brightshield wrote:I'm not saying that all Gaidens are necessarily bad games. Just that they're not great either, and always inferior to a mothership title.
The point is that your assessment of "inferior" seems to always rest on scope of gameplay, game length, etc., which isn't necessarily the focus of any RPG but may obviously come up in review scores. Yes, gaidens tend to be subordinated to their mainline counterparts in terms of budget, system, length, world breadth, etc. But if someone's playing the games for the characters and story, does most of that objective data even matter? Is every RPG with a sprawling world map better than every RPG with a point and click map? Is every game with nine main characters better than every game with four? Is every RPG that's 80 hours long better than every RPG that's 40? As long as the game still has an enjoyable system, it's more than possible for someone to like it better than a main entry, and that shouldn't be "funny" or seem "foolish" to you, as you'd noted earlier in the Dawn discussion.
But, as always, you seem to have missed the boat when it comes to the point of my argument. I'm not
trying to sit here and chat about how we should all be able to like whatever we want. That much is obvious, so I don't know why you keep bringing that up as though we're arguing about it. All I'm trying to say is that review scores are
not devoid of opinions. They encapsulate the opinion of the author and also take cues from what's expected at the time for the console in question. Anyway, feel free to ignore this again, but that's all I'm saying.
brightshield wrote:Your constant attacks on those who liked Dawn (and now apparently all escorts in spite of you having only played two or so) are just ridiculous.
lol, I didn't attack anyone. I just refuse to back down, and am a persistent little bastard. The same thing could be applied to you though. Your persistence matches my own.
As I've already said, your language uses a diction of attack. I already pulled examples, so I'll just quote myself:
Lunar Eclipse wrote:You said denying how horrible it was is "foolish" [...] that it was "funny" to you that anyone would defend "the worst RPG protagonist ever", etc. You've been talking in absolutes, saying that the game has no redeeming qualities and then just pretty much quipping, "Oh, but if you like totally horrible things, that's okay. It's just that your opinion is silly and mine is obviously right because of the review scores [...]"
You're insulting people who like the game and telling them that they're wrong to like it and that their ignorance is laughable to you. That's a bit ruder than simple persistence.
brightshield wrote:I'm not sure why I'm even trying anymore. You clearly can't distinguish between opinion and fact.
That'd be you my friend. You seem to use opinions as a crutch to justify people liking crap. Crap is still crap whether you love it or hate it. You may love cheeseburgers, but steak is the superior cut of meat. You may prefer silver to gold, but gold is the superior metal. You may prefer your run down 10 year old Honda, but a brand new Corvette is still the superior vehicle. You may prefer R.L. Stine to William Shakespeare, but Shakespeare is the superior writer. You may prefer the Mets, but the Yankees are the better team. You'll probably dismiss all these things as merely my opinion, but whatever. I tried.
This is so the opposite of what I've been saying that it's utterly ridiculous. You're just throwing out these straw men to try to make a point that no one can disagree with. Yes, we understand that certain products are "superior" to others or that they can have certain objectively more entertaining, interesting, or useful features.
But that's not the point. The point is that even if we can see things in a somewhat objective sense, our assessment of those items is
always colored by a certain level of opinion no matter what we do to remove ourselves from it. Reviewers aren't magically exempted from opinion, and in many reviews, opinions are all we see. Add to that the fact that games are meant to be quite a bit more experiential than gold or a sports car and there's a much wider opening for opinion to play a part in assessment, particularly with the rapidly shifting expectations we see in anything digital nowadays.
brightshield wrote:No one said they were genre-defining.
Let me stop you right here. In order for a game to be considered "one of the best ever" it has to be a genre defining masterpiece. Not only must the actual game be great, but it has to actually do something for the gaming community. Again, this much should be obvious.
Again, why does this matter? Was the sentence even about this at all? No. It was just me saying that Tales isn't genre-defining. I've never tried to argue that Tales is the best series ever or anything of the sort. Why are we diverting the conversation in this fashion by pulling out irrelevant sentence fragments?
brightshield wrote:But thinking that a character has no redeeming qualities is an opinion unless there's just so little character development that he doesn't have a character to begin with.
Same thing could be said about the Springer show then. We all know that 99% of the people who go on the show, are terrible people with no real redeeming qualities. You can petend that it's just my opinion if it makes you feel better though. =)
This is such a ludicrous comparison that I don't even know what to say. The people on that show aren't "characters" nor is there any sort of goal of development. They're paid to act like idiots and to pretend to do atrocious things. Again, how does this have anything to do with RPG protagonists?
brightshield wrote:You forget that Lloyd has more to him than that though. Lloyd literally forces his beliefs on people, and refuses to listen to any of Yggdrasil's arguments. Lloyd is also very quick to resort to violence when people anger him, and he's quite the smart ass at times. In fact, some people actually consider Lloyd to be the true "evil" one in the game, due to him literally forcing people to see things his way. Yggdrasil at least tries to intelligently debate, when his motives are questioned. So yeah, Lloyd is definitely "interesting" to say the least...
Does it matter that Lloyd refuses to listen to Yggdrasil when the writers make him so obviously insane? The writing favors Lloyd and doesn't do a very good job of making you say, "Hm, maybe there really was another way." It makes you
understand how Yggdrasil got to that point, but he's too nutty when it comes to the way that he's warped the worlds and tried to keep his sister alive for anyone to actually expect Lloyd to listen to Yggdrasil at that point. It's the same in Phantasia. You can understand how Dhaos got to that point, but the whole antihero thing falls flat because, ultimately, Dhaos is insane in the future timeline and employed monsters to slaughter entirely villages in the past even when he
wasn't totally insane from the ages of entombment in the mausoleum. That doesn't make Cless any less of a generic hero. There's not an "Aha! He should have followed what the villain said!" moment in either game. Thus, Morrison's indictment "Truly, if there is evil in this world, it lies within the heart of mankind" is ultimately lost on us because what Cless does isn't written as being equally evil. We just get a last second antihero realization for Dhaos and then, well, nothing. The story doesn't question Cless, nor does the story question Lloyd. It just humanizes the villains, which really doesn't have any direct connection to making Lloyd or Cless any more evil or wrong. The villains are still ultimately crazies that we know have to die.
brightshield wrote:1. The whole "new standard" thing is total bull. Games aren't getting progressively better, this is a terrible generation to be a gamer.
As I've said before, I mean that there are constantly new standards in some of the
only aspects of games you can truly gauge in an objective sense, i.e. graphics, music, voice acting, etc. Even though one Tales game might be better in all those aspects, it might be judged more harshly based on console or time of release. If you can't even admit that, then I don't know what to say.
brightshield wrote:My Mario example disproves all this. Another example is GTA. GTA Vice City and San Andreas made very minor improvements to the groundbreaking GTA3, however they all have similar scores.
Oh yes, your two examples within franchises that almost
always score well based solely on namesake and/or nostalgia certainly disprove everything. If anything, you've proved my point and disproved your own considering I suggested that the namesake often pads scores (which seems to be the case here) and you suggested that titles needed to be groundbreaking to be truly great (which seems to not be the case here, as implied by gameplay clones getting similar/equal scores when compared to the titles that actually broke that ground).
... But again, beside the point. I'll just stop here since I've already made my original point again and I've probably already said so much that you'll pull out every other quote except for the ones about reviews including opinion and time-dependent factors.