Role-Playing Games
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
I have to say, this is the first time I've agreed with Yahtzee 100%. Well, I liked Borderlands, but it DID get tired really quickly and I never bothered to try and make a second character.
RPG's are stale and gimmicky and half the time they aren't RPG's they just shoehorn a leveling system to keep the OCD audience from chucking the game halfway through.
Also, I agree that JRPG's are utter crap. (Except for Dragon Quest 8, which was shockingly enjoyable) Even when all my weeaboo friends were gushing like little girls over Sepheroth, I thought Final Fantasy 7 was boring and incomprehensible.
RPG's are stale and gimmicky and half the time they aren't RPG's they just shoehorn a leveling system to keep the OCD audience from chucking the game halfway through.
Also, I agree that JRPG's are utter crap. (Except for Dragon Quest 8, which was shockingly enjoyable) Even when all my weeaboo friends were gushing like little girls over Sepheroth, I thought Final Fantasy 7 was boring and incomprehensible.
Borderlands was a combination of a lot of better games thrown in together to create a very mediocre turd.
i lol'd at "stupid gay rubbish"
/comment
i lol'd at "stupid gay rubbish"
/comment
Wow, it certainly does take a grade-a asshole to flame people's memories of playing pen and paper RPG's when they were kids, for no apparent reason or comedic effect. Let's see, what else is there in this broken mess of an article? Oh great, more JRPG bashing, with the exact same phrasing that he used the previous 5 billion times. Excuse me while I quietly slip into a boredom-induced coma.
Phew... a little bitchy and judgemental today are we?
" Again, surely every game has you playing a role to a certain extent, but presumably it's intended to harken back to the old pen-and-paper role-playing games you used to play with your little friends around the kitchen table in your pathetic, idle youth (or pathetic, idle current existence). But those games were about literally taking on a role"
Perhaps this was meant to be ironic, or one of those "Don't mean this to be taken personally" (when the person clearly means to eviscerate your soul) moments of passive aggression.
Still, I think there were some good points made about the strange categorizations we throw on games...
" Again, surely every game has you playing a role to a certain extent, but presumably it's intended to harken back to the old pen-and-paper role-playing games you used to play with your little friends around the kitchen table in your pathetic, idle youth (or pathetic, idle current existence). But those games were about literally taking on a role"
Perhaps this was meant to be ironic, or one of those "Don't mean this to be taken personally" (when the person clearly means to eviscerate your soul) moments of passive aggression.
Still, I think there were some good points made about the strange categorizations we throw on games...
Wow. I think I actually felt my braincells dying as I read this article and the responses to it.
Much like beauty, genre really is in the eye of the beholder. This is not taxonomy, for fuck's sake. We're all smart enough to use the Internet, so theoretically, we should be smart enough to make some determinations about how a game is constructed from the blurbs on the back of the box without relying upon an arbitrary label placed upon it by some marketroid who thinks that "it'll be more popular if it's a ______ game".
Ignore the 'classifications', except to use them for a quick and arbitrary sorting, and if you're someone who uses quick and arbitrary classifications to make your purchasing decisions, well, I have some DLC of a bridge in New York I can pass on to you, dirt cheap.
EDIT: oh, and yeah, Borderlands is shit as a single-player game. Redundant and nothing particularly new or innovative. The story is occassionally entertaining, but not to the point where it actually merits the time investment.
Multiplayer, however? We had a pretty good time. I don't know if it was 4x $60 fun, but it was an enjoyable few hours with my friends.
Much like beauty, genre really is in the eye of the beholder. This is not taxonomy, for fuck's sake. We're all smart enough to use the Internet, so theoretically, we should be smart enough to make some determinations about how a game is constructed from the blurbs on the back of the box without relying upon an arbitrary label placed upon it by some marketroid who thinks that "it'll be more popular if it's a ______ game".
Ignore the 'classifications', except to use them for a quick and arbitrary sorting, and if you're someone who uses quick and arbitrary classifications to make your purchasing decisions, well, I have some DLC of a bridge in New York I can pass on to you, dirt cheap.
EDIT: oh, and yeah, Borderlands is shit as a single-player game. Redundant and nothing particularly new or innovative. The story is occassionally entertaining, but not to the point where it actually merits the time investment.
Multiplayer, however? We had a pretty good time. I don't know if it was 4x $60 fun, but it was an enjoyable few hours with my friends.
In all honesty I've completely lost interest in this aged dialogue but what the hell. You summed it up pretty well yourself. Games that reach out to the traditional sense of what a "ROLE Playing Game" is are what is hopefully the future of RPG gaming. The genre is undergoing a transformation like many other genres before it. Platforming used to be a linear two-dimensional jump-a-thon that brought you from point A to point B. These days it is a three-dimensional, less-linear jump-a-thon that brings you from point A to point B, or C, or D, or even Z. RPGs were once an adventure of unlikely heroes that grouped together and took turns whacking old men with sticks... now we can choose how, when where and if we even want to hit the old man with the stick at all. Any game that falls behind better have a nostalgia or franchise factor to hold on to or else they won't have the ability to stand up among the big names like Mass Effect and Dragon Age... in western markets anyway.