Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

[parappa]

How 'bout that demo, eh? So good.

I think this will prove to be the best JRPG on the PS3. Although from what I've heard Tales of Graces f is good too, and I don't mean to make light of Valkyria Chronicles either.

[Monde Luna]

I played the demo and I didn't feel like there was enough in it to make me feel one way or another about the game. What in the demo convinced you that the game is going to be so good?

[Silver Phoenix]

Yes, because a tiny demo gives you the entire story and every aspect of an entire game. What did a Lunar demo ever do to get you to want to play it? There was even less going on.

[Kizyr]

A good demo can hook you in like an extended movie trailer, or reading the first chapter of a book.

...in fact, I'm having a hard time continuing Tales of Destiny (PS1) right now because I felt the first 15-20 minutes of the game did a really bad job of making me care about any of the characters (in marked contrast to Tales of Phantasia, which hooked me almost right away).

Though whether it's a trailer or a demo, I wouldn't make the jump from "this looks like it's gonna be great" to "this is gonna be the best thing ever". But different folks, different goalposts, y'know. KF

[parappa]

I played the demo and I didn't feel like there was enough in it to make me feel one way or another about the game. What in the demo convinced you that the game is going to be so good?

Well, I'm not evaluating it on story right now. Mostly just art style and game mechanics. Level-5 seems to be on fire right now, so just about anything they do that doesn't obviously suck is going to excite me, to be honest.

I tend not to play JRPGs for the story, actually--not since the 32-bit era ended. Occasionally there's one that speaks to me on that level (eg. Persona 4 Golden, playing now), but a lot of JRPGs I just grind through and don't care much about the plot. Somewhere along the way all JRPGs seemed to start all telling minor variations of the same story. I'm not sure which changed more: me or the games.

Take Lost Odyssey or FF XIII for example. Lost Odyssey had some excellent story bits in it--sub-plots or developments that gave me chills. But the overall plot was lost on me; I cared about the personal events surrounding the characters, but not about the political storyline overarching the game.

Similarly with FF XIII, the story was okay, but not strong enough to elevate the whole game. For a game that was supposed to be all about the story, the story was just kinda there. Perfunctory storytelling, from where I stand. Not much better than a run-of-the-mill anime series.

I played the crap out of Dragon Quest IX but it definitely wasn't for the story. Not that the story was terrible, but it didn't properly engage me either. The stuff happening in the game was just there for flavour, more or less.

To cite some counter-examples, I played both The Walking Dead and 999: Nine Doors, Nine Persons, Nine Hours over the holidays. Both had good writing. 999 aka Zero Escape had a kind of surprising Makoto Shinkai twist ending to it. A very Japanese / manga style story, but obviously I'm okay with that.

My one complaint about The Walking Dead is that the majority of the plot seemed to be lifted straight out of The Road, like the writers had used The Road as a template. (Also the one really cool thing about The Road is that it was a zombie style apocalypse story without any zombies in it, and The Walking Dead ruined that by putting zombies back in it.) Still, I can't argue with the emotional impact of The Walking Dead. Rip-off of The Road or not, the game moved me.

Anyway, the issue with JRPG stories is a really big one. I've been discussing it with similar-minded friends for years trying to work out what it is about, in particular, post-FF X games that lost us in terms of story writing. I'm not sure I can do the issue justice here but I'll throw out a point or two.

One thing that started really bothering me are JRPGs where the characters don't have a very good reason for wanting to become more powerful--ie. adventurers who seek to become stronger for power's own sake. Some flimsy reasons given are either that a normal life is boring, or that there's a large threat looming to destroy the world and they want to stand against it. It's not that a good story can't be told with one of these premises, but such a premise alone isn't very interesting.

My impression of Blue Dragon, for instance, was that a bad guy shows up and it's all "well, guess we'd better go explore dungeons until we can beat him." The plots of Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story were similarly so confused and/or cliche that it degenerated into so much noise and I couldn't really tell what was going on or why I should care. I think that the way the human mind works is that we tend to only notice new information and filter out stuff we've heard too many times before, and for that reason most of what I remember about those games has little to do with the stories they were telling.

Maybe I'm being too harsh, I dunno. What I do know is that I don't really play JRPGs as a storytelling medium any more. Lunar is a good example of a JRPG whose story stuck pretty well because it was novel to me back when I first played it. Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Suikoden, and Xenogears were all appealing as story games. At some point during the PS2 era, though, there were too many "me too" JRPGs and it all just kinda turned into a mess. Since then I've come to feel that a JRPG can be a good game and not have a particularly good story, because I've pretty much learned to live without good storytelling in JRPGs.

Bah, I'm ranting too much here. Sorry.

[parappa]

Really cool behind the scenes video here showing the Level-5 production team:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T6JJ6Es4Hk

[DragonmasterDan]

I've pre-ordered the "Wizards Edition". I have very high hopes for this game.

[soup or man]

I'm playing the game now and it really is fantastic. It's really charming. Everything about it is extremely pleasant. There are a lot of things to collect and side-quests to do, but none of 'em ever feel like chores to me. And that's unusual, because normally I tire of such things rather quickly. The music is good, too. I can already tell the world map theme will go down as one of those tracks I listen to over and over throughout the years. Needless to say, too, the game is stunningly beautiful. I'm anxious to get to every new area just because I know there's gonna be some really good, new eye candy.

[Monde Luna]

Parappa fair enough, now I understand why you have such high hopes for the game. We obviously play for different reasons. =)

[Nobiyuki77]

I guess for me, I don't mind that most stories in games follow the same basic premise or templates. What I'm really looking for is for the story to either be told well, or have some original twist (or both).

What I loved about Xenoblade's story were the future visions, and how it not only tied into the game's story in a huge way, but also played a huge role in the gameplay as well. That really impressed me because I love when games incorporate their storytelling into the gameplay itself (Lunar 2 is another example of this, as Lucia being uncontrollable allowed us to see her character develop by her evolving battle actions).

Loving Ni no Kuni, but I'm taking it slow. Partially because I've already played this beginning section on DS. XD

[Old_School]

I'm about 30 hours into the game and it's the best console jrpg I've played in years. It has beautiful graphics, a very impressive world map and an addictive monster collecting system. I spent most of the night playing this and had to FORCE myself to turn the ps3 off and prepare for bed. I very much hope this game has good sales and more like it are developed.