Japanese game developers have lost it

Its seems as though every Japanese made game I have played is plagued with archaic gameplay and technology. Here just a few of the annoyances

• The camera angles for the majority of their games are simply awful. Either their are no camera controls or horrendously placed cameras.
• Their storytelling tends to be stale and predictable. And what makes it worse is the emotionless voice acting and unbelievable dialogue.
• The main character is cut from the same cloth as every other Japanese game. The are overly badass and nothing bothers them or blindly passionate about saving the world.
• Because of their inability to tell a story; and the strong belief that their story is very interesting, they bombard gamers with constant and meaningless cutscenes which frequently interrupts the game.
• Horrendous loading times. It seems to me that very very few Japanese games have acceptable loading times. Its almost as if the game was not tested because the loading times for some their games are so long its hard to believe that it was tested. To make matters worse is the lack of re-instancing of a level when you die or fail the mission. Because the level is not being re-instanced, it is reloaded as if the data is not in memory, further lengthening the loading times.

It has gotten so bad that I avoid Japanese made games for these reasons and this has been my experience over the last ten years or more years of playing their games. Am I the only one that has this grievance with their games?

Its seems as though every Japanese made game I have played is plagued with archaic gameplay and technology. Here just a few of the annoyances

• The camera angles for the majority of their games are simply awful. Either their are no camera controls or horrendously placed cameras.
• Their storytelling tends to be stale and predictable. And what makes it worse is the emotionless voice acting and unbelievable dialogue.
• The main character is cut from the same cloth as every other Japanese game. The are overly badass and nothing bothers them or blindly passionate about saving the world.
• Because of their inability to tell a story; and the strong belief that their story is very interesting, they bombard gamers with constant and meaningless cutscenes which frequently interrupts the game.
• Horrendous loading times. It seems to me that very very few Japanese games have acceptable loading times. Its almost as if the game was not tested because the loading times for some their games are so long its hard to believe that it was tested. To make matters worse is the lack of re-instancing of a level when you die or fail the mission. Because the level is not being re-instanced, it is reloaded as if the data is not in memory, further lengthening the loading times.

It has gotten so bad that I avoid Japanese made games for these reasons and this has been my experience over the last ten years or more years of playing their games. Am I the only one that has this grievance with their games?

Pedro

· I play western games with just as bad cameras angles and some does not have any control over the camera.

· Western stories are not that much better. The worse if the "Twist" that many western seam to have in their story. Then it just the same almost stander story.

· Western games characters are not much better than any of their characters. WRPG character are the worse set up characters I have seen. They always have over the top baggiest with overused ideal

· I seen western games do the same thing.

· What is worse about load time is that you get it just go into a building like Fallout 3.

Those problems are in western games too unless you are Bias and will choose to see what you want to see.

Its seems as though every Japanese made game I have played is plagued with archaic gameplay and technology. Here just a few of the annoyances

• The camera angles for the majority of their games are simply awful. Either their are no camera controls or horrendously placed cameras.
• Their storytelling tends to be stale and predictable. And what makes it worse is the emotionless voice acting and unbelievable dialogue.
• The main character is cut from the same cloth as every other Japanese game. The are overly badass and nothing bothers them or blindly passionate about saving the world.
• Because of their inability to tell a story; and the strong belief that their story is very interesting, they bombard gamers with constant and meaningless cutscenes which frequently interrupts the game.
• Horrendous loading times. It seems to me that very very few Japanese games have acceptable loading times. Its almost as if the game was not tested because the loading times for some their games are so long its hard to believe that it was tested. To make matters worse is the lack of re-instancing of a level when you die or fail the mission. Because the level is not being re-instanced, it is reloaded as if the data is not in memory, further lengthening the loading times.

It has gotten so bad that I avoid Japanese made games for these reasons and this has been my experience over the last ten years or more years of playing their games. Am I the only one that has this grievance with their games?

Pedro

I don't think i even care about the japanese gaming market right now. There's ben 3 more earthquakes today, and it's devastation from what i've seen. God damn.. i hope they manage over this.

Forget about that, i'm e'fed up right now. From which games did you gather those points anyway overtime? Because most current gen western games i've played have most of the problems you've listed, from my own games that i played. And some are worse.

Its seems as though every Japanese made game I have played is plagued with archaic gameplay and technology. Here just a few of the annoyances

• The camera angles for the majority of their games are simply awful. Either their are no camera controls or horrendously placed cameras.
• Their storytelling tends to be stale and predictable. And what makes it worse is the emotionless voice acting and unbelievable dialogue.
• The main character is cut from the same cloth as every other Japanese game. The are overly badass and nothing bothers them or blindly passionate about saving the world.
• Because of their inability to tell a story; and the strong belief that their story is very interesting, they bombard gamers with constant and meaningless cutscenes which frequently interrupts the game.
• Horrendous loading times. It seems to me that very very few Japanese games have acceptable loading times. Its almost as if the game was not tested because the loading times for some their games are so long its hard to believe that it was tested. To make matters worse is the lack of re-instancing of a level when you die or fail the mission. Because the level is not being re-instanced, it is reloaded as if the data is not in memory, further lengthening the loading times.

It has gotten so bad that I avoid Japanese made games for these reasons and this has been my experience over the last ten years or more years of playing their games. Am I the only one that has this grievance with their games?

Pedro

I appreciate both Japanese and western games, but honestly, you're points can be applied the same way with western games.

Sorry Pedro, my dear, but that s*** can honestly be applied to any freakin' game, Japanese or not. God knows we can say that about most of FPS games out there (COD anyone?) and guess which developers overwork those types of 'tropes'? (Hint: Western devs)

This industries been going on for over 25+ years, can you imagine the many ideas that have been reused?? Besides, could you have not picked such a poor-piss time to talk about mess like this? I believe there are probably some Japanese devs that 'lost' more than their touch in gaming (as you put it) in recent weeks....game developing is the last thing on these peoples minds.

· I play western games with just as bad cameras angles and some does not have any control over the camera.

· Western stories are not that much better. The worse if the "Twist" that many western seam to have in their story. Then it just the same almost stander story.

· Western games characters are not much better than any of their characters. WRPG character are the worse set up characters I have seen. They always have over the top baggiest with overused ideal

· I seen western games do the same thing.

· What is worse about load time is that you get it just go into a building like Fallout 3.

Those problems are in western games too unless you are Bias and will choose to see what you want to see.

wiouds

Western games has less problems with the camera than their Japanese counterparts. I am not saying that it doesn't exist on western games its just that is abundantly more frequent with Japanese games.

My experience from playing both western and japanese games is that the stories in japanese games revolves around the same generic storyline and this generally spans across genres. Its more generic than the western counterparts.

Western characters are significantly better when it comes to personality and voice acting like in Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

I am anal about loading times and in general western games have faster loading times. Fallout 3 is a mess on the consoles when it comes to loading times so I know where you are coming from.

Sorry Pedro, my dear, but that s*** can honestly be applied to any freakin' game, Japanese or not. God knows we can say that about most of FPS games out there (COD anyone?) and guess which developers overwork those types of 'tropes'? (Hint: Western devs)

This industries been going on for over 25+ years, can you imagine the many ideas that have been reused?? Besides, could you have not picked such a poor-piss time to talk about mess like this? I believe there are probably some Japanese devs that 'lost' more than their touch in gaming (as you put it) in recent weeks....game developing is the last thing on these peoples minds.

PumpkinBoogie

You act as if I am asking the people of Japan to drop what they are doing to remedy these problems right now. I am simply talking about my beef with their games which is independent of the current state of Japan.

Agreed, I haven't enjoyed playing a Japanese-made game in years.

Besides, could you have not picked such a poor-piss time to talk about mess like this? I believe there are probably some Japanese devs that 'lost' more than their touch in gaming (as you put it) in recent weeks....game developing is the last thing on these peoples minds.

PumpkinBoogie

Yeah... unfortunately i really cannot seperate what i feel about what's going on right now, and disscuss this with a open ended mind. I really can't. I would have disagreed with the thread starter anyway since, like everyone els said, these general observations can, and will be applied to almost every single game from the west.

Do not get me started on the state of western RPGs with their cliche infested Tolkien base which has become overly excessive and horribly generic, and the state of horrible mediocrity in the FPS genre (which DNF and Serious Sam 3 will fix this year). The almost death of good adventure games, and horrifyingly bad excess of shooters, and ofcourse the lack of good platformers.

I could go on.

But yeah.. **** this. Their recover and our support as human beings is a hella lot important. Unless apathy has ruined your mind.

TC,every complaint you listed can be applied to a lot of games regardless if they where developed by Western or Japanese devs.

What you listed seems to be more about developers in general rather than Japanese.

• Yeah, camera angles seem to be worse in Japanese games.
• Gaming stories are stale and predictable, not bound to a single nation. Bioware are the worst example of this, rehashing the same story over and over again, all while picking as many cliches as possible. Case in point Dragon Age: Origins (although Mass Effect was guilty of this as well).The only stories I even gave a **** about this gen are the western games Grey Matter and Mask of the Betrayer and the Japanese game Mother 3.
• Generalizations, I have played quite a few where the protagonist isnt some kind of badass. Although there are a lot of them, just like in Western games. Too many games seem to have overly muscular men and sexualized women.
• You mean like the consistant amount of dialogue you get in Western games as well. Sure its not Hideo Kojima level, but it is still pretty bad.
• The worst loading times I have ever had was with Age of Conan, where load times could exceed a minute. Load times are hardly exclusive to a single nation.

I find that the western games have worse camera than Japanese games.

Many western games are just as generic as Japanese games.

One thing I would call Mass Effect and Dragon Age characters is being generic. ME2 companions are the whiniest cast I have every seen. They only time you really see them is when you talk to them and get their "pity me" speeches. I like FF13 characters so much more.

Unless you have a stopwatch and timing them, I do not notice any real big different. Of course load time is more about the type of game then where it is from.

comparing a western game with a japanesse game is like comparing transformers 2 with inception (there are way better examples but i remember these 2 right now) one is action packed, flashy and mostly without story while the other has its awesome characters, story and storytelling, some of us like more the second kind of games/movies although we enjoy both (as is the case with the 2 movies in the example) each type of game does its own thing stop trying one to be the copy of the other just because its the one you liked it so, i would be very sad if the japanesse lose their touch at storytelling games for going with the westernized flashy kind of games.

I can think of plenty to complain about when it comes to non-Japanese games. For one, their obsession with the illusion of "choice" (e.g., Mass Effect) often significantly hampers their ability to tell an interesting and engaging story. I for one like the linearity in Japanese games, because it enables the writers to actually do their job instead of just kind of meekly asking the player what kind of story he or she would like.

I for one like the linearity in Japanese games, because it enables the writers to actually do their job instead of just kind of meekly asking the player what kind of story he or she would like.

GabuEx

big +1 in this one

You should play something by Platinum or Level 5 or one of the dozens of other Japanese developers who have by no means "lost it."shaunmc

I did enjoy Bayonetta like a new found crack. LOL. I will definitely check out Level 5. Vanquish had potential but the game remained static from begining to end. It was mind boggling how much potential that game had.

I can think of plenty to complain about when it comes to non-Japanese games. For one, their obsession with the illusion of "choice" (e.g., Mass Effect) often significantly hampers their ability to tell an interesting and engaging story. I for one like the linearity in Japanese games, because it enables the writers to actually do their job instead of just kind of meekly asking the player what kind of story he or she would like.

GabuEx

I feel you with the illusion of choice in Bioware games. As for the writing in Japanese games it feels more like a compilation of ideas that are great independently but have no cohesion turning it into a big mess. This pattern can also be found in anime.

I can think of plenty to complain about when it comes to non-Japanese games. For one, their obsession with the illusion of "choice" (e.g., Mass Effect) often significantly hampers their ability to tell an interesting and engaging story. I for one like the linearity in Japanese games, because it enables the writers to actually do their job instead of just kind of meekly asking the player what kind of story he or she would like.GabuEx

Choices are one of the fundamentals of role-playing. At least Western RPG's are trying to be RPG's. And BioWare writers are by far better writers than all Japanese developers' writers put together.

Anyway, I always preferred games developed in the Western hemisphere, but I find myself playing even less Japanese games than I used to. It seems that Japanese devs either went handheld or strayed in some misguided effort to appeal to Western audiences by making awful shooters or whatever. Waiting to see Ninja Gaiden III and keeping an eye on The Last Guardian and Dark Souls, but that's about it, really.

Its seems as though every Japanese made game I have played is plagued with archaic gameplay and technology. Here just a few of the annoyances

• The camera angles for the majority of their games are simply awful. Either their are no camera controls or horrendously placed cameras.
• Their storytelling tends to be stale and predictable. And what makes it worse is the emotionless voice acting and unbelievable dialogue.
• The main character is cut from the same cloth as every other Japanese game. The are overly badass and nothing bothers them or blindly passionate about saving the world.
• Because of their inability to tell a story; and the strong belief that their story is very interesting, they bombard gamers with constant and meaningless cutscenes which frequently interrupts the game.
• Horrendous loading times. It seems to me that very very few Japanese games have acceptable loading times. Its almost as if the game was not tested because the loading times for some their games are so long its hard to believe that it was tested. To make matters worse is the lack of re-instancing of a level when you die or fail the mission. Because the level is not being re-instanced, it is reloaded as if the data is not in memory, further lengthening the loading times.

It has gotten so bad that I avoid Japanese made games for these reasons and this has been my experience over the last ten years or more years of playing their games. Am I the only one that has this grievance with their games?

Pedro

This list could describe many games in general rather than just Japanese ones.

Recently, I been finding myself less impress with many WRPG. A good number been giving up on role playing and replace it menu play. That is game really make it where the only choices that matter and the ones you pick from menu. A few others have also reduce everything to talking or fighting. JRPG has always been about developing your character role so you can deal with strong enemies.

Choices are one of the fundamentals of role-playing. At least Western RPG's are trying to be RPG's. And BioWare writers are by far better writers than all Japanese developers' writers put together.

Anyway, I always preferred games developed in the Western hemisphere, but I find myself playing even less Japanese games than I used to. It seems that Japanese devs either went handheld or strayed in some misguided effort to appeal to Western audiences by making awful shooters or whatever. Waiting to see Ninja Gaiden III and keeping an eye on The Last Guardian and Dark Souls, but that's about it, really.

UpInFlames

Very true. Story telling and character development is their strong point and it makes for an entertaining experience.

[QUOTE="GabuEx"]I can think of plenty to complain about when it comes to non-Japanese games. For one, their obsession with the illusion of "choice" (e.g., Mass Effect) often significantly hampers their ability to tell an interesting and engaging story. I for one like the linearity in Japanese games, because it enables the writers to actually do their job instead of just kind of meekly asking the player what kind of story he or she would like.UpInFlames

Choices are one of the fundamentals of role-playing. At least Western RPG's are trying to be RPG's. And BioWare writers are by far better writers than all Japanese developers' writers put together.

Anyway, I always preferred games developed in the Western hemisphere, but I find myself playing even less Japanese games than I used to. It seems that Japanese devs either went handheld or strayed in some misguided effort to appeal to Western audiences by making awful shooters or whatever. Waiting to see Ninja Gaiden III and keeping an eye on The Last Guardian and Dark Souls, but that's about it, really.

stories and dialogue in western games are so terrible and generic,their gameplay is good though, japanesse have aways delivered interesting stories far better than any wrpg and any bioware game. as i said is like comparing transformers 2 with inception they are different but both good in their own thing, just don't blame inception because half people can't enjoy a good story and just want bullets flying every 5 mins.

Its seems as though every Japanese made game I have played is plagued with archaic gameplay and technology. Here just a few of the annoyances

• The camera angles for the majority of their games are simply awful. Either their are no camera controls or horrendously placed cameras.
• Their storytelling tends to be stale and predictable. And what makes it worse is the emotionless voice acting and unbelievable dialogue.
• The main character is cut from the same cloth as every other Japanese game. The are overly badass and nothing bothers them or blindly passionate about saving the world.
• Because of their inability to tell a story; and the strong belief that their story is very interesting, they bombard gamers with constant and meaningless cutscenes which frequently interrupts the game.
• Horrendous loading times. It seems to me that very very few Japanese games have acceptable loading times. Its almost as if the game was not tested because the loading times for some their games are so long its hard to believe that it was tested. To make matters worse is the lack of re-instancing of a level when you die or fail the mission. Because the level is not being re-instanced, it is reloaded as if the data is not in memory, further lengthening the loading times.

It has gotten so bad that I avoid Japanese made games for these reasons and this has been my experience over the last ten years or more years of playing their games. Am I the only one that has this grievance with their games?

Pedro

[QUOTE="GabuEx"]

I can think of plenty to complain about when it comes to non-Japanese games. For one, their obsession with the illusion of "choice" (e.g., Mass Effect) often significantly hampers their ability to tell an interesting and engaging story. I for one like the linearity in Japanese games, because it enables the writers to actually do their job instead of just kind of meekly asking the player what kind of story he or she would like.

Pedro

I feel you with the illusion of choice in Bioware games. As for the writing in Japanese games it feels more like a compilation of ideas that are great independently but have no cohesion turning it into a big mess. This pattern can also be found in anime.

Perhaps you're just playing the wrong Japanese games? I don't know, but I do have to say my experience has been quite different; all of the greatest stories and presentatinos I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing in the realm of video games came from Japanese games. The Mother series, to give one example, is in my opinion the pinnacle of video game storytelling, and it's totally unlike anything Nintendo has ever created before or since. Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon was one of the most unique games I've ever played, and had absolutely incredible atmosphere. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories had one of the most brilliant presentations of its story that I've gone through, and the ending completely floored me and had me thinking about it for days. Tales of Symphonia was one of the best RPGs I've played, and was very welcome in its length. Those are just a few of the ones I can think of.

Choices are one of the fundamentals of role-playing. At least Western RPG's are trying to be RPG's. And BioWare writers are by far better writers than all Japanese developers' writers put together.

UpInFlames

I reaaaaally can't agree. Mass Effect's illusion of choice - and yes, it is an illusion of choice; none of your choices actually materially impact the core plot in any way - seriously hampers the game's ability to deliver an engaging storyline.

For starters, since you can do whatever you want with Commander Shepard, he is literally the most boring character that he could possibly be. His personality cannot affect the game in any way whatsoever since the player is free to define it as he or she sees fit, which means that his personality does not play any part in anything. He has no heroic BSODs, no epiphanies, no personal triumphs, nothing that would do anything to make him a fully dimensioned human being. He is basically a cardboard cutout that the player can move around and play with, and little more.

The same is true of your party members, too. The player has complete control (in most cases) over which party members to take along and which to leave behind. This shackles the writers even further, because not only can they not assume anything about Shepard, they also can't assume anything about his party or his relationship with those people. Each character has their own special sandboxed mission where they do their thing, sure, but just like Shepard, none of the characters actually impact the plot in any way. You could literally take any of them, remove them from the story, and replace them with someone completely different, and the story would not have to be changed, like, at all.

And then there's the fact that you can do missions in any order, with only a few unifying missions that you have to undertake at a given time. This, too, completely shackles the writers, because now not only can they not assume anything about Shepard, his party members, or his relationships with them, but they also can't assume anything about what they've done. As such, the vast majority of the things you do in the game do not affect anything else whatsoever; they exist completely unto themselves, and once you leave them behind, that's it, you never hear back from them in any significant fashion, ever.

Mass Effect - and I say this as someone who still really enjoyed it - had one of the most boring storylines in any game when you really look at it. Shepard finds this artifact, then he finds out that Saren is a traitor, and that's all well and good, but then for the entire remainder of the game until you reach Ilos, it's just one irrelevant encounter after other. Go here, do this, make a paragon/renegade choice or two, and now you're done. Then you go to a new planet, wash, rinse, and repeat. There's no unity, no cohesion, no plot twists (save for the very beginning, and maybe the Sovereign encounter), and frankly nothing of real import except for the few missions that you can't put off. The choices that that game offered completely denied it any chance of having an interesting and engaging story from start to finish, and instead reduced it down to mostly being a console version of episodic gaming.

I reaaaaally can't agree. Mass Effect's illusion of choice - and yes, it is an illusion of choice; none of your choices actually materially impact the core plot in any way - seriously hampers the game's ability to deliver an engaging storyline.

For starters, since you can do whatever you want with Commander Shepard, he is literally the most boring character that he could possibly be. His personality cannot affect the game in any way whatsoever since the player is free to define it as he or she sees fit, which means that his personality does not play any part in anything. He has no heroic BSODs, no epiphanies, no personal triumphs, nothing that would do anything to make him a fully dimensioned human being. He is basically a cardboard cutout that the player can move around and play with, and little more.

The same is true of your party members, too. The player has complete control (in most cases) over which party members to take along and which to leave behind. This shackles the writers even further, because not only can they not assume anything about Shepard, they also can't assume anything about his party or his relationship with those people. Each character has their own special sandboxed mission where they do their thing, sure, but just like Shepard, none of the characters actually impact the plot in any way. You could literally take any of them, remove them from the story, and replace them with someone completely different, and the story would not have to be changed, like, at all.

And then there's the fact that you can do missions in any order, with only a few unifying missions that you have to undertake at a given time. This, too, completely shackles the writers, because now not only can they not assume anything about Shepard, his party members, or his relationships with them, but they also can't assume anything about what they've done. As such, the vast majority of the things you do in the game do not affect anything else whatsoever; they exist completely unto themselves, and once you leave them behind, that's it, you never hear back from them in any significant fashion, ever.

Mass Effect - and I say this as someone who still really enjoyed it - had one of the most boring storylines in any game when you really look at it. Shepard finds this artifact, then he finds out that Saren is a traitor, and that's all well and good, but then for the entire remainder of the game until you reach Ilos, it's just one irrelevant encounter after other. Go here, do this, make a paragon/renegade choice or two, and now you're done. Then you go to a new planet, wash, rinse, and repeat. There's no unity, no cohesion, no plot twists (save for the very beginning, and maybe the Sovereign encounter), and frankly nothing of real import except for the few missions that you can't put off. The choices that that game offered completely denied it any chance of having an interesting and engaging story from start to finish, and instead reduced it down to mostly being a console version of episodic gaming.GabuEx

Mass Effect might not be a game in which your choices impact the core storyline (and I never claimed it does), but it still has meaningful choices regarding your character and how you interact with other characters and the gameworld. Various Western RPG's employ different types of choices. Some focus on your character, some on the storyline, some on the gameworld...the point is the all try to enable the player to leave his own mark in one way or another. Even Mass Effect, which is hardly a shining example of great RPG's, does more in this regard than the vast majority of Japanese RPG's.

Regarding what you said about Shepard, I think you are simply not good at role-playing, perhaps even lack the understanding of what role-playing is all about. Shepard is not even supposed to be much more than an extension of the player, a vessel with whom the player interacts with the gameworld. If you don't invest yourself into the character then you kind of fail at role-playing.

I didn't find Mass Effect's storyline to be that great, really (the first encounter with Sovereign was the highlight for me), but it still has far better WRITING and STORYTELLING than pretty much any Japanese game ever made. The Japanese might be good with CONCEPTS, but all efforts are completely ruined with atrociously bad writing and voice acting save for a few select exceptions. It's like telling jokes. Tell a hilarious joke in a drab and monotone manner and no one will laugh. Tell a mediocre joke with verve and you will bring the house down. All stories are already told and most revolve around simple themes, they're just repackaged to make them seem fresh. It's how you tell them what really counts.

The only choice that matter in ME2 was the class you pick from but they already pick the role for the character.

I define my character roles more from how they deal with the problems. So I can play a game without the menu playing with the hollow shell hero and still call it a rpg.

PLus I getting bord of the unchanging WRPG stories.

[QUOTE="GabuEx"]I reaaaaally can't agree. Mass Effect's illusion of choice - and yes, it is an illusion of choice; none of your choices actually materially impact the core plot in any way - seriously hampers the game's ability to deliver an engaging storyline.

For starters, since you can do whatever you want with Commander Shepard, he is literally the most boring character that he could possibly be. His personality cannot affect the game in any way whatsoever since the player is free to define it as he or she sees fit, which means that his personality does not play any part in anything. He has no heroic BSODs, no epiphanies, no personal triumphs, nothing that would do anything to make him a fully dimensioned human being. He is basically a cardboard cutout that the player can move around and play with, and little more.

The same is true of your party members, too. The player has complete control (in most cases) over which party members to take along and which to leave behind. This shackles the writers even further, because not only can they not assume anything about Shepard, they also can't assume anything about his party or his relationship with those people. Each character has their own special sandboxed mission where they do their thing, sure, but just like Shepard, none of the characters actually impact the plot in any way. You could literally take any of them, remove them from the story, and replace them with someone completely different, and the story would not have to be changed, like, at all.

And then there's the fact that you can do missions in any order, with only a few unifying missions that you have to undertake at a given time. This, too, completely shackles the writers, because now not only can they not assume anything about Shepard, his party members, or his relationships with them, but they also can't assume anything about what they've done. As such, the vast majority of the things you do in the game do not affect anything else whatsoever; they exist completely unto themselves, and once you leave them behind, that's it, you never hear back from them in any significant fashion, ever.

Mass Effect - and I say this as someone who still really enjoyed it - had one of the most boring storylines in any game when you really look at it. Shepard finds this artifact, then he finds out that Saren is a traitor, and that's all well and good, but then for the entire remainder of the game until you reach Ilos, it's just one irrelevant encounter after other. Go here, do this, make a paragon/renegade choice or two, and now you're done. Then you go to a new planet, wash, rinse, and repeat. There's no unity, no cohesion, no plot twists (save for the very beginning, and maybe the Sovereign encounter), and frankly nothing of real import except for the few missions that you can't put off. The choices that that game offered completely denied it any chance of having an interesting and engaging story from start to finish, and instead reduced it down to mostly being a console version of episodic gaming.UpInFlames

Mass Effect might not be a game in which your choices impact the core storyline (and I never claimed it does), but it still has meaningful choices regarding your character and how you interact with other characters and the gameworld. Various Western RPG's employ different types of choices. Some focus on your character, some on the storyline, some on the gameworld...the point is the all try to enable the player to leave his own mark in one way or another. Even Mass Effect, which is hardly a shining example of great RPG's, does more in this regard than the vast majority of Japanese RPG's.

Regarding what you said about Shepard, I think you are simply not good at role-playing, perhaps even lack the understanding of what role-playing is all about. Shepard is not even supposed to be much more than an extension of the player, a vessel with whom the player interacts with the gameworld. If you don't invest yourself into the character then you kind of fail at role-playing.

I didn't find Mass Effect's storyline to be that great, really (the first encounter with Sovereign was the highlight for me), but it still has far better WRITING and STORYTELLING than pretty much any Japanese game ever made. The Japanese might be good with CONCEPTS, but all efforts are completely ruined with atrociously bad writing and voice acting save for a few select exceptions. It's like telling jokes. Tell a hilarious joke in a drab and monotone manner and no one will laugh. Tell a mediocre joke with verve and you will bring the house down. All stories are already told and most revolve around simple themes, they're just repackaged to make them seem fresh. It's how you tell them what really counts.

Definition of ROLE-PLAY

transitive verb1: to act out the role of 2: to represent in action

Role playing means to play a part, not to do whatever you want. Its great that western rpgs tend to offer freedom, but to say that rpgs which don't offer the same freedom aren't rpgs is to fail to understand what the word means.

And speaking as a guy who is playing through ME2 (and has played all of Bioware's console games bar the DAs) I have not been as impressed by the writing, choices (walk past puppy, give puppy treat or kick puppy?) and story of Bioware's games as I have been by the writing, choices and story of Tactics Ogre (choices pop up less frequently, but they are less simplistic). Story and writing wise, the same could be said of pretty much any game Matsuno has done (the first localization of FFT was atrocious, but aside from that its all been great stuff).

And the gameplay/game design of Western rpgs this gen not named Oblivion or Mass Effect 2 has been atrocious. With greater scale one has to accept a little less polish, but many wrpgs play like games where crap was frequently thrown into the game up until the last minute, with no regard for whether or not anything worked individually let alone whether anything worked together. And wrpg's willingness to ape popular genres in order to garner greater sales seems to be paying off for them, but the pandering kind of hurts their tone and design.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_sOTO3cUbo

Definition of ROLE-PLAY

transitive verb1: to act out the role of 2: to represent in action

Role playing means to play a part, not to do whatever you want. Its great that western rpgs tend to offer freedom, but to say that rpgs which don't offer the same freedom aren't rpgs is to fail to understand what the word means.

And speaking as a guy who is playing through ME2 (and has played all of Bioware's console games bar the DAs) I have not been as impressed by the writing, choices (walk past puppy, give puppy treat or kick puppy?) and story of Bioware's games as I have been by the writing, choices and story of Tactics Ogre (choices pop up less frequently, but they are less simplistic). Story and writing wise, the same could be said of pretty much any game Matsuno has done (the first localization of FFT was atrocious, but aside from that its all been great stuff).

And the gameplay/game design of Western rpgs this gen not named Oblivion or Mass Effect 2 has been atrocious. With greater scale one has to accept a little less polish, but many wrpgs play like games where crap was frequently thrown into the game up until the last minute, with no regard for whether or not anything worked individually let alone whether anything worked together. And wrpg's willingness to ape popular genres in order to garner greater sales seems to be paying off for them, but the pandering kind of hurts their tone and design.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_sOTO3cUbo

Its seems as though every Japanese made game I have played is plagued with archaic gameplay and technology. Here just a few of the annoyances

• The camera angles for the majority of their games are simply awful. Either their are no camera controls or horrendously placed cameras.
• Their storytelling tends to be stale and predictable. And what makes it worse is the emotionless voice acting and unbelievable dialogue.
• The main character is cut from the same cloth as every other Japanese game. The are overly badass and nothing bothers them or blindly passionate about saving the world.
• Because of their inability to tell a story; and the strong belief that their story is very interesting, they bombard gamers with constant and meaningless cutscenes which frequently interrupts the game.
• Horrendous loading times. It seems to me that very very few Japanese games have acceptable loading times. Its almost as if the game was not tested because the loading times for some their games are so long its hard to believe that it was tested. To make matters worse is the lack of re-instancing of a level when you die or fail the mission. Because the level is not being re-instanced, it is reloaded as if the data is not in memory, further lengthening the loading times.

It has gotten so bad that I avoid Japanese made games for these reasons and this has been my experience over the last ten years or more years of playing their games. Am I the only one that has this grievance with their games?

Pedro

Definition of ROLE-PLAY

transitive verb1: to act out the role of 2: to represent in action

Role playing means to play a part, not to do whatever you want. Its great that western rpgs tend to offer freedom, but to say that rpgs which don't offer the same freedom aren't rpgs is to fail to understand what the word means.

And speaking as a guy who is playing through ME2 (and has played all of Bioware's console games bar the DAs) I have not been as impressed by the writing, choices (walk past puppy, give puppy treat or kick puppy?) and story of Bioware's games as I have been by the writing, choices and story of Tactics Ogre (choices pop up less frequently, but they are less simplistic). Story and writing wise, the same could be said of pretty much any game Matsuno has done (the first localization of FFT was atrocious, but aside from that its all been great stuff).

And the gameplay/game design of Western rpgs this gen not named Oblivion or Mass Effect 2 has been atrocious. With greater scale one has to accept a little less polish, but many wrpgs play like games where crap was frequently thrown into the game up until the last minute, with no regard for whether or not anything worked individually let alone whether anything worked together. And wrpg's willingness to ape popular genres in order to garner greater sales seems to be paying off for them, but the pandering kind of hurts their tone and design.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_sOTO3cUbo

CarnageHeart

In most Western RPG's the main character isn't strongly defined so that the player is sufficiently empowered to shape the character as he sees fit. If the character is defined by the developers, it diminishes the role-playing (role-playing in the context of video games as derived from pen and paper RPG's, otherwise all games would be RPG's if we took the general term at face value). There are Western RPG's with pre-defined characters (The Witcher, for example), but those games offer choices in other areas - the player can directly affect the story, gameworld, NPC's. As I said, offering choices to players is one of the fundamentals of the genre. Not all games have to offer them in the same areas, but they have to offer them somewhere - otherwise, they're kind of poor excuses for RPG's, in my opinion.

Sure, you can cling on to an 13-year-old exception, but that's all it is - a really old exception.

I'm not sure what did you try to imply with that trailer, but Dragon Age is one of the best RPG's in recent years (at least the PC version).

Your thread has absolutely no point. All games, not only japanese, have some follow here and there. I dont think japanese games have this problems as i can name a lot of games with compelling stories. Most japanese rpgs have awesome stories. But like i said, its really a few games.

As a side not, the worst camera i have ever seen in my life: Legacy of Kain: Defiance

who needs an engaging storyline , overall plot and great cutscenes when you can make choises!!! seriously mass effect choises don't have any effect at all, even killing the council changes a few lines in mass effect 2 and thats as big as choises get in that game, but some people think they are a big deal. Choises that do not affect the plot or anything besides a few line of dialogue and the "choise" of doing the missions in the order you want which they end up being a filler in the game because only a very few key missions can advance the game thanks to that system and a character who can't have a personality and its boring and bland thanks to you "making" his choises is just lol. And i liked mass effect, a lot specially me2, but i have yet to see a western rpg with a decent story that comes even close to the great jrpgs.

Mass Effect might not be a game in which your choices impact the core storyline (and I never claimed it does), but it still has meaningful choices regarding your character and how you interact with other characters and the gameworld. Various Western RPG's employ different types of choices. Some focus on your character, some on the storyline, some on the gameworld...the point is the all try to enable the player to leave his own mark in one way or another. Even Mass Effect, which is hardly a shining example of great RPG's, does more in this regard than the vast majority of Japanese RPG's.

Regarding what you said about Shepard, I think you are simply not good at role-playing, perhaps even lack the understanding of what role-playing is all about. Shepard is not even supposed to be much more than an extension of the player, a vessel with whom the player interacts with the gameworld. If you don't invest yourself into the character then you kind of fail at role-playing.

I didn't find Mass Effect's storyline to be that great, really (the first encounter with Sovereign was the highlight for me), but it still has far better WRITING and STORYTELLING than pretty much any Japanese game ever made. The Japanese might be good with CONCEPTS, but all efforts are completely ruined with atrociously bad writing and voice acting save for a few select exceptions. It's like telling jokes. Tell a hilarious joke in a drab and monotone manner and no one will laugh. Tell a mediocre joke with verve and you will bring the house down. All stories are already told and most revolve around simple themes, they're just repackaged to make them seem fresh. It's how you tell them what really counts.

UpInFlames

(Spoilers ahead for those who haven't played Mass Effect.)

But it doesn't have meaningful choices. That's the thing. Because their budget is limited, they completely railroad characters along one single given path and provide basically three ways in which to respond to something that a character said, all of which will ultimately get you to the same end result in the end. That's exactly the problem: people have basically been suckered into believing that, because they can decide whether their player says something noble or dickish, they've somehow got control over how the game goes. It's totally an illusion, it really is. If you doubt that it is, think about pivotal moments in the game and how much control you actually had over them, and if you did have control, how much your choice impacted the game. Let's go through the scenarios one at a time.

Eden Prime: Nihlus dies, Jenkins dies, Shepard finds the beacon. Can you suspect Saren of treachery and save Nihlus? No. Can you protect Jenkins and save him from death? No. Can you feel apprehensive about the beacon and not touch it? No. Sum total of difference your choices make: **** all.

Citadel: Evidence is found implicating Saren, Garrus is recruited, Wrex is recruited. Can you convince the council of Saren's guilt any other way? No. Can you go all rogue and opt not to receive the council's help? No. Can you refuse to recruit either Garrus or Wrex? Yes - but does it have any effect on the plot? Nope. Sum total of difference your choices make: **** all. Again.

Therum: Find and rescue Liara. Defeat Krogan battlemaster. Can you refuse to recruit her to your ranks? No. Can you avoid the battle with the Krogan? No. Sum total of difference your choices make: You don't even have any choices to make here, so... yep, **** all.

Feros: Infiltrate ExoGeni compound and find out what they were up to. Find out what Saren is up to. Defend Zhu's Hope. Defeat thorian. Can you refuse to infiltrate the compound? No. Can you opt not to defend Zhu's Hope? To an extent, in that you can opt to kill unimportant members of the colony. Does this affect anything in the game? Absolutely not. Can you reason with the thorian and prevent a battle? No. Sum total of difference your choices make: **** all. Once again.

Noveria: Gain access to hot labs. Find out what the geth are up to. Confront mind-controlled captain. Kill Benezia. Confront Rachni queen. Can you gain access to the hot labs in multiple ways? Yes - but does one way have any more effect on the plot than another? Nope. Can you refuse to go to the hot labs? No. Can you avoid killing the captain? Yes - but does that affect the plot? Nope. Can you avoid killing Benezia? No. Can you avoid killing the Rachni queen? Yes - but... oh, you know what I'm going to say by now - no, it doesn't affect the plot in any way. Sum total of difference your choices make: **** all. Yep.

Virmire: Assault Saren's compound. Protect the Salarian commandos. Confront Saren. Sacrifice either Ashley or Kaidan. Can you opt not to assault the compound? No. Can you opt not to protect the Salarians? Yes - but doing so affects nothing. When Saren makes his case, can you agree with him and join him? No. Does it make any difference to the plot whether you sacrifice Ashley or Kaidan? Absolutely not. Sum total of difference your choices make: still **** all.

Ilos: Pursue Saren. Get to Citadel. Confront Saren. Kill Saren. Opt whether to save the Council. Can you refuse to pursue Saren, trusting the council instead? No. Can you convince Saren not to attack. Yes - and then he attacks anyway. Can you choose what to do with the Council? Yes - and then this decision, this groundbreaking, galaxy-altering decision... has absolutely **** all to do with the events in Mass Effect 2, except for a tiny cameo. Which is basically an ultimate **** you to players who actually thought they had any control over the progression of the game. Sum total of difference your choices make, in the entire game... ****. All.

I'm using Mass Effect as an example here. But this is the case in every single game that offers the player choice. Choice necessarily makes the story less interesting, and the player still gets railroaded from point A to point B with only minor plot details changing here and there in response to the player's actions. I would even almost call it a scam in terms of the fundamental and complete disconnect between what players think about it and the reality in terms of what players actually get.

If you want a game that actually, really offers players true choice, take a look at Dungeons and Dragons. In DnD, except for where the rules explicitly forbid it (and even then the dungeon master can change these rules with the consent of the players), any given player can do any given action at any given time, and any such action has the very real potential to fundamentally and irreparably alter the story such that the dungeon master now has to completely rethink what's going to happen next (the DM can railroad players like in video games, but this is highly frowned upon). That's bona fide choice, right there. Games like Mass Effect? Purely smoke and mirrors, honestly. It's not that I'm bad at role playing. Video games are bad at providing the opportunity for role playing.

All of the above is why, despite the fact that - again - I enjoy games like Mass Effect and the like, I can't help but sigh when people assert that the "choice" that such games offer provide a level of immersion above and beyond Japanese games that makes them objectively superior. Give me a game that has one single well-developed story, take it or leave it, any day. Games like this are at the very least honest about what the player is going to get, and I find these games much more immersive and engaging than games that basically just sit back and tell me I'm going to be able to make choices and then basically do little more than ask me what color drapes I want in the house in which I'm forced to live.

As for writing quality... that's basically completely subjective, so there's not much more I can say other than that I disagree. There are plenty of Japanese games I've played whose writing was perfectly fine and completely engaging. I gave examples of such games in a post earlier in this thread.

[QUOTE="CarnageHeart"]

Definition of ROLE-PLAY

transitive verb1: to act out the role of 2: to represent in action

Role playing means to play a part, not to do whatever you want. Its great that western rpgs tend to offer freedom, but to say that rpgs which don't offer the same freedom aren't rpgs is to fail to understand what the word means.

And speaking as a guy who is playing through ME2 (and has played all of Bioware's console games bar the DAs) I have not been as impressed by the writing, choices (walk past puppy, give puppy treat or kick puppy?) and story of Bioware's games as I have been by the writing, choices and story of Tactics Ogre (choices pop up less frequently, but they are less simplistic). Story and writing wise, the same could be said of pretty much any game Matsuno has done (the first localization of FFT was atrocious, but aside from that its all been great stuff).

And the gameplay/game design of Western rpgs this gen not named Oblivion or Mass Effect 2 has been atrocious. With greater scale one has to accept a little less polish, but many wrpgs play like games where crap was frequently thrown into the game up until the last minute, with no regard for whether or not anything worked individually let alone whether anything worked together. And wrpg's willingness to ape popular genres in order to garner greater sales seems to be paying off for them, but the pandering kind of hurts their tone and design.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_sOTO3cUbo

smerlus

I was never a DnD guy, but I did play early wprgs like Ultima, Wizardy and Bard's Tale and they certainly didn't let players determine the direction of things. If you want to pretend rpgs started with the later Ultimas or Fallout or something, its a free country, but that's not the way the genre started.

In Bioware games decisions are always good (morally pure, not harming an innocent even if that's the most expidient route), evil (okay, not evil, ruthless) or neutral. There wouldn't be talk ofdeveloping dangerous technologyin a Bioware game, they would explicitly state the costs of the tech in morally laden terms. Like M Night Shaymalan movies alwayshave a twist ending, Bioware games always have moral clarity (and for things that benefit you, a moral cost) in their choices. Sometimes Bioware's framing is convincing (talking with a scientist about his role in a project which helped keep a dangerous race infertile) but often it is laughably forced (tech which provides insight into the Geth being contingent on the continued suffering of a scientist's idiot savant brother).

I don't see how does the sloppy, unpolished, Mysteries of Westgate contradicts my statement that Western developers tend to ship bug infested slop. As I stated, there are a couple reasonably polished wrpgs (though the planet roaming bits of ME2 are horrendously bad the shooting bitsare competent this time around) out there, but most developers would rather ship a sloppy product which has a bunch of bullet points on the back of the box (and increasingly, apes a popular action genre) than a good, polished game.

Thanks for the in-depth analysis, but it is completely unnecessary considering the very first thing I wrote in my previous post.

Once again, what Mass Effect does is it enables players to leave their mark in terms of character progression and growth and how they are percieved by other characters in the gameworld. The actual core plot might not change much, but the experience can be very different. The player's character will act differently and will be percieved differently which definitely contributes to the tone of the overall experience. Also, I find the choices regarding my party very meaningful. There was a REASON why I made the choice that I did concerning Alenko, Ashley and Wrex (you failed to mention him, by the way). I would also say that the final mission in Mass Effect 2 was brilliant as I felt compelled to do the best I can and it was very rewarding to realize that my choices affected the success of the mission (and by success I don't just mean getting the job done, but keeping everyone alive).

Thinking about it a bit more, saying that doesn't impact the story is asinine, to be perfectly honest. Everything I do in the game is part of the story. Developers provide me with the core plot, but I get to shape the entire story. What happens to my party members or even some random NPC's or how I interact with the gameworld is everything but meaningless. How the hell is it NOT part of the story?

Video game RPG's are derived from pen and paper RPG's, but they are not one and the same and it is unreasonable to expect the same level of freedom to be present in both RPG forms. BUT--back to my original point--at least Western RPG's are trying to emulate pen and paper RPG's within the inherent constraints of the medium.

[QUOTE="smerlus"][QUOTE="CarnageHeart"]

Definition of ROLE-PLAY

transitive verb1: to act out the role of 2: to represent in action

Role playing means to play a part, not to do whatever you want. Its great that western rpgs tend to offer freedom, but to say that rpgs which don't offer the same freedom aren't rpgs is to fail to understand what the word means.

And speaking as a guy who is playing through ME2 (and has played all of Bioware's console games bar the DAs) I have not been as impressed by the writing, choices (walk past puppy, give puppy treat or kick puppy?) and story of Bioware's games as I have been by the writing, choices and story of Tactics Ogre (choices pop up less frequently, but they are less simplistic). Story and writing wise, the same could be said of pretty much any game Matsuno has done (the first localization of FFT was atrocious, but aside from that its all been great stuff).

And the gameplay/game design of Western rpgs this gen not named Oblivion or Mass Effect 2 has been atrocious. With greater scale one has to accept a little less polish, but many wrpgs play like games where crap was frequently thrown into the game up until the last minute, with no regard for whether or not anything worked individually let alone whether anything worked together. And wrpg's willingness to ape popular genres in order to garner greater sales seems to be paying off for them, but the pandering kind of hurts their tone and design.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_sOTO3cUbo

I was never a DnD guy, but I did play early wprgs like Ultima, Wizardy and Bard's Tale and they certainly didn't let players determine the direction of things. If you want to pretend rpgs started with the later Ultimas or Fallout or something, its a free country, but that's not the way the genre started.

In Bioware games decisions are always good (morally pure, not harming an innocent even if that's the most expidient route), evil (okay, not evil, ruthless) or neutral. There wouldn't be talk ofdeveloping dangerous technologyin a Bioware game, they would explicitly state the costs of the tech in morally laden terms. Like M Night Shaymalan movies alwayshave a twist ending, Bioware games always have moral clarity (and for things that benefit you, a moral cost) in their choices. Sometimes Bioware's framing is convincing (talking with a scientist about his role in a project which helped keep a dangerous race infertile) but often it is laughably forced (tech which provides insight into the Geth being contingent on the continued suffering of a scientist's idiot savant brother).

I don't see how does the sloppy, unpolished, Mysteries of Westgate contradicts my statement that Western developers tend to ship bug infested slop. As I stated, there are a couple reasonably polished wrpgs (though the planet roaming bits of ME2 are horrendously bad the shooting bitsare competent this time around) out there, but most developers would rather ship a sloppy product which has a bunch of bullet points on the back of the box (and increasingly, apes a popular action genre) than a good, polished game.

GabuEx

[QUOTE="CarnageHeart"]

[QUOTE="smerlus"] If you're to use that broad definition than every game is a role playing game because I play the role of Mario in SMB Galaxy, I play the role of a Quarterback in Madden 2011...yadda yaddda yadda. However if you take what Pen and Paper RPG's were...a bunch of people sitting around acting out whatever they wanted using only the confines of a rule set, then that would be different. If you then take the founding fathers' vision of computer RPG's and see they tried their best to emulate the PnP roleplaying games using the confines of technology and programming....your definition really doesn't fit. Anyways UIF isn't using the example of decision making as freedom to "do what you want" but as an example as how you can tailor make a character to a be the kind of role you want to play as and i've always found it amusing that when a player is given the chance to create whatever kind of character they want, they complain that their character is boring. I would agree that that person is bad at role playing or lacks imagination. secondly, i'd have to question a poster's motive if they list kicking a dog, not kicking a dog as an example of one of the decisions in ME2 seeing that it isn't in any ME game i've ever played however there are decisions whether to turn dangerous technology over to scientists to study it for the benefit of learning, or destroying it just to be safe. Doesn't seem to match up with the good/evil example given but hey, not everyone can back up their position without using hyperbole. Or Dragon Age, Or Mask of the Betrayer, Or Mysteries of Westgate, Or Eschelon Books 1 and 2, or...well I understand you're making a broad generalization based off of the very few WRPG's you've actually been able to play this generation so i'll forgive you.smerlus

I was never a DnD guy, but I did play early wprgs like Ultima, Wizardy and Bard's Tale and they certainly didn't let players determine the direction of things. If you want to pretend rpgs started with the later Ultimas or Fallout or something, its a free country, but that's not the way the genre started.

In Bioware games decisions are always good (morally pure, not harming an innocent even if that's the most expidient route), evil (okay, not evil, ruthless) or neutral. There wouldn't be talk ofdeveloping dangerous technologyin a Bioware game, they would explicitly state the costs of the tech in morally laden terms. Like M Night Shaymalan movies alwayshave a twist ending, Bioware games always have moral clarity (and for things that benefit you, a moral cost) in their choices. Sometimes Bioware's framing is convincing (talking with a scientist about his role in a project which helped keep a dangerous race infertile) but often it is laughably forced (tech which provides insight into the Geth being contingent on the continued suffering of a scientist's idiot savant brother).

I don't see how does the sloppy, unpolished, Mysteries of Westgate contradicts my statement that Western developers tend to ship bug infested slop. As I stated, there are a couple reasonably polished wrpgs (though the planet roaming bits of ME2 are horrendously bad the shooting bitsare competent this time around) out there, but most developers would rather ship a sloppy product which has a bunch of bullet points on the back of the box (and increasingly, apes a popular action genre) than a good, polished game.

1) It was a long time ago, but IIRC the virtues in Ultima didn't kick in until Ultima 4.

2) Like professional reviews, player impressions have their uses, but they bring their own set of issues. Sometimes players tend to overcorrect ('The review didn't rate this game high enough, so I'm going to rate it real high to bring balance to the universe'). Also, professional reviews tend to understate bugs and other issues, not overstate them, so if reviewrs agree that a game has a lot of bugs 99 times out of 100 its because it has a lot of bugs. Also (and this relates to my next post) sometimes player reviews are written well after launch (and thus, several patches).

3) Yes, I expect games to ship ina reasonable state of polish (which is part of the reason I was so disappointed by GT5). Guilty as charged.

4) As for jrpgs being static in the sense that they don't need a series of patches to work, I hope this always remains the case. As for your claim they don't take chances, I point you towards the likes of Persona 3, SMT: Norturne, Demon's Souls, FF12 and Valkyria Chronicles.

Thanks for the in-depth analysis, but it is completely unnecessary considering the very first thing I wrote in my previous post.

Once again, what Mass Effect does is it enables players to leave their mark in terms of character progression and growth and how they are percieved by other characters in the gameworld. The actual core plot might not change much, but the experience can be very different. The player's character will act differently and will be percieved differently which definitely contributes to the tone of the overall experience. Also, I find the choices regarding my party very meaningful. There was a REASON why I made the choice that I did concerning Alenko, Ashley and Wrex (you failed to mention him, by the way). I would also say that the final mission in Mass Effect 2 was brilliant as I felt compelled to do the best I can and it was very rewarding to realize that my choices affected the success of the mission (and by success I don't just mean getting the job done, but keeping everyone alive).

Thinking about it a bit more, saying that doesn't impact the story is asinine, to be perfectly honest. Everything I do in the game is part of the story. Developers provide me with the core plot, but I get to shape the entire story. What happens to my party members or even some random NPC's or how I interact with the gameworld is everything but meaningless. How the hell is it NOT part of the story?

Video game RPG's are derived from pen and paper RPG's, but they are not one and the same and it is unreasonable to expect the same level of freedom to be present in both RPG forms. BUT--back to my original point--at least Western RPG's are trying to emulate pen and paper RPG's within the inherent constraints of the medium.

UpInFlames

The real issue is that the decisions you made in ME1 had little or no effect in ME2. This is supposedly because the Termina system is really far away from the citadel....

You save the council? Doesn't matter since everyone still hates humans and the only people that notice are the people on the citadel and there's maybe a random news report on it. This supposedly huge decision has no effect on any aspect of the game.

If the council is dead is Anderson or Udina leading it? Doesn't matter either. Other than the conversations you have with the two no one seems to even know about it or have opinions on it.

Not sure what happens if you cap Wrex. I bet he comes back in ME3 somehow and gets revenge cause he regenerated or something.

I'm also not sure what changes if you decided to get info from the computer on Ilos but I doubt that matters either.

Kaiden or Ashley? Who cares, they only show up one freakin time anyway.... And then they chew you out!!

"Where were you all this time Shepard??!!??

"I was dead."

"That's no excuse!!!!" :lol:

At least with Liara you got extra scenes in the Shadow Broker DLC that got rid of the awkwardness.

Another point is that I don't think you're really percieved by the game world. I mean if you insult someone they're obviously going to react in a not so nice way. Good responses tend to get good responses and vice versa. Shepard doesn't have a reputation other than the bio you give him at the beginning of the game. I was expecting some changes in the story depending on the way you acted throughout the game but we really didn't get that. Has shepard been a good boy or has he been punching news reporters?? No one knows and no one seems to care. I expected Shepard to get a lot of heat for that back in ME1 and he gets to do it again in ME2 lol.

The fnal mission was a bit of a joke imo... I mean for everyone to just die you have to literally do nothing to the ship. And man do you get owned there... I'm sure that most people will get out alive on their first playthrough anyway. I do get nervous whenever I send someone through the airducts though.

Its seems as though every Japanese made game I have played is plagued with archaic gameplay and technology. Here just a few of the annoyances

The camera angles for the majority of their games are simply awful. Either their are no camera controls or horrendously placed cameras.

Their storytelling tends to be stale and predictable. And what makes it worse is the emotionless voice acting and unbelievable dialogue.

The main character is cut from the same cloth as every other Japanese game. The are overly badass and nothing bothers them or blindly passionate about saving the world.

Because of their inability to tell a story; and the strong belief that their story is very interesting, they bombard gamers with constant and meaningless cutscenes which frequently interrupts the game.

Horrendous loading times. It seems to me that very very few Japanese games have acceptable loading times. Its almost as if the game was not tested because the loading times for some their games are so long its hard to believe that it was tested. To make matters worse is the lack of re-instancing of a level when you die or fail the mission. Because the level is not being re-instanced, it is reloaded as if the data is not in memory, further lengthening the loading times.

It has gotten so bad that I avoid Japanese made games for these reasons and this has been my experience over the last ten years or more years of playing their games. Am I the only one that has this grievance with their games?Pedro

You can apply that very same argument to Western games:

-The camera angles for the majority of their games are simply awful. Either there are no camera controls or horrendously placed cameras.

-Their storytelling tends to be stale and predictable. And what makes it worse is the emotionless voice acting and unbelievable dialogue.

-The main character is cut from the same cloth as every other Western game. The are overly badass and nothing bothers them, or they're just plain emotionless bald space marines.

-Because of their inability to tell a story; and the strong belief that their story is very interesting, they bombard gamers with constant and meaningless cutscenes which frequently interrupts the game.

-Horrendous loading times and numerous bugs. It seems very very few Western games have acceptable polish or loading times. Its almost as if the game was not tested because loading times for some of their games are so long and the bugs too numerous, it's hard to believe that it was tested.

See, it's not so hard to generalize.

Mass Effect might not be a game in which your choices impact the core storyline (and I never claimed it does), but it still has meaningful choices regarding your character and how you interact with other characters and the gameworld. Various Western RPG's employ different types of choices. Some focus on your character, some on the storyline, some on the gameworld...the point is the all try to enable the player to leave his own mark in one way or another. Even Mass Effect, which is hardly a shining example of great RPG's, does more in this regard than the vast majority of Japanese RPG's.

Regarding what you said about Shepard, I think you are simply not good at role-playing, perhaps even lack the understanding of what role-playing is all about. Shepard is not even supposed to be much more than an extension of the player, a vessel with whom the player interacts with the gameworld. If you don't invest yourself into the character then you kind of fail at role-playing.

I didn't find Mass Effect's storyline to be that great, really (the first encounter with Sovereign was the highlight for me), but it still has far better WRITING and STORYTELLING than pretty much any Japanese game ever made. The Japanese might be good with CONCEPTS, but all efforts are completely ruined with atrociously bad writing and voice acting save for a few select exceptions. It's like telling jokes. Tell a hilarious joke in a drab and monotone manner and no one will laugh. Tell a mediocre joke with verve and you will bring the house down. All stories are already told and most revolve around simple themes, they're just repackaged to make them seem fresh. It's how you tell them what really counts.UpInFlames

In other words, your only complaint against Japanese games is their English translated dialogues and dubbed English voices? So your basically attacking Japanese devs over the English localizations, something they have no control over? I hate to break it to you, but it's Western localization teams that are mostly responsible for the quality of the English translated dialogues and English voice dubbing. Just because the English dubbing might be good or bad, that tells us nothing about the quality of the original Japanese voice acting. In most cases, the original voice Japanese acting is vastly superior to the English dubbing, due to the original script being written specifically in that language with that culture in mind. That's the reason why so many anime and JRPG fans always demand dual-audio voice tracks.

And even if the English localization team does do a very good job, as is often the case with Square Enix titles, even the best localizations will never preserve the original script and meaning in its entirety due to the very nature of translation. For example, there are many words in a language that have multiple meanings, but during a translation, only one of those meanings make it through, thus any script translated from one language to another, no matter how faithful, are highly subject to the interpretation of the translators and will always lose the subtlety present in the original script. Furthermore, a direct translation from Japanese would often sound awkward in English due to the very nature of the language being different in addition to the cultural differences, so a high degree of interpretation from the translators is often required for it to make more sense to a Western audience.

In other words, localizing a game from one region and language to another is a much tougher job than you think. But at least Japanese devs and their Western localization teams at least make an effort to bring their titles Westside, whereas Western devs never make any effort to do the same in the opposite direction, which is why Western games are never popular in Japan. The very few Japanese dubs I've heard of Western games, most recently Uncharted 2, generally seem quite bad compared to the original English voice acting, so don't be surprised at the lukewarm reception Western games often receive in Japan.

If you're to use that broad definition than every game is a role playing game because I play the role of Mario in SMB Galaxy, I play the role of a Quarterback in Madden 2011...yadda yaddda yadda.

However if you take what Pen and Paper RPG's were...a bunch of people sitting around acting out whatever they wanted using only the confines of a rule set, then that would be different. If you then take the founding fathers' vision of computer RPG's and see they tried their best to emulate the PnP roleplaying games using the confines of technology and programming....your definition really doesn't fit.

...

Soin the early Ultima's when you had to live by the virtues, let's say honesty, did you forget that you can lie to people in dialogue choices and get dinged on your honestly and then when dealing with blind shop keepers, give them the correct amount of coin and make up for your bad deeds? The whole game was about balance and the game gave you the ability to do what you want but you still had to lean to the good side. It was the reason I was able to kill a hobo that I just gave coins to, just so i could get those coins back, make up for it later in the game and still beat the game.

and wrong. There are situations when talking to team members and I can give them orders to do something (renegade points) or ask them nicely (paragon points) neither of these options are good/evil/whatever you want to call it and neither have any moral bearing.

And are you still being a review jocky and getting your opions after not playing the game? how did that work out for you while playing the GOTY Red Dead Redemption. The issues with Mysteries of Westgate is that it was supposed to be one of the first expansions finished, yet came out last so it didn't have the bells and whistles as the later expansions. The majority of people were able to play it with no bugs. When you use reviews to to attempt to back up your opinion, try to go to more varied sources than professional reviews. try looking up user reviews from places like RPGcodex. your statements would be more accurate that way.

Also you fault WRPG's for shipping shoddy while patches are able to fix these problems. JRPG's will always remain static, safe and typical...while games like New Vegas (a game i strangely ran with only two bugs despite all the problems the reviews told me i would have) only improve in time while driving the genre further.smerlus

The earliest computer RPGs were all linear, rogue-like, dungeon crawlers. They never had anything even remotely resembling the branching plot choices you see in modern RPGs. It wasn't until a decade after the first computer RPGs appeared that they began offering dialog "choices" of some kind, and even these had no impact on the plot, which was still linear and would always have the same outcome no matter what. It wasn't until at least a decade and a half after the first computer RPGs that we eventually began seeing RPGs offering branching plot choices that affect the outcome. In other words, no, I don't buy that "founding fathers" claim.

"RPG" in the videogame sense does not refer to "role-playing", not even close. The definition for an RPG video game for the last few decades has always referred to the RPG-derived gameplay mechanics, not the way the story is presented or even whether there is a story at all. Like with all videogame genres, the videogame RPG genre is determined by the gameplay mechanics, not the storyline. If anything, the videogame genre that specialized in dialogues were adventure games, not RPGs. The concept of dialogue choices was itself something that RPGs borrowed from adventure games, not tabletop RPGs.

Besides, if WRPG fans are going to argue that JRPGs are not "real RPGs" because they don't let you make "choices" (even though many do, but let's pretend they don't for a moment), then by that same logic, a Japanese visual-novel adventure game is far more of an RPG than a WRPG. In contrast to most WRPGs which only give you an illusion of choice that has very little influence on the storyline, the choices you make in a visual novel has an impact on the entire direction of the storyline, and this is usually the norm rather than the exception. It's because visual novels are already very non-linear and quite popular in the East that it's not a necessity for JRPG devs to include branching plot choices in ever RPG they make, since visual novels already do them better.

With that said, countless JRPGs do in fact offer "choices", and I'm not just referring to Atlus games either. In fact, this is usually the norm when it comes to tactical JRPGs, where most of the major franchises in that subgenre have been offering plot-altering choices since at least the SNES era. And these choices are often more plot-relevant and morally ambiguous than the kind of choices you often see in most WRPGs. Recent examples of this include the Tactics Ogre remake and Radiant Historia released last month, both of which have evolved the non-linear branching plot concept much more than any WRPGs in recent years have done.

In other words, your only complaint against Japanese games is their English translated dialogues and dubbed English voices? So your basically attacking Japanese devs over the English localizations, something they have no control over? I hate to break it to you, but it's Western localization teams that are mostly responsible for the quality of the English translated dialogues and English voice dubbing. Just because the English dubbing might be good or bad, that tells us nothing about the quality of the original Japanese voice acting. In most cases, the original voice Japanese acting is vastly superior to the English dubbing, due to the original script being written specifically in that language with that culture in mind. That's the reason why so many anime and JRPG fans always demand dual-audio voice tracks.

And even if the English localization team does do a very good job, as is often the case with Square Enix titles, even the best localizations will never preserve the original script and meaning in its entirety due to the very nature of translation. For example, there are many words in a language that have multiple meanings, but during a translation, only one of those meanings make it through, thus any script translated from one language to another, no matter how faithful, are highly subject to the interpretation of the translators and will always lose the subtlety present in the original script. Furthermore, a direct translation from Japanese would often sound awkward in English due to the very nature of the language being different in addition to the cultural differences, so a high degree of interpretation from the translators is often required for it to make more sense to a Western audience.

In other words, localizing a game from one region and language to another is a much tougher job than you think. But at least Japanese devs and their Western localization teams at least make an effort to bring their titles Westside, whereas Western devs never make any effort to do the same in the opposite direction, which is why Western games are never popular in Japan. The very few Japanese dubs I've heard of Western games, most recently Uncharted 2, generally seem quite bad compared to the original English voice acting, so don't be surprised at the lukewarm reception Western games often receive in Japan.Jag85

It's almost impossible to determine if the problem is in the localization, the original script or a combination of both. Quite frankly, I don't give a s***. They can hire better translators. This is not some sort of an impossible feat. Books and movies are translated in countless languages, and more often than not, a good book is a good book in any language.

To be honest, laying all the blame on localization is far-fetched, to say the least. Even Western-developed games are plagued by crappy writing (and these are games where nothing can be "lost in translation") so the notion that Japanese developers are so awesome at writing but simply terrible at localization is, well, highly unrealistic.

CarnageHeart

Jag85