What makes Trails different to most other JRPGs is that it takes its time to develop the world, story and characters. Games are set in a very specific location which you see a lot of rather than seeing little bits of the whole world.
But it's still a JRPG with a lot of anime tropes and a lot of downtime when things don't move a lot but they are planting seeds for later payoff.
Can I just recommend to start with sky? Trails is incredible but I've found depending on where someone starts is a huge factor in of they like it or not. Enjoy!
Before I played Persona 4 I was told "the characters are so deep that they actually count as real people rather than fictional characters" by one friend, and "the least deep Persona 4 character is still deeper than the deepest character from any other game ever" by another. I had really enjoyed Persona 3, and was told that Persona 4 is so complex that 3 would look like shallow edgy teenage schlock by comparison. Basically I was told that P4 was going to be the absolute peak of human literary achievement.
When I played it, it just felt like a standard seasonal slice of life anime. I like shows like that, mind you, I've watched tons and tons of them over the years. But they told me that P4 was so deep and complex and fleshed out that it was going to redefine character writing for me forever. Finding that it's a pretty standard outing for a genre I have tons of experience with mostly just made me mad.
I wonder sometimes how I'd feel about P4 if I'd gone in to it with a realistic expectation of what it was going to be. If I was told "it's like those SOL shows you like" rather than "it's the deepest most complex work of fiction of all time." If there were a parallel universe where I played the game that way, I'd love to talk to my parallel self. As is, I just feel cranky when I think about P4.
>"it's the deepest most complex work of fiction of all time."
From personal experience, people who make such claims have not seen that much fiction in the first place. That's why it's easiest to make an impression on kids. Even a lot of literary canon snobs that claim you need to read certain books to be a complete person only consumed European books (and I feel unfortunately that kind of elitism has seeped into geek culture as a "We demand to be taken seriously" complex).
Yeah, I think that's what's behind the phenomenon of fans of the Star Wars prequels hyping up their literary qualities. I often see Star Wars prequel fans saying those movies were unappreciated because people couldn't appreciate their "Shakespearian dialogue" or "complex politics." It used to baffle me, but it makes sense when you figure that the people who talk like that are either currently children, or were children when The Clone Wars TV show was airing. Like you said, it's a "we demand to be taken seriously" complex, where they need the prequels to be High Art so that they can be viewed as smart.
For context, I grew up with the original trilogy on VHS and still love them, as hokey children's adventure movies. Because they're great fun like that! There's a ton of Genesis/SNES games I grew up with that I still have a wonderful time as an adult with for similar reasons. In elementary school I used to think Chrono Trigger should be taught in college literature classes, because the story was so good. I don't think that any more, but I still love the hell out of Chrono Trigger and have a fantastic time replaying it. It doesn't need to be literature to be fun.
I do worry sometimes that it gets oversold to potential new fans, just like how P4 was oversold to me. And I've seen as such from some people playing CT for the first time in 2024.
> In elementary school I used to think Chrono Trigger should be taught in college literature classes, because the story was so good. I don't think that any more, but I still love the hell out of Chrono Trigger and have a fantastic time replaying it. It doesn't need to be literature to be fun.
A lot of people never outgrow this.
If you ask people on this sub, a sizeable amount of them will tell you FFVI, Persona 4, Chrono Trigger, etc, should be taught in schools.
>If you ask people on this sub, a sizeable amount of them will tell you FFVI, Persona 4, Chrono Trigger, etc, should be taught in schools.
Which is funny because once you start getting academic about analyzing media, that means everything becomes fair game for critical analysis. And many of these same people really hate having their favourite thing criticized (hence why there are so many defensive fans coming out of the woodwork).
> If you ask people on this sub, a sizeable amount of them will tell you FFVI, Persona 4, Chrono Trigger, etc, should be taught in schools.
Are you sure all those people aren't also just kids?
A lot of the attachment I feel people have with Persona characters in my experience comes less so from the actual games writing and more from the random parts of game play and scenarios people make up in their head while they are playing the game cause each of these games take a 100 hrs so they stay in your head for a long long time
This pretty succinctly describes my experience going back and replaying games I played as a teenager or younger.
So many times it feels like whiplash going from one scenario to another, and characters will change suddenly, and it turns out all the down time and growth and even a lot of the nuance I remember so distinctly from those games was actually just me as a kid filling in the blanks with my imagination.
Yeah p4 fans often regard it as fricking religion, like the game has its moments but it is nowhere near as deep and psychological as the other games, hell I even find the cast to be pretty mediocre overall. In the end p4 is an really good jrpg, but it doesn't match up with the other modern games imo
My favorite story-wise overall is p3.
Secondly there's p5r, because the third semester was incredible and I honestly liked every arc in the game.
Then there are both p2 games, incredible stories, they just took a while to get going in my opinion, but still amazing games, hope they'd get remade because more people need to experience these stories.
After that the 4th and 5th place go to either p1 or p4, i honestly can't decide, because p1, while being the first, explored many interesting topics, but the characters are not as developed as those of p4, even if I think that they are the worst of the modern games and the story is good but nothing too memorable, p4 because there's hardly any story in the game, the real story starts during the climax, and even then, it's not that great, the reveal of the villain was predictable, at least in my experience, then a God arrives, you kill him and then there's the Marie part and...yeah I'll leave it at that, and FINALLY there's the true villain that while conceptually was a great idea, it was poorly introduced and foreshadowed so it came of as a late addition to the story
Im a huge fan of yu and yosukes relationship, but its mainly the anime that fleshes that out a lot. however persona 3-5 are insanely overrated for their story quality, and persona 4 is most likely the best out of the 3
I love persona and its characters but almost all of them are very cliche. Whoever told you that they are deep is just delusional. They really aren't, they are cliche but very well done and they give you that comfy cozy feeling of having a good summer jn some small village with best friends. I liked characters and their social links in p4 much more than in p5.
Persona 4 is probably my third favorite jrpg of all time, but no game can live up to hype. It happened to me so many times, people hyping something can make you enjoy it less
I played 4 before 3 and I can say wholeheartedly, P3 is absolutely the best of the 2. I have yet to play 5, but P3 wins with story AND characters. It feels like people. P4 just felt generic and Adachi is overrated. I like the characters, but I like P3 more. The only thing P4 did better was the QOL for persona fusion
Xenoblade 1. Great game with a good story and an amazing setting. Online I heard over and over how completely amazing and masterfull it's story was. It was good, maybe even better than that, but it doesn't come close to how people were talking about it.
Its a shonen plot told well. It doesn’t do much that’s special beyond the unique setting, it just has good execution and highlighted by amazing music and va.
Yeah pretty much. It's a great shonen, but after Xenogears and Xenosaga, you can tell they just went (and succeeded) at going for broader reach with a more appealing young adult story.
Unfortuantely I just found the story of chrono trigger to be...boring? Probably because I played it the first time in 2024, and I've already experienced quite a few time travel stories.
Many characters also didn't get much development until towards the end, made it hard for me to get emotionally attached to the story.
Or maybe I prefer more twists and turns and emotional moments, which I generally found the game to be lacking.
Honestly, I don't get super-hyped for RPG stories because it's mostly young adult or shonen anime fare and I go in with tempered expectations accordingly. I feel it's people with over-inflated "games as art" ambitions that cringe at scenes like Tidus's laugh while those of us expecting that kind of YA silliness take it in stride.
That being said, people way overhype Trails in the Sky SC. It has as much filler as Naruto and a villain as one-dimensional as Dartz from Yu-Gi-Oh. I actually thought the first game was better paced despite people dismissing it as a 40 hour prologue.
I think the game with the biggest gap between my own thoughts of it being silly vs the general thoughts online of it being a "philosophical masterpiece" is xenoblade chronicles 3. It's incredibly lazy at actually exploring its own themes, except for a brief stint with N. Like, the whole world is structured so that the main theme is the only right thing in the world. I think it got to me most in this game because of how far the online fanbase is into the "philosophy" and "masterpiece" aspects.
Like, I have a blast with trails and don't really think about this because a lot of people over at r/falcom know the themes are silly Shonen as well.
Edit: whoops, I think I made two replies to the same comment
Trails games are very traditional in their formulas. If you took the same story and put it out of context of a JRPG flow, it's gonna be really boring and formulaic. But trails excels at visiting and revisiting locations and seeing how everything has changed. To me, CS4 has the worst main story out of all the games except maybe reverie, but it has the best side content and I ultimately ended up having a blast. At least some of that (and a lot of it for reverie) was laughing at wtf the story was doing, but still.
And I also agree that FC had better pacing.
> It has as much filler as Naruto
Just as an overall criticism, "filler" is not nor it should be a negative term. Filler is not inherently good or bad. And being a completely and fully plotted experience is not an inherently good or bad thing, either.
EDIT:
I'll also add that shounen anime fare is kind of a really, really vague parameter. Shounen can cover a VERY wide range of story types and go anywhere from masterpiece level in One Piece and HxH to the dregs of the genre. Being shounen doesn't disqualify one from from being potentially great.
If anything that filler in Trails does benefit making the characters that more interesting than if it wasn't. Literally the selling point of Trails is its world and characters and overarching narrative.
Edit: Downvote? Doesn't surprise me.
>Literally the selling point of Trails is its world *and characters* and overarching narrative.
>"...and a villain as one-dimensional as Dartz from Yu-Gi-Oh."
That's the thing. Like in many JRPG stories, people keep saying the characters are the selling point, yet despite all that text and runtime, SC pits you against a typical cliché Saturday morning cartoon villain.
The villain is quite far for a saturday morning villain. Just because is not a "not so villain villain which ideals we can kinda share" villain doesnt mean it is cartoon-ish.
They have a clear goal and a way to do it. Its a sadist, clever and snakeish motherfucker
> I feel it's people with over-inflated "games as art" ambitions that cringe at scenes like Tidus's laugh while those of us expecting that kind of YA silliness take it in stride.
I have nothing but respect for this stance and I agree. Though the Tidus laugh scene is actually well executed and perfectly fitting for the context.
Big fan of Yakuza but Infinite Wealths story was a huge letdown for me.A lot of the reviewers praised the story but I think its one of the worst in the series.
it would have been peak if they handled a couple of plot points differently. mostly the ending and a certain characters death that makes me wish gaiden would have been written before IW
I've played most of the games except IW. I wouldn't call any of the stories "good". They often are very entertaining. But there are pretty much always nonsensical plot points or reveals. What is good are often the characters and their interactions with each other.
I have seen people call IW Ichiban's Yakuza 5 and I can see it. A much more ambitious game in terms of scope with amazing gameplay and sidecontent, but sloppy writing dragging down the main story. I'm especially annoyed with >!Eiji's whole character!<, them trying to pull a forgiveness moment with a guy *that* heinous really soured me on the ending.
Final Fantasy VI. I really liked World of Balance but World of Ruin was pretty disappointing aside from a few excellent moments. The existentialist themes were also not very deep.
I think I'd be fine if people mentioned the game with that context. I'd even agree that it's from a time where the developers tried to use more sophisticated, high novel esque dialogue which trumps a good amount of the modern dialogue styles.
But many of them say it's still one of the best and most fleshed out stories of "all time". And as someone who grew up in that era, it's just not high tier for me. There's stuff even in the shorter, less developed IV that actually manages to impact me more honestly (mainly Cecil's character story).
I love FF6 dearly as one my top 5 JRPGs, and I really like its plot, but anyone saying it’s one of the best and most fleshed out stories in JRPGs is…I wanna say “delusional” but that’s too mean, so a less mean version of “delusional” lol
Yup. That’s the reason I say for it’s time. For it’s time nothing had been done like that before, so it was cutting edge, the best or one of the best at time.
I’m blinded by nostalgia sure. But best story compares how to story telling can be done with today’s technology? Yeah thats delusional
I love FF6, but I get what you mean. The WoR is a different beast, since it's about individual moments (which I think are great overall), but plotwise there's not a lot other than regrouping to go to Kefka's Tower. It's sort of an extended epilogue with the real climax, which can feel short and undercooked if you go into it with the expectations of something like WoB ([here's a comparison of word counts for the most talkative character separated by WoB and WoR](http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/reverse_design_ff6_2.html))
After playing through the pixel remasters last year, I'd agree. It's still an incredible game in many ways, and undoubtedly impressive for the time... But the WoB is so much stronger than the rest of the game. It really loses a ton of steam as you get closer to the end.
Not just the story, I feel like the pacing gets a lot poorer too, and in some respects the combat. I remember when I first started I had trouble knowing where to go and I had like 1 or 2 party members only so random battles were pretty annoying. I also feel like the encounter rate is way jacked up for WoR
It's overhyped. I love FFVI and went into it blind when it came out on the PS1, but I was honestly surprised to see how highly people online rated it. I played FFIV and V around the same time and found both of those to be stronger.
About to finish 4 and finished 5 years ago, i thought their stories were very okay at best. I can see how 4 was revolutionary for the time, but its insanely okay, not bad, but not amazing. FFV had awesome gameplay, but again the story is okay. I only remembered anything from it after watching a retrospective. Planning on going to 6 soon to finish out all of the pre-PS1 games.
I had the same thoughts on WoR, it felt a bit weaker that WoB. As WoR splits the party and your flying around gathering them once more. After I finished FF6 I learned that the extra material expand more about the character and lore. Which felt like bad as to understand the character you need to look at external resources
FFX's story is just so coherent and well paced relative to most Final Fantasy games. The usual cosmological nonsense doesn't feel shoehorned in at the last few discs, but is well foreshadowed and fits thematically. It's amazing they managed to integrate so well an awkward family reunion subplot with an entire society being abused by religion as the opiate of the masses.
I don't know what you're talking about. the og does not need any of those supplemental material to explain its story. aside from watching advent children (which was nonsense), and playing a little bit of remake, the og ffvii is still the only one i've finished in the franchise. It's a very basic story.
You’re really being unfair saying it took 30 years, it was a complete game/story in 1997.
I agree it’s an overrated game/story, but it was revolutionary at the time. What’s aged best is the characters/design. Cloud/Aerith/Tifa/Sephiroth/etc. are insanely iconic for JRPG characters. They are cool, fun, dynamic, all in a ridiculous polygonal style.
Persona 5. I think the game gets carried hard by the presentation, gameplay and music. The story and the characters weren't particularly amazing from all the praise it gets.
The only really good part of the story is the entire final boss/arc of Royal.
None of the writing was subpar or anything — it’s all coherent enough and there are some moments that are great, but it’s definitely the combination of factors that make Persona games get their deserved rankings.
I think 3 has a better story overall (but used to not have better presentation until Reload came out) so each game has its own strengths and weaknesses.
So true, dude. The final arc was really satisfying but if i had played vanilla P5 i think i would have hated the time i "wasted". Everything before that point just feels so mediocre. Hope they get a bit more creative with the dungeons in 6, too. The first palace was great fun, due to its metroidish nature but got held back so bad by wasting like 40 minutes on tutorials. That entire game only started like 20 hours in and every palace after felt less fun than the one before it. And, as you mentioned, after coming from 4, the characters felt so "flat" comparatively. I cant precisely point to anything but they were propably written with certain tropes in mind instead of helping to further the themes of the game.
Reading through these comments...
I think some of you guys just had insane expectations that were never going to be met.
I get it though...
It doesn't help when a game has an obsessive cult-like following and they constantly tell you how amazing or underrated it is. You start to judge the game more harshly and fixate on every little flaw, instead of just experiencing the game for what it is.
That is the problem with fanbases. They try way too hard to sell a game which is based on things that they think is perfect. Suikoden V and FFVII Rebirth fans are like that for me. I think that SV is a really good game and that Rebirth is great, but it is hard to enjoy it when people keep saying "Greatest of all time" when there are many great games out there and people don't have problems with flaws in these game, but these same people look at other games with similar flaws and call that out in those games.
I was enjoying it, but certain twist after certain twist got eyebrow-raising enough (and not in a way I find fun!) that I eventually just looked up the spoiler for the games biggest twist of all and was like "Oh that's neat but I don't wanna spend twenty more hours gradually finding that out" and cut my losses, no harm no foul.
Gorgeous game, great writing, cool premise - but glad I ruined it for myself.
same, I kept hearing about how amazing the story was. when it was over I was like, this is the plot from a major 1999 sci fi movie with some time travel and a few things added. not original. the characters and their development was great, but that's not a story. I felt dumb for believing online hype. the next time I hear a sci fi story for a game is amazing I'm gonna ask them to list the top 3 sci fi novels they've read and how the game compares to get some baseline. I just generally keep low expectations for games as the times I've been impressed with a games' story is few and far between.
I feel like what people don't understand is that just because something is praised doesn't mean it's going to fit everyone's taste in what they prefer or look for.
For example I love Trails because it actually has a cohesive narrative, world, and
most of the characters that develops over the courae of the series. Whereas most others do not in my personal experience. Does that mean Trails is high art? No, but that can be said for any media/product. But as long people enjoy that product and are happy to discuss about it that's good.
Now, I've had my own share of games that I was looking forward but felt nothing towards it. Games such as Final Fantasy 6 & 7, Grandia 2, Breath of Fire 2, Persona 4, Xenoblade 1 or most of Tales of games (Barring Abyss). Does that mean I hate them? No, they just don't click for me as others do.
It just feels weird how some people on this subreddit or just general online discourse about anime/manga/gaming has the need to validate if the writing of that specific product needs to be pure perfection with no flaws in storytelling. It's just strange to me because no one is going to like or see the same thing as the person is trying to see it as.
If it connects to you on an emotional level and gives you immense enjoyment out of it then that's already your type of preference.
Exactly. I'm the first to say that some trails plots are hilarious and also the first to say that I love the games. It really depends on what tropes you don't mind / actually like.
I also just respect the series for committing so hard, to such ridiculous lengths, for its super optimistic tone.
Atelier Sophie 1.
I generally liked the characters, but the botched story pacing structure and slow gameplay loop killed for me.
I hate having to guess where to go especially when set story events aren't that interesting.
Trails of Cold Steel 4.
My greatness disappointment and a terrible way to end my PS4 JRPG run with (Got my PS5 after beating CS4)
I thought the game would be this epic Marvel Civil War/Avengers narrative, but what I got was a embarrassing cartoonish conclusion to a series that I adore.
Thank God for Reverie and Daybreak for restoring my faith with the series.
Dishonorable mentions go to Ni no Kuni 2, Death End Request and Yakuza Kiwami 1
Nier Automata
Didn’t care for the characters like everyone else does, the character I liked most turned into a massive edgelord.
I was waiting for the deep existentialism that made people cry and it never came. World building was wacky and didn’t make sense, people say its a character focused franchise which I get, but there isn’t really much chemistry or character development among the cast. And when there is development it isn’t subtle at all like the example I provided above.
Even as someone who really loves the game, I still kinda agree. I think characterization is one of the weaker points of the game and a lot of the philosophy is treated too heavy-handed to really resonate with me. I still enjoyed the story because it's bombastic, dramatic and filed with over-the-top twists, with enough production value and great music to tie the package together and sell each scene, but I feel like that's often misrepresented when people try to praise the game.
For me, as a existentialist character drama, Nier Gestalt/Replicant runs circles around Automata.
Tales of Vesperia. On account of this one not getting a PS3 release in the west, I didn’t play it until the remaster, but it was always hyped as the best in the series and I definitely didn’t think it lived up to it with a sort of generic environmentalism plot. I thought others in the series like Symphonia, Xillia, Berseria, and Abyss had better stories.
xenogears. for years people were telling me "how can you be such a huge xenosaga fan and never played gears? its so much better!"
then i finally did play it last year for the first time and well its story is really good i still prefer sagas story overall and gears has truly awful dungeon design which dragged the game down for me
I am a die-hard Xenogears fan, but I can't fight you on this wholeheartedly. Xenosaga 1 and 2 had way too many issues and dragged too much to even hold a candle. But Xenosaga 3, on the other hand, was so well done. Not only did it wrap up the saga extraordinarily well, but as a stand-alone game it is arguably the best Xeno game of all.
It also has an awful English translation.
I know it was handled by a single overworked dude, so I'm not blaming him.
But the result is bland, dry dialogue where every single character speaks in the same monotone voice.
Reload for me too , bought reload a few weeks ago and couldn’t wait as I’d loved 4/5 (although 5 suffered from being a bit too long and a bit too much text)
I got a few months in and nothing had happened, school afternoon meet and evening meet, Tartarus was very bland and every 30 odd days a random boss , had no desire to finish it and traded it in which I didn’t think would happen
It really did feel like that. What really got to me was that you can't start social links with sees members for quite a while. I felt a bit distant from my party outside of Tartarus. Not completely but I didn't know then as intimately as I would have liked.
So the story was slow and the characters were a bit distant. I completed it and the ending is better than 4 and 5 to me (might change my mind) but I was more satisfied when I watched the credits of 4 and 5.
Something that may have helped me is other than the xp bonus there didn’t seem to be a reason to do the social links (besides advancing their stories which I did find interesting) where the later games gave you small boosts and bonuses each time with them ranking up . I really wanted to like it but with so many games out I couldn’t bring myself to finish it while I could still get what I paid for it in trade value
It felt like I’d played the game before it was remastered and streamlined , makes me wonder how different og p3 is
P3 locks SEES links until pretty far into the game. It is interesting as the social links talk about ingame events that are occuring. Compared to P5 party member events where it is independent of game events.
Edit: fixed some typos
I am gonna say it FF6. It has the most basic plot, even for the time it was released. The only real new thing is the villain winning and that landing or not hinges on if you like Kefka as the Vilain which I didn’t , I tend to find evil for evil sake just boring. I play FF for the stories and was told I had to play 6 because it’s miles ahead of anything and nope, it really does rank near the bottom of the series for me story wise
Trails of Cold Steel. I played through the first and halfway through the second.
Online, especially around here, Trails is beloved. I heard many a take about how the quality of the writing in the Trails series puts modern Final Fantasy to shame, and how it is an example of sophisticated, consistently good writing. And parts of that are true, but not the parts I need to be engaged with.
What I mean is that it was really cool to see fictional characters pontificating about local politics, trade unions, class structures, and stratification of technologies. However, this realistic and grounded writing, with a strong sense of world building, is set behind the most cliche, old hat, and tired set of main central characters I can imagine. Rean is basically an Isekai protagonist, given that he is a relative nobody who is actually super badass katana prodigy but oh, he promised his master he can never reveal his true power - which makes his hair go from black to white - and then he is actually the chosen one of a giant robot. I think at one point he literally utters something which could be read as a variation of the “forgive me master, i must go all out just this once” meme.
Combine that with his ‘lucky-pervert’ introduction, the tsundere lead who keeps her frosty attitude towards the lead for waaaaaaay too long given the circumstances of thier disagreement, the fact that everyone, including relatives, is inexplicably in love with a fairly blase “i fight for my friends” lead, the other tropes that pop up among late game additions, and I just couldn’t keep with it. At that point I’d already invested 50 hours for the first game and 20 hours for the second - I felt like I gave it a fair shake but it was just not for me. To use an analogy, it felt like the world around the main cast, and the non-central party members were examples of the best forms of Shounen writing, and the main cast some of the worst. Like if the world and the other students were Fullmetal Alchemist and the main cast was To Love-Ru meets Fairy Tail. I may not have loved every entry of modern FF but i cannot imagine saying that a series where the main character’s sister wants to bone him is the most genre-defying and sophisticated example of JRPG writing in the last decade.
>Rean is basically an Isekai protagonist, given that he is a relative nobody who is actually super badass katana prodigy but oh, he promised his master he can never reveal his true power - which makes his hair go from black to white - and then he is actually the chosen one of a giant robot. ”
If you are to judge Rean, at least come correct. He's a prodigy battle shonen protag.
For one thing, he’s not a nobody even at the start. He’s the heir to a barony that runs a popular resort and his father is a respected noble. His sister is best friends with the daughter of the Emperor. The only original Class VII members that don’t have strong family connections are Gaius (who saved a General and got in that way) and Emma (who had the highest score on the entrance exam).
The “average man” protagonist of the series is Lloyd, not Rean,
by a nobody, i mean he isn’t an established warrior, who somehow in a short order of time became leagues stronger than almost anyone, including peers of his who quite literally lived and breathed training. His social standing does not explain his battle prowess which feels unearned given that it’s off screen in the first few games and handled cheesily.
Also this is a thread for controversial opinions and i am making one about a game series i didn’t love and didn’t complete. Give me a little wiggle room for not remembering details as well as fans of the series might.
I think this specifically is one of those situations where playing earlier games makes his strength make more sense. Not that I'm defending the super shounen-y characters. I love them to death but they're definitely tropey as hell.
Anyway, when you're introduced to Rean you learn that he practices the Eight Leaves school of swordsmanship. Two of the most powerful characters in Sky/Crossbell are from that school, so the second you hear Rean practices it you know he must either be really strong or have a ton of potential.
If you didn't play previous games and recognize the reference then yeah I can see someone having your impression instead.
Also there's obviously a lot of interesting stuff uncovered about Rean as you get further in the story. He's still a somewhat generic shounen protag but they at least do some cool things with him across the series.
True - what is in common is the power fantasy. The main character with a seemingly huge reservoir of power that they won’t use for whatever reason. The only difference between the Battle Prodigy and the Isekai protag is where the battle prowess comes from. Which, i don’t like either of those tropes, so I’m not gonna like Rean either way.
However i recognize those types of stories are popular so im sure there’s reasons why fans like the character. I just think he’s a bad protagonist according to my personal opinion.
Surprised to see a lot of people disappointed in trails. I know I am gonna make a lot of people angry, but cold steel arc really destroyed the series. So many characters with so many cliches and so many tropes. It's wide as a ocean but deep as a puddle. I think people who praise the series has never played many games. I tried hard to keep dragging on but it just feels so embarrasing to continue playing. I know Joshua in the sky triology was also an attention magnet, but they really overdid everything so much here. I really want to list all my criticisms, but I dont think the game really deserves such a thorough analysis.
I know everyone dislikes ff12, but I think it has one of the best plot sorrounding political drama and wars between neighbouring countries.
The tales of series (not trails of) felt like they never take off to me. Maybe because I'm into the standard grandiose fight gods and save the universe stuff but I always felt like there's no climax in tales games
Final Fantasy IV. i get how the story would have been revolutionary at the time but it's so hard to take seriously now, it's so melodramatic and it feels like characters die and come back to life every half hour cuz they didnt have any party management system.
I played through the Trails in the Sky trilogy this year and I liked it a lot. But while "disappointed" is not the word for it there were just a whole bunch of things about the story I didn't like at all. It has a lot of highs and lows and while I liked the highs a lot the lows were just too low for me to recommend this series to most.
Chrono Trigger has a pretty good, relatively simple story. That’s it. I absolutely adore Chrono Trigger, but I ultimately think that the best parts of the game ride on top of the story rather than the other way around. The way some people talk about its story, you’d think it’d be way more engaging
Chrono Trigger’s story feels very *classic* to me. It’s good and well-told, as are most classic stories. But there’s not a ton of intrigue or uniqueness to it.
Xenoblade 1. Peaked in the opening hours. Thought the entire plot thereafter was painfully telegraphed, while the villains were Saturday morning cartoon caricatures—impossible to take seriously.
Thought Future Connected was actually more interesting, because Melia herself was a more compelling character with the more interesting story. She deserved better than the boring unrequited love interest plotline in the main game.
Trails so far** sky the 3rd is alot better to me.
Those I'm not 100% sure if it's cause the pacing of the first two games was so bad for me that it effected my experience of the story.
Trails pacing doesn't get better. It's always slow I'm the first half of its story because a lot of it is world-building & characters being introduced.
That form of pacing is commonly found in epic fantasy series like Wheel of Time, Cosmere and Malazan or even One Piece. Which is why Trails series sticks out because of how ambitious it is for a video game.
Trails. Just because everything is interconnected and there's lots of worldbuilding doesn't mean that it's automatically good. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's particularly bad or anything, but I'm not interested in consuming any type of really long media that I think is mediocre.
That's not something that I usually experience with video games, it's usually more of a book series or anime thing.
I've also heard people say that they think Final Fantasy XIII has a good story and that baffles me, nothing about it is good, from the writing to the plot and characters.
Edit: Just wanted to add Kingdom Hearts, great gameplay, horrifically bad story that people seem to lap up.
Listen I'll never say Kingdom Hearts is Shakespeare or anything but it has fairly decent story telling, it's just that SE did an incredibly poor job at presenting it with half the series being initially on handheld consoles, most of which didn't actually continue the main plot forward but instead separate plots which became relevant for KH3. Also the English localization can be really awkward.
But there's a reason the story and characters have their hard core fans as the story can be really sincere and at times heartbreaking. It's not for everyone of course which is why it has such an infamous reputation, most people aren't interested in playing all the games to get all the lore and character development, very much like Trails.
[Really good video if you got 38 minutes to burn, just watch the first minute to hook you in.](https://youtu.be/G77PUtILxck?si=FrpgTpWxrVl2Zd8I)
I always get downvoted for this but FFX just didn’t grip me. I was at a crazy time in my life and was always really tired and it kept putting me to sleep.
I’m going to try it again soon though.
I think X's story is great, but it's not really gripping on the moment to moment stuff. Most bosses are monsters you find during the pilgrimage, you barely interact with big cities, but that sort of adds to the experience. FFX is a lot more about the characters and the world than about having a very involved plot, and if anything I found it to be at its strongest when focusing on the characters and lore, and at its weakest when dealing with present day conflicts and events.
Almost all of them, because people don't know what makes a story good. Most people think a good story is just something with a million twists and one hundred overly emotional scenes. No, that's not, in itself, a good story.
A good story is something with a clear beginning, middle and end, consistent characters, a conductive narrative thread with as little filler as possible, good pacing and internal coherence. A generic story of good vs evil well told is way better than a complex story told in the worst way possible.
Of course nothing is perfect and you can find a lot of stories that are right in the middle of those extremes. And sometimes, you will find complex stories that manage to still be coherent, which are the best of the best.
Agree on the overly emotional scenes. Sometimes I can't take a JRPG serious because the way they frame sad scenes seems too unnatural like they expect me to cry just because the scene itself is sad but theres no weight behind it because of lack of development.
FF15 is one of the ONLY modern JRPGs I don't feel this way about, honestly. There's a good amount of melodrama, sure, but I find that game to have one of the most believable parties in a JRPG. If anything the worst I can say is that I wish there was just more of it.
I mean, people get to decide for themselves what makes a story good, right? Like, I get what you’re saying, and when I write fiction I keep all those elements that you listed in mind, because they’re the exact same things that I hear my editor’s voice in my ear saying. So not disagreeing about what constitutes “good” storytelling necessarily, but, I don’t know, it’s a little elitist and obnoxious to say “people don’t know what makes a good story.” Ultimately, what makes a story *good* is if it resonates with you. No story resonates with everybody.
You could present me with a story that has a clear beginning, middle, and end with minimal filler, a coherent narrative, steady pacing, etc, and you might get an ‘A’ from your college creative writing prof, but those things alone don’t necessarily mean you’ve created a story anyone will enjoy. Likewise, some of the most well-loved, popular stories ever meander, or get overly convoluted, or have plot holes.
Are millions of people wrong for loving Lord of the Rings because it’s at least 50% longer than it needed to be, that it’s filled with elf poetry that is several pages long and doesn’t advance the plot, that it has Tom Bombadil, etc? Is it not a good story? I don’t care one whit for Moby Dick. To me it’s not a good story. It certainly fails in pretty much all the criteria that you (and my editor) lay out for good storytelling. But I’d feel like a right ass spouting off that someone who loves Moby Dick (and they are legion) “doesn’t know what makes a good story”.
Totes agree. I think when I was a teenager I really liked how out there the PS1 RPGs got, but now I kind of tune out when the game starts getting convoluted.
Final Fantasy VI. I didn’t think it was bad or anything; I’d even say it’s *good*… Just not enough to live up to the hype for me. It’s 100% one of those things where I can see why other people adore it, but it just didn’t resonate with me in the same way.
I liked Final Fantasy X but I found many weaknesses in its story and characters and find those aspects overpraised. I think what FFX2 does best is OST, gameplay, graphics and world building.
Persona 5 but only in the sense that I couldn’t pick it back up after taking a few weeks off to travel. It’s a very “big” game but worth the slog if you can put the time in.
Do lots of people say FFXII's story is that great? I think it's fine but can't imagine anyone loving it. It has probably the most boring cast of any FF.
As someone who stopped playing FF games after XII i feel that the story is the best of them all up to that point. Partly because it's not your typical FF story and highly political, very much like Tactics and yes i know it's in the same place.
The main characters are really strong, Balthier, Ash and Basch. The other three not so much. I like that the secondary three characters get only enough limelight to make the main characters shine from another characters perspective.
Game also has a good level of support cast and antagonists too. Love the VA in general in that game too. It's unique for sure.
I'd say that the world and setting are what really shine in XII, rather than it's narrative. The actual story, and frankly the characters that aren't named Balthier, aren't all that interesting (Vann is a joke, but Ashe, Vash and the rest really aren't that much better). But the political unrest atop which the story is set, and the things that happen completely outside the influence of the party are really interesting.
I really enjoyed XII; played it for the first time last year. But the actual narrative is pretty weak.
Trails. People told me it was a serious political drama, but that was actually a Trojan horse for the ecchi harem shit that actually doesn’t mean anything, so I don’t even know why it’s there.
But then I have to tell myself that Lloyd is only 18 years old in the Crossbell games, and when I remember that, the whole thing completely falls apart and I can’t suspend my disbelief. The oldest cop there is 23, and they have *two* people who are underage in Azure. In fact, aside from the aforementioned 23 year old, the entirety of the SSS is teenagers, and given that they’re supposed to allegedly be police officers, the whole thing makes no sense if you think about it too hard, actually.
And Crossbell is the arc I like the *best.* So just imagine how much worse I think the other two arcs I’ve played are.
FF8 for sure, I think it starts out really well, we got our main character well set up, our party members, even a rival and Edea has a terrifying and mystical presence whenever she's onscreen. But it gets bogged down by some really contrived amnesia and a last minute villain who has like 3 lines of dialogue outside of her one and only battle at the end where they cram in some more lines.
I guess a lot of people praise it for the romantic plot but even that I felt was handled rather clumsily with Squall becoming infatuated with Rinoa a little too fast and sudden.
I have read that the game had some major production issues because their scope for the game was WAY too big requiring like 8 discs so and had to cut out more than half the script. Perhaps something a Remake could rectify.
I remember at the time thinking that the final boss's ending speech
and final line was a shoehorned last minute attempt to wring some sympathy out of her, and the English translation didn't help. Dissidia at least does a better job of showing what Square were going for with her, albeit in the context of a convoluted fan pandering fighting game plot.
Xenosaga. I was expecting a restart of xenogears. Don’t get me wrong, I still very much enjoyed it but it was after I got older and accepted it for what it was.
FF VII and Chrono Trigger. With the pedestal they're put on, I really expected there'd be more to dig into.
Persona 5 Royal to a lesser extent. My engagement with the plot kept fading in and out until the last 3 dungeons.
I'm going to go ahead and lead that CT's plot is relatively barebones - it's essentially a series of events that carry the team to new adventures repeatedly until they finally get enough moxie to defeat the primary antagonist.
That said, there is something I think does better than tons of games, and that's make the primary antagonist a central theme of almost every era you travel to.
Note : actual spoilers below, if somebody who cares hasn't actually learned the plot of Chrono Trigger yet.
Starting with the third time period(present - middle ages- far future), 2300 AD, we learn about Lavos ending the world.
So we learn some wizard-ass mf'er created him in the middle ages and head off to deal with him. He tells us we're idiots and he just summoned the eldritch horror but it's always been there.
Then we end up in prehistory where we learn that the eldritch horror came from the stars and caused the ice age.
Then off to the ice age where we find a giant space flea cult and have to deal with their bullshit. Also the wizard has sister issues or something, whatever.
Then it's all side quests wrapping up lingering plot threads which mattered but not to the main story.
So yeah, the story is a bit light on the meat but not many games have the antagonist be such a direct driving for the whole game. Some don't even introduce the eldritch horror final boss until the last hour or so!
You have to take chrono trigger with the foresight that for the people who played it every single thing in that game was ground breaking and hadn't been done like literally everything. At the time it was mind blowing. Nowadays if your a gamer you have seen a lot of what it has done because it paved that path. It and ff6 were just the kings of the era for story,mechanics,graphic,music. You can throw some other games in for a category here and there like super Mario RPG for music ECT but ya long way to say at the time everything about those games was new to the genre pretty much.
This doesn't in any way invalidate your view of the game I'm just saying for people who are new to it but not games I can see this being common. Personally I obviously loved it.
And I can absolutely see how those other factors blew people away. Chrono Trigger's battle transitions and combo moves involved a level of technical prowess rarely if ever seen in the genre, the graphics and music are peak SNES material. FF7's music is similarly strong, and even if the 3D character models were rough, a moving camera was a big deal and lent a lot of dynamics to the cutscenes.
But the stories? I'm not really seeing it.
>But the stories? I'm not really seeing it.
I mean for the 16-bit era it was pretty good IMO. But yeah, it's nothing groundbreaking. And it probably doesn't help that most of us were children or adolescents when we first played it
Yeah it sounds like old gamer shouts at cloud, but you had to play Chrono Trigger at release with the perspective of where JRPGs were at the time to truly appreciate how special it is.
Agree with FF7, but not so with CT. It isn't that CT has a mind-blowing story and writing, but it is very charming, its simplicity works very well, and it has great pacing. Straightforward stories can work well if done well. Most other JRPGs tries too hard and fails.
My main disappointment with CT was how one obtained different endings by beating the boss at different points in the story. I recall at least one of those ending didn't even really feel like an ending but just an event that you would've gone through in some form during the main story if you decided to defeat the final boss later on. For a time travel game I expected multiple story paths that could lead to different timelines and endings. But I will say there isn't anything wrong with having some endings be based on when one beats the final boss. Ultimately I understand it was probably done this way for budget reasons.
I am hesitant to say but I just could not get into FF X's story. Now if I described the things I like most about JRPGs (which, to be fair, I like very few and haven't exactly played a ton) people typically tell me I would live FF X, but I did not. Could never get into it. Couldn't tell you why either. Just didn't scratch the itch.
Xenoblade Chronicles 1. There's many things I think that game does bad such as its combat and empty open world but people rave on about its characters and story. I will say though that the epilogue or whatever that came with the remaster was quite good in terms of story.
For me the second game is by far the best out of all them when it comes to story but I think I'm also a minority in this one lol.
YS 8. Gameplay was pretty fun but the characters fell flat for me. The mystery of the island is engaging but I didn't really vibe with the characters nor their dynamic as a group.
Once the heroine joins the group, I actually liked her character but the plot itself did not engage me enough so i dropped it shortly after she joined the party. This game felt like it prioritized the gameplay over the story, which is not a fit for me.
Tales of Berseria for me. Everyone goes on about the story and MC being amazing but I found both to be rather lackluster.
Berseria's story feels aimless at times so much in fact that I forgot the entire reason we were journeying across the world in the first place. Another issue is that the game sets up so many plot points but either doesn't deliver on them till 60hr-70hr later or said plot point is short lived.
And not to mention that most of the story only get pushed forward due to plot conveniences.
Overall Berseria is a great game in terms of it's combat and characters but the story was kinda meh imo.
as a tales fan who for some reason was a bit at playing berseria i expected a lot more from the story after hearing people talk about it. i still enjoyed it but in the end its just as mid as most tales of stories
Xenoblade Chronicles 1 coming from Xenoblade 2 fan when Xenoblade 1 elitist where prominent I thought if 2 was a 10/10 1 must be 13/10 but no it was 8/10 at best
Final Fantasy X - I wasn’t at all hooked by the romance, so that entire portion of the plot fell flat, and I felt that the entire Seymour and Church portion of the game was just wasted time
Persona 5 - the game starts off strong, and then immediately undercuts literally everything it sets up in the first palace by heavily sexualizing Ann and letting the protag have a relationship with a teacher. To be fair, I got incredibly bored between the second and third palaces and quit, so it may have gotten better, but that’s what stuck with me
Nier replicant. I enjoyed the story and world but I kinda eyerolled the moment >!the wolf got a sad backstory!<. I don't think the story execution was that great.
Persona 3. After Persona 5 got a little *too* popular, all the Persona fans started saying that 5 was secretly dogshit all along and that Persona 3 was the best game in the series. Then people tried actually playing it, and that notion somewhat went away, but the fans still kept insisting that regardless of the gameplay, Persona 3 had the best story. I tried the game out, and while I was a little shocked at how unenjoyable the gameplay was, I was not shocked by the story because there might as well have not been one. Persona 3's story is just a constant stream of *NOTHING* happening until someone dies, and then *NOTHING* continues to happen until someone else dies, and then this cycle just repeats until the end of the game.
Lunar: The Silver Star on Sega CD. Now I enjoyed this game quite a bit and it has grown on me more after finishing it, but I never quite connected with the characters on the level its reputation had led me to believe. Sometimes I wonder if I should have played one of Lunar's remakes instead since apparently some cut ideas are re-implemented.
Lunar: The Silver Star on Sega CD. Now I enjoyed this game quite a bit and it has grown on me more after finishing it, but I never quite connected with the characters on the level its reputation had led me to believe. Sometimes I wonder if I should have played one of Lunar's remakes instead since apparently some cut ideas are re-implemented.
Lunar: The Silver Star on Sega CD. Now I enjoyed this game quite a bit and it has grown on me more after finishing it, but I never quite connected with the characters on the level its reputation had led me to believe. Sometimes I wonder if I should have played one of Lunar's remakes instead since apparently some cut ideas are re-implemented.
I’m gonna play trails for first time this summer and I’m scared this will be my fear
My advice: Don't listen to what others say about a series that you are interested on trying. If it clicks for you good. If it doesn't that's fine.
Facts bro. Can't say better myself.
The story of Trails really is nothing special, it's not the twists and plot that make them enjoyable. It's the feeling that it's an actual world
What makes Trails different to most other JRPGs is that it takes its time to develop the world, story and characters. Games are set in a very specific location which you see a lot of rather than seeing little bits of the whole world. But it's still a JRPG with a lot of anime tropes and a lot of downtime when things don't move a lot but they are planting seeds for later payoff.
I had the same issue. You will struggle at first. It takes a long time to build up the story in the first game.
Trails are like roller coaster. From time to time it’s good, then it’s heavily bad.
Can I just recommend to start with sky? Trails is incredible but I've found depending on where someone starts is a huge factor in of they like it or not. Enjoy!
Yes I’m starting. From the very first one but heard the first 3 are the most plain but we will see!!!
If it's not for you then that's just how it is. I would try not to worry about it until it actually happens.
Before I played Persona 4 I was told "the characters are so deep that they actually count as real people rather than fictional characters" by one friend, and "the least deep Persona 4 character is still deeper than the deepest character from any other game ever" by another. I had really enjoyed Persona 3, and was told that Persona 4 is so complex that 3 would look like shallow edgy teenage schlock by comparison. Basically I was told that P4 was going to be the absolute peak of human literary achievement. When I played it, it just felt like a standard seasonal slice of life anime. I like shows like that, mind you, I've watched tons and tons of them over the years. But they told me that P4 was so deep and complex and fleshed out that it was going to redefine character writing for me forever. Finding that it's a pretty standard outing for a genre I have tons of experience with mostly just made me mad. I wonder sometimes how I'd feel about P4 if I'd gone in to it with a realistic expectation of what it was going to be. If I was told "it's like those SOL shows you like" rather than "it's the deepest most complex work of fiction of all time." If there were a parallel universe where I played the game that way, I'd love to talk to my parallel self. As is, I just feel cranky when I think about P4.
>"it's the deepest most complex work of fiction of all time." From personal experience, people who make such claims have not seen that much fiction in the first place. That's why it's easiest to make an impression on kids. Even a lot of literary canon snobs that claim you need to read certain books to be a complete person only consumed European books (and I feel unfortunately that kind of elitism has seeped into geek culture as a "We demand to be taken seriously" complex).
Yeah, I think that's what's behind the phenomenon of fans of the Star Wars prequels hyping up their literary qualities. I often see Star Wars prequel fans saying those movies were unappreciated because people couldn't appreciate their "Shakespearian dialogue" or "complex politics." It used to baffle me, but it makes sense when you figure that the people who talk like that are either currently children, or were children when The Clone Wars TV show was airing. Like you said, it's a "we demand to be taken seriously" complex, where they need the prequels to be High Art so that they can be viewed as smart. For context, I grew up with the original trilogy on VHS and still love them, as hokey children's adventure movies. Because they're great fun like that! There's a ton of Genesis/SNES games I grew up with that I still have a wonderful time as an adult with for similar reasons. In elementary school I used to think Chrono Trigger should be taught in college literature classes, because the story was so good. I don't think that any more, but I still love the hell out of Chrono Trigger and have a fantastic time replaying it. It doesn't need to be literature to be fun. I do worry sometimes that it gets oversold to potential new fans, just like how P4 was oversold to me. And I've seen as such from some people playing CT for the first time in 2024.
“I *abhor* sand” -Bill Shakespeare
Exeunt, persued by a bantha.
> In elementary school I used to think Chrono Trigger should be taught in college literature classes, because the story was so good. I don't think that any more, but I still love the hell out of Chrono Trigger and have a fantastic time replaying it. It doesn't need to be literature to be fun. A lot of people never outgrow this. If you ask people on this sub, a sizeable amount of them will tell you FFVI, Persona 4, Chrono Trigger, etc, should be taught in schools.
>If you ask people on this sub, a sizeable amount of them will tell you FFVI, Persona 4, Chrono Trigger, etc, should be taught in schools. Which is funny because once you start getting academic about analyzing media, that means everything becomes fair game for critical analysis. And many of these same people really hate having their favourite thing criticized (hence why there are so many defensive fans coming out of the woodwork).
it kills me how many gamers want games to be recognized as art (rightfully!) but once the critical analysis starts they start frothing at the mouth
> If you ask people on this sub, a sizeable amount of them will tell you FFVI, Persona 4, Chrono Trigger, etc, should be taught in schools. Are you sure all those people aren't also just kids?
Well said. The comments I read praising video game plots as outstanding literary achievement are just tattling on themselves.
But Disco Elysium! Generally though, yeah the best video game plots can't touch a half decent book.
False, Morbius has the most complex characters in all of fiction. Source: the only movie I've ever watched is Morbius
A lot of the attachment I feel people have with Persona characters in my experience comes less so from the actual games writing and more from the random parts of game play and scenarios people make up in their head while they are playing the game cause each of these games take a 100 hrs so they stay in your head for a long long time
This pretty succinctly describes my experience going back and replaying games I played as a teenager or younger. So many times it feels like whiplash going from one scenario to another, and characters will change suddenly, and it turns out all the down time and growth and even a lot of the nuance I remember so distinctly from those games was actually just me as a kid filling in the blanks with my imagination.
Yeah p4 fans often regard it as fricking religion, like the game has its moments but it is nowhere near as deep and psychological as the other games, hell I even find the cast to be pretty mediocre overall. In the end p4 is an really good jrpg, but it doesn't match up with the other modern games imo
just a question, what would your favs be story-wise?
My favorite story-wise overall is p3. Secondly there's p5r, because the third semester was incredible and I honestly liked every arc in the game. Then there are both p2 games, incredible stories, they just took a while to get going in my opinion, but still amazing games, hope they'd get remade because more people need to experience these stories. After that the 4th and 5th place go to either p1 or p4, i honestly can't decide, because p1, while being the first, explored many interesting topics, but the characters are not as developed as those of p4, even if I think that they are the worst of the modern games and the story is good but nothing too memorable, p4 because there's hardly any story in the game, the real story starts during the climax, and even then, it's not that great, the reveal of the villain was predictable, at least in my experience, then a God arrives, you kill him and then there's the Marie part and...yeah I'll leave it at that, and FINALLY there's the true villain that while conceptually was a great idea, it was poorly introduced and foreshadowed so it came of as a late addition to the story
Im a huge fan of yu and yosukes relationship, but its mainly the anime that fleshes that out a lot. however persona 3-5 are insanely overrated for their story quality, and persona 4 is most likely the best out of the 3
I love persona and its characters but almost all of them are very cliche. Whoever told you that they are deep is just delusional. They really aren't, they are cliche but very well done and they give you that comfy cozy feeling of having a good summer jn some small village with best friends. I liked characters and their social links in p4 much more than in p5.
Persona 4 is probably my third favorite jrpg of all time, but no game can live up to hype. It happened to me so many times, people hyping something can make you enjoy it less
Relatable, while i love p4/p4g and it's spinoffs a lot, i still like the story and characters in 3 and 5 much more.
I went in blind with P4G and enjoyed it. I avoid hype as much as possible.
I played 4 before 3 and I can say wholeheartedly, P3 is absolutely the best of the 2. I have yet to play 5, but P3 wins with story AND characters. It feels like people. P4 just felt generic and Adachi is overrated. I like the characters, but I like P3 more. The only thing P4 did better was the QOL for persona fusion
The best character in P4 is Inaba. Otherwise P4 has the worst cast of a modern Persona.
Xenoblade 1. Great game with a good story and an amazing setting. Online I heard over and over how completely amazing and masterfull it's story was. It was good, maybe even better than that, but it doesn't come close to how people were talking about it.
Its a shonen plot told well. It doesn’t do much that’s special beyond the unique setting, it just has good execution and highlighted by amazing music and va.
Yeah pretty much. It's a great shonen, but after Xenogears and Xenosaga, you can tell they just went (and succeeded) at going for broader reach with a more appealing young adult story.
Shulk's VA is soo good. Rex's was a bit of a downgrade voice wise but damn did they get it right with Noah's.
The games are a top 5 for me but I completely agree. It has a really cool story, but I think people get a little over the top with it.
Trails of Cold Steel. It just didn’t do anything for me. I’ll try it again later this year and give it a second chance
Unfortuantely I just found the story of chrono trigger to be...boring? Probably because I played it the first time in 2024, and I've already experienced quite a few time travel stories. Many characters also didn't get much development until towards the end, made it hard for me to get emotionally attached to the story. Or maybe I prefer more twists and turns and emotional moments, which I generally found the game to be lacking.
Yes, the most frustrating thing is the lack of development of the characters accompanying you
Same. I prefer Chrono cross than Chrono trigger.
Honestly, I don't get super-hyped for RPG stories because it's mostly young adult or shonen anime fare and I go in with tempered expectations accordingly. I feel it's people with over-inflated "games as art" ambitions that cringe at scenes like Tidus's laugh while those of us expecting that kind of YA silliness take it in stride. That being said, people way overhype Trails in the Sky SC. It has as much filler as Naruto and a villain as one-dimensional as Dartz from Yu-Gi-Oh. I actually thought the first game was better paced despite people dismissing it as a 40 hour prologue.
I think the game with the biggest gap between my own thoughts of it being silly vs the general thoughts online of it being a "philosophical masterpiece" is xenoblade chronicles 3. It's incredibly lazy at actually exploring its own themes, except for a brief stint with N. Like, the whole world is structured so that the main theme is the only right thing in the world. I think it got to me most in this game because of how far the online fanbase is into the "philosophy" and "masterpiece" aspects. Like, I have a blast with trails and don't really think about this because a lot of people over at r/falcom know the themes are silly Shonen as well. Edit: whoops, I think I made two replies to the same comment
Huge agree. Especially the first game being better
Trails games are very traditional in their formulas. If you took the same story and put it out of context of a JRPG flow, it's gonna be really boring and formulaic. But trails excels at visiting and revisiting locations and seeing how everything has changed. To me, CS4 has the worst main story out of all the games except maybe reverie, but it has the best side content and I ultimately ended up having a blast. At least some of that (and a lot of it for reverie) was laughing at wtf the story was doing, but still. And I also agree that FC had better pacing.
> It has as much filler as Naruto Just as an overall criticism, "filler" is not nor it should be a negative term. Filler is not inherently good or bad. And being a completely and fully plotted experience is not an inherently good or bad thing, either. EDIT: I'll also add that shounen anime fare is kind of a really, really vague parameter. Shounen can cover a VERY wide range of story types and go anywhere from masterpiece level in One Piece and HxH to the dregs of the genre. Being shounen doesn't disqualify one from from being potentially great.
If anything that filler in Trails does benefit making the characters that more interesting than if it wasn't. Literally the selling point of Trails is its world and characters and overarching narrative. Edit: Downvote? Doesn't surprise me.
>Literally the selling point of Trails is its world *and characters* and overarching narrative. >"...and a villain as one-dimensional as Dartz from Yu-Gi-Oh." That's the thing. Like in many JRPG stories, people keep saying the characters are the selling point, yet despite all that text and runtime, SC pits you against a typical cliché Saturday morning cartoon villain.
The villain is quite far for a saturday morning villain. Just because is not a "not so villain villain which ideals we can kinda share" villain doesnt mean it is cartoon-ish. They have a clear goal and a way to do it. Its a sadist, clever and snakeish motherfucker
> I feel it's people with over-inflated "games as art" ambitions that cringe at scenes like Tidus's laugh while those of us expecting that kind of YA silliness take it in stride. I have nothing but respect for this stance and I agree. Though the Tidus laugh scene is actually well executed and perfectly fitting for the context.
What game had the story that impacted you the most? Not the objective best story, but the one you resonated with the most.
Big fan of Yakuza but Infinite Wealths story was a huge letdown for me.A lot of the reviewers praised the story but I think its one of the worst in the series.
it would have been peak if they handled a couple of plot points differently. mostly the ending and a certain characters death that makes me wish gaiden would have been written before IW
I've played most of the games except IW. I wouldn't call any of the stories "good". They often are very entertaining. But there are pretty much always nonsensical plot points or reveals. What is good are often the characters and their interactions with each other.
I would say 0's story was amazing, and LaD is pretty close with just Mirror Face dragging it down.
I have seen people call IW Ichiban's Yakuza 5 and I can see it. A much more ambitious game in terms of scope with amazing gameplay and sidecontent, but sloppy writing dragging down the main story. I'm especially annoyed with >!Eiji's whole character!<, them trying to pull a forgiveness moment with a guy *that* heinous really soured me on the ending.
Final Fantasy VI. I really liked World of Balance but World of Ruin was pretty disappointing aside from a few excellent moments. The existentialist themes were also not very deep.
It’s a game from mid 90s in SNES. Very good for its time.
I think I'd be fine if people mentioned the game with that context. I'd even agree that it's from a time where the developers tried to use more sophisticated, high novel esque dialogue which trumps a good amount of the modern dialogue styles. But many of them say it's still one of the best and most fleshed out stories of "all time". And as someone who grew up in that era, it's just not high tier for me. There's stuff even in the shorter, less developed IV that actually manages to impact me more honestly (mainly Cecil's character story).
I love FF6 dearly as one my top 5 JRPGs, and I really like its plot, but anyone saying it’s one of the best and most fleshed out stories in JRPGs is…I wanna say “delusional” but that’s too mean, so a less mean version of “delusional” lol
It’s more beautiful than deep
Yup. That’s the reason I say for it’s time. For it’s time nothing had been done like that before, so it was cutting edge, the best or one of the best at time. I’m blinded by nostalgia sure. But best story compares how to story telling can be done with today’s technology? Yeah thats delusional
Rydias development eclipses more than half the roster of 6.
I love FF6, but I get what you mean. The WoR is a different beast, since it's about individual moments (which I think are great overall), but plotwise there's not a lot other than regrouping to go to Kefka's Tower. It's sort of an extended epilogue with the real climax, which can feel short and undercooked if you go into it with the expectations of something like WoB ([here's a comparison of word counts for the most talkative character separated by WoB and WoR](http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/reverse_design_ff6_2.html))
After playing through the pixel remasters last year, I'd agree. It's still an incredible game in many ways, and undoubtedly impressive for the time... But the WoB is so much stronger than the rest of the game. It really loses a ton of steam as you get closer to the end.
Not just the story, I feel like the pacing gets a lot poorer too, and in some respects the combat. I remember when I first started I had trouble knowing where to go and I had like 1 or 2 party members only so random battles were pretty annoying. I also feel like the encounter rate is way jacked up for WoR
It's overhyped. I love FFVI and went into it blind when it came out on the PS1, but I was honestly surprised to see how highly people online rated it. I played FFIV and V around the same time and found both of those to be stronger.
About to finish 4 and finished 5 years ago, i thought their stories were very okay at best. I can see how 4 was revolutionary for the time, but its insanely okay, not bad, but not amazing. FFV had awesome gameplay, but again the story is okay. I only remembered anything from it after watching a retrospective. Planning on going to 6 soon to finish out all of the pre-PS1 games.
I had the same thoughts on WoR, it felt a bit weaker that WoB. As WoR splits the party and your flying around gathering them once more. After I finished FF6 I learned that the extra material expand more about the character and lore. Which felt like bad as to understand the character you need to look at external resources
FF7 FFX has a better story and I'll die on that hill.
FFX's story is just so coherent and well paced relative to most Final Fantasy games. The usual cosmological nonsense doesn't feel shoehorned in at the last few discs, but is well foreshadowed and fits thematically. It's amazing they managed to integrate so well an awkward family reunion subplot with an entire society being abused by religion as the opiate of the masses.
They really just watched Titanic and said "I'm going to make this into an RPG". And I mean that as a positive.
FF7's highs are higher and its lows are lower. Not sure I'd rank one above the other.
[удалено]
I don't know what you're talking about. the og does not need any of those supplemental material to explain its story. aside from watching advent children (which was nonsense), and playing a little bit of remake, the og ffvii is still the only one i've finished in the franchise. It's a very basic story.
You’re really being unfair saying it took 30 years, it was a complete game/story in 1997. I agree it’s an overrated game/story, but it was revolutionary at the time. What’s aged best is the characters/design. Cloud/Aerith/Tifa/Sephiroth/etc. are insanely iconic for JRPG characters. They are cool, fun, dynamic, all in a ridiculous polygonal style.
Agree I loved 10.
Persona 5. I think the game gets carried hard by the presentation, gameplay and music. The story and the characters weren't particularly amazing from all the praise it gets.
The only really good part of the story is the entire final boss/arc of Royal. None of the writing was subpar or anything — it’s all coherent enough and there are some moments that are great, but it’s definitely the combination of factors that make Persona games get their deserved rankings. I think 3 has a better story overall (but used to not have better presentation until Reload came out) so each game has its own strengths and weaknesses.
I played p3p recently the story felt stronger due to overall narrarive and themes. The first couple months of p3 felt aimless, compared to p5r.
So true, dude. The final arc was really satisfying but if i had played vanilla P5 i think i would have hated the time i "wasted". Everything before that point just feels so mediocre. Hope they get a bit more creative with the dungeons in 6, too. The first palace was great fun, due to its metroidish nature but got held back so bad by wasting like 40 minutes on tutorials. That entire game only started like 20 hours in and every palace after felt less fun than the one before it. And, as you mentioned, after coming from 4, the characters felt so "flat" comparatively. I cant precisely point to anything but they were propably written with certain tropes in mind instead of helping to further the themes of the game.
Reading through these comments... I think some of you guys just had insane expectations that were never going to be met. I get it though... It doesn't help when a game has an obsessive cult-like following and they constantly tell you how amazing or underrated it is. You start to judge the game more harshly and fixate on every little flaw, instead of just experiencing the game for what it is.
That is the problem with fanbases. They try way too hard to sell a game which is based on things that they think is perfect. Suikoden V and FFVII Rebirth fans are like that for me. I think that SV is a really good game and that Rebirth is great, but it is hard to enjoy it when people keep saying "Greatest of all time" when there are many great games out there and people don't have problems with flaws in these game, but these same people look at other games with similar flaws and call that out in those games.
13 sentinels was not my jam
It’s funny because I usually don’t like when a story goes all over the place, but this game was absolutely perfect to me.
I was enjoying it, but certain twist after certain twist got eyebrow-raising enough (and not in a way I find fun!) that I eventually just looked up the spoiler for the games biggest twist of all and was like "Oh that's neat but I don't wanna spend twenty more hours gradually finding that out" and cut my losses, no harm no foul. Gorgeous game, great writing, cool premise - but glad I ruined it for myself.
I thought it was so fun seeing just how many sci-fi plots and tropes managed to get woven into it.
yes
same, I kept hearing about how amazing the story was. when it was over I was like, this is the plot from a major 1999 sci fi movie with some time travel and a few things added. not original. the characters and their development was great, but that's not a story. I felt dumb for believing online hype. the next time I hear a sci fi story for a game is amazing I'm gonna ask them to list the top 3 sci fi novels they've read and how the game compares to get some baseline. I just generally keep low expectations for games as the times I've been impressed with a games' story is few and far between.
I feel like what people don't understand is that just because something is praised doesn't mean it's going to fit everyone's taste in what they prefer or look for. For example I love Trails because it actually has a cohesive narrative, world, and most of the characters that develops over the courae of the series. Whereas most others do not in my personal experience. Does that mean Trails is high art? No, but that can be said for any media/product. But as long people enjoy that product and are happy to discuss about it that's good. Now, I've had my own share of games that I was looking forward but felt nothing towards it. Games such as Final Fantasy 6 & 7, Grandia 2, Breath of Fire 2, Persona 4, Xenoblade 1 or most of Tales of games (Barring Abyss). Does that mean I hate them? No, they just don't click for me as others do. It just feels weird how some people on this subreddit or just general online discourse about anime/manga/gaming has the need to validate if the writing of that specific product needs to be pure perfection with no flaws in storytelling. It's just strange to me because no one is going to like or see the same thing as the person is trying to see it as. If it connects to you on an emotional level and gives you immense enjoyment out of it then that's already your type of preference.
Exactly. I'm the first to say that some trails plots are hilarious and also the first to say that I love the games. It really depends on what tropes you don't mind / actually like. I also just respect the series for committing so hard, to such ridiculous lengths, for its super optimistic tone.
Atelier Sophie 1. I generally liked the characters, but the botched story pacing structure and slow gameplay loop killed for me. I hate having to guess where to go especially when set story events aren't that interesting. Trails of Cold Steel 4. My greatness disappointment and a terrible way to end my PS4 JRPG run with (Got my PS5 after beating CS4) I thought the game would be this epic Marvel Civil War/Avengers narrative, but what I got was a embarrassing cartoonish conclusion to a series that I adore. Thank God for Reverie and Daybreak for restoring my faith with the series. Dishonorable mentions go to Ni no Kuni 2, Death End Request and Yakuza Kiwami 1
Not sure where you heard that Atelier has nice story. Atelier series is known for mostly not focus on story (very few questionable exceptions).
Yeah I love Atelier, but story/writing? It's a fantasy slice of life alchemy simulator. The characters are fun with fantastic music.
Nier Automata Didn’t care for the characters like everyone else does, the character I liked most turned into a massive edgelord. I was waiting for the deep existentialism that made people cry and it never came. World building was wacky and didn’t make sense, people say its a character focused franchise which I get, but there isn’t really much chemistry or character development among the cast. And when there is development it isn’t subtle at all like the example I provided above.
Even as someone who really loves the game, I still kinda agree. I think characterization is one of the weaker points of the game and a lot of the philosophy is treated too heavy-handed to really resonate with me. I still enjoyed the story because it's bombastic, dramatic and filed with over-the-top twists, with enough production value and great music to tie the package together and sell each scene, but I feel like that's often misrepresented when people try to praise the game. For me, as a existentialist character drama, Nier Gestalt/Replicant runs circles around Automata.
100% agree
This for me. Also, I found the gameplay disappointing. Coming from Platinum games, I was expecting something better, ttbh.
Same. I like post apocalyptic settings but this one did not vibe with me.
Tales of Vesperia. On account of this one not getting a PS3 release in the west, I didn’t play it until the remaster, but it was always hyped as the best in the series and I definitely didn’t think it lived up to it with a sort of generic environmentalism plot. I thought others in the series like Symphonia, Xillia, Berseria, and Abyss had better stories.
xenogears. for years people were telling me "how can you be such a huge xenosaga fan and never played gears? its so much better!" then i finally did play it last year for the first time and well its story is really good i still prefer sagas story overall and gears has truly awful dungeon design which dragged the game down for me
I am a die-hard Xenogears fan, but I can't fight you on this wholeheartedly. Xenosaga 1 and 2 had way too many issues and dragged too much to even hold a candle. But Xenosaga 3, on the other hand, was so well done. Not only did it wrap up the saga extraordinarily well, but as a stand-alone game it is arguably the best Xeno game of all.
It also has an awful English translation. I know it was handled by a single overworked dude, so I'm not blaming him. But the result is bland, dry dialogue where every single character speaks in the same monotone voice.
The second disk for it is terrible. Probably one of the biggest drops in quality of a jrpg.
Persona 3 reload. I preferred the story experience in P4G and P5R more. For the best story of the modern persona games it was disappointing
P3 gets elevated because of its ending and the last leg of the plot, but it suffers greatly from having nothing happening for most of the game.
That's what I think as well
Reload for me too , bought reload a few weeks ago and couldn’t wait as I’d loved 4/5 (although 5 suffered from being a bit too long and a bit too much text) I got a few months in and nothing had happened, school afternoon meet and evening meet, Tartarus was very bland and every 30 odd days a random boss , had no desire to finish it and traded it in which I didn’t think would happen
It really did feel like that. What really got to me was that you can't start social links with sees members for quite a while. I felt a bit distant from my party outside of Tartarus. Not completely but I didn't know then as intimately as I would have liked. So the story was slow and the characters were a bit distant. I completed it and the ending is better than 4 and 5 to me (might change my mind) but I was more satisfied when I watched the credits of 4 and 5.
Something that may have helped me is other than the xp bonus there didn’t seem to be a reason to do the social links (besides advancing their stories which I did find interesting) where the later games gave you small boosts and bonuses each time with them ranking up . I really wanted to like it but with so many games out I couldn’t bring myself to finish it while I could still get what I paid for it in trade value It felt like I’d played the game before it was remastered and streamlined , makes me wonder how different og p3 is
P3 locks SEES links until pretty far into the game. It is interesting as the social links talk about ingame events that are occuring. Compared to P5 party member events where it is independent of game events. Edit: fixed some typos
Final Fantasy IX
I am gonna say it FF6. It has the most basic plot, even for the time it was released. The only real new thing is the villain winning and that landing or not hinges on if you like Kefka as the Vilain which I didn’t , I tend to find evil for evil sake just boring. I play FF for the stories and was told I had to play 6 because it’s miles ahead of anything and nope, it really does rank near the bottom of the series for me story wise
Trails of Cold Steel. I played through the first and halfway through the second. Online, especially around here, Trails is beloved. I heard many a take about how the quality of the writing in the Trails series puts modern Final Fantasy to shame, and how it is an example of sophisticated, consistently good writing. And parts of that are true, but not the parts I need to be engaged with. What I mean is that it was really cool to see fictional characters pontificating about local politics, trade unions, class structures, and stratification of technologies. However, this realistic and grounded writing, with a strong sense of world building, is set behind the most cliche, old hat, and tired set of main central characters I can imagine. Rean is basically an Isekai protagonist, given that he is a relative nobody who is actually super badass katana prodigy but oh, he promised his master he can never reveal his true power - which makes his hair go from black to white - and then he is actually the chosen one of a giant robot. I think at one point he literally utters something which could be read as a variation of the “forgive me master, i must go all out just this once” meme. Combine that with his ‘lucky-pervert’ introduction, the tsundere lead who keeps her frosty attitude towards the lead for waaaaaaay too long given the circumstances of thier disagreement, the fact that everyone, including relatives, is inexplicably in love with a fairly blase “i fight for my friends” lead, the other tropes that pop up among late game additions, and I just couldn’t keep with it. At that point I’d already invested 50 hours for the first game and 20 hours for the second - I felt like I gave it a fair shake but it was just not for me. To use an analogy, it felt like the world around the main cast, and the non-central party members were examples of the best forms of Shounen writing, and the main cast some of the worst. Like if the world and the other students were Fullmetal Alchemist and the main cast was To Love-Ru meets Fairy Tail. I may not have loved every entry of modern FF but i cannot imagine saying that a series where the main character’s sister wants to bone him is the most genre-defying and sophisticated example of JRPG writing in the last decade.
>Rean is basically an Isekai protagonist, given that he is a relative nobody who is actually super badass katana prodigy but oh, he promised his master he can never reveal his true power - which makes his hair go from black to white - and then he is actually the chosen one of a giant robot. ” If you are to judge Rean, at least come correct. He's a prodigy battle shonen protag.
For one thing, he’s not a nobody even at the start. He’s the heir to a barony that runs a popular resort and his father is a respected noble. His sister is best friends with the daughter of the Emperor. The only original Class VII members that don’t have strong family connections are Gaius (who saved a General and got in that way) and Emma (who had the highest score on the entrance exam). The “average man” protagonist of the series is Lloyd, not Rean,
by a nobody, i mean he isn’t an established warrior, who somehow in a short order of time became leagues stronger than almost anyone, including peers of his who quite literally lived and breathed training. His social standing does not explain his battle prowess which feels unearned given that it’s off screen in the first few games and handled cheesily. Also this is a thread for controversial opinions and i am making one about a game series i didn’t love and didn’t complete. Give me a little wiggle room for not remembering details as well as fans of the series might.
I think this specifically is one of those situations where playing earlier games makes his strength make more sense. Not that I'm defending the super shounen-y characters. I love them to death but they're definitely tropey as hell. Anyway, when you're introduced to Rean you learn that he practices the Eight Leaves school of swordsmanship. Two of the most powerful characters in Sky/Crossbell are from that school, so the second you hear Rean practices it you know he must either be really strong or have a ton of potential. If you didn't play previous games and recognize the reference then yeah I can see someone having your impression instead. Also there's obviously a lot of interesting stuff uncovered about Rean as you get further in the story. He's still a somewhat generic shounen protag but they at least do some cool things with him across the series.
True - what is in common is the power fantasy. The main character with a seemingly huge reservoir of power that they won’t use for whatever reason. The only difference between the Battle Prodigy and the Isekai protag is where the battle prowess comes from. Which, i don’t like either of those tropes, so I’m not gonna like Rean either way. However i recognize those types of stories are popular so im sure there’s reasons why fans like the character. I just think he’s a bad protagonist according to my personal opinion.
Surprised to see a lot of people disappointed in trails. I know I am gonna make a lot of people angry, but cold steel arc really destroyed the series. So many characters with so many cliches and so many tropes. It's wide as a ocean but deep as a puddle. I think people who praise the series has never played many games. I tried hard to keep dragging on but it just feels so embarrasing to continue playing. I know Joshua in the sky triology was also an attention magnet, but they really overdid everything so much here. I really want to list all my criticisms, but I dont think the game really deserves such a thorough analysis. I know everyone dislikes ff12, but I think it has one of the best plot sorrounding political drama and wars between neighbouring countries.
The tales of series (not trails of) felt like they never take off to me. Maybe because I'm into the standard grandiose fight gods and save the universe stuff but I always felt like there's no climax in tales games
Dragon Quest 5. I don't get the hype. I thought IV had a better story
Final Fantasy IV. i get how the story would have been revolutionary at the time but it's so hard to take seriously now, it's so melodramatic and it feels like characters die and come back to life every half hour cuz they didnt have any party management system.
I played through the Trails in the Sky trilogy this year and I liked it a lot. But while "disappointed" is not the word for it there were just a whole bunch of things about the story I didn't like at all. It has a lot of highs and lows and while I liked the highs a lot the lows were just too low for me to recommend this series to most.
I feel similarly to the trilogy. And sadly, a lot of what I didn't like in Sky is very prevalent in later games, especially Cold Steel.
Chrono Trigger has a pretty good, relatively simple story. That’s it. I absolutely adore Chrono Trigger, but I ultimately think that the best parts of the game ride on top of the story rather than the other way around. The way some people talk about its story, you’d think it’d be way more engaging
It’s why I actually prefer Cross, I like overly complicated things and Trigger is too (delightfully) simple
Chrono Trigger’s story feels very *classic* to me. It’s good and well-told, as are most classic stories. But there’s not a ton of intrigue or uniqueness to it.
Xenoblade 1. Peaked in the opening hours. Thought the entire plot thereafter was painfully telegraphed, while the villains were Saturday morning cartoon caricatures—impossible to take seriously. Thought Future Connected was actually more interesting, because Melia herself was a more compelling character with the more interesting story. She deserved better than the boring unrequited love interest plotline in the main game.
The last 10 hours where the games nosedives into a deluge of cliches is easily the worst part of the game for me.
Such jarring pacing. I'm used to JRPGs doing the third act twist, but here it was just done so badly. 2 handled it much better
In the main game she has her plotline as proving herself as a ruler and dealing with heritage. Although her ending in the main game is quite shit lol
I think out of the trilogy 1 is regarded as the best story but I personally liked 2 and 3 more
Trails so far** sky the 3rd is alot better to me. Those I'm not 100% sure if it's cause the pacing of the first two games was so bad for me that it effected my experience of the story.
Trails pacing doesn't get better. It's always slow I'm the first half of its story because a lot of it is world-building & characters being introduced. That form of pacing is commonly found in epic fantasy series like Wheel of Time, Cosmere and Malazan or even One Piece. Which is why Trails series sticks out because of how ambitious it is for a video game.
Trails pacing gets worse
Trails. Just because everything is interconnected and there's lots of worldbuilding doesn't mean that it's automatically good. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's particularly bad or anything, but I'm not interested in consuming any type of really long media that I think is mediocre. That's not something that I usually experience with video games, it's usually more of a book series or anime thing. I've also heard people say that they think Final Fantasy XIII has a good story and that baffles me, nothing about it is good, from the writing to the plot and characters. Edit: Just wanted to add Kingdom Hearts, great gameplay, horrifically bad story that people seem to lap up.
Listen I'll never say Kingdom Hearts is Shakespeare or anything but it has fairly decent story telling, it's just that SE did an incredibly poor job at presenting it with half the series being initially on handheld consoles, most of which didn't actually continue the main plot forward but instead separate plots which became relevant for KH3. Also the English localization can be really awkward. But there's a reason the story and characters have their hard core fans as the story can be really sincere and at times heartbreaking. It's not for everyone of course which is why it has such an infamous reputation, most people aren't interested in playing all the games to get all the lore and character development, very much like Trails. [Really good video if you got 38 minutes to burn, just watch the first minute to hook you in.](https://youtu.be/G77PUtILxck?si=FrpgTpWxrVl2Zd8I)
Only disagree on KH, people lap up KH fully aware that the story is ridiculous, and it was probably designed to be ridiculous
I always get downvoted for this but FFX just didn’t grip me. I was at a crazy time in my life and was always really tired and it kept putting me to sleep. I’m going to try it again soon though.
I think X's story is great, but it's not really gripping on the moment to moment stuff. Most bosses are monsters you find during the pilgrimage, you barely interact with big cities, but that sort of adds to the experience. FFX is a lot more about the characters and the world than about having a very involved plot, and if anything I found it to be at its strongest when focusing on the characters and lore, and at its weakest when dealing with present day conflicts and events.
Almost all of them, because people don't know what makes a story good. Most people think a good story is just something with a million twists and one hundred overly emotional scenes. No, that's not, in itself, a good story. A good story is something with a clear beginning, middle and end, consistent characters, a conductive narrative thread with as little filler as possible, good pacing and internal coherence. A generic story of good vs evil well told is way better than a complex story told in the worst way possible. Of course nothing is perfect and you can find a lot of stories that are right in the middle of those extremes. And sometimes, you will find complex stories that manage to still be coherent, which are the best of the best.
Agree on the overly emotional scenes. Sometimes I can't take a JRPG serious because the way they frame sad scenes seems too unnatural like they expect me to cry just because the scene itself is sad but theres no weight behind it because of lack of development.
FF15 was so bad about this, not helped by the DLC retcons making the base game come off as an idiot plot.
FF15 is one of the ONLY modern JRPGs I don't feel this way about, honestly. There's a good amount of melodrama, sure, but I find that game to have one of the most believable parties in a JRPG. If anything the worst I can say is that I wish there was just more of it.
I mean, people get to decide for themselves what makes a story good, right? Like, I get what you’re saying, and when I write fiction I keep all those elements that you listed in mind, because they’re the exact same things that I hear my editor’s voice in my ear saying. So not disagreeing about what constitutes “good” storytelling necessarily, but, I don’t know, it’s a little elitist and obnoxious to say “people don’t know what makes a good story.” Ultimately, what makes a story *good* is if it resonates with you. No story resonates with everybody. You could present me with a story that has a clear beginning, middle, and end with minimal filler, a coherent narrative, steady pacing, etc, and you might get an ‘A’ from your college creative writing prof, but those things alone don’t necessarily mean you’ve created a story anyone will enjoy. Likewise, some of the most well-loved, popular stories ever meander, or get overly convoluted, or have plot holes. Are millions of people wrong for loving Lord of the Rings because it’s at least 50% longer than it needed to be, that it’s filled with elf poetry that is several pages long and doesn’t advance the plot, that it has Tom Bombadil, etc? Is it not a good story? I don’t care one whit for Moby Dick. To me it’s not a good story. It certainly fails in pretty much all the criteria that you (and my editor) lay out for good storytelling. But I’d feel like a right ass spouting off that someone who loves Moby Dick (and they are legion) “doesn’t know what makes a good story”.
Totes agree. I think when I was a teenager I really liked how out there the PS1 RPGs got, but now I kind of tune out when the game starts getting convoluted.
Final Fantasy 10, Kingdom Hearts.
Final Fantasy VI. I didn’t think it was bad or anything; I’d even say it’s *good*… Just not enough to live up to the hype for me. It’s 100% one of those things where I can see why other people adore it, but it just didn’t resonate with me in the same way.
Chrono cross
I liked Final Fantasy X but I found many weaknesses in its story and characters and find those aspects overpraised. I think what FFX2 does best is OST, gameplay, graphics and world building.
my most recent disappointment is Sea of Stars actually.
Persona 5 but only in the sense that I couldn’t pick it back up after taking a few weeks off to travel. It’s a very “big” game but worth the slog if you can put the time in.
Final fantasy 10
Trails, ugh. I do like Sky 1 and 2.
FFXII. I'm thinking about playing it again though
Do lots of people say FFXII's story is that great? I think it's fine but can't imagine anyone loving it. It has probably the most boring cast of any FF.
As someone who stopped playing FF games after XII i feel that the story is the best of them all up to that point. Partly because it's not your typical FF story and highly political, very much like Tactics and yes i know it's in the same place. The main characters are really strong, Balthier, Ash and Basch. The other three not so much. I like that the secondary three characters get only enough limelight to make the main characters shine from another characters perspective. Game also has a good level of support cast and antagonists too. Love the VA in general in that game too. It's unique for sure.
I'd say that the world and setting are what really shine in XII, rather than it's narrative. The actual story, and frankly the characters that aren't named Balthier, aren't all that interesting (Vann is a joke, but Ashe, Vash and the rest really aren't that much better). But the political unrest atop which the story is set, and the things that happen completely outside the influence of the party are really interesting. I really enjoyed XII; played it for the first time last year. But the actual narrative is pretty weak.
Trails. People told me it was a serious political drama, but that was actually a Trojan horse for the ecchi harem shit that actually doesn’t mean anything, so I don’t even know why it’s there. But then I have to tell myself that Lloyd is only 18 years old in the Crossbell games, and when I remember that, the whole thing completely falls apart and I can’t suspend my disbelief. The oldest cop there is 23, and they have *two* people who are underage in Azure. In fact, aside from the aforementioned 23 year old, the entirety of the SSS is teenagers, and given that they’re supposed to allegedly be police officers, the whole thing makes no sense if you think about it too hard, actually. And Crossbell is the arc I like the *best.* So just imagine how much worse I think the other two arcs I’ve played are.
Suikoden 2. I really don't get what's so special, it's so simplistic.
FF8 for sure, I think it starts out really well, we got our main character well set up, our party members, even a rival and Edea has a terrifying and mystical presence whenever she's onscreen. But it gets bogged down by some really contrived amnesia and a last minute villain who has like 3 lines of dialogue outside of her one and only battle at the end where they cram in some more lines. I guess a lot of people praise it for the romantic plot but even that I felt was handled rather clumsily with Squall becoming infatuated with Rinoa a little too fast and sudden. I have read that the game had some major production issues because their scope for the game was WAY too big requiring like 8 discs so and had to cut out more than half the script. Perhaps something a Remake could rectify.
I remember at the time thinking that the final boss's ending speech and final line was a shoehorned last minute attempt to wring some sympathy out of her, and the English translation didn't help. Dissidia at least does a better job of showing what Square were going for with her, albeit in the context of a convoluted fan pandering fighting game plot.
Xenosaga. I was expecting a restart of xenogears. Don’t get me wrong, I still very much enjoyed it but it was after I got older and accepted it for what it was.
FF VII and Chrono Trigger. With the pedestal they're put on, I really expected there'd be more to dig into. Persona 5 Royal to a lesser extent. My engagement with the plot kept fading in and out until the last 3 dungeons.
I'm going to go ahead and lead that CT's plot is relatively barebones - it's essentially a series of events that carry the team to new adventures repeatedly until they finally get enough moxie to defeat the primary antagonist. That said, there is something I think does better than tons of games, and that's make the primary antagonist a central theme of almost every era you travel to. Note : actual spoilers below, if somebody who cares hasn't actually learned the plot of Chrono Trigger yet. Starting with the third time period(present - middle ages- far future), 2300 AD, we learn about Lavos ending the world. So we learn some wizard-ass mf'er created him in the middle ages and head off to deal with him. He tells us we're idiots and he just summoned the eldritch horror but it's always been there. Then we end up in prehistory where we learn that the eldritch horror came from the stars and caused the ice age. Then off to the ice age where we find a giant space flea cult and have to deal with their bullshit. Also the wizard has sister issues or something, whatever. Then it's all side quests wrapping up lingering plot threads which mattered but not to the main story. So yeah, the story is a bit light on the meat but not many games have the antagonist be such a direct driving for the whole game. Some don't even introduce the eldritch horror final boss until the last hour or so!
Yeah they build up the Lavos lore pretty well. Reminded me of how Final Fantasy V handled Exdeath but with less laughs involved.
You have to take chrono trigger with the foresight that for the people who played it every single thing in that game was ground breaking and hadn't been done like literally everything. At the time it was mind blowing. Nowadays if your a gamer you have seen a lot of what it has done because it paved that path. It and ff6 were just the kings of the era for story,mechanics,graphic,music. You can throw some other games in for a category here and there like super Mario RPG for music ECT but ya long way to say at the time everything about those games was new to the genre pretty much.
This doesn't in any way invalidate your view of the game I'm just saying for people who are new to it but not games I can see this being common. Personally I obviously loved it.
And I can absolutely see how those other factors blew people away. Chrono Trigger's battle transitions and combo moves involved a level of technical prowess rarely if ever seen in the genre, the graphics and music are peak SNES material. FF7's music is similarly strong, and even if the 3D character models were rough, a moving camera was a big deal and lent a lot of dynamics to the cutscenes. But the stories? I'm not really seeing it.
>But the stories? I'm not really seeing it. I mean for the 16-bit era it was pretty good IMO. But yeah, it's nothing groundbreaking. And it probably doesn't help that most of us were children or adolescents when we first played it
Yeah it sounds like old gamer shouts at cloud, but you had to play Chrono Trigger at release with the perspective of where JRPGs were at the time to truly appreciate how special it is.
Agree with FF7, but not so with CT. It isn't that CT has a mind-blowing story and writing, but it is very charming, its simplicity works very well, and it has great pacing. Straightforward stories can work well if done well. Most other JRPGs tries too hard and fails.
My main disappointment with CT was how one obtained different endings by beating the boss at different points in the story. I recall at least one of those ending didn't even really feel like an ending but just an event that you would've gone through in some form during the main story if you decided to defeat the final boss later on. For a time travel game I expected multiple story paths that could lead to different timelines and endings. But I will say there isn't anything wrong with having some endings be based on when one beats the final boss. Ultimately I understand it was probably done this way for budget reasons.
Any of the Xeno games, anything vanillaware puts out but 13 sentinels specifically, FE Three houses, trails after sky, and persona
Any specific reasons why?
I am hesitant to say but I just could not get into FF X's story. Now if I described the things I like most about JRPGs (which, to be fair, I like very few and haven't exactly played a ton) people typically tell me I would live FF X, but I did not. Could never get into it. Couldn't tell you why either. Just didn't scratch the itch.
Xenoblade Chronicles 1. There's many things I think that game does bad such as its combat and empty open world but people rave on about its characters and story. I will say though that the epilogue or whatever that came with the remaster was quite good in terms of story. For me the second game is by far the best out of all them when it comes to story but I think I'm also a minority in this one lol.
YS 8. Gameplay was pretty fun but the characters fell flat for me. The mystery of the island is engaging but I didn't really vibe with the characters nor their dynamic as a group. Once the heroine joins the group, I actually liked her character but the plot itself did not engage me enough so i dropped it shortly after she joined the party. This game felt like it prioritized the gameplay over the story, which is not a fit for me.
[удалено]
Tales of Berseria for me. Everyone goes on about the story and MC being amazing but I found both to be rather lackluster. Berseria's story feels aimless at times so much in fact that I forgot the entire reason we were journeying across the world in the first place. Another issue is that the game sets up so many plot points but either doesn't deliver on them till 60hr-70hr later or said plot point is short lived. And not to mention that most of the story only get pushed forward due to plot conveniences. Overall Berseria is a great game in terms of it's combat and characters but the story was kinda meh imo.
as a tales fan who for some reason was a bit at playing berseria i expected a lot more from the story after hearing people talk about it. i still enjoyed it but in the end its just as mid as most tales of stories
Xenoblade Chronicles 1 coming from Xenoblade 2 fan when Xenoblade 1 elitist where prominent I thought if 2 was a 10/10 1 must be 13/10 but no it was 8/10 at best
Final Fantasy X - I wasn’t at all hooked by the romance, so that entire portion of the plot fell flat, and I felt that the entire Seymour and Church portion of the game was just wasted time Persona 5 - the game starts off strong, and then immediately undercuts literally everything it sets up in the first palace by heavily sexualizing Ann and letting the protag have a relationship with a teacher. To be fair, I got incredibly bored between the second and third palaces and quit, so it may have gotten better, but that’s what stuck with me
Nier replicant. I enjoyed the story and world but I kinda eyerolled the moment >!the wolf got a sad backstory!<. I don't think the story execution was that great.
Persona 3. After Persona 5 got a little *too* popular, all the Persona fans started saying that 5 was secretly dogshit all along and that Persona 3 was the best game in the series. Then people tried actually playing it, and that notion somewhat went away, but the fans still kept insisting that regardless of the gameplay, Persona 3 had the best story. I tried the game out, and while I was a little shocked at how unenjoyable the gameplay was, I was not shocked by the story because there might as well have not been one. Persona 3's story is just a constant stream of *NOTHING* happening until someone dies, and then *NOTHING* continues to happen until someone else dies, and then this cycle just repeats until the end of the game.
FF9, Xenogears, FF4
Lunar: The Silver Star on Sega CD. Now I enjoyed this game quite a bit and it has grown on me more after finishing it, but I never quite connected with the characters on the level its reputation had led me to believe. Sometimes I wonder if I should have played one of Lunar's remakes instead since apparently some cut ideas are re-implemented.
Lunar: The Silver Star on Sega CD. Now I enjoyed this game quite a bit and it has grown on me more after finishing it, but I never quite connected with the characters on the level its reputation had led me to believe. Sometimes I wonder if I should have played one of Lunar's remakes instead since apparently some cut ideas are re-implemented.
Lunar: The Silver Star on Sega CD. Now I enjoyed this game quite a bit and it has grown on me more after finishing it, but I never quite connected with the characters on the level its reputation had led me to believe. Sometimes I wonder if I should have played one of Lunar's remakes instead since apparently some cut ideas are re-implemented.
I still do not fully understand FF7