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

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Fcret said:
Not to go too millennial, but one of my major annoyances with Harry Potter is how J.K. never really contextualizes why the purebloods hate the muggles. It's just, "pureblood supremacists is bad people and that's why they hate muggles"
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I always saw purebloods and muggles as more of a class thing than a racial thing. I don't think J.K. thought that hard about it or anything, but it didn't seem like the bad guys really "hated" muggles so much as just thought muggles were inherent inferiors that they're morally allowed to abuse for their own benefit or entertainment if they want to,. Less like racial tension, and more like the stereotypical lord feeling free to rape peasant girls, or samurai feeling free to test their swords by randomly murdering peasants, or high-caste Indians feeling free to exploit low-caste Indians.

This ties back to JRPGs, since I get the impression a lot of fantasy racial tension in Japanese fiction is actually more influenced by or actually an allegory for social caste tension instead, which would make sense coming from a country that's been racial homogeneous forever but had relatively more intense social stratification as recently as the 19th century. Like, few places are as bad about it as India, but Asia in general has tended to have some really nasty views by their upper classes towards the lower classes. For a period of time in Japan, the lowest social castes of people there were called names that literally translate to "not human" and "clumps of filth". A lot of stuff you'll see in Japanese fiction where some racial group think of themselves as superiors while some other group are basically no better than animals feels like it has more in common with these Asian caste dynamics than they do racial dynamics an American would be familiar with.
 
Fcret said:
I'm pretty sure that JRPG designers in the 90s were in cahoots with the guide/magazine writers. Hell, in Yuji Horii's and Game Freak's case, the guide/magazine writers went into the gaming industry themselves.

Speaking of Valkyrie Profile and guides - despite having an abysmally low print run and pretty bad sales, it somehow got an official Prima guide for the English release.

Behold:
View attachment 8530403

"Unless you have good instincts" is a wild thing to say. Yeah man, my neanderthal ancestors evolved the capacity to sniff out hidden variables in videogames. It was essential to hunting mammoths.
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Speaking of silly lines in player's guides, here's one from Chrono Cross':
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>While no one in their right mind would want the game to take longer,

I would love to read a guide to Chrono Cross written by someone who's just miserable having to play through it, complaining every step of the way.
 
Fcret said:
I think stories like this are fine to tell, but the issue is that modern writers (especially Japanese ones I've noticed) really struggle to understand the driving forces behind prejudice. Groups always have in-group and out-group preferences, but hardnosed systemic racism is something that emerges over a long period of time where historical events ossify the relationship between two groups. A story where a bunch of different groups randomly dislike each other just doesn't really make sense except in a Saturday morning cartoon.
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The two examples of jrpgs doing race well I can immediately think of is Symphonia with half elves where they are hated in one world and rule with an iron fist in another, and Valkyria Chronicles with the not jews (though that may be my personal bias). In both series (especially VC3) it doesn't feel too on the nose (pun unintended) and you have both positive and negative examples of people.
Retarded Weeb said:
I always saw purebloods and muggles as more of a class thing than a racial thing.
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It's 100% British aristocracy, which one can look at the state of the UK to see how good those people done in a system that prefers them over everyone else.
Retarded Weeb said:
which would make sense coming from a country that's been racial homogeneous forever
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Even with Japan being closed off it still had racism based on location of birth and the whole shitshow with the Ainu. It's easy to forget that just about every group will eventually find methods to differentiate to favour ones currently in power.

The main issue with writing about racism is that it's kinda pointless. It's an obvious bad thing that can't be justified to continue, it's alright for flavour, but as a central plot you might as well go with light side and dark side.
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
The two examples of jrpgs doing race well I can immediately think of is Symphonia with half elves where they are hated in one world and rule with an iron fist in another, and Valkyria Chronicles with the not jews (though that may be my personal bias). In both series (especially VC3) it doesn't feel too on the nose (pun unintended) and you have both positive and negative examples of people.
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Pretty much every Tales of game has some sort of race or class divide plot now that i remember.
Phantasia and Symphonia with Half-Elves
Destiny had the Erthers and Aetherians
Eternia has Infernia and Celestia
Rebirth had the Humas and Gajumas
Abyss has real people and replicas
Vesperia has the Empire and the Guilds, Humans and Entelexia.
Xillia has Humans and Spirits, and the two continets of Elympios and Rize Maxia
Zesteria and Berseria has Humans and Seraphim/Malakhim and guess Daemons?
Arise has the Renans and the Dahnans.
wtfNeedSignUp said:
Even with Japan being closed off it still had racism based on location of birth and the whole shitshow with the Ainu. It's easy to forget that just about every group will eventually find methods to differentiate to favour ones currently in power.
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That's another thing that i liked about Symphonia adressing, Even if everyone were a part of the same group, they'd find some other reason to divide themselves.
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
Even with Japan being closed off it still had racism based on location of birth and the whole shitshow with the Ainu. It's easy to forget that just about every group will eventually find methods to differentiate to favour ones currently in power.
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Yeah, but I guess what I'm getting at is, it feels like too often modern discourse over these things wants to boil down every human conflict in fiction to being an allegory for American whites vs. niggers.
 
Retarded Weeb said:
Yeah, but I guess what I'm getting at is, it feels like too often modern discourse over these things wants to boil down every human conflict in fiction to being an allegory for American whites vs. niggers.
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That's just leftist brainrot, especially as they start removing accounts of historical racism by changing the definition. Niggers is the most boring kind of racism since it is impossible to say that they had a fault in their situation, unlike cases like Italians and Jews that eventually caused a lot of organized crime, or Chinese that just retreated to their own community ghetto.
 
They're bringing back .hack.

I've never beat a .hack game before, but CC2 being free to develop it without Bandai Namco is probably the best thing it has going for it. Hopefully it's good whenever it comes out in the 2030s.
 
HexFag said:
They're bringing back .hack.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=UcjZq9RWAH8
I've never beat a .hack game before, but CC2 being free to develop it without Bandai Namco is probably the best thing it has going for it. Hopefully it's good whenever it comes out in the 2030s.
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I'm thinking it's almost certainly going to be a reboot with a new timeline. The original game, Infection, is set in 2010 and it's so far away from what our actual timeline is at this point that it really just needs to be scrapped.

Funnily enough, we did end up getting a properly futuristic consumer HMD VR setup pretty close to the year of Infection (2013 with the Oculus Dev Kit instead of 2010) and it's actually way better than the VR tech in Infection. Unfortunately by the time we got VR headsets, MMOs were essentially a dead genre.
 
HexFag said:
I've never beat a .hack game before, but CC2 being free to develop it without Bandai Namco is probably the best thing it has going for it. Hopefully it's good whenever it comes out in the 2030s.
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I hope it doesn't come out in 4 different titles you must buy to get the whole picture this time.
Or an anime that's slower than snails.

Fcret said:
Funnily enough, we did end up getting a properly futuristic consumer HMD VR setup pretty close to the year of Infection (2013 with the Oculus Dev Kit instead of 2010) and it's actually way better than the VR tech in Infection. Unfortunately by the time we got VR headsets, MMOs were essentially a dead genre.
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Too bad we didn't get viruses so aggressive they can rewrite a game in real time and put people into a coma. The World was treated as if it was an actual world instead of a game IIRC, contrary to what happens in the games, heh.
 
.hack//zero looks like a remake of the original game but with an edgier Kite.

I liked the original tetralogy well enough but the GU trilogy are some of my favorite JRPGs. They don't do anything particularly well but they're hugely entertaining.
 
Tor Lugosi said:
.hack//zero looks like a remake of the original game but with an edgier Kite.

I liked the original tetralogy well enough but the GU trilogy are some of my favorite JRPGs. They don't do anything particularly well but they're hugely entertaining.
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IMOQ's story is I think even more relevant today - a big MMO is actually a secret data harvesting operation for training the ultimate AI.

I'm also glad that the not!Blackrose we saw in the trailer is still allowed to be tarted up in skimpy armor. That kind of commitment to aesthetic is a good indication that they're not going to intentionally sloppify things.

Other than that, I'd be fine with a reimagining of IMOQ's story with something closer to GU's gameplay.
 
Fcret said:
IMOQ's story is I think even more relevant today - a big MMO is actually a secret data harvesting operation for training the ultimate AI.
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Was that the case? I recall that the issue is that the game used recycled data someone used to create an AI of his dead daughter, and got transplanted into the game's files. I'm not sure how and why there were super-viruses capable of crashing the internet and leaving people comatose, though.
The whole thing about a supervirus killing the previous internet was sadly a misused plot point, I expected that the corrupted entities were due to the virus having mutated and infiltrated the games, not fantasy digital monsters that come built-in with a Prophecy (TM).
 
Newcomer 42 said:
The whole thing about a supervirus killing the previous internet was sadly a misused plot point, I expected that the corrupted entities were due to the virus having mutated and infiltrated the games, not fantasy digital monsters that come built-in with a Prophecy (TM).
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I'm pretty sure the supervirus was overblown for political reasons, but also it no longer really mattered due to everything running on AltimitOS (which was the only OS not affected for some reason).

Speaking about the supervirus and Altimit, on doing some refresher reading I stumbled on the wiki article about the virus in question, "Pluto's Kiss":
Pluto's Kiss (冥王の口づけ) is a catastrophic event that took place on December 24, 2005. On that day, all computers connected to the Internet crashed simultaneously around the globe. Additionally, all networked computer and communication network control systems were shut down, resulting in numerous traffic accidents and disasters.

In the United States, the automatic retaliatory systems malfunctioned, in a short time reaching a point of crisis. 77 minutes later, the global network was able to recover itself from the incident, but the resulting chaos caused the United States' nuclear defense and automated counter-strike systems to be armed.

It was later discovered that the virus creator was a ten-year-old elementary school student, living in Los Angeles, California, called Warren Brock.

The incident was so damaging that United States President, Jim Stonecold, later resigned from office in January 2006 after taking full responsibility for the incident.

Ever since then, ALTIMIT OS has been the only major operating system in the world; this is credited to its remarkable stability.
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Jim STONECOLD
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A president Stonecold, you say? I wonder what his early career looked like...
 
Waiting for next Sky title in the fall. I played the Nordics demo last year. It was okay. Personally I prefer Trails.

I'm curious about Proud Nordics. Looks intriguing. But is there only one town or are there several?
 
Apparently they're currently working on a Chrono Trigger remake. Hopefully "modern audiences" don't completely fuck it up.
 
I would appreciate it being cleaned up a bit, balancing-wise, because while this is almost certainly an unpopular opinion, I thought it was very poorly balanced. Until the very end, all enemy encounters were extremely easy and could be ended with just a few basic attacks, and the bosses were damage sponges that generally could not do much to you so unless you were really careless it'd be tough to lose. Only exceptions to that rule I can think of are the Golems, Magus, and the final Lavos form.

But obviously the remake wouldn't stop at balancing, it'd definitely get the modern audience treatment (off the top of my head, Ayla would definitely get covered up, and I'm sure there are a few jokes that didn't even register as offensive when I played that Squenix's ethics department will find to be literally killing marginalized folx.) And the art would be butchered too, unless they go for a hand drawn style. The game was very fun to watch- all the animations and sprites were very expressive and over-the-top, and it definitely had some anime influence beyond just Toriyama having designed the characters. I can't see how that level of stylization could be recreated with 3D models well. Redrawing all the sprites in HD by hand would look phenomenal, but there's no way they're gonna put in that much effort. The music too, I doubt could be remade. I won't get too deep into the autistic weeds here but music isn't like graphics where it's negatively impacted by the fidelity of the system. You can write a complete-sounding song on any hardware if you know what you're doing. Chrono Trigger's music takes full advantage of the limitations and manages to sound complete in spite of it- any changes to the music would just be changes for the sake of being different. (see: Superstar Saga remake)
 
synthetic_glazer said:
The music too, I doubt could be remade. I won't get too deep into the autistic weeds here but music isn't like graphics where it's negatively impacted by the fidelity of the system. You can write a complete-sounding song on any hardware if you know what you're doing. Chrono Trigger's music takes full advantage of the limitations and manages to sound complete in spite of it- any changes to the music would just be changes for the sake of being different. (see: Superstar Saga remake)
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For such an important remake, I have no doubt that they'll use a live orchestra with the option to switch back to the classic music.
synthetic_glazer said:
off the top of my head, Ayla would definitely get covered up, and I'm sure there are a few jokes that didn't even register as offensive when I played that Squenix's ethics department will find to be literally killing marginalized folx.
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Flea
 
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