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What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

hghwolf said:
It's deeper than anything CT has, especially when taken as a whole rather than as eight individual sections plus final sequence.

Like, I'm not gonna claim LaL is this philosophical masterpiece that invites a deep reflection on the human condition but it definitely has more sauce than 'space monster bad, and actually everything bad in the world and throughout history is connected to that space monster'.
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Is "everyone bad you fought in the entire game was connected to a guy who got really upset over a personal betrayal and decided to become evil" a ton better than Lavos, really? That's the area they're the most similar, if anything.

Mostly I think I don't value the novelty of the framing and different genres of vignettes more than I do the general story in CT. Especially since some of those sections barely have combat (Qube gets it in an arcade machine and right in the end?), skip having party members, give you weird combat tools that don't synergize...

It has some high highs but a lot of low or slogging points. I never really felt like that in Trigger, and it's the same kind of problem the cast bloated FFs get.
 
hghwolf said:
CT is definitely good but suffers heavily from its artstyle and narrative style, which is more suited to a comedy skit for children than anything substantive
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Well, yeah. Chrono Trigger's whole appeal is that it's basically a video game version of those storylines you'd come up with while playing with toys as a kid. It establishes itself as a story more concerned with having fun than being a treatise on the human condition or something, and sometimes that's okay.

And I say this as someone who prefers Chrono Cross.
 
I don't know, Lavos always struck me as a great bit of storytelling, especially for the time. It's both a lurking evil and the coming apocalypse, and the time travel conceit lets you experience its influences in each period and see the consequences of its awakening. It's one of the more effective save the world plots in part because you get to see it happening for real, and you get to wander through the aftermath. Not just the devastation caused on the Day of Lavos but the human ruin of the survivors. It's a strong execution of the premises of the story.

I played Chrono Trigger when I was a kid and like a lot of things you play as a kid it acquires an outsize importance to you over time. But Robo staying behind to tend to the forest in a lonely vigil over hundreds of years means something to me man. The game just nails it.
 
Ford Prefect said:
I don't know, Lavos always struck me as a great bit of storytelling, especially for the time. It's both a lurking evil and the coming apocalypse, and the time travel conceit lets you experience its influences in each period and see the consequences of its awakening. It's one of the more effective save the world plots in part because you get to see it happening for real, and you get to wander through the aftermath. Not just the devastation caused on the Day of Lavos but the human ruin of the survivors. It's a strong execution of the premises of the story.

I played Chrono Trigger when I was a kid and like a lot of things you play as a kid it acquires an outsize importance to you over time. But Robo staying behind to tend to the forest in a lonely vigil over hundreds of years means something to me man. The game just nails it.
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I mean it isn't like Robo was alone. Fiona and her husband were around initially, and there's a whole-ass church built around him afterwards; presumably over the course of the centuries, other people interacted with him.

Or at least, I like to think so. It's cheerier that way.
 
NemoMarx said:
Is "everyone bad you fought in the entire game was connected to a guy who got really upset over a personal betrayal and decided to become evil" a ton better than Lavos, really? That's the area they're the most similar, if anything.
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Yes, because none of those narratives actually require that connection. The evil version of the final chapter has him jacking into those fights to help the antagonist win but they'd still be antagonists in that exact same way if he never had his incel rage moment. CT is so shackled to making everything Lavos fault while at the same time giving Lavos basically no narrative agency that you'd think it was written by a Amerofundie as a Satan figure.

LaL's villains are just villains, no interstellar pseudogod required, and that lets it make much more valid statements on morality. It still flubs the delivery sometimes, it doesn't have anything particularily insightful to say, but it's a million times more respectable for being about humans and human emotion, not a great outside corrupting force.
Ford Prefect said:
I played Chrono Trigger when I was a kid and like a lot of things you play as a kid it acquires an outsize importance to you over time. But Robo staying behind to tend to the forest in a lonely vigil over hundreds of years means something to me man. The game just nails it.
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I feel like this is one of the weakest parts of CT actually; not because the core concept is bad or anything - Robo is probably one of the strongest characters CT has - but because it tries to have its cake and eat it too in the execution. For Robo it's centuries, but for the rest of the crew and, maybe more importantly, the player it's just a quick hop through time and that undercuts the gravitas of his decision and the weight of his sacrifice because it doesn't feel weighty, it's called weighty and while one can certainly 'go in' on this, as it were, that's to the players credit, not the games, because from the game side it's throwing you a party because you clicked a button.

EDIT : Like, I'm one of those people who will defend Drakengards gameplay not because it's good and a fun time but because it connects you to Caims headspace so well. The only thing that could possibly drive someone to kill thousands of people, one swing of the sword at a time, in a fashion where it moves beyond being combat and enters the realm of industrial craft, is hatred. Sheer, white hot, uncritical, unexamined, meaningless, neverending hatred. You don't need to be TOLD that Caim hates the Empire, your every action in the game, if you stick with it, makes it blindingly obvious that Caim hates the Empire, and that hatred is his driving force, because the game makes hatred, pointless, meaningless, directionless hatred your motivation as well. I don't think I've ever had fun playing Drakengard (well, maybe when I hit the catharsis button) but it's still one of my absolute most favourite, most highly rated games of all time for this sublime ludonarrative and the only game that even comes close to it is Nier (dad version).

What, in comparison, is Robos forest sidequest ?
 
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Ford Prefect said:
You can't really call FFXIII a 'newer' FF game any more, it's fifteen years old at this point lol
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I suppose that newer becomes a bit fuzzier when it comes to long-running media. It's fifteen years old, but that still's a fair bit less than half the age of the series, and there were a lot more entries in the series before than there have been after.
 
foamy said:
I mean it isn't like Robo was alone. Fiona and her husband were around initially, and there's a whole-ass church built around him afterwards; presumably over the course of the centuries, other people interacted with him.
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That 'initially' is doing a lot of heavy lifting :V

hghwolf said:
I feel like this is one of the weakest parts of CT actually; not because the core concept is bad or anything - Robo is probably one of the strongest characters CT has - but because it tries to have its cake and eat it too in the execution. For Robo it's centuries, but for the rest of the crew and, maybe more importantly, the player it's just a quick hop through time and that undercuts the gravitas of his decision and the weight of his sacrifice because it doesn't feel weighty, it's called weighty and while one can certainly 'go in' on this, as it were, that's to the players credit, not the games, because from the game side it's throwing you a party because you clicked a button.
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Tastes will differ I guess but to me the tragedy of it is that for you it really is just a moment. That you fill in the rest is a feature of art, not a bug.
 
LordInsane said:
I suppose that newer becomes a bit fuzzier when it comes to long-running media. It's fifteen years old, but that still's a fair bit less than half the age of the series, and there were a lot more entries in the series before than there have been after.
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FFXIII today is as old as FFVI was when FFXIII came out. I understand that because software generations are now longer, there hasn't been a big graphical revolution from 2D to 3D, and there have been fewer intervening games (unless you count FFXIV expansions lol) it might feel less clear, but it would have been a bit strange to call VI a 'newer Final Fantasy' in 2009 and that seems fairly applicable to XIII. Some SV users were still in elementary school when it came out.
 
foamy said:
Better, because, amongst other things, it's not the apparent pure edge that you got from the other.
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Maybe you misunderstood me ?

Drakengard doesn't think that hatred is a good thing. I don't think it's a good thing. Drakengard thinks its shit, and it shows this by having Caim fail, over and over and over. Caim never actually improves a situation with his presence. He just kills a lot of people in the process of failing. The A ending is the closest you get to that and, well, Drakengard 2 has a few words about that.

But telling someone that hatred is bad because it's bad to hate is trite. That's Heroic Teenager X telling Villainous Adult Y to just forgive and forget. It doesn't land, even if it's genuinely true.

Drakengard puts you in the role of Villainous Adult Y and it lets you play it out, all the way, and you fail, every time, no matter what. You can never save Furiae, and the ones who averts the apocalypse the times it actually happens are Angelus, who has let go of her hate, and Seere, who never hated in the first place because he's a naive child. (For a given value of 'avert' anyway)

It gleefully tells you where the routes split, indulges in 'if I only had X then', and you think that maybe this time it will be better, but it only ever gets worse because noone who hates in that game ever lets go of their hate, except in the A ending which is the first and best ending you can reach, and it's not that good an ending. You cut your way through every wall the game throws up only to find that you've fucked it again and fucked it for everyone around you in your hateful, spiteful actions and all you can do now is damage control, if that.

To me, that's meaningful. That actually makes me think about how I interact with the world. That makes me examine my hatred and reject it, even when it's easy to indulge it. Drakengard actually made me become a better person, but it only managed that by letting me be a worse person without insulating me from the consequences (within the scope of its narrative and capacity as a videogame, which is where that method is acceptable).

Or to put this more briefly, you learn to avoid the edge by cutting yourself on it a lot better than by being told to avoid it.
 
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I have just finished Golden Sun some days ago, so it's really fresh in my mind. Will I recommand it ? No. Is it awful ? No.

Golden Sun is old and that is this main default. The rythm is wanky, sometimes characters are speaking way too much, the game has way too much random fights even when you can avoid them, the GBA didn't have enough buttons for the psynergy shortcut, meaning, you need to use the menus often to use them.
So everything seems uselessly long.
(and completing the game without a guide today, is almost impossible, or you need a LOT of free time)

But.

The game has a bunch of interesting ideas for the story. The battle system is interesting*, it's very flexible and offers a lot of possibilities, both in the way how you want to build your character and how you want to approach battles. The interaction with the map and the enigmas were nice. Not ground-breaking, but doing the job.

Overall, I think it's a game who can truly shine with a remaster. Do it like Chained Echoes, with less battle but more difficult ones, the system will particurlaly fit in it. Rework on the dialogues. Speed up the walking. Expand a bit the inventory and add shortcuts for psynergy powers. And it will be an excellent game.

*I think it's a discussion we had before in this topic, but I am always puzzled by the logic : "I found a way to cheese the game (or have copied a strategy found on the web which allows to cheese the game), so the gameplay of this game sucks because the cheese strategy is working well."
For example, in the case of Golden Sun, there is an efficient reduction damage strategy which allows to cheese most of the game. So, you can use it and not engage with the system at all, but it doesn't mean the system is bad. It feels like to punish the devs to have been unable to detect a limit in the system they made and then, to burn everything tp the ground because of it. It sucks.
 
I would hesitate to name a 'worst' demon design in SMT because there's just so many and it's impossible to contain them all in a single human brain. But while I do think that Strange Journey Demeter's design isn't great, I couldn't possibly say it's as bad as Soul Hackers Diana or fucking Chemtrail lmao
 
Ah yes, exactly what you think of when you imagine Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt: a woman covered in naked boobs. Just, so many boobs. Literal boob armour. No, not armour that reveals most of her breasts: armour literally made of tits.
 
You can do anything to make a design unsettling, but covering it in tits just looks weird. Mara is a literal giant penis and it still feels like they put more effort into it than Diana.
 
Kadmus said:
Ah yes, exactly what you think of when you imagine Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt: a woman covered in naked boobs. Just, so many boobs. Literal boob armour. No, not armour that reveals most of her breasts: armour literally made of tits.
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Yeah, it's like... I can respect the notion of basing the a design for Diana or Artemis on the concept of the Artemis of Ephesus.

It's just that the implementation is so utterly skullfucking silly.
 
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