JRPG General - Video games were never meant to be shorter than 50 hours.

[Fcret]

Okay after taking a break to ruin my life by getting back into FFXIV, I've come back and finished the main story of .hack//GU Vol 3 Redemption. Some thoughts:

Spoiler

1) I know endings are hard but it feels like GU has the same sort of issue as IMOQ in that the ending just feels incredibly unsatisfying. I guess there's a whole new extra volume in last recode but I don't know how they can really tie it up to make things good.
2) The pacing of the third volume is absolutely atrocious. You spend like half the game dealing with Sakaki's moustache-twirling antics (despite having a big final showdown with him in the previous volume) and it just feels like a slog. Then you almost immediately get thrown into the confrontation with Ovan, beat him, and then the final part of the game is suddenly upon you. Hell, there's all this hype about Haseo's final form and you basically get like five hours to actually use it with no real meaningful weapon upgrades or progression.
3) Haseo's character transformation feels incredibly rushed. Obviously he grows up a lot in vol 1 and 2 but vol 3 is him going full LE GOOD GUY GREG and it just doesn't feel organic at all. I feel like his acerbicness and aloofness just got completely deleted in a way that kills his character.

I have to say, after finishing Tales of Vesperia, I really don't see why so many hailed it as a classic. I think a large part of it in the west was the fact it was an Xbox exclusive, because it sure wasn't anything special in most respects, and was quite annoying and obtuse in others and lacked a lot of key quality-of-life stuff, like marking locations on the world map.

Vesperia was special because it was the first HD game and it was really the culmination of the 3D Tales formula that had started in Symphonia and then continued advancing in Abyss. Vesperia is also special because it was one of the few big budget JRPGs made in an era when everyone was abandoning the genre.

I think it's also important to keep in mind that it was the point where Namco stopped dicking around and finally committed to taking the franchise seriously in the west. Symphonia's localization has a ton of problems (not simply translation errors but outright scripting and voice errors) whereas Vesperia is substantially more polished.

 

[Grub]

I think it's also important to keep in mind that it was the point where Namco stopped dicking around and finally committed to taking the franchise seriously in the west. Symphonia's localization has a ton of problems (not simply translation errors but outright scripting and voice errors) whereas Vesperia is substantially more polished.

I had Tales of Symphonia but I could never really get into it and never finished it. I'd played the dejap fan translation of Tales of Phantasia before that and it's still the only other Tales game I've played but I liked Phantasia a lot more than Symphonia. I don't know what the stories of the other Tales games are like but the story and characters felt weaker in Symphonia than in Phantasia and I don't even remember the battle system in Symphonia so it couldn't have been that great compared to ToP's which I vividly remember.

 

[Fcret]

I'd played the dejap fan translation of Tales of Phantasia before that and it's still the only other Tales game I've played but I liked Phantasia a lot more than Symphonia. I don't know what the stories of the other Tales games are like but the story and characters felt weaker in Symphonia than in Phantasia

DeJap took a lot of liberties in punching up the script to Phantasia, but you are correct that Phantasia's story is a lot more intricate than pretty much every other entry. Phantasia was written as a proper fantasy epic - you have to contend with a dying world and struggle against fate itself. After Phantasia, most of the team was dissolved and Tales morphed into having more conventional shounen storytelling carry it.

In a lot of ways, I don't even really consider Phantasia to be part of the same series because it's so different narratively.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

What were the Symphonia errors?
NB has to have some shit planned for the year because we know that Abyss, Destiny, and Xillia 2 are on the way.

Now, with Sega I would die for a Sakura Wars collection.....could they even be able to port that properly?

 

[Fcret]

What were the Symphonia errors?

Go look them up, they're all over the place. A lot of places where the spoken dialogue differs from what's written, characters attributed to lines spoken by other characters, and straight up dialogue being out of sync.

It's extra bad on the remasters because they reverted to the Japanese text box count but the voices don't match at all in several scenes (leading to dialogue straight up being deleted). Most notable point of issue in all versions is the first meeting with Remiel.

Now, with Sega I would die for a Sakura Wars collection.....could they even be able to port that properly?

They definitely could. Hell, the Cotton collection on Switch is just running the games in a Sega Saturn emulator. They could just literally translate them, ship them with a Saturn emulator, and call it a day.

But they also seem to have given up on Sakura Wars.

 

[Maniacal Foreigner]

DeJap took a lot of liberties in punching up the script to Phantasia, but you are correct that Phantasia's story is a lot more intricate than pretty much every other entry. Phantasia was written as a proper fantasy epic - you have to contend with a dying world and struggle against fate itself. After Phantasia, most of the team was dissolved and Tales morphed into having more conventional shounen storytelling carry it.

In a lot of ways, I don't even really consider Phantasia to be part of the same series because it's so different narratively.

The writer and lead programmer on Tales of Phantasia - Yoshiharu Gotanda - went on to found tri-Ace, taking most of Wolf Team's staff along with him and creating the Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile series.