Roderick

Nondescript Adventure Gaming Topique

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Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX are some of my favorite games and I always thought they were generally well regarded by most people. However, I've become aware in recent years how much people apparently dislike those games. It makes me just a little bit sad for some reason.

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In my experience, people who dislike them all don't have nearly as much to say about them as people who liked one of them but hated another. Frequently this is between VII and VIII, people tend to have this weird sense of loyalty to one while despising the other to the point of being spiteful to those who prefer it.

 

Of course, the only difference between the two is that the people who like VIII better are objectively wrong.

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Of course, the only difference between the two is that the people who like VIII better are objectively wrong.

 

You bite your tongue kind sir!!! VIII is a goddamn gem! Such a weird and tragic story that still sticks with me to this day.

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All Final Fantasies are this to me

Such an exaggeration. No one has ever smiled like that or held a controller like that playing a Final Fantasy game, even when Chocobo Racing.

Zeus, I'm another FF hater, but if you got good experiences out of the series, that's fine. Final Fantasy V, VI, and Chrono Trigger were fun for me because I felt like the mechanics retained a meaningful relationship with the stories. I only played the PC demos of VII and VIII, but combat just took up so much time for no reason I could make sense of.

But in this thread we're here for the adventure of it! Maybe that's enough.

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Screw you guys, Final Fantasy IX is the best game in the series!

This is correct.

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I have tried to play FF VII, but it hasn't aged well and midgear is a horrible mess of boring exposition and dull fighting. To top it off, Cloud is completely unlikeable in my eyes, and I don't care about his moaning.

 

FF IX is amazing, but III and I are the best FF's in my eyes. Dissidia is also awesome. Have yet to play V.

 

As for Adventure games, I recently played and finished the whole Deponia Trilogy, and it's a joy. The ending was a particular highlight. Some of the puzzles are annoyingly esoteric, but overall the story is a great one and there's lots of laughs to be had, as well as genuinely touching moments too. I also found it had such an enjoyable and original world and art style that it kept me wanting more. Even after the finale, I would welcome a spin-off series with open arms, just so I can be back in the world of Deponia.

Would recommend it to anyone who's a fan of the Adventure Game genre.

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What is an adventure game? I assumed y'all were talking about point&click adventures.

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We are. We were. Then I started playing FF7 because it's a storydriven game and ruined the thing. It'll be over soon.

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Maybe there should be a separate JRPG thread. I feel like the wave of 90s nostalgia that's washing over our age group right now has brought with it a current of JRPG love. Suddenly I'm tempted to go back and replay all the Final Fantasy games and then argue about whether Sephiroth or Kefka is a better villain on message boards.

 

Ah, to be 12 and have infinite free time.

 

Anyway, adventure games are cool! I'm playing the third season of Sam and Max right now and I'm enjoying it a decent amount. I would describe the experience as 'pleasant'. No one part of it is ridiculously amazing... the jokes are mixed and the puzzles are pretty standard... but it gives me a generalized feeling of relaxed enjoyment that's disconnected from the demand for time and the completionist compulsion that a lot of other games rely on to 'hook' you. I think that's one of the things I like most about adventure games.

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I'm playing Ghost Trick right now. I like how the puzzles seem very limited in possible permutations. It lets me flip a bunch of switchs in the environments like some sort of fabric children's book with zippers and buttons. I hate getting stuck in point&click adventures and I haven't had that type of frustration in this one yet. The story explains the game-mechanics a bit too thoroughly in the first scene, but I get excited about the animations.

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HNNNG I had such a craving to replay Ghost Trick a week ago. It's one of the smartest en funnest adventure games in recent years and (don't tell anyone!) secretly a lot more fun than any continuation of Phoenix Wright since the third.

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HNNNG I had such a craving to replay Ghost Trick a week ago. It's one of the smartest en funnest adventure games in recent years and (don't tell anyone!) secretly a lot more fun than any continuation of Phoenix Wright since the third.

 

dude, you have to defend a killer whale in court. How much less fun can it get?

 

(although I have to admit, sometimes in PW games, it's hard to know what exaclty they are asking for)

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We are. We were. Then I started playing FF7 because it's a storydriven game and ruined the thing. It'll be over soon.

 

A terrible story, told in a borderline incomprehensible fashion, but still a story in spite of this.   

 

Incidentally, I really like FF7, but not for the story. The music is killer, the enemy designs are usually pretty characterful, and there are some truly bizarre scenes (I'll never forget my stay at the Honey Bee Inn...) Surrounding all of this, threatening to suffocate the humour and vibrancy of the world and the characters, is the stultifying dull, disjointed story. 

 

Oh, and those fucking unskippable battle animations. Damn them to hell!

 

Sorry. Got a bit carried away there.

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Resurrection! I've just finished the Director's Cut of Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, marking the first time in at least ten years I've played the game. A few things drew my attention:

 
Instantly noticeable is how Revolution have apparently put their best effort into uglifying this game. They seem to have redrawn some, but not all, of the animated sprites of the characters. The result is that sometimes some of them look super crisp and vector-y, and others pixely and old. Look at this:
 
Nejo_1.png
 
See how conspicuously different Duane is rendered? George himself suffers even worse from this, as some of his animations are redone, and others aren't.
 
Then, to distract us even more, Dave Gibbons has drawn all of the characters a portrait that now pops up during dialogues. You can't switch this off. The portraits rarely animate and are drawn in a completely different style than the core game.
 
broken-sword-shadow-of-the-templars-the-
 
Where the original was charming and consistent, this director's cut is visually a hodge-podge of styles.
 
Another thing I noticed is that Revolution have tried to pretend the game is set in current times. That was true for the 1996 original of course, but the game is so uncompromisingly 90s that it doesn't translate. There's talk of Euros and Nico's radio plays a disastrously chosen array of indie soft rock (that is tonally so off that it smarts). George's monologue at the start of the game, where he speaks of 'the end of the millennium' has been removed. A better choice would've been to revel in that this is set in the 90s: nothing else makes sense. This is a world of public pay phones, no one has a mobile, there's no internet around and no one's putting Vines on Twitter about Templar murders. Come on.
 
The additional content is well done, I think. It's fun to dig into Nico's backstory, but it only serves to emphasize that at the end of the game I still don't know anything about George! He starts out a tourist in Paris and at the end he's still just a tourist in Paris. I also notice now how weird his relationship with Nico is. He suddenly declares she's the girl he loves, but there's been no chemistry to speak of before that time. Then he kisses her while she's tied up - a move straight from the James Bond School of Seduction: force her until she starts to like it.
 
I get why George would fall for Nico: she's a smart and sophisticated French reporter. But the other way around? George is on the one hand a surprisingly competent Indiana Jones character, solving mysteries and defying death all around, but on the other he's a complete goof. Throughout the game Nico seems more tired and vexed at him than anything else. Then George shows a particularly jealous and controlling side whenever André Lobineau comes up. What's there for Nico to like, exactly? It's not that I don't think it could never work out, but that it suddenly happens at the end of the game feels like wish fulfilment; George getting his reward for saving the world because that's what happens when a man meets a woman in fiction. But the relationship does exactly nothing for the story. I would've preferred it to develop slowly over the course of many games.
 
What I do appreciate is how elegant the game is designed. There's no backtracking, and to be fair, not a lot of challenge either. Apart from one horrific code cracking puzzle, everything's solved before you notice there's a puzzle. The atmosphere is great, the music terrific and all in all it's a rollicking adventure... but we already had that in the original. This director's cut serves mostly to muck up the graphics and add an amusing but pointless diversion with nico.
 

Rant about a twenty year old game over!! 

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So I dunno if this has been mentioned before but what I've played of The Journey Down (I've just bought the second chapter but haven't started it) is pretty great. The first chapter is free on ios at the moment and on deep discount on steam because they just released the second chapter. They get a bigger cut if you buy through their site, but the first chapter is not discounted correspondingly to the steam price. There's also an old lo fi version of the first chapter for free here.

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I hated the Director's cut starting seconds after firing up the game. The original had a marvelous, explosive beginning. They decided to ruin it by inserting the Nico stuff before that. And then all the new animations are just horrid. What a waste.

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I get why George would fall for Nico: she's a smart and sophisticated French reporter. But the other way around? George is on the one hand a surprisingly competent Indiana Jones character, solving mysteries and defying death all around, but on the other he's a complete goof. Throughout the game Nico seems more tired and vexed at him than anything else. Then George shows a particularly jealous and controlling side whenever André Lobineau comes up. What's there for Nico to like, exactly? It's not that I don't think it could never work out, but that it suddenly happens at the end of the game feels like wish fulfilment; George getting his reward for saving the world because that's what happens when a man meets a woman in fiction. But the relationship does exactly nothing for the story. I would've preferred it to develop slowly over the course of many games.

The poorly written romance always bugged me when I first played it long ago and it never really gets better in any later game. They pull a Monkey Island 2 with Broken Sword 2 where the characters have broken up, but there really doesn't seem any difference between the way the two act toward eachother in the sequel.

 

I sold all of my Broken Sword/Revolution games after finishing 3. A few months ago I was wondering if maybe that was a mistake and I'm really missing out with all of these director's cuts, but I think it's probably best to leave these games in the past for me.

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Alright, I've done the terrible thing, I've just finished Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon, and it was a HUGE MESS.

 

What on Baphomet's green earth was wrong with Revolution? I'm just going to pretend Broken Sword 3 never happened. What a disastrous game. Bad crate puzzles, bad character animation, bad design, bad writing, bad controls, bad puzzles, bad voice acting. It's horrible in every way except its symphonic soundtrack. Of course, then the credits roll and it has a metal song that couldn't possibly miss the point more if it tried. I just don't understand any of the decisions they made here. None. Nothing.
 
Throughout its entirety it feels more like a badly written fanfic than something by the relatively competent hands of those who made the first two games. Especially the difference in the way George is handled is subtle but palpable. He suddenly makes rather sexist remarks about ladies (which the original George would rarely do), and he's just generally more judgemental and snappy. At one point in the game he enters a mystical shop (this is before the hilarious, unironic visit to a freaking Jamaican voodoo lady, GOOD LORD) and is super skeptical about ley lines and ancient myths. Can someone remind him that six months prior he witnessed the resurrection of a goddamn Mayan god? UGH, it all feels so lame and generic 'bad adventure game', I hate it. And it insists on revisiting characters and locations from the first game in a desperate attempt to tie it together, but only comes off as unimaginative. This game is just awful.
 
By the way, I also replayed Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror in between (obviously), and I really loved it, Director's Cut included. They animated the portraits and the style is just generally a lot better suited to the game. The puzzles are more difficult and plentiful and the environments are just lovely. Little vignettes like the two ladies on the island or the smiling El General character in Quaramonte city - flourishes that really liven up the game. Again, a bit of a quick ending, but I liked the pacing and the sense of atmosphere. I'm actually really, really impressed they made this in a single year after the release of the first game. It just doesn't show at all, it's an impeccable adventure game.
 
The way this series devolves as it proceeds is nuts though:
 

Broken Sword 1: Hey cool, templars, weird cults, some vaguely mystical forces but mostly murderous clowns.

Broken Sword 2: Alright, an ancient Mayan god comes to life, I can dig it, we're in the jungle after all.

Broken Sword 3: An actual fucking dragon in England and George becomes King Arthur. We're done here.

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WHOA WHOA WAIT WAIT WAIT, as of yesterday, Sanitarium, Sani-fecking-tarium is available on Steam!

 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/284050/

 

I know it was out for ages on gog, but this is Steam! I haven't played Sanitarium since 1998, so it's bound to delight and disappoint, but holy cow.

 

Fun fact: did you know Sanitarium was the holy grail, that I've sought after since 1999 or so, when I got it into my head that I had to own a physical copy? I've searched through countless gaming stores to find one (Ebay would obviously be cheating). It was such a fun quest, to always have something to be on the lookout for. Now, it has ended! I've bought the thing on Steam, because who needs a physical copy nowadays anyway? So, long story short, SANITARIUM! Sani-DAYUM-rium!

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I remember for a bit in 2003-2005 Sanitarium regularly appeared in bargain jewelcase racks, in the United States at least.

 

I remember being really disappointed in that game after the school kid chapter. Like it didn't just get sort of bad, it got really bad all around. The graphics became shit, the puzzles became nonsensical, the game started becoming buggier, and the writing was just horrible. No idea what happened there since it started off pretty strong if I recall. Needless to say, I got rid of my copy long long ago.

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