Good vs. Bad JRPG intros

[Drathnoxis]

I've always liked the opening to Mario RPG. Bowser captures the princess, Mario beats up Bowser, and boom, giant sword falls out of the sky. The stakes are ramped up efficiently, and the stage is set within minutes. A lot of JRPGs are so in love with their own story that they force you to watch an hour of stilted dialogue before they even let you past the tutorial. If you're lucky. That's not to say that I don't enjoy story in games, but there are wrong ways to go about it. It's been a while since I've played it so I can't go into detail, but FF12 is probably as firmly in the wrong as you can get.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I've always liked the opening to Mario RPG. Bowser captures the princess, Mario beats up Bowser, and boom, giant sword falls out of the sky. The stakes are ramped up efficiently, and the stage is set within minutes. A lot of JRPGs are so in love with their own story that they force you to watch an hour of stilted dialogue before they even let you past the tutorial. If you're lucky. That's not to say that I don't enjoy story in games, but there are wrong ways to go about it. It's been a while since I've played it so I can't go into detail, but FF12 is probably as firmly in the wrong as you can get.

Reminds me of Chrono Trigger as well. Get up, festival, sucked off through time, go. It's simple but i think these are product of SNES limitations. Even FF7, which is the best game ever, has an incredible intro mostly because it is simple enough to get you rolling but leaves mystery as to why. Though you could also argue that FF7 has an 8 hour intro which includes all of Midgar if you consider everything that part sets up.

 

[Elijin]

Not enough time has been spent fangirling over the out of nowhere hype watching people play underwater basketball produced.

It's probably the only opening that has not only stuck with me, but the memory of feeling engaged by it has stuck.

So yeah, go FFX and your underwater ballgame that was cancelled due to being more underwater than expected.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Final Fantasy 7 Remake's first chapter absolutely blew me away when I played the demo for the first time, not long after I'd finished the original game for the first time. Seeing the city of Midgar expanded to know what's behind the black, the greater detail in the character interactions, and taking one of the worst boss fights in gaming history and turning it into one of the best - everything about that first chapter just hit it out of the park. And those things continued through the whole game, in my opinion, even as it started to go off the rails in a lot of other ways.

 

[Drathnoxis]

fangirling

Wait, you're a girl? I didn't think we had any of those left on the Escapist.