characters are voiced by the cast of firefly helps and hinders the game. They tend to deflate tension with their glib lines but you also get the sense that the squad has known each other for a while. Considering ODST was just a mini dlc campaign forced to be sold as a full release by Microsoft, ODST is a strong entry. I wish it had gotten more resources put into it cause it could have been something amazing.
Reach is pretty meh. The game wants to be a war drama but outside of George nobody in Noble 6 have any discernable personality. You dont feel anything when they all eventually bite the dust. Most of the campaign missions are separated by days if not weeks so everything feels disjointed. The actual story of the game(getting Cortana to the Pillar of Autumn, the ship where Halo starts) begins in the last third of the game. Its not like having the spartans with you does much anyways, they are stronger than marines but still dont do anything cool and the game contrives ways to keep you separated from the squad for long stretches. Being apart of the elite special forces unit of humanity isnt fully realized.
I've only watched parts of Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, but the assistant character inspired me to think of a much more interesting story.
The assistant character is the 17-year-old Kay Faraday, the self proclaimed Great Thief Yatagarasu, who steals the truth.
Obviously that is the sort of theatrics associated with thieves in fiction rather than reality, but it gave me the idea: what if the assistant actually was a teenage delinquent?
What if they was an actually troubled youth assigned to you by the police to make them respect the law or what have you, and over the course of the game you manage to gain their respect and actually befriend them and make them turn their life around? With the perspective of someone that actually has done crime present they could also add some valuable points at key moments, creating some character dynamics. It could end with a final case where someone from youth's past has committed a crime so it is personal and all the things they've learnt is put on its head. It would be a story about recidivism and the circumstances that makes people commit crimes.
Granted this is so far removed from the series proper that it might as well be fan fiction. And if the game starts out with an antagonistic assistant I suspect it would put everybody in a foul mood.
The assistant character is the 17-year-old Kay Faraday, the self proclaimed Great Thief Yatagarasu, who steals the truth.
Obviously that is the sort of theatrics associated with thieves in fiction rather than reality, but it gave me the idea: what if the assistant actually was a teenage delinquent?
What if they was an actually troubled youth assigned to you by the police to make them respect the law or what have you, and over the course of the game you manage to gain their respect and actually befriend them and make them turn their life around? With the perspective of someone that actually has done crime present they could also add some valuable points at key moments, creating some character dynamics. It could end with a final case where someone from youth's past has committed a crime so it is personal and all the things they've learnt is put on its head. It would be a story about recidivism and the circumstances that makes people commit crimes.
Granted this is so far removed from the series proper that it might as well be fan fiction. And if the game starts out with an antagonistic assistant I suspect it would put everybody in a foul mood.
Hhm... Not a bad idea for the premise of some kind of investigative game. Probably not a Ace Attorney kind of thing but an interesting idea.
Still a bit salty about Mass Effect dropping the Dark Energy subplot
If you can erase your memory of all AC and replay the first two games, one can see it had potential.
My first game in the series was AC2, which connects the main historical plot with the modern day not just with dialogue with these glyph puzzles, secrets to discover and a really fun wacky DaVinci Code style conspiracy theory. AC2 is my favorite game of the 21st century (or tied with Witcher 3) because all of the pieces formed this really fun interesting world I wanted to keep revisiting, and the "modern day" was central to it. Playing the original AC just added to the mystery and intrigue.
But that was a long time ago and, yeah, since they didn't really end it well and then did nothing interesting with it, it is fair to declare the modern day a stupid waste of time, because that's true for like 10 games that came after. But those first two games showed its potential.
It's also likely one of the reason ME3 had such a hard time actually wrapping the series up, because the Dark Energy plot was apparently meant to be central to the Reapers motives and with that out, well, there wasn't really much to replace it, which is why ME2 mostly feels like the plot doesn't matter much and is carried by the loyalty missions and the suicide mission in particular.
There's no guarantee that it would have been a significantly better ending if that hadn't changed but if that was indeed the primary plan before being dumped, I can only imagine it did nothing to help to lose it halfway through the saga.
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If you're going the change writers 2/3 of the way through a trilogy my advice would be to make sure the new writer was better than the old one... but that's just me being crazy and shit.
I didn't want guarantee or "seal of quality". It might've still been bad writing, but it would be more interesting premise than "baddies want to kill us" we got.
I read they’d changed horses midstream because some dingleberry leaked the ending about six months prior to launch and (I want to say) Casey Hudson got really pissed off and he and one other guy secluded themselves for a few weeks with naught but a pen, paper and a bucket of cocaine and rewrote the last third or so of the game.
Though that being said, the Reapers annihilating the whole of galactic civilisation every 50,000 years so that the overuse of Mass Effect technology - a technology by Sovereign’s own admission they made - doesn’t destroy the universe strikes me as no less stupid than the programming error leading to Ultron level villainy they went with. It’s kind of like that episode of Star Trek TNG where they reveal high warp speed travel is tearing subspace holes in the galaxy like petrol fumes (among other pollutants) we’re doing to the Ozone in the 80s.
Also, last bit. I have a feeling that had the starchild not been random awkward kid but say, Saren, that sequence wouldn’t have been so maligned.
And as I remember it, it wasn't long before they were happily zipping along at Warp Factor eight-point-whatever again, and that plot point was never brought up again for the rest of the series.
Wait wait wait... so the Reapers leave all their Mass Effect tech laying around so advanced civs will grow in predictable patterns to make The Harvest easier but The Harvest is necessary because of the use of Mass Effect tech? That's moronic.
Maybe not so maligned but without significant tweaks to the dialogue would have still been dumb as dogshit.
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I thought the reapers did the harvest or whatever to make more reapers?
I don't know. I think Saren would have been a much much better choice... especially if you did the paragon playthrough and got him to kill himself. I think there would still be grumbling but no where near as much as with the weird kid.
Kinda sorta, it was how they 'preserved' organic life... by turning it into Reapers. *shrugs*
I don't have an issue with whoever shows up in the scene... it's the premises behind picking a colour ending that are dumb as fuck. 'The Intelligence' is derpy.
Killer 7 - There was a lot of backstory/lore that was removed from the cutting room floor, or put in to supplemental books or comic adaptions. Yes, Killer 7 had a short American comic adaption that tied in to the main game. Not all of the Smiths receive an equal amount of focus or are barely there within the story. Not counting use in gameplay. Due to time and budget restraints, Suda could only focus on so much, with the major plot being the conspiracy.
I prefer the Heaven Smiles as they are in the game and definitely unique, but it's still would've been cool to see them as straight up, rage/berserker type zombies. Or have in-between evolution stage between berserker and later manic kamikaze forms.
I prefer the Heaven Smiles as they are in the game and definitely unique, but it's still would've been cool to see them as straight up, rage/berserker type zombies. Or have in-between evolution stage between berserker and later manic kamikaze forms.
They stuck with the premise for a while, needing authorisation from Starfleet command to go above Warp 5. Eventually they realised it was a pointless flow breaker that slowed down plots so they handwaved it away with new and improved engines. Which to be fair, does sound like the sort of thing Starfleet R&D would do.
Well that's what they DO with the Harvest, not WHY they do the Harvest in the first place.
Frankly, delving into the Reaper's origins and motivations was a mistake: they're ancient machine lifeforms that want to destroy us all. Who gives a fuck why.
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If they are doing the harvest to make more of themselves then that kinda is the why right there.