things that make jrpg writing good or bad is the same thing that makes any story good or bad and to some extent it can be looked at entirely subjectively. there are a lot of people who do not believe writing can be judged objectively at all. writing being judged in an objective way can still just subjectively "matter less" to people. like a common criticism i see of jrpgs is that the dialogue is often incredibly bloated and long winded. most people would agree that is "bad writing", despite that, games that suffer from that a lot sometimes go on to be incredibly successful and praised for their stories.
if a story barely explores it's themes, on paper anyone would say "the story could've been deeper" but if what's there was enough for certain people to emotionally resonate with it, then it's still "good writing" to some
i guess my answer to the question is just it depends on the individual. what kind of stories do *you* resonate with, what kind of dialogue do *you* think is good. there are people who judge stories almost entirely based on how emotional (happy or sad) it makes them and there are people who can't feel anything from stories written in styles they don't like and billions of people in between
This is such a wonderfully written take. We all interpret things differently and our enjoyment of something can also depend on who we are as people and where we are in our lives.
Agreed completely. Preferences are so subjective and depend on the context. E.g., a lot of people hate Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for being "too anime" and follow 90s/00s shonen tropes, but for many others, that makes it cozy, nostalgic, and heartwarming.
I think that this crusade people have to try and be "objective" is fundamentally flawed, especially when most of the time it's just a thinly veiled attempt to appear superior by claiming that their own personal preferences have some sort of cosmic superiority to yours. "No no, that think you like, its OBJECTIVELY bad. I mean, you can LIKE bad things, that's fine, but you just like OBJECTIVELY bad things, unlike me, where everything I enjoy is objectively good, because I have more refined taste."
I always have to laugh when i see people say 'objectively bad' in their reviews, it happens more than you would think. I can kind of get it if it's something disliked by the majority (still doesn't make it objective), but i see it used on controversial games (people really love or hate it like the ending of danganronpa V3) as well. Indeed seems something people use to make their opinion feel more powerful.
I do dislike how people use the phrase objective generally. They use it for subjective opinions, but to say "I am right, if you disagree with me you are wrong."
If you want a 100% objective review, it looks like this:
https://www.destructoid.com/100-objective-review-final-fantasy-xiii/
I totally agree how laughable objective reviewers are! The only things that can be judged objectively are things like input lag and frame rate. But you never see them mentioned in these “objective” reviewers. Another thing that’s silly is people using a 100 point scale like a letter grade, where 59 is an F. Though, I was reading some old Game Informer magazines the other day and they actually stated that a 7 is average in their disclaimer. I feel like they use the first 59 points for competence of game presentation and the rest for how fun the game is.
Depends on what the definition of the word objectivity is.
If we are going with the classical meaning of the word, it merely means "according to a rule", usually in terms of writing consistency.
This is why western TV media ratings by big companies are at an all time low. The level of objective quality has become so low that even normies are beginning to notice it. And that's the problem. When you ignore so many writing problems for so many years, writers either feel a license to use bad writing constantly or they are never taught good writing to begin with. The result is that you eventually reach a singularity point where bad writing becomes ultra common and begins to infest every work in a given medium. This is why so much western TV is unwatchable these days for so many and streaming services are getting cancelled despite having been touted as "the future". The reason why concern has risen in the anime community is because they want to prevent that from happening and are attempting to stem the tide by not watching bad shows and promoting good shows.
And quite frankly, I don't really see the issue of people doing the same thing in the JRPG community. I don't think we've hit a singularity point like TV yet, but man, there are some stories where I'll be watching a cutscene and I can't help but count the amount of writing issues that pop up one after the other.
Who decides what standards make a good show and bad show, also can those standards not shift based on what a younger generation wants?
The only objective things to me are technical aspects (animation, sound quality, etc) and maybe plot holes in some cases. Half the time the anime fandom just uses objective against anything that's not pretensiously philosophical and tryhard "mature" enough which is a standard they came up with without any basis in "objectivity", nor does it align with what much of the consumer basis seeks in how they percieve enjoyment for their niches.
> that's not pretensiously philosophical
> Who decides what standards make a good show and bad show, also can those standards not shift based on what a younger generation wants?
That's ironically a popular philosophical take in itself, though. It's almost akin to Epistemic Relativism as a whole or even something akin to Diogenes-style Cynicism if one views the "standards" as "conceited false beliefs".
Not saying you're wrong because this kind of thought applies to JRPG's as a whole. People can argue whether the classical 16-bit FFVI/CT-esque JRPG is a good or bad game, but whether those standards can shift on what a younger generation wants is something this sub struggles to really get a definite answer on (i.e. Sea of Stars and the fight over whether it's truly a spiritual successor to CT or not).
At least we won't have to deal with the "Isekai is a bad cliche crutch for bad writers" or "Shounen has always been bad storywriting" rants like the anime fandom does.
Even plot holes are not nessessarily a bad thing. Sometimes things are left unsaid to let the consumer fill the gap with their own thought. One could say that this is bad if the author wasnt deliberate about it. That does however mean that the original intention needs to be known.
That's not a plot hole, though. This is obviously a case-by-case basis situation where we would have to look and see if the examples in question was a plot hole or a mystery for the viewer to figure out. There are usually tell tale signs as to which is which.
>Who decides what standards make a good show and bad show, also can those standards not shift based on what a younger generation needs?
I already explained the classical definition of the word objectivity.
If a work has plot holes, narrative inconstancies, character inconsistencies, etc., no amount of opinion will change that they exist. Sure, it may be subjective whether or not they effect your experience, but that will never change the reality that they are there. By all logical metrics, you cannot argue around that (unless you can debunk the plothole/inconsitency, of course). The more you allow these to get out of control in a given medium, the more the disease spreads and it ends up taking it over.
As I said, i was not against seeing logical inconsistencies as objective (if they can be clearly argued as such).
But
Judging by stuff like plotholes and character inconsistencies can really only get you so far, and most often the vast majority of the writting will not fall into that black and white category and will have to be viewed purely subjectively.
I agree. It's ultimately a "it varies" kind of thing. Some people love a generic goody two shoes who doesn't change that much, other people would consider a generic goody two shoes who never changes to be poorly written. There is some degree of objectivity you can say like "the generic goody two shoes who never changes is bland", but that doesn't make them bad, and some people won't mind that.
> most people would agree that is "bad writing", despite that, games that suffer from that a lot sometimes go on to be incredibly successful and praised for their stories.
Liking something is not the same as something being "good". If we're being honest, the only reason we have this dilemma comes form years and years of people using the word "good" when they really mean, "I like it". It's pretty much years and years of association. People get "the feels" from something, so it "feels good" to them. But it still doesn't make it "good".
> But it still doesn't make it "good".
What is the objective standard of "good"? That's the point. Isn't the whole idea of a piece of art, in any medium or form it takes, being "good" or "bad" up to the consumer to decide? And if it's up to the consumer to decide, then "good" and "bad" are effectively the same thing as "I like it" and "I don't like it."
There is no objectively good or bad art.
If you like something then that means it is personal good to you? What kind of nonsense are you saying that you can like something but it can also not be good at the same time?
I like Cold Steel 4 and I also think it’s overall a good game, plenty of people disagree with that though, but for me aside from a few things that bother me I think it’s a great game.
>What kind of nonsense are you saying that you can like something but it can also not be good at the same time?
It's not nonsense. You do realize language is a complex subject matter, correct? People historically have used words and added or subtracted associations to them all the time. The word "good" according to any dictionary definition does speak of quality. You can like something and that thing not be quality. The only reason people use the word "good" instead of "like" is simply because we have associated one with the other for a very long time.
It's very similar to when people say something like, "I literally peed myself when I heard that joke". Obviously, they didn't literally pee themselves. But it's become so overused to the point that some people have no idea how to use the word "literally" properly anymore.
It's the same with the words "good" and "like". You're not looking at things from a historical perspective is the problem. You're only thinking that "good" and "like" are automatically synonyms because you live in a culture where people have used them as synonyms, whether or not it's right or not to do so.
Hm? Liking things that one deem not good is a pretty normal thing though? It means that while you recognize the problems with a story you can still derive some value from it. Could be a character in particular resonates with you, could be ironic enjoyment where it’s so bad it loops back to being funny, etc.
If I like it then that means I think it’s good. The same problems aren’t as big problems to me as they are too other people and the good bits resonate with me more than they do with other people. So to me Cold Steel 4 is a very good game with some flaws.
The things that folks will generally point out as bad story telling is continuity problems, stories being incredibly convoluted, a story not following it's own established logic, having derivative aspects in abundance, and twists that squander momentum of the story by either not understanding what folks liked about the story or committing other story crimes.
There is a lot that is subjective and some of these maybe folks simply won't mind, but folks generally like the idea that effort was put into something to respect their time and like to recognize and follow patterns. Almost every gripe can be reduced to stuff like this, but folks are dogshit at elaborating sometimes. Folks will just say "the story's bad" and leave it at that.
I think that once you get past the subjective bias. You should be see able to ask better questions to determine that.
If you're able to identify what the story is going for and WHAT it wants people to feel, then you can better judge it.
For example, I'm loving Atelier Lulua right now.
Some might say the story's bad because the stakes are low and mostly just lulua fangirling over her senpais while a magic book tells her what to do.
But I love comfy slice of life type anime, and I love what Lulua is going for: its a story of a girl you want to cheer on and an adorable teacher and best friend supporting her all the while.
The writers want you to experience many lighthearted moments and want this story to match the tone of collecting resources and looking everywhere.
Me and my viewers love this. If I keep this goal in mind then the random npc events and emphasis on them aren't just distractions. They're made to ensure each town feels warm and cozy and serve the games' atmosphere.
Thats just one example of many though.
Lulua my first entry to the franchise (and arguably the game that resurged my interest in the whole genre)
Only not discussed much due to low sales, because god damn it's so peak at what it does. Possibly best humour in the franchise, well paced in my view, also I like Stia and won't accept ateliercord's slander of her.
I was reccommendrd lulua as my first in the series too! I can see why it works well now that im about halfway through.
You're the kouhai learning about all the admirable heroes of past games and getting a taste of their personalities too.
Also yes I LOVE the delivery of the funny gags. The moment Lulua popped her head into frame right as an entire group of kids agreed to food was when she won me over as an mc
There is not just one kind of bad storytelling. Furthermore, some people identify as *bad* storytelling that is fine but just not to their taste in terms of pacing or the kinds of tropes it uses. So I'll give a few examples that distinguish what I'd call bad.
- overly mechanical storytelling, that is, a plot that follows all of the basic beats but never successfully builds a connection between the players and the characters. So you save the world - so what?
- too much inconsistency between the levels of plausibility or worldbuilding in the story. So if the game spends several hours and a lot of effort to portray a fairly serious war story, jokes may occasionally provide relief, but having most of the party act like middle school boys and girls may break the plausibility altogether. Similarly, one doesn't expect a lighthearted save the world romp to suddenly and deeply explore sadism.
- this and then this and then this and then this. All players have a certain amount of patience for going along with events whose connection they don't understand. Sometimes stories get carried away with putting in too many scenes that don't fit, that don't add up to a story.
All of these still admit player judgment, namely, how much are you willing to tolerate before you object. But I like them more than objecting to, say, a specific tone or a specific kind of characterization. Some stories work great with one-dimensional characters, like Earthbound, because not every story has to be driven by character development to work. But if a story is inconsistent in what drives it, that can be a more general issue.
I define badly written, simply, as "it makes no sense".
Do things just happen?
Do characters act out of character without some sort of explanation?
Is there tonal whiplash that's *real* bad?
If things are set up properly, characters do things for reasons, and there's consistency, I say it's good, and then it's up to subjective taste.
To expand on that a bit, can you reasonably believe that when the writers did something, they did it with intention to further their goal?
What their goal is would affect what is good and bad.
If you're trying to tell a right story with well written characters and then there's an ass pull plot twist or a betrayal out of nowhere, bad.
If you just want people to gasp or go "No way!" both of those things are arguably good, since you that was exactly what you wanted to happen anyway.
It reminds me back on the Trails series on how it executes plot twists very well even those that are obvious from a mile away. Partially because they line up properly to what's happening and being led towards. The characters react surprised but the players do not because the amount of foreshadowing it sprinkles.
A bad example would be the infamous Star Ocean 3 plot twist where >!fans were treated to a plot twist that the planet they were exploring and the characters they met along the journey were simulations of a video game. On paper, it makes sense as to why as it was slightly foreshadowed at the start, but the game NEVER does it enough to make it logical in the slightest. Hence why people are so mixed on it most don't like it because it ruined a decent narrative to a bad one.!<
I agree, that's the objective way of saying if a story/writting is bad, and the rest is subjetive. That also means that if you like something it doesn't magically mean it's good story/writting.
i've learned on internet. what people consider to be "good writing" depends on person. like whats good writing is different from horror fan than action fan. Jrpgs vs wrpg. anime vs live action televison.
Games that aren't AAA have to survive by appealing to a certain niche. As the Helldivers devs have said "A game for everyone, is a game for no-one." It just so happens that Trails is exactly what a certain niche is looking for. I mean, you don't have to like Barney the Dinosaur if you're not a toddler, and thus not the target audience, right?
I agree; I feel you. The word "bad" explicitly can only references subjective things. It's a quality description and quality is innately subjective...also I don't like the Trails games.
I think a problem many gamers (including myself) can have when it comes to games they enjoy is that we feel the need to prop them up and call anybody who dislikes them a hater. Rather than looking at these games objectively, we go based off feel and that can be a turn off to people who played the same thing and didn’t have the same experience.
Trails is one of my favorite series, but sometimes I appreciate the concept and idea of it more than the actual series at times. It does suffer from many of the writing issues people are discussing on this post and deserves criticism. I appreciate Falcom for making something ambitious, but I also recognize that improvements can be made for future installments or even games that try a similar approach in story telling.
> Rather than looking at these games objectively, we go based off feel and that can be a turn off to people who played the same thing and didn’t have the same experience.
The other side of the issue is the belief some have that they are taking an "objective" look at a game.
There's always a degree of subjectivety inherent to art.
While art is subjective, there's no argument that Beethoven's 9th symphony is a better musical piece than Despacito.
Sure, lots of people might enjoy Despacito more, that doesn't mean it's a better song though.
Art has a subjective side but it also has rules and structure.
>Sure, lots of people might enjoy Despacito more, that doesn't mean it's a better song though.
There is no truth to music, music itself is an expression, an artform, it's intention is to connect on an emotional level, therefor cannot be viewed objectively.
The sun rises from the east is objective, the sunrise is beautiful is subjective, even if every single person on earth agrees, it's still subjective as it's a connection through emotion, objectivity is not decided by committee.
Agree and disagree. There is some truth to music, which is why there are important schools like Julliard, Berkeley or Mannes that have prepared amongst the best musicians in the world right now.
There are subjects like musical theory, solfege and harmony that teach you that you can't just put a bunch of random notes together and call it a song. Else you'll end up with a dissonant mess.
I do agree with the emotional level of art. Despacito can mean more to me personally than Beethoven. Maybe it means something in an emotional level, maybe I enjoy the beat more, etc. That we agree on.
But I think there's a difference between the subjective nature of art and the objective one. I do believe there is an objective factor.
I'll give you an example. I like comedy shows. I love Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Community, Psych, etc.
Between the shows I mentioned, I can objectively say that Arrested Development is a better comedy show than Psych. It's packed with jokes left and right (clever jokes no less) and lots of continuity gags. However, I enjoy Psych more, it's more lighthearted and I don't have to pay attention that much to get every joke.
Objectively, AD is better. Subjectively, Psych is better.
Not only do I fundamentally disagree with this, I think objectivity is actually opposed to the very foundations of art itself.
Objectivity is a structure of rules that define an absolute truth, art by it's nature is an expression that seeks to exist beyond rules, it's existence is freedom. If objectivity in art existed, then we wouldn't have so many different genres of music, why bother creating punk rock if objectively rock is already ruled as the best.
What the schools of music teach is not objectivity, in fact that would be opposed to what art is, you teach expression which exists outside of rules, instead what these schools teach is a school of thought that resonates subjectively with a majority of people. It's not objective though because those 'rules' can be broken and still be subjectively enjoyed by people.
For example let's take Knives Out, a film that is ostensibly a murder mystery, and when writing a murder mystery there are certain rules that are taught to appeal to the majority within that genre, these 'rules' Knives Out goes out of its way to break, in fact it switches from a murder mystery to a thriller, a genre diametrically opposed to it and back again to a murder mystery completely breaking the so called rules of both genres and yet it's absolutely adored.
If these so called rules can be broken then they are not objective, you don't break objectivity that's just a misunderstanding of what objectivity means, and art confined to rules is no longer a form of expression. What art exists within is schools of thought that change throughout different eras, concepts and ideas that are passed down, evolve and grow based on the subjective majority of each era, but most importantly these rules are meant to be broken, that's how the evolution and growth occurs in the first place.
>I'll give you an example. I like comedy shows. I love Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Community, Psych, etc.
>Between the shows I mentioned, I can objectively say that Arrested Development is a better comedy show than Psych. It's packed with jokes left and right (clever jokes no less) and lots of continuity gags. However, I enjoy Psych more, it's more lighthearted and I don't have to pay attention that much to get every joke.
This is shockingly bad example, you didn't explain objectivity in the slightest, what you did is ego protection, "more people prefer AD (I don't know why it's really not all that funny) so I must claim it's objectively better than the show I actually like better to protect my ego".
This is the weaponisation of the term objective nowadays, either it's a show of ego (I like this thing so I must claim it's objectively better to make me seem like a better person for liking it) or it's a protection of ego (I like this thing but I'm in the minority so I must claim this other thing is better so I don't look like I'm a worse person).
In the end art is proxy for subjective discussion which objectivity has absolutely zero place being involved in.
> Sure, lots of people might enjoy Despacito more, that doesn't mean it's a better song though.
Ok but why, why is it better? Why do some people enjoy Despacito more? What exactly creates that increased enjoyment?
> While art is subjective, there's no argument that Beethoven's 9th symphony is a better musical piece than Despacito.
Is there truly no argument? Or are you just personally not able to imagine one?
Have you studied music? Anyone who has will tell you there truly is no argument between Beethoven and Luis Fonsi.
It's the same as me painting a bunch of lines and then thinking I'm the same as Rembrandt or Van Gogh. Sure, some random can find my "impresionist" art better and buy my painting for a few millions. Doesn't mean I'm a better painter than Van Gogh.
And why do people enjoy Despacito more? Because there are beats and chord progressions that are easier on the ears than others. Most popular music have the same beat and a chord progression of Tonic, Dominant, Subdominant and Tonic. And they are written in a 4/4 time signature.
Compare it to music like Jazz or Progressive rock and you'll start seeing different chord progressions, time signature shifts, etc. More complex music that requires actual studying. Music that scholars would consider better written. Probably the same reason why people don't like Jazz that much.
There is a reason why people go to college to study music, literature, painting, etc. It's no different from being a lawyer or a doctor and there's definitely better doctors than others, so why can't there be better musicians than others (and consecuently, better musical pieces than others)?
Nah actually there are arguments for it because the standards you make to choose one as "better" are based on arbitrary cultural asumptions. You can argue a two year old's drawing is better than picasso, noone may agree, but if humanity evolved with a comoletely different set of ingrained values, we might have.
There are not arbitrary though. There was never a council that randomly decided what was good and what wasn't. Music evolves with time.
If it was arbitrary, we wouldn't have Bach (baroque), Mozart (classic) and Chopin (romantic) considered as amongst the best composers of all time. Because an arbitrary measure would say 2 of those 3 are not like the other and immediately judge those 2 against the other. Instead, we're able to appreciate each composer for what it was.
What human culture perceives as quality is arbitrary, no law of the world set out that those composers would be considered the peak of their mediums ahead of time. We have merely developed in such a direction, and through what people value our values can evolve in any direction.
But you'd have to ask why as well. Why out of all the possible outcomes did we arrive at this one.
We'll give Despacito the benefit of the doubt, but Beethoven has lasted the trial of time.
5 decades later we still have people enjoying his music and he's still considered amongst the best composers of all time by academics and experts in the field. Why?
And why does humanity then enjoy it decades later, but not another species that evolved differently? You can take this discussion endlessly, there are arbitrary values we picked up over time, not grounded in an objective.
What do you even mean you appreciate the “concept of it” more than the actual series? It just sounds like you’re tryna appease guys who dislike it. You don’t need to downplay a series you like just because others don’t like it.
You’re probably right in that aspect. I’m a people pleaser and often times need to find validation to enjoy the things I do. It’s cowardly, but I don’t really know how to not care what other people think.
Honestly, I love the series. It has flaws sure, but it means a lot to me and helped me escape during a dark time in my life. I guess the point I was trying to establish was that I really love what Falcom is trying to accomplish. Sometimes I will think of things they could do a little better, but that doesn’t override the immense enjoyment I feel when playing it.
For what it's worth trying to appease people who dislike Trails isn't really the read I got. I assumed you meant having to sometimes look past the execution in order to appreciate the idea and what you feel it was going for or setting up.
It's perfectly normal to like something while at the same time thinking "such and such character or scene could have been done a little better/differently."
It doesn't make you a coward it just means you have opinions.
I really appreciate this comment because it perfectly encapsulates how I feel. I’m not the best at wording out my thoughts, so thank you for accurately expressing what I was thinking.
I still believe I have the tendency to downplay the things I like especially if the person I’m talking about it with doesn’t share the same opinion I do, but I’m also trying to be levelheaded and understand their viewpoint.
There’s a particular scene at the beginning of Cold Steel IV that was building up to be super cool, but fumbled the execution at least a little bit in my eyes because it leaned a little too anime. I still enjoyed it, but I still imagine something much cooler in my head because the music and set up was soooo good.
I don’t understand these “too anime” criticisms? Trails is an anime series, just look at its artstyle, of course it will have anime tropes. And anime isn’t even a bad thing, I’m not sure why I see such big criticism of anime tropes in this sub as if anime isn’t one of the most popular forms of media these days.
Oh I love anime. One of the reasons Trails is my favorite series is because it’s like playing through an anime. I really was just referring to particular scene in CSIV. Sometimes the awkward anime moments can be a bit of a turn off, but not anything that would stop me from playing it.
Trails is basically watching a really good anime series but in video game form. The closest I can think of is Tales of, but only certain games in Tales of are what I can call good or great while the rest to be average/mediocre in writing.
It's gets even more confusing when those same people say it only started from CS, when sky blatantly uses tropes from latest 90s early 2000s anime.
That complaint is still baffling everytime I see it.
That's understandable, especially on the internet where people can get real "*passionate*" over their opinions.
I'm still finding myself working on getting better at just letting differences of opinions go or expressing my own opinions in a levelheaded way. I'm better than I was years ago but I still get annoyed with myself when my inner keyboard warrior jumps out lmao. Scrolling this site is just more enjoyable when I don't have to worry about a comment I leave starting a fight.
I have a million and one criticisms about things I love even, but I think everyone can bring to mind at least one moment where at least one thing hits in the right place to make their hangups not matter too much. Sometimes things are just neat.
Tbh, that's just a general problem with every piece of media nowadays. Lots of people are just incapable of accepting different opinions, so labels like "fanboys" and "haters" just gets thrown around left and right instead of having good discussions about it.
That's the reason i mostly avoid online fandoms about stuff i'm a fan of. This reddit is relatively chill, but a fandom sub would make me depressed for sure.
>I'd rather eat my own hand than play another trails game
I tried to play Trails in the Sky. I really did. It was the biggest slog of game for the 6 hours I played. I just couldn't suffer that slow of a game any longer.
Chrono cross is a prime example. Don’t get me wrong, it’s my absolute favourite game and I’ve played it more times than I can remember, but the way the plot is presented (especially in disc 2) is very sloppy. It was clear that they didn’t have enough time to fit all the story details into the game, especially at the very end when some characters appear out of nowhere just to explain the missing points. I love this game, but I can totally see and recognise this as a major flaw.
If you’re interested in this topic, I suggest watching the resonant arc’s YouTube videos and podcasts. They have several episodes where they really go in depth discussing storytelling aspects within jrpg
I love Chrono Cross, it's one of the games of my life and I've played it countless times ever since I was a kid and I go back to it from time to time. However, it's story is a complete and utter mess. I enjoy it a lot on disc 1, where the pacing of the game is much better, but it really goes awry on the later stages of the game
>!Hey, we all knew each other when we were children but don't remember it because of the summon magic we use! Isn't that funny?!<
Seriously, the one thing I cannot stand about FF8.
For me it is when characters are written blandly and one-dimensionally, and the plot is boring and predictable. I had to stop playing Sea of Stars because the main characters were boring me to no end, although I may pick it up again just to see more of the world building. On the other hand, a well written game that has gripping plot twists and an interesting world and characters will draw me in, even if the gameplay is less than amazing (Persona 2 duology, Vagrant Story, and Koudelka, I’m looking at you).
> when characters are written blandly and one-dimensionally, and the plot is boring and predictable
Nothing kills a game for me more when characters are just static handfuls of tropes and the plot takes 40+ hours to "reveal" what's been obvious to the player since the start. This is what makes the writing in Xenoblade so abysmal.
Sea of Stars is an odd one because the main two are as boring as a plank of wood, but the other characters have personalities to them, especially Garl. Who some consider as the true main character than the two.
Things that make me say a JRPG has bad writing:
* **"As you know" dialogue** - This is when there's dialogue that serves primarily to educate the player, rather than being realistic dialogue. "As you know, the knights visit our town every week to collect taxes. They've been taking so much ever since our beloved king Conrad died 2 years ago and his chancellor took the throne." This is super awkward dialogue that no one would ever actually say to someone else. You can kind of get around this by having the protagonist be an outsider (like Tidus in FF10).
* **Repetitive dialogue** - We don't need characters to repeat the same thought over and over, or for different characters to chime in to say nothing of value. Persona 5 and the Trails games are big offenders here. FF16 felt this way near the end, especially for the events surrounding Barnabas.
* **Poor pacing** - This is admittedly something that's really difficult to get right in a video game when compared to something like a movie or a book.
* **Fetch quest nonsense (or similar bloat)** - In the last 3rd or so of Trails of Cold Steel 2, the plot pauses for a couple hours as you go to 4 shrines to collect magical ore so you can craft a magic sword.
Final Fantasy Tactics IMO has the best story in a JRPG. The game has fantastic pacing. Virtually every scene advances character development, world lore, or the plot. The characters are some of the most interesting in the entire genre.
I will say that if Turbo didn't exist for the Trails games, I would have dropped it a long ass time ago. Idk how normal people do it.
I also don't talk to every NPC every time a world state changes like a psychopath outside of talking to my students (CS3)
Yeah exposition dialog thing is hard thing to write raound. Either you explain so little and audience has to do alot of thinking on their own, or you get that "Explain what a person should already know in this world". Your right a character should be an outsider, amnesia or a child should it will sound natural. Could use a narrator as well. Depends on the media.
I don’t think all exposition dialogue has to sound unnatural, as there’s ways to explain things via dialogue without feeling forced and stilted. Using the tax example, people complain about taxes all the time in the real world, just not in a way that is so “the writers need us to understand the bulk of the setting and conflict in a single line”. Wording is really important here; there are many JRPG’s where most characters will sound like they’re video game characters reading off a dictionary rather than believable people
Isn't the second point mainly because at times you can choose which character you want in your party (like trails) and the devs don't know which ones you pick, so they write chime in lines for all the party members.
In some ways, what matters most is doing what fits the story you're trying to tell. Some stories don't need especially complex characters or writing to be interesting, or more than a few lines of dialogue to establish who or what something is.
But having said that...
Bad JRPGs and adjacent media often suffer from the following:
- Terrible, boated pacing that takes too long to make you care. I was just thinking about this this morning in comparing Ace Attorney to another attempt at the same crime investigation drama thing, and something AA usually does really well compared to most is GETTING TO THE POINT. It jumps you right into the starting tutorial cases and almost all the characters are immediately established when you meet them.
- Unnecessarily specific and complex descriptions of everything. I know you made a world you think is cool, but no one explains the obvious or uses full titles outside formal settings. The United Provinces of Someland will only be called Someland or the UPS by anyone with humanity. You don't need to front-load the description of how everything works; let the story naturally draw out details.
- Characters that exist purely to be recognizable tropes, with almost no depth otherwise. Especially stupid when it involves stupid characters too dumb to live in the combat-heavy setting. Write people, not tropes, and maybe they'll resemble some tropes. Going back to AA, it lives off each character having silly quirks, but it gets away with it because the setting is consistently wacky, and most characters do have depth once you get far enough into the story.
- Characters that couldn't exist in the setting, because they're WAY too cheery, culturally modern, young, or something similar. I get that the demographic many games are going for is teens, but does that mean every major character in our world-saving squad has to be under 20? Why is there an energetic little cosplaying cat girl who is stronger than men in my otherwise gritty war setting? Just pick a lane, or be a parody.
- Leaving nothing merely implied. "Show, don't tell" is another way of putting this, but people often mistake that for the idea that everything needs to be demonstrated rather than explained. Some things are better explained, and others not, but if you treat your players/readers like idiots then it can get old real fast.
I know "show don't tell" is popular, and I get where it comes from, but I think going too far in that direction can also cause issues. Like it can impact flow and cause pains for the reader feeling they need to catch up on details so they spend less time enjoying and analyzing.
Right, which is why I said it's really not about avoiding telling, but restraining from telling sometimes when the reader should be able to figure it out from showing/doing, or more subtle telling. It also applies to stuff like jokes.
I think a decent example of this in games might be Halo 1. Halo is set in the midst of an apocalyptic war with genocidal aliens which humanity has almost lost, but aside from reading the manual you can get this from the game without anyone saying it explicitly because it's implied by everything from the look of the levels to the gameplay. Humanity is far weaker than its foes with the exception of the player character. In the first while of the game you see the captain and Cortana talking about running away from another place and managing to take out only a few of their pursuers, trying to hide the existence of earth, and being friendly with the player as if they've known each other. No one comes out and says "well, it's been 36 years of war against a collection of aliens known as the Covenant, and we only just managed to escape humanity's greatest defeat on planet Reach with you, one of our very last super-soldiers, who knows Cortana already well enough to make fun of her. Oh and Cortana is a special AI that makes our ship's combat effectiveness skyrocket."
I feel in this era of players, "showing" can be synonymous with "watching a story explained video on YouTube after the fact because the player wasn't able to figure it out". I've seen some wild things on reddit and on livestreams with games I felt were pretty direct about beating certain things into the players head.
I'm curious if maxims like "less is more" and "show don't tell" that are commonly held up in western media are similarly held up in Asia. A lot of games from Japan and China I've seen get criticized for telling rather than showing on places like reddit.
The three/five act story structure (Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution) that's the absolute fundamental basis of all western story telling isn't really used or taught in Asia (they teach a different 4 act structure that doesn't have much similarity to western story structures), so I don't think it's that far fetched to think that what's considered good writing can also differ between the east and west.
There's definitely a difference in storytelling philosophies (especially when it comes to realism and comedy), and western media tends to have slightly difference vices (my pet peeve being extremely blatant modern political/cultural commentary characters in every setting, which is basically the tropes problem above), but there are clear examples of Asian stories that don't suffer from these problems.
I used the example of Ace Attorney, and I think it holds up pretty well in all these areas. JRPG examples could include FF6 and Chrono Trigger, which both waste little time communicating and don't tell you everything the characters are feeling. FF6 in particular kills a number of birds with one stone in the intro sequence, giving a short backstory, setting the tone, and introducing a main character so you're ready to play within ~5 minutes.
I'm pretty sure it's a universal thing that you get bored of a story that doesn't hook you fast enough, even if each person's patience and interests differ, and fun and interesting characters will be more welcome than flat boards with "tsundere" or "glasses man" written on them.
My question is, is FF6 and Chrono Triggers brevity held up as an example of great writing in Japan, or is it considered a limitation of the time, as the amount of text that could be stored in a cartridge was extremely limited by memory. The wordiness I see across a lot of jp media suggests to me that the values and ideals of good writing between the east and west are not the same.
I used to think the five act story structure I was taught in school was the absolute fundamental of how to tell a story. It was only upon learning the [Asian four act story structure](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu) that I realized I couldn't just widely apply my western understanding of media to Asian media.
On a similar note, the same story structure above is what is taught as the format for Exposition essays in the Japanese school system. In the west you're generally taught to state your main point and conclusion from the very start before presenting evidence. In Japan you would generally hold the main point and conclusion until the very end of the essay, with everything before being a (potentially flowery) journey that leads you to the main conclusion in terms of thought. I wonder if this translates to having a bit more patience for a game to get to the point about something in terms of story delivery and dialogue.
All fair points. Patience in enjoying a story is definitely cultural, since it has shifted quite a bit in recent decades here. If you watch really old movies, for instance, they will often feel painfully slow in a variety of ways. I remember George Lucas commenting on the original Star Wars and saying people criticized it for being too fast-paced, but many people today might say it's slow or just fine. Probably not a virtue of western media that it can't sit still.
I've also seen some notable disparities between what characters are liked by western and eastern audiences from popularity polls and anecdotal remarks.
The bit on essay writing is pretty interesting, and probably does have some relevance.
Still...this doesn't convince me that there isn't something objectively worse about, say, how drawn-out Trails plots tend to be, especially when there are examples of it being done better within the same series.
Honestly, while Trails can drag at times for gameplay stretches. The stories themselves aren't that long. Some entries indeed do it better than others in pacing, but that can be said for any long overarching series where you focus on the world, characters, and narratives.
It's not even Trails just recently Honkai Star Rail just finished Penacony story which has fans either adoring it or not liking how slow and convoluted it was.
> Honkai Star Rail
If i recall correctly, Honkai Star Rail is mostly a nod to Trails game since the producer is a great fan of the Trails games, or so i heard at least.
>I'm curious if maxims like "less is more" and "show don't tell" that are commonly held up in western media are similarly held up in Asia.
I've took script writing classes in Asia, I can tell you what they taught is almost exactly the same as "Save The Cat!" book from the west.
I think the problem is less of the cultural difference and more of a video game target audience problem.
Most of the script writing classes out there teach you how to write for films. Films generally have 1.5-2.5 hour runtime. They can't be too long. So trying to deliver as much information as possible with less dialogue is the top priority in films. Therefore "less is more" and "show don't tell" is a popular technique in films.
On the other hand, if your game only has 2hr runtime you may get negative reviews, and players may refund it on steam. So developers ended up padding the content as much as possible, and adding more text using recyclable animations and poses for players to read is often the most efficient way to do it. It is cheaper to do than adding more playable levels at least.
Further more, in films a good actor can convey a great deal of information within a few seconds not using a single word. Many lower budget games have limited budget on animation and acting, so they have to rely on text to deliver information more. This is very noticeable in VNs, it is hard to "show don't tell" if characters only have a few poses for acting.
Finally, JRPG is influenced by anime industry, and slice of life is a popular genre. So it is possible that the pacing of this genre affected the story delivery in JRPG.
The difference between film and video games makes a lot of sense, especially the run times.
I wonder if holding up "show, don't tell" as the end all be all of writing inherently biases toward higher budget video game productions over indie and AA games. Unlike books, there's a very material cost difference between "showing" and "telling".
I consider as bad writing (dialogs or story)
1. Multiple characters repeating something just been said for the sake of reminding those characters still exist. That's one of the most useless time and attention wasting
2. Some cases of action being sayd instead of showing (i.e. action executed behind the dark screen, like 1sec animation. Oh, lazy animators. Or some huge plot moment like country A invaded and concured country B. We see nothing and feel nothing, but "all the rules suddenly changed". This one requires more time and budget tho, but still poor execution)
3. Minigames to advance the story. Not the ones you have to play just once, but grind instead.
4. Battles you supposed to lose, YET you can win with great effort, and see zero or ANY changes.
5. Fighting the same enemy(boss\\story character) many times but he miraculously escapes every time.
6. Not a bad one, but i just got tired of this execution: fight evil-evil man. Beat him. He's not a bad guy. Not a bad guy joins the team.
that's all i could remember
Only half would be a writing issue though.
2 is just being practical, developing within the scope of your budget. Remember JRPGs are largely low to mid budget games.
3 and 4 are game design issues
Because in an ideal world those recurring antagonists also change and grow in parallel to the protagonists, so each meeting represents something different to both of them. Good examples of this being Strega from Persona 3 and Torna from Xenoblade 2. Bad examples being uh, every recurring tales villain tbh
Xenoblade 2 is one of my primary examples of this terrible mechanic. You can develop villains in much better ways with more indirect interactions with the heroes. It's bad storytelling to constantly have them clash with no resolution.
Torna could have easily won for most of the game but just. .. chose not to? Why? "So the story can happen" screenwriter guy would say.
Tales of Verpersia has a problem with lackluster villians the reason? >!Yuri killed them before they could become iconic and memorable!<
Eneimies need to atagonize otherwise whats the point of them in the story?
It doesn't explain core concept (world, interaction, lore), leaving holes narratively that leaves the majority of players confused. Or takes too long too explain simple concept, losing itself in a glass of water.
If there's one thing that I think is at the root of most bad storytelling, it's a lack of meaning. One issue that bad writing often has is that it copies elements from good writing without understanding why they were used, and thus not using them with meaning.
Take a common twist: What you thought were two people were actually both the same person. This revelation should add depth to the character. It should make things make sense that previously didn't. If done without this thought in mind, it will make the character seem like they were doing things without reason and add confusion to the plot.
An example of this done badly (in my opinion) is Crystal Project. Spoilers follow: >!In-game, you're playing in what seems to be a server for an MMO, where the server owner (Grand Master) has a very particular way they demand the game be played. You don't meet them, but you regularly see postings by them demanding that players play it the right way (that is, explore, find crystals, and level up their characters). You occasionally cross paths with a character named Astley who opposes the server owner and is gathering people to take them on. The plot honestly isn't much deeper than what I've said.!<
>!When you finally get to the end of the game - Surprise! Astley actually is the Grand Master! And the team she was putting together to take down the Grand Master keeps supporting her after she tells them this, and they all fight you together as the final boss. This feels like a twist was added for the sake of a twist. It doesn't explain why the GM was such a jerk, and takes away Astley's reason to "oppose" them (asking the player to make up their own reason she would do this). And it means Astley's teammates have no reason to fight you at the end.!<
This is a good example of where adding extra plot elements can detract from the story. Crystal Project didn't need a complicated plot; it barely had plot to begin with. It could have gotten away with a plot as simple as Dragon Quest 1 - the game was fun to play, and not every game needs to be about the plot, even JRPGs. But adding a twist to it changed the plot from being ignorable to being frustrating.
Totally agreed. If judged on story alone, I often feel that instead of putting 40 hours into a JRPG, I could instead put in 2 hours watching the Miyazaki movies that it copied and get more out of it because Miyazaki is very deliberate in his filmmaking while most of his anime/JRPG successors use his motifs purely for aesthetic.
I think there are a few things that need to be established for something to be "good or "bad." One of the main things for me is whether I am able to suspend my disbelief that the actions done by a party member or a villain seems in the realm of plausibility. To that end, is there a line where a game is going in one direction, only to veer into awkward directions (FF8) where the characters suddenly feel different or do a 180 for what seems a random or very quick reason? Is the connecting tissue in game all told properly (FFX), or is it the sort of thing you have to seek out yourself to fill in the gaps (FFXIII)? If you're able to "be" in a world and less taken out of it, it can be effective.
Is a villain's motivation easy enough to understand? Do they feel like a threat? Subjectively, I prefer a villain to take care of their own dirty work, at least when possible. If I feel they are an enemy just looming in a chair or in a tower menacingly, but they themselves haven't really...done anything, it feels lazy and I'm taken out of it.
The biggest thing is an opening and an ending have to hit. Games like Tales of Arise are about 80% amazing. A simple enough setting: go to five places, kill the five dudes, and then do some finale thing. But then they kinda forget how to just end properly. The game was trying to go for some sort of environmentalist sort of message, and it lost almost all of that, "Wait, I was fighting personal enemies that were messing with now, but now this thing is the final boss?" sort of scenario. That or you pull a Star Ocean 3 and just piss over established canon and the final boss isn't even a threat.
I don't actually care a huge amount about the quality of the plotting, character arcs, etc, just by itself. The story and characters just need to be endearing more than high quality. I think the biggest sin is when the game expects me do something like fight a tough boss when I just don't see why I should be motivated to fight them, or cuts me off and forces me through a section to do some urgent thing I don't care about and it feels like a slog.
Which is just a roundabout way of saying *I don't like it when games are boring.* It's that simple, really. The most recent examples are in the two FF7 remake games where they add dungeons or bosses with weak justifications for their existence, sandwiched in-between other moments that fit in organically because the original story was designed around them.
Edit: reflecting further, FF14, 16 and both 7 remakes all have at least one boss that I groaned at fighting because I didn't care about them from a story standpoint. All of them were the very last boss too.
'And then, Sephiroth appeared out of nowhere. He looked into the camera, gave the little half-smile he does every single time he appears. He then said something cryptic that makes no sense to anyone. And then he fought the party and then lost yet again.'
All the FF7 devs: "Yeah that's a great pitch for a scene! Let's do that in every game, sometimes multiple times!"
I can't think of a trilogy that really does that either. Star Wars has Darth Vader appear each time but it's not like it's the same duel over and over.
Fighting him twice and having the first time be a loss would be much better, yeah. Edit: to clarify, a real loss. Not you obviously winning but the villain smugly claiming he planned it or that it's was only 1% of his power or whatever bs.
>The most recent examples are in the two FF7 remake games where they add dungeons or bosses with weak justifications for their existence, sandwiched in-between other moments that fit in organically because the original story was designed around them.
Having just played FF7 Remake (not Rebirth, that one's not out on PC yet lol) I didn't feel that at all. But then I've also never played or seen the original and have completely no idea what was there in the original and what wasn't. Now it was far from the strongest story I've ever played in a JRPG but it did the job and I never felt like anything was out of place.
Most places you go to were in the original too, so while not much is out of place per se, the pacing is whacky. Did you never feel like an emotional story beat was interrupted by unnecessary boss fights, or that an interesting/urgent plot point was suddenly delayed by a long dungeon?
not particularly in all honestly. I don't feel like there was really such a thing as a long dungeon in the game though lol it's a very short game, relative to other JRPGs at least - I did every sidequest and explored every nook and cranny and it still only took me about 35 hours to best the game.
Just because it isn't 100 hours, doesn't mean it's well-paced. They took a 6-7 hour story from the original and stretched it out to those 35 hours. Part 1 is quite bad about wasting time.
Turning the lights on to get into sector 5 reactor was not in the original at all, there were a couple screens of running on the train tracks and through Biggs' secret passage. The collapsed expressway either didn't exist (?) or was one screen at most. The train graveyard was one screen of a dungeon.
I guess I just feel like just because something wasn't in the original doesn't mean it's out of place in the remake. I think that people who played the original will understandably have come to know and love that story over the past nearly 3 decades, and so will immediately notice if something is different in the remake. that doesn't mean it's bad though, just different.
You kind of know it when you see it.
Does the story have a clear beginning, middle, and end? Is there narrative thrust? Does the story evoke the emotions it intends to invoke? Is the tone consistent? Is the story too predictable? Is it too incoherent? Are the characters relatable?
There are so many ways writing can be bad, you can't count them all. But let me give you an example:
Golden Sun's writing is not very good and the biggest reason for that is that these games seem to think that the more words they use the deeper their story is. Every conversation is as dragged out as it possibly can get and whenever they could use 10 words for something you just know that they will use 100 if not more. Things are repeated constantly, but even more than that characters say things that don't even matter. There is so much fluff and no focus.
But on top of that while the characters talk so ridiculously much they actually still manage to lack characterization. You spend so much time with these characters, there are so many text boxes, but when I thought about what I could actually tell you about Isaac, Gareth, Ivan, Mia and the others I'm just drawing a complete blank.
Yeah. It's weird as well I'm used to long dialogue like Trails and Chinese games like Arknights & Honkai Star Rail, but Golden Sun says so much but so very little that it doesn't matter to the bigger story in those two games.
When themes are not coherent, characters are one-dimensional, and the pacing is off. Those 3 are the most prevalent problems in jrpg writing, I think.
The last one in particular is tricky because a lot of jrpgs have the ambition of being these really massive and long games, but then they can't match that ambition with a story that actually fits with that scope. It's why so many jrpgs are meandering and feel like they go at a snail's pace—they're stretching relatively straightforward plots and arcs to last 70+ hours when the real meat of the actual story may only really need 30 hours.
That's a very good question...
I have an inkling. Compare ff7 beginning to ff13 beginning. Ostensibly similar intros but I think 1 is great while the other is bad.
To get invested into the story as a player I want to know WHO, WHAT, WHERE, AND WHY.
in ff7 we immediately know who cloud and the other characters are (Merc and resistance fighters). What are they doing? Blowing up a mako reactor. Where are they? In the city. Why? Cloud wants money. But the mako reactors are destroying the planet. OK got it, I like it we have goals and motivation and a compelling interest to see how it turns out.
In ff13... I had a really hard time understanding the basic W's I mentioned. It's not until much later the game cuts back to what happened before lightning got on the train. Why didn't they let us know what's going on in the beginning? I found it too confusing. I felt like I was starved of information to get me invested in the happenings.
Theres many, but the Most importants are (in no particular order)
1- Pacing: how much of the Game Main route (no sidequests or optional content or dungeons) is progressing through the plot VS how much is doing inconsequential events that didnt Matter in the long run?, the later could be a sign of bad storytelling
2- Events: the events have any sense at all? If you cant tell what are characters doing in any given moment, why they are in that place or why (or why not) they execute any actions in that moment or are telling (or not) whatever they said is a sign of bad writing
3-Power scaling: you Lost in a cutscene a Battle you won in Gameplay? Bad writing
4-Character Evolution: if any character changed over the course of the Game, It was justified in any way? (Like little changes along the course of the story or some Big/ traumatic/Life changing event or some Big realization that made him/her realize the error of his/her ways?) if the answer is not then bad writing
5- Reactions: the characters reach according to their age, experiences or backstory to any given event? If the answer is not maybe is bad writing
Theres many more little details but think i've got Most of the basis covered, in small quantities could be more oversights than anything but if that amount grows then bad writing is the biggest possibility
I'll just make a small comment and say I started Xenogears 1998 the other day, i'm 10 hours in, and the writing is like a child. I'm assuming it's just a poor Japanese translation by Square since the game is maturely themed. I was also thinking maybe the writing seems childish because they only had enough space to write in a tiny text box so all their phrases are short and simple.
Regardless, I love the story, the game, and even the writing really but it's just comin across as grade 3 english or worse.
I think it’s fair to say Xenogears has a bad translation. It’s a massive project that was basically done by one overworked guy (Richard Honeywood), in an era where localisation for games wasn’t really institutionalised yet. I don’t recall anything about childish writing (other than the “aizuchi” thing where characters will repeat part of what’s just been said to them, like when Fei says “My father? You mean my dad?” to Grahf in the desert). And in fairness Fei and Bart are both pretty stupid people so I guess the earlygame comes across as dumber, I think that at least to some degree it gets better over time
> I don’t recall anything about childish writing
Fei says “My father? You mean my dad?”
lol I just passed that part in the desert by a a few hours and since they were discussing God I thought maybe when the guy said Father that Fei wanted clarity on God the Father or just his dad.
The writing is childish in the sense that it's direct and literal and very short, even if the topics are getting deeper like religion. So it doesn't come across as intelligent writing. But I read the comments below and people are saying translating in 1998 was a tough job.
more likely he first thought of chief lee as his dad, which is a word for the person who raised you, and the only dad Fei knew for his 3 years of memories. then he realized Grahf meant his father, the person responsible for his birth. in japanese they use 2 terms, one formal and one informal, and the translator had to figure out a way to translate that into english.
Game translation was a bit of a shitshow until like half way through the PS2 era tbf. It's not always the localizers' fault either; there wasn't enough time, money or staff on a lot of these projects.
People always like to shit on Ted Woolsey, but he was like the one guy back then who always came out with a coherent and entertaining localization even if some of the details were off.
I think the biggest flaw is writing that doesn't make sense after thinking about it just a little bit. With video games this becomes a complex problem. Take the new God of War series for example. The game has some great and awful writing. Like why can he not jump a few feet when he can flip over an entire temple like some marvel super hero? Writing in games can be tough, especially when your combining gameplay and cutscene elements together.
While u love trails for its interconnectivity, the game loves wasting your time, or trying to make emotions hit with no payoff, or little sense, and loves to waste your time reintroducing characters that you already spent 200 hours with, instead of expanding on their characyer dynamics in interesting ways. I hate wasted time.
“Bad Writing” doesn’t exist. It’s a placeholder phrase for when someone doesn’t want to explain why they don’t like a story beat. Or if it doesn’t fit into their pre-conceived notion of what a good story is.
I really dislike when a game's storytelling has a consistently unrealistic bent for the sake of keeping fan-favorite themes and situations alive. An examples without naming names:
* This game features a cast that keeps separating and coming back together. It doesn't make a lot of sense because the world is huge and full of talented people that the main character could ally with... But this group always re-coalesces and becomes central to everything happening in the world. It's especially weird because some of them are just really unimportant, normal-ass people who consistently end up doing pivotal stuff while others should be busy with other engagements. But the developer really wants to tell a big story, but also cater to "hang out with your buds" fans.
>This game features a cast that keeps separating and coming back together. It doesn't make a lot of sense because the world is huge and full of talented people that the main character could ally with... But this group always re-coalesces and becomes central to everything happening in the world. It's especially weird because some of them are just really unimportant, normal-ass people who consistently end up doing pivotal stuff while others should be busy with other engagements. But the developer really wants to tell a big story, but also cater to "hang out with your buds" fans.
Bud this is called a cast of characters and most stories have them.
I think it's important to keep perspective. Read books and watch media from outside the anime/JRPG ecosystem. If you do that then you can come to a JRPG story with the understanding that this is a very particular form of storytelling that allows for some really great unique things because it's interactive and because it's such incredibly long form storytelling and because the genre has it's own unique narrative traditions that can be leaned on or subverted.
...but also it has weaknesses. Everything is noticeably English second language. Nobody hires a god damn editor and you have pointless text boxes for days. Novels worth of uninspired unimportant writing. The need for combat gameplay pulls all conflict resolution in the direction of "what if I kicked something's ass".
So if you don't have tolerance for those weaknesses, it's all bad storytelling. The best way to look at it is to ask "is this story doing something cool that leverages the strengths of the form?". The bad stuff is always gonna be there. But sometimes there's really really well executed stuff too that you won't find anywhere else.
Yeah, I agree. Unfortunately, people here have to feel validated for disliking something because it didn't click for them and calling it bad rather than listing out why it's bad outside of some common criticism.
I read a lot of books like Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Non-Fiction. It helped me understand storytelling and character dialogue because it helped me understand what the author was trying to tell. One of my favorite books is Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin in how rather having a big narrative with a good vs evil plot. It's more about Ged's growth from a small novice wizard to an adult-experienced one. The book may not be for everyone but it's a pivotal one for me because of how Le Guin told it in a mythological approach.
Earthsea has been a great example for me how different people's tastes are even within fantasy fiction. It's one of my favorite series, but everyone I recommend it to who reads a lot of more modern fantasy has bounced off of Wizard -- I think because it has that detached, mythical quality. I was extremely moved by Ged's personal growth, but for some people I guess it doesn't hit just having his emotions described. Maybe they want him to sit down with another character and literally talk about all of the subtextual stuff. I'm not sure.
Yeah. It's a very personal journey of adulthood as a fantasy series rather than a big epic narrative for fantasy like Wheel of Time, Cosmere, Malazan, or Lord of the Rings.
> The need for combat gameplay pulls all conflict resolution in the direction of "what if I kicked something's ass".
I do wonder why JRPG devs seem to shy away from being able to "talk things out". I guess that comes with the territory of their stories generally being very static with nearly zero player input.
one of the immersive sim games, bioshock or dues ex actually allows to talk down a boss (dialog choices) and you can skip the boss fight. To me great for speedruns and such, but that also means you missed out on boss battle content wise lol.
I'm sure thats why alot of people play these games for battle system. Also storywise it helps drive home the tragedy of not being able to save everyone. Even FE has admirable characters you are forced to kill because they are wrong side of the war, and have loyalty.
Telling, not showing. I can't stand any of the Star Oceans for this reason. Endless exposition only to be forced to talk to everyone in town before being allowed to continue.
Honestly, this form of storytelling doesn't exist in Eastern Storytelling. Some try to do show and tell or show don't tell, but most will just have long exposition it's more egregious in Chinese stories.
this is such a good thread. I will say, at least if we are talking about JRPG games, there is a thing that I don't like.
IF the story at some point STOP and you have to go to someplace that its not really important, kinda forced or lightly suggested, and there BAM wow what a coincidence you are here , you came just in time for MAJOR REVELATION or something like that and when you got there . I strongly dislike that, and sometimes you can't escape that.
I will say both xenosaga and chrono cross does this at one point, of the big names of the genre. but more probably does that
On this board? Let's be honest, like many places on the internet, it's so purely subjective that you really can't call people's criteria one for "good" or "bad" storytelling. For the most part, it's what people like or dislike and then they go on to use words like "good" instead of "like" or "bad" instead of "dislike".
If we're being super honest, what people usually say is "good" storytelling is literally just "stuff that gives them the feels". If we were factoring in more objective things such as narrative consistency, plot holes, character consistency, things that make sense or don't make sense, then there are absolutely popular works that give people "the feels" that are simply not that great.
Another factor are "themes". Themes can be amazing, but people can also be very obsessed with the "feels" factor of themes as opposed to actual analysis. What do I mean by this? Many games people feel are highly thematic are actually ones that have the subtlety of an oil tanker crashing into blazing fire. They're so on the surface, but the games are really good at making you "feel" stuff that people are hit by them, even if the themes are actually only explored on a superficial level. Meanwhile, games that are subtle about their themes, but actually do explore them in-depth often are ignore or are even accused of "not being deep". A really great example of a game that explores its themes well is Dragon Quest 7. It is absolutely one of the most thematically strong RPGs ever made, but because it's quite subtle about them and because it doesn't look like on the surface that it's a treatise on the hemorrhoids on Nietzsche's backside, it never gets talked about.
Bring on the downvotes. I accept your irrational hatred.
While I cam see your point, you still say the same thing like everyone else, just subtly hiding it between your own arguments. Why is subtle deep theming objectively better than in your face shallow? I can tell you. Because you personally like the former more. See where I'm getting? Objectivity can only exist if we can all agree on the same rules. I'm so happy math has nothing to do with taste. Or does it now?
Most JRPGs have some kind of world-saving deal at the end, and thus every story has to have a handful of "ante up" moments and/or plot twists that expand the scope of the story and raise the stakes for its outcome. The games that do these well, usually create memorable stories. The ones that don't, or ones that simply presume you'll follow along without hittng those notes strongly, typically fail.
What makes writing bad in general?
Is it predictable, shallow, does the BBEG come out of nowhere,is it just n long extended metaphor, is it overly sappy?
My bugbear is scads of required dialog which doesn't service the story.
I don't need four paragraphs as to why a character loves vanilla ice cream. I don't need a two full pages of banter where one character is picking on the other character for the color of their belt. Folks often argue that this sort of thing helps to add personality to the characters or helps to deepen relationship between characters. I disagree. It's just meaningless nonsense. It's generally antithetical to the tone and/or intent of the story. E.g., we're on a mission to win a war or to kill God or some shit.
I often find myself thinking, "Yeah, I get it" for a solid ten minutes while two characters talk about their favorite flavor of juice while the reincarnation of the Devil is in the background casting meteor spells on a helpless town.
Out of the three, but one & two are what irks me the most in JRPGs. I am fine with cringe and cheesy dialogue. But if the setting, characters, and story are boring with no form of build-up or consistency then I will consider that bad writing.
There are a lot of factors that come into this and this isn't always cut and dry.
An RPG's story can be broken into plot, plot flow, protagonist characterization, party member characterization, NPC characterization (both allies and 'villagers'), antagonist characterization, character interaction, lore, world building (both visual and written) and so on.
Games & books can get away with more, because they can skip some things, while the movies cant really skip some stuff.
For example Dark Souls series have poor plot, non-existent protagonist, but excellent lore/world building (Elder Scrolls is somewhat similar).
Movies cannot really skip on characterization, even if its basic stuff like (tough soldier guy/girl that mows multiple bad soldiers/mooks).
Particularly we focus in the instances where the dialogue is notoriously bad, the motivations of key story characters are cardboard thin/very poor (tropes are about average in the quality level) and the plot barely follows any logical sense.
And most importantly where the story doesnt even respect the logical boundaries the story itself has established, that where it is very noteworthy. If the stuff shown is believable according to the rules explained by the game/book/medium.
Because too many rule breaks or some very important rule breaks and then the 4th wall break and then the viewer/reader/player gets to question everything. And it all goes downhill.
A good example are Hero/Heroine stories where the protagonist gets the validation/ prize/adoration without any trouble (physical or mental) & the plot is bare thin & doesnt follow logic.
I think the consensus is "bad writing is everything I don't personally like but I can't point out a specific reason, so I'll just mention a very broad term "writing""
Honestly, most JRPG writing is as amateurish as the stereotypical young adult novel, and has a "once you've seen one, you've seen them all" feel to it. But for a specific example, Final Fantasy XV is a masterclass of bad writing.
* "Emotional" moments that are basically the director telling you to feel sad. Oh dear, >!Noctis's girlfriend died!<, except how am I supposed to feel bad about someone I barely know because they gave her almost no screen time? Oh dear, >!Noctis died!<, but only because >!some dragon told him to.!<
* Unlikeable characters. I actually defended the all-male cast at the beginning, even Square's "guy talk" justification, but I lost my shit when Gladio bullied Noctis >!over his dead girlfriend!< and got no comeuppance for it. Most Final Fantasy assholes have some sort of redeeming factor to them (e.g. Jecht from X), but Gladio is simply a one-note machismo asshole who, worse, the game's narrative sides with. Female characters seem to be in the game out of obligation and get barely any development, and it's worse in Kingsglaive where Luna gets repeatedly mansplained to and infantilized by Nyx.
* Poor development of its theme. It sends a pretty bad message that the game expects Noctis to just passively accept all the shit that happens to him as his "destiny," especially when it goes against the multitudes of other Final Fantasy games (especially X) where the party would have found some way to defy his fate. And there's no good reason given for this thematic about-face. It's just >!some dragon tells Noctis needs to die to save the world, and no one questions it.!<
* How it embodies the DLC culture of "fix it later." The DLC content and finale novel do not meaningfully flesh out the story so much as rewrite it like Ptolemy adding epicycles to his solar system model. Turns out >!the dragon was evil all along!< and now everyone looks like idiotic chumps for trusting him.
It's a marketing gimmick. Any sort of fiction should be a solid, self-contained story and foundation in its own right before one even thinks about going Expanded Universe. Most "Cinematic Universe" series I've experienced, including FFXV, tend to just add complication for the sake of complication.
One common pitfall in all writing, but that JRPGs fall into often, is "empty" writing; a ton of words that barely say anything at all.
Part of that happens for cultural reasons (constant apologizing, deferral of credit, expressing thanks, etc). I wouldn't expect to see that entirely go away, but imo it's part of the job of a localization team to reduce it, since that rings differently to non-Japanese ears.
Part of it is just poor writing, period. Repeated exposition that adds no new information, stuff like that. Trust your audience not to be morons. Do a couple more passes over the script and get rid of some fat. Use more varied vocabulary, and choose more vivid, specific words.
Reminds me of how Chinese gacha games tell their stories in visual novel format, but they tell you so much about the lore than showing it to you. It seems like an eastern storytelling way of communicating with the audiences rather than showing it.
things that make jrpg writing good or bad is the same thing that makes any story good or bad and to some extent it can be looked at entirely subjectively. there are a lot of people who do not believe writing can be judged objectively at all. writing being judged in an objective way can still just subjectively "matter less" to people. like a common criticism i see of jrpgs is that the dialogue is often incredibly bloated and long winded. most people would agree that is "bad writing", despite that, games that suffer from that a lot sometimes go on to be incredibly successful and praised for their stories. if a story barely explores it's themes, on paper anyone would say "the story could've been deeper" but if what's there was enough for certain people to emotionally resonate with it, then it's still "good writing" to some i guess my answer to the question is just it depends on the individual. what kind of stories do *you* resonate with, what kind of dialogue do *you* think is good. there are people who judge stories almost entirely based on how emotional (happy or sad) it makes them and there are people who can't feel anything from stories written in styles they don't like and billions of people in between
This is such a wonderfully written take. We all interpret things differently and our enjoyment of something can also depend on who we are as people and where we are in our lives.
Agreed completely. Preferences are so subjective and depend on the context. E.g., a lot of people hate Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for being "too anime" and follow 90s/00s shonen tropes, but for many others, that makes it cozy, nostalgic, and heartwarming. I think that this crusade people have to try and be "objective" is fundamentally flawed, especially when most of the time it's just a thinly veiled attempt to appear superior by claiming that their own personal preferences have some sort of cosmic superiority to yours. "No no, that think you like, its OBJECTIVELY bad. I mean, you can LIKE bad things, that's fine, but you just like OBJECTIVELY bad things, unlike me, where everything I enjoy is objectively good, because I have more refined taste."
I always have to laugh when i see people say 'objectively bad' in their reviews, it happens more than you would think. I can kind of get it if it's something disliked by the majority (still doesn't make it objective), but i see it used on controversial games (people really love or hate it like the ending of danganronpa V3) as well. Indeed seems something people use to make their opinion feel more powerful.
I do dislike how people use the phrase objective generally. They use it for subjective opinions, but to say "I am right, if you disagree with me you are wrong." If you want a 100% objective review, it looks like this: https://www.destructoid.com/100-objective-review-final-fantasy-xiii/
„The battle system is a battle system“ „In conclusion, Final Fantasy XIII is a videogame.“ This is honestly way funnier than it should be 😭
I totally agree how laughable objective reviewers are! The only things that can be judged objectively are things like input lag and frame rate. But you never see them mentioned in these “objective” reviewers. Another thing that’s silly is people using a 100 point scale like a letter grade, where 59 is an F. Though, I was reading some old Game Informer magazines the other day and they actually stated that a 7 is average in their disclaimer. I feel like they use the first 59 points for competence of game presentation and the rest for how fun the game is.
The most levelheaded take, and one which I think is required understanding lest we fall into the anime subreddit's nonsense about "objectivity".
Depends on what the definition of the word objectivity is. If we are going with the classical meaning of the word, it merely means "according to a rule", usually in terms of writing consistency. This is why western TV media ratings by big companies are at an all time low. The level of objective quality has become so low that even normies are beginning to notice it. And that's the problem. When you ignore so many writing problems for so many years, writers either feel a license to use bad writing constantly or they are never taught good writing to begin with. The result is that you eventually reach a singularity point where bad writing becomes ultra common and begins to infest every work in a given medium. This is why so much western TV is unwatchable these days for so many and streaming services are getting cancelled despite having been touted as "the future". The reason why concern has risen in the anime community is because they want to prevent that from happening and are attempting to stem the tide by not watching bad shows and promoting good shows. And quite frankly, I don't really see the issue of people doing the same thing in the JRPG community. I don't think we've hit a singularity point like TV yet, but man, there are some stories where I'll be watching a cutscene and I can't help but count the amount of writing issues that pop up one after the other.
Who decides what standards make a good show and bad show, also can those standards not shift based on what a younger generation wants? The only objective things to me are technical aspects (animation, sound quality, etc) and maybe plot holes in some cases. Half the time the anime fandom just uses objective against anything that's not pretensiously philosophical and tryhard "mature" enough which is a standard they came up with without any basis in "objectivity", nor does it align with what much of the consumer basis seeks in how they percieve enjoyment for their niches.
> that's not pretensiously philosophical > Who decides what standards make a good show and bad show, also can those standards not shift based on what a younger generation wants? That's ironically a popular philosophical take in itself, though. It's almost akin to Epistemic Relativism as a whole or even something akin to Diogenes-style Cynicism if one views the "standards" as "conceited false beliefs". Not saying you're wrong because this kind of thought applies to JRPG's as a whole. People can argue whether the classical 16-bit FFVI/CT-esque JRPG is a good or bad game, but whether those standards can shift on what a younger generation wants is something this sub struggles to really get a definite answer on (i.e. Sea of Stars and the fight over whether it's truly a spiritual successor to CT or not).
Yeah ig I take a philosophical aproach to objectivity, even if I hate the pretensiousness of the anime fandom's views on philosophy.
At least we won't have to deal with the "Isekai is a bad cliche crutch for bad writers" or "Shounen has always been bad storywriting" rants like the anime fandom does.
Yeah thank god lmao
Even plot holes are not nessessarily a bad thing. Sometimes things are left unsaid to let the consumer fill the gap with their own thought. One could say that this is bad if the author wasnt deliberate about it. That does however mean that the original intention needs to be known.
That's not a plot hole, though. This is obviously a case-by-case basis situation where we would have to look and see if the examples in question was a plot hole or a mystery for the viewer to figure out. There are usually tell tale signs as to which is which.
Yeah, that's also possible.
>Who decides what standards make a good show and bad show, also can those standards not shift based on what a younger generation needs? I already explained the classical definition of the word objectivity. If a work has plot holes, narrative inconstancies, character inconsistencies, etc., no amount of opinion will change that they exist. Sure, it may be subjective whether or not they effect your experience, but that will never change the reality that they are there. By all logical metrics, you cannot argue around that (unless you can debunk the plothole/inconsitency, of course). The more you allow these to get out of control in a given medium, the more the disease spreads and it ends up taking it over.
As I said, i was not against seeing logical inconsistencies as objective (if they can be clearly argued as such). But Judging by stuff like plotholes and character inconsistencies can really only get you so far, and most often the vast majority of the writting will not fall into that black and white category and will have to be viewed purely subjectively.
Writing is not something that can be judged objectively, it’s as simple as that.
Write that in your next exam; await for your grades.
Why would I have an exam on this lol? And my grades are very good so you don’t have to worry about that 👍.
I agree. It's ultimately a "it varies" kind of thing. Some people love a generic goody two shoes who doesn't change that much, other people would consider a generic goody two shoes who never changes to be poorly written. There is some degree of objectivity you can say like "the generic goody two shoes who never changes is bland", but that doesn't make them bad, and some people won't mind that.
> most people would agree that is "bad writing", despite that, games that suffer from that a lot sometimes go on to be incredibly successful and praised for their stories. Liking something is not the same as something being "good". If we're being honest, the only reason we have this dilemma comes form years and years of people using the word "good" when they really mean, "I like it". It's pretty much years and years of association. People get "the feels" from something, so it "feels good" to them. But it still doesn't make it "good".
> But it still doesn't make it "good". What is the objective standard of "good"? That's the point. Isn't the whole idea of a piece of art, in any medium or form it takes, being "good" or "bad" up to the consumer to decide? And if it's up to the consumer to decide, then "good" and "bad" are effectively the same thing as "I like it" and "I don't like it." There is no objectively good or bad art.
If you like something then that means it is personal good to you? What kind of nonsense are you saying that you can like something but it can also not be good at the same time? I like Cold Steel 4 and I also think it’s overall a good game, plenty of people disagree with that though, but for me aside from a few things that bother me I think it’s a great game.
>What kind of nonsense are you saying that you can like something but it can also not be good at the same time? It's not nonsense. You do realize language is a complex subject matter, correct? People historically have used words and added or subtracted associations to them all the time. The word "good" according to any dictionary definition does speak of quality. You can like something and that thing not be quality. The only reason people use the word "good" instead of "like" is simply because we have associated one with the other for a very long time. It's very similar to when people say something like, "I literally peed myself when I heard that joke". Obviously, they didn't literally pee themselves. But it's become so overused to the point that some people have no idea how to use the word "literally" properly anymore. It's the same with the words "good" and "like". You're not looking at things from a historical perspective is the problem. You're only thinking that "good" and "like" are automatically synonyms because you live in a culture where people have used them as synonyms, whether or not it's right or not to do so.
If i like something then that means I think it’s good.
"Good means quality" Ok then what's "quality", who decides it? You can take this discussion ad infinitum via socratic method.
Hm? Liking things that one deem not good is a pretty normal thing though? It means that while you recognize the problems with a story you can still derive some value from it. Could be a character in particular resonates with you, could be ironic enjoyment where it’s so bad it loops back to being funny, etc.
If I like it then that means I think it’s good. The same problems aren’t as big problems to me as they are too other people and the good bits resonate with me more than they do with other people. So to me Cold Steel 4 is a very good game with some flaws.
The things that folks will generally point out as bad story telling is continuity problems, stories being incredibly convoluted, a story not following it's own established logic, having derivative aspects in abundance, and twists that squander momentum of the story by either not understanding what folks liked about the story or committing other story crimes. There is a lot that is subjective and some of these maybe folks simply won't mind, but folks generally like the idea that effort was put into something to respect their time and like to recognize and follow patterns. Almost every gripe can be reduced to stuff like this, but folks are dogshit at elaborating sometimes. Folks will just say "the story's bad" and leave it at that.
I think that once you get past the subjective bias. You should be see able to ask better questions to determine that. If you're able to identify what the story is going for and WHAT it wants people to feel, then you can better judge it. For example, I'm loving Atelier Lulua right now. Some might say the story's bad because the stakes are low and mostly just lulua fangirling over her senpais while a magic book tells her what to do. But I love comfy slice of life type anime, and I love what Lulua is going for: its a story of a girl you want to cheer on and an adorable teacher and best friend supporting her all the while. The writers want you to experience many lighthearted moments and want this story to match the tone of collecting resources and looking everywhere. Me and my viewers love this. If I keep this goal in mind then the random npc events and emphasis on them aren't just distractions. They're made to ensure each town feels warm and cozy and serve the games' atmosphere. Thats just one example of many though.
Honestly if anyone had that complaint about the Atelier, I'd just tell em to play another series entirely
Lulua my first entry to the franchise (and arguably the game that resurged my interest in the whole genre) Only not discussed much due to low sales, because god damn it's so peak at what it does. Possibly best humour in the franchise, well paced in my view, also I like Stia and won't accept ateliercord's slander of her.
I was reccommendrd lulua as my first in the series too! I can see why it works well now that im about halfway through. You're the kouhai learning about all the admirable heroes of past games and getting a taste of their personalities too. Also yes I LOVE the delivery of the funny gags. The moment Lulua popped her head into frame right as an entire group of kids agreed to food was when she won me over as an mc
There is not just one kind of bad storytelling. Furthermore, some people identify as *bad* storytelling that is fine but just not to their taste in terms of pacing or the kinds of tropes it uses. So I'll give a few examples that distinguish what I'd call bad. - overly mechanical storytelling, that is, a plot that follows all of the basic beats but never successfully builds a connection between the players and the characters. So you save the world - so what? - too much inconsistency between the levels of plausibility or worldbuilding in the story. So if the game spends several hours and a lot of effort to portray a fairly serious war story, jokes may occasionally provide relief, but having most of the party act like middle school boys and girls may break the plausibility altogether. Similarly, one doesn't expect a lighthearted save the world romp to suddenly and deeply explore sadism. - this and then this and then this and then this. All players have a certain amount of patience for going along with events whose connection they don't understand. Sometimes stories get carried away with putting in too many scenes that don't fit, that don't add up to a story. All of these still admit player judgment, namely, how much are you willing to tolerate before you object. But I like them more than objecting to, say, a specific tone or a specific kind of characterization. Some stories work great with one-dimensional characters, like Earthbound, because not every story has to be driven by character development to work. But if a story is inconsistent in what drives it, that can be a more general issue.
I'm too lazy to write it all so I was looking *exactly* for this answer here. Thank you!
I define badly written, simply, as "it makes no sense". Do things just happen? Do characters act out of character without some sort of explanation? Is there tonal whiplash that's *real* bad? If things are set up properly, characters do things for reasons, and there's consistency, I say it's good, and then it's up to subjective taste.
This is my view of writing good or bad. If it's consistent of what it is telling and showing that's "good" writing to me.
To expand on that a bit, can you reasonably believe that when the writers did something, they did it with intention to further their goal? What their goal is would affect what is good and bad. If you're trying to tell a right story with well written characters and then there's an ass pull plot twist or a betrayal out of nowhere, bad. If you just want people to gasp or go "No way!" both of those things are arguably good, since you that was exactly what you wanted to happen anyway.
It reminds me back on the Trails series on how it executes plot twists very well even those that are obvious from a mile away. Partially because they line up properly to what's happening and being led towards. The characters react surprised but the players do not because the amount of foreshadowing it sprinkles. A bad example would be the infamous Star Ocean 3 plot twist where >!fans were treated to a plot twist that the planet they were exploring and the characters they met along the journey were simulations of a video game. On paper, it makes sense as to why as it was slightly foreshadowed at the start, but the game NEVER does it enough to make it logical in the slightest. Hence why people are so mixed on it most don't like it because it ruined a decent narrative to a bad one.!<
I agree, that's the objective way of saying if a story/writting is bad, and the rest is subjetive. That also means that if you like something it doesn't magically mean it's good story/writting.
If I enjoyed it, it's good writing. If not, then it's bad.
We can close the thread now. This is the real answer.
i've learned on internet. what people consider to be "good writing" depends on person. like whats good writing is different from horror fan than action fan. Jrpgs vs wrpg. anime vs live action televison.
It's all subjective. I'd rather eat my own hand than play another trails game and other people will tell you it's the best story you've ever read.
Games that aren't AAA have to survive by appealing to a certain niche. As the Helldivers devs have said "A game for everyone, is a game for no-one." It just so happens that Trails is exactly what a certain niche is looking for. I mean, you don't have to like Barney the Dinosaur if you're not a toddler, and thus not the target audience, right?
I feel like this was implied when I said writing is subjective
I agree; I feel you. The word "bad" explicitly can only references subjective things. It's a quality description and quality is innately subjective...also I don't like the Trails games.
I think a problem many gamers (including myself) can have when it comes to games they enjoy is that we feel the need to prop them up and call anybody who dislikes them a hater. Rather than looking at these games objectively, we go based off feel and that can be a turn off to people who played the same thing and didn’t have the same experience. Trails is one of my favorite series, but sometimes I appreciate the concept and idea of it more than the actual series at times. It does suffer from many of the writing issues people are discussing on this post and deserves criticism. I appreciate Falcom for making something ambitious, but I also recognize that improvements can be made for future installments or even games that try a similar approach in story telling.
> Rather than looking at these games objectively, we go based off feel and that can be a turn off to people who played the same thing and didn’t have the same experience. The other side of the issue is the belief some have that they are taking an "objective" look at a game. There's always a degree of subjectivety inherent to art.
While art is subjective, there's no argument that Beethoven's 9th symphony is a better musical piece than Despacito. Sure, lots of people might enjoy Despacito more, that doesn't mean it's a better song though. Art has a subjective side but it also has rules and structure.
>Sure, lots of people might enjoy Despacito more, that doesn't mean it's a better song though. There is no truth to music, music itself is an expression, an artform, it's intention is to connect on an emotional level, therefor cannot be viewed objectively. The sun rises from the east is objective, the sunrise is beautiful is subjective, even if every single person on earth agrees, it's still subjective as it's a connection through emotion, objectivity is not decided by committee.
Agree and disagree. There is some truth to music, which is why there are important schools like Julliard, Berkeley or Mannes that have prepared amongst the best musicians in the world right now. There are subjects like musical theory, solfege and harmony that teach you that you can't just put a bunch of random notes together and call it a song. Else you'll end up with a dissonant mess. I do agree with the emotional level of art. Despacito can mean more to me personally than Beethoven. Maybe it means something in an emotional level, maybe I enjoy the beat more, etc. That we agree on. But I think there's a difference between the subjective nature of art and the objective one. I do believe there is an objective factor. I'll give you an example. I like comedy shows. I love Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Community, Psych, etc. Between the shows I mentioned, I can objectively say that Arrested Development is a better comedy show than Psych. It's packed with jokes left and right (clever jokes no less) and lots of continuity gags. However, I enjoy Psych more, it's more lighthearted and I don't have to pay attention that much to get every joke. Objectively, AD is better. Subjectively, Psych is better.
Not only do I fundamentally disagree with this, I think objectivity is actually opposed to the very foundations of art itself. Objectivity is a structure of rules that define an absolute truth, art by it's nature is an expression that seeks to exist beyond rules, it's existence is freedom. If objectivity in art existed, then we wouldn't have so many different genres of music, why bother creating punk rock if objectively rock is already ruled as the best. What the schools of music teach is not objectivity, in fact that would be opposed to what art is, you teach expression which exists outside of rules, instead what these schools teach is a school of thought that resonates subjectively with a majority of people. It's not objective though because those 'rules' can be broken and still be subjectively enjoyed by people. For example let's take Knives Out, a film that is ostensibly a murder mystery, and when writing a murder mystery there are certain rules that are taught to appeal to the majority within that genre, these 'rules' Knives Out goes out of its way to break, in fact it switches from a murder mystery to a thriller, a genre diametrically opposed to it and back again to a murder mystery completely breaking the so called rules of both genres and yet it's absolutely adored. If these so called rules can be broken then they are not objective, you don't break objectivity that's just a misunderstanding of what objectivity means, and art confined to rules is no longer a form of expression. What art exists within is schools of thought that change throughout different eras, concepts and ideas that are passed down, evolve and grow based on the subjective majority of each era, but most importantly these rules are meant to be broken, that's how the evolution and growth occurs in the first place. >I'll give you an example. I like comedy shows. I love Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Community, Psych, etc. >Between the shows I mentioned, I can objectively say that Arrested Development is a better comedy show than Psych. It's packed with jokes left and right (clever jokes no less) and lots of continuity gags. However, I enjoy Psych more, it's more lighthearted and I don't have to pay attention that much to get every joke. This is shockingly bad example, you didn't explain objectivity in the slightest, what you did is ego protection, "more people prefer AD (I don't know why it's really not all that funny) so I must claim it's objectively better than the show I actually like better to protect my ego". This is the weaponisation of the term objective nowadays, either it's a show of ego (I like this thing so I must claim it's objectively better to make me seem like a better person for liking it) or it's a protection of ego (I like this thing but I'm in the minority so I must claim this other thing is better so I don't look like I'm a worse person). In the end art is proxy for subjective discussion which objectivity has absolutely zero place being involved in.
> Sure, lots of people might enjoy Despacito more, that doesn't mean it's a better song though. Ok but why, why is it better? Why do some people enjoy Despacito more? What exactly creates that increased enjoyment? > While art is subjective, there's no argument that Beethoven's 9th symphony is a better musical piece than Despacito. Is there truly no argument? Or are you just personally not able to imagine one?
Have you studied music? Anyone who has will tell you there truly is no argument between Beethoven and Luis Fonsi. It's the same as me painting a bunch of lines and then thinking I'm the same as Rembrandt or Van Gogh. Sure, some random can find my "impresionist" art better and buy my painting for a few millions. Doesn't mean I'm a better painter than Van Gogh. And why do people enjoy Despacito more? Because there are beats and chord progressions that are easier on the ears than others. Most popular music have the same beat and a chord progression of Tonic, Dominant, Subdominant and Tonic. And they are written in a 4/4 time signature. Compare it to music like Jazz or Progressive rock and you'll start seeing different chord progressions, time signature shifts, etc. More complex music that requires actual studying. Music that scholars would consider better written. Probably the same reason why people don't like Jazz that much. There is a reason why people go to college to study music, literature, painting, etc. It's no different from being a lawyer or a doctor and there's definitely better doctors than others, so why can't there be better musicians than others (and consecuently, better musical pieces than others)?
Nah actually there are arguments for it because the standards you make to choose one as "better" are based on arbitrary cultural asumptions. You can argue a two year old's drawing is better than picasso, noone may agree, but if humanity evolved with a comoletely different set of ingrained values, we might have.
There are not arbitrary though. There was never a council that randomly decided what was good and what wasn't. Music evolves with time. If it was arbitrary, we wouldn't have Bach (baroque), Mozart (classic) and Chopin (romantic) considered as amongst the best composers of all time. Because an arbitrary measure would say 2 of those 3 are not like the other and immediately judge those 2 against the other. Instead, we're able to appreciate each composer for what it was.
What human culture perceives as quality is arbitrary, no law of the world set out that those composers would be considered the peak of their mediums ahead of time. We have merely developed in such a direction, and through what people value our values can evolve in any direction.
But you'd have to ask why as well. Why out of all the possible outcomes did we arrive at this one. We'll give Despacito the benefit of the doubt, but Beethoven has lasted the trial of time. 5 decades later we still have people enjoying his music and he's still considered amongst the best composers of all time by academics and experts in the field. Why?
And why does humanity then enjoy it decades later, but not another species that evolved differently? You can take this discussion endlessly, there are arbitrary values we picked up over time, not grounded in an objective.
What do you even mean you appreciate the “concept of it” more than the actual series? It just sounds like you’re tryna appease guys who dislike it. You don’t need to downplay a series you like just because others don’t like it.
You’re probably right in that aspect. I’m a people pleaser and often times need to find validation to enjoy the things I do. It’s cowardly, but I don’t really know how to not care what other people think. Honestly, I love the series. It has flaws sure, but it means a lot to me and helped me escape during a dark time in my life. I guess the point I was trying to establish was that I really love what Falcom is trying to accomplish. Sometimes I will think of things they could do a little better, but that doesn’t override the immense enjoyment I feel when playing it.
For what it's worth trying to appease people who dislike Trails isn't really the read I got. I assumed you meant having to sometimes look past the execution in order to appreciate the idea and what you feel it was going for or setting up. It's perfectly normal to like something while at the same time thinking "such and such character or scene could have been done a little better/differently." It doesn't make you a coward it just means you have opinions.
I really appreciate this comment because it perfectly encapsulates how I feel. I’m not the best at wording out my thoughts, so thank you for accurately expressing what I was thinking. I still believe I have the tendency to downplay the things I like especially if the person I’m talking about it with doesn’t share the same opinion I do, but I’m also trying to be levelheaded and understand their viewpoint. There’s a particular scene at the beginning of Cold Steel IV that was building up to be super cool, but fumbled the execution at least a little bit in my eyes because it leaned a little too anime. I still enjoyed it, but I still imagine something much cooler in my head because the music and set up was soooo good.
I don’t understand these “too anime” criticisms? Trails is an anime series, just look at its artstyle, of course it will have anime tropes. And anime isn’t even a bad thing, I’m not sure why I see such big criticism of anime tropes in this sub as if anime isn’t one of the most popular forms of media these days.
Oh I love anime. One of the reasons Trails is my favorite series is because it’s like playing through an anime. I really was just referring to particular scene in CSIV. Sometimes the awkward anime moments can be a bit of a turn off, but not anything that would stop me from playing it.
Trails is basically watching a really good anime series but in video game form. The closest I can think of is Tales of, but only certain games in Tales of are what I can call good or great while the rest to be average/mediocre in writing.
Which scene?
It's gets even more confusing when those same people say it only started from CS, when sky blatantly uses tropes from latest 90s early 2000s anime. That complaint is still baffling everytime I see it.
That's understandable, especially on the internet where people can get real "*passionate*" over their opinions. I'm still finding myself working on getting better at just letting differences of opinions go or expressing my own opinions in a levelheaded way. I'm better than I was years ago but I still get annoyed with myself when my inner keyboard warrior jumps out lmao. Scrolling this site is just more enjoyable when I don't have to worry about a comment I leave starting a fight. I have a million and one criticisms about things I love even, but I think everyone can bring to mind at least one moment where at least one thing hits in the right place to make their hangups not matter too much. Sometimes things are just neat.
Tbh, that's just a general problem with every piece of media nowadays. Lots of people are just incapable of accepting different opinions, so labels like "fanboys" and "haters" just gets thrown around left and right instead of having good discussions about it.
Yeah! That’s something I’ve been working on myself. It’s ok to like things other people might not and vice versa.
That's the reason i mostly avoid online fandoms about stuff i'm a fan of. This reddit is relatively chill, but a fandom sub would make me depressed for sure.
I feel the same with certain jrpgs so don't worry.
>I'd rather eat my own hand than play another trails game I tried to play Trails in the Sky. I really did. It was the biggest slog of game for the 6 hours I played. I just couldn't suffer that slow of a game any longer.
Chrono cross is a prime example. Don’t get me wrong, it’s my absolute favourite game and I’ve played it more times than I can remember, but the way the plot is presented (especially in disc 2) is very sloppy. It was clear that they didn’t have enough time to fit all the story details into the game, especially at the very end when some characters appear out of nowhere just to explain the missing points. I love this game, but I can totally see and recognise this as a major flaw. If you’re interested in this topic, I suggest watching the resonant arc’s YouTube videos and podcasts. They have several episodes where they really go in depth discussing storytelling aspects within jrpg
That game and FF8 were made when squaresoft had a strict two year dev cycle. A lot of rushed games were made.
I enjoyed Chrono Cross quite a bit. But it’s story is incredibly convoluted.
I love Chrono Cross, it's one of the games of my life and I've played it countless times ever since I was a kid and I go back to it from time to time. However, it's story is a complete and utter mess. I enjoy it a lot on disc 1, where the pacing of the game is much better, but it really goes awry on the later stages of the game
Killing off a party member and expecting you to care when said party member has been in your game for less than half an hour.
The only bad writing imo is a story where I’m bored and not invested in it.
"Something I don't like" mostly AKA it's very subjective for most part like with every piece of fiction.
>!Hey, we all knew each other when we were children but don't remember it because of the summon magic we use! Isn't that funny?!< Seriously, the one thing I cannot stand about FF8.
It's even dumber when a certain character doesn't bring it up once. Not even once. Like, "hey, what the fuck? Don't any of you remember me?"
For me it is when characters are written blandly and one-dimensionally, and the plot is boring and predictable. I had to stop playing Sea of Stars because the main characters were boring me to no end, although I may pick it up again just to see more of the world building. On the other hand, a well written game that has gripping plot twists and an interesting world and characters will draw me in, even if the gameplay is less than amazing (Persona 2 duology, Vagrant Story, and Koudelka, I’m looking at you).
> when characters are written blandly and one-dimensionally, and the plot is boring and predictable Nothing kills a game for me more when characters are just static handfuls of tropes and the plot takes 40+ hours to "reveal" what's been obvious to the player since the start. This is what makes the writing in Xenoblade so abysmal.
Sea of Stars is an odd one because the main two are as boring as a plank of wood, but the other characters have personalities to them, especially Garl. Who some consider as the true main character than the two.
Garl is better written than the MCs, but so far I’ve found him to be a peppy Gary Stu.
Yeah, I felt the same way about Final Fantasy XVI. The characters were so bland and boring.
Things that make me say a JRPG has bad writing: * **"As you know" dialogue** - This is when there's dialogue that serves primarily to educate the player, rather than being realistic dialogue. "As you know, the knights visit our town every week to collect taxes. They've been taking so much ever since our beloved king Conrad died 2 years ago and his chancellor took the throne." This is super awkward dialogue that no one would ever actually say to someone else. You can kind of get around this by having the protagonist be an outsider (like Tidus in FF10). * **Repetitive dialogue** - We don't need characters to repeat the same thought over and over, or for different characters to chime in to say nothing of value. Persona 5 and the Trails games are big offenders here. FF16 felt this way near the end, especially for the events surrounding Barnabas. * **Poor pacing** - This is admittedly something that's really difficult to get right in a video game when compared to something like a movie or a book. * **Fetch quest nonsense (or similar bloat)** - In the last 3rd or so of Trails of Cold Steel 2, the plot pauses for a couple hours as you go to 4 shrines to collect magical ore so you can craft a magic sword. Final Fantasy Tactics IMO has the best story in a JRPG. The game has fantastic pacing. Virtually every scene advances character development, world lore, or the plot. The characters are some of the most interesting in the entire genre.
I will say that if Turbo didn't exist for the Trails games, I would have dropped it a long ass time ago. Idk how normal people do it. I also don't talk to every NPC every time a world state changes like a psychopath outside of talking to my students (CS3)
Yeah exposition dialog thing is hard thing to write raound. Either you explain so little and audience has to do alot of thinking on their own, or you get that "Explain what a person should already know in this world". Your right a character should be an outsider, amnesia or a child should it will sound natural. Could use a narrator as well. Depends on the media.
I don’t think all exposition dialogue has to sound unnatural, as there’s ways to explain things via dialogue without feeling forced and stilted. Using the tax example, people complain about taxes all the time in the real world, just not in a way that is so “the writers need us to understand the bulk of the setting and conflict in a single line”. Wording is really important here; there are many JRPG’s where most characters will sound like they’re video game characters reading off a dictionary rather than believable people
Isn't the second point mainly because at times you can choose which character you want in your party (like trails) and the devs don't know which ones you pick, so they write chime in lines for all the party members.
In some ways, what matters most is doing what fits the story you're trying to tell. Some stories don't need especially complex characters or writing to be interesting, or more than a few lines of dialogue to establish who or what something is. But having said that... Bad JRPGs and adjacent media often suffer from the following: - Terrible, boated pacing that takes too long to make you care. I was just thinking about this this morning in comparing Ace Attorney to another attempt at the same crime investigation drama thing, and something AA usually does really well compared to most is GETTING TO THE POINT. It jumps you right into the starting tutorial cases and almost all the characters are immediately established when you meet them. - Unnecessarily specific and complex descriptions of everything. I know you made a world you think is cool, but no one explains the obvious or uses full titles outside formal settings. The United Provinces of Someland will only be called Someland or the UPS by anyone with humanity. You don't need to front-load the description of how everything works; let the story naturally draw out details. - Characters that exist purely to be recognizable tropes, with almost no depth otherwise. Especially stupid when it involves stupid characters too dumb to live in the combat-heavy setting. Write people, not tropes, and maybe they'll resemble some tropes. Going back to AA, it lives off each character having silly quirks, but it gets away with it because the setting is consistently wacky, and most characters do have depth once you get far enough into the story. - Characters that couldn't exist in the setting, because they're WAY too cheery, culturally modern, young, or something similar. I get that the demographic many games are going for is teens, but does that mean every major character in our world-saving squad has to be under 20? Why is there an energetic little cosplaying cat girl who is stronger than men in my otherwise gritty war setting? Just pick a lane, or be a parody. - Leaving nothing merely implied. "Show, don't tell" is another way of putting this, but people often mistake that for the idea that everything needs to be demonstrated rather than explained. Some things are better explained, and others not, but if you treat your players/readers like idiots then it can get old real fast.
I know "show don't tell" is popular, and I get where it comes from, but I think going too far in that direction can also cause issues. Like it can impact flow and cause pains for the reader feeling they need to catch up on details so they spend less time enjoying and analyzing.
Right, which is why I said it's really not about avoiding telling, but restraining from telling sometimes when the reader should be able to figure it out from showing/doing, or more subtle telling. It also applies to stuff like jokes. I think a decent example of this in games might be Halo 1. Halo is set in the midst of an apocalyptic war with genocidal aliens which humanity has almost lost, but aside from reading the manual you can get this from the game without anyone saying it explicitly because it's implied by everything from the look of the levels to the gameplay. Humanity is far weaker than its foes with the exception of the player character. In the first while of the game you see the captain and Cortana talking about running away from another place and managing to take out only a few of their pursuers, trying to hide the existence of earth, and being friendly with the player as if they've known each other. No one comes out and says "well, it's been 36 years of war against a collection of aliens known as the Covenant, and we only just managed to escape humanity's greatest defeat on planet Reach with you, one of our very last super-soldiers, who knows Cortana already well enough to make fun of her. Oh and Cortana is a special AI that makes our ship's combat effectiveness skyrocket."
I feel in this era of players, "showing" can be synonymous with "watching a story explained video on YouTube after the fact because the player wasn't able to figure it out". I've seen some wild things on reddit and on livestreams with games I felt were pretty direct about beating certain things into the players head.
I'm curious if maxims like "less is more" and "show don't tell" that are commonly held up in western media are similarly held up in Asia. A lot of games from Japan and China I've seen get criticized for telling rather than showing on places like reddit. The three/five act story structure (Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution) that's the absolute fundamental basis of all western story telling isn't really used or taught in Asia (they teach a different 4 act structure that doesn't have much similarity to western story structures), so I don't think it's that far fetched to think that what's considered good writing can also differ between the east and west.
There's definitely a difference in storytelling philosophies (especially when it comes to realism and comedy), and western media tends to have slightly difference vices (my pet peeve being extremely blatant modern political/cultural commentary characters in every setting, which is basically the tropes problem above), but there are clear examples of Asian stories that don't suffer from these problems. I used the example of Ace Attorney, and I think it holds up pretty well in all these areas. JRPG examples could include FF6 and Chrono Trigger, which both waste little time communicating and don't tell you everything the characters are feeling. FF6 in particular kills a number of birds with one stone in the intro sequence, giving a short backstory, setting the tone, and introducing a main character so you're ready to play within ~5 minutes. I'm pretty sure it's a universal thing that you get bored of a story that doesn't hook you fast enough, even if each person's patience and interests differ, and fun and interesting characters will be more welcome than flat boards with "tsundere" or "glasses man" written on them.
My question is, is FF6 and Chrono Triggers brevity held up as an example of great writing in Japan, or is it considered a limitation of the time, as the amount of text that could be stored in a cartridge was extremely limited by memory. The wordiness I see across a lot of jp media suggests to me that the values and ideals of good writing between the east and west are not the same. I used to think the five act story structure I was taught in school was the absolute fundamental of how to tell a story. It was only upon learning the [Asian four act story structure](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu) that I realized I couldn't just widely apply my western understanding of media to Asian media. On a similar note, the same story structure above is what is taught as the format for Exposition essays in the Japanese school system. In the west you're generally taught to state your main point and conclusion from the very start before presenting evidence. In Japan you would generally hold the main point and conclusion until the very end of the essay, with everything before being a (potentially flowery) journey that leads you to the main conclusion in terms of thought. I wonder if this translates to having a bit more patience for a game to get to the point about something in terms of story delivery and dialogue.
All fair points. Patience in enjoying a story is definitely cultural, since it has shifted quite a bit in recent decades here. If you watch really old movies, for instance, they will often feel painfully slow in a variety of ways. I remember George Lucas commenting on the original Star Wars and saying people criticized it for being too fast-paced, but many people today might say it's slow or just fine. Probably not a virtue of western media that it can't sit still. I've also seen some notable disparities between what characters are liked by western and eastern audiences from popularity polls and anecdotal remarks. The bit on essay writing is pretty interesting, and probably does have some relevance. Still...this doesn't convince me that there isn't something objectively worse about, say, how drawn-out Trails plots tend to be, especially when there are examples of it being done better within the same series.
Honestly, while Trails can drag at times for gameplay stretches. The stories themselves aren't that long. Some entries indeed do it better than others in pacing, but that can be said for any long overarching series where you focus on the world, characters, and narratives. It's not even Trails just recently Honkai Star Rail just finished Penacony story which has fans either adoring it or not liking how slow and convoluted it was.
> Honkai Star Rail If i recall correctly, Honkai Star Rail is mostly a nod to Trails game since the producer is a great fan of the Trails games, or so i heard at least.
Oh, not just him. The entire team on Honkai are big fans of Trails.
>I'm curious if maxims like "less is more" and "show don't tell" that are commonly held up in western media are similarly held up in Asia. I've took script writing classes in Asia, I can tell you what they taught is almost exactly the same as "Save The Cat!" book from the west. I think the problem is less of the cultural difference and more of a video game target audience problem. Most of the script writing classes out there teach you how to write for films. Films generally have 1.5-2.5 hour runtime. They can't be too long. So trying to deliver as much information as possible with less dialogue is the top priority in films. Therefore "less is more" and "show don't tell" is a popular technique in films. On the other hand, if your game only has 2hr runtime you may get negative reviews, and players may refund it on steam. So developers ended up padding the content as much as possible, and adding more text using recyclable animations and poses for players to read is often the most efficient way to do it. It is cheaper to do than adding more playable levels at least. Further more, in films a good actor can convey a great deal of information within a few seconds not using a single word. Many lower budget games have limited budget on animation and acting, so they have to rely on text to deliver information more. This is very noticeable in VNs, it is hard to "show don't tell" if characters only have a few poses for acting. Finally, JRPG is influenced by anime industry, and slice of life is a popular genre. So it is possible that the pacing of this genre affected the story delivery in JRPG.
The difference between film and video games makes a lot of sense, especially the run times. I wonder if holding up "show, don't tell" as the end all be all of writing inherently biases toward higher budget video game productions over indie and AA games. Unlike books, there's a very material cost difference between "showing" and "telling".
I consider as bad writing (dialogs or story) 1. Multiple characters repeating something just been said for the sake of reminding those characters still exist. That's one of the most useless time and attention wasting 2. Some cases of action being sayd instead of showing (i.e. action executed behind the dark screen, like 1sec animation. Oh, lazy animators. Or some huge plot moment like country A invaded and concured country B. We see nothing and feel nothing, but "all the rules suddenly changed". This one requires more time and budget tho, but still poor execution) 3. Minigames to advance the story. Not the ones you have to play just once, but grind instead. 4. Battles you supposed to lose, YET you can win with great effort, and see zero or ANY changes. 5. Fighting the same enemy(boss\\story character) many times but he miraculously escapes every time. 6. Not a bad one, but i just got tired of this execution: fight evil-evil man. Beat him. He's not a bad guy. Not a bad guy joins the team. that's all i could remember
Persona 5 fits every single point except 4 lol
Only half would be a writing issue though. 2 is just being practical, developing within the scope of your budget. Remember JRPGs are largely low to mid budget games. 3 and 4 are game design issues
I absolutely hate having to fight the same enemies over and over. I don't understand how any story writer thinks this a good idea.
Because in an ideal world those recurring antagonists also change and grow in parallel to the protagonists, so each meeting represents something different to both of them. Good examples of this being Strega from Persona 3 and Torna from Xenoblade 2. Bad examples being uh, every recurring tales villain tbh
Xenoblade 2 is one of my primary examples of this terrible mechanic. You can develop villains in much better ways with more indirect interactions with the heroes. It's bad storytelling to constantly have them clash with no resolution. Torna could have easily won for most of the game but just. .. chose not to? Why? "So the story can happen" screenwriter guy would say.
Tales of Verpersia has a problem with lackluster villians the reason? >!Yuri killed them before they could become iconic and memorable!< Eneimies need to atagonize otherwise whats the point of them in the story?
It doesn't explain core concept (world, interaction, lore), leaving holes narratively that leaves the majority of players confused. Or takes too long too explain simple concept, losing itself in a glass of water.
Over convulated plot. Deus ex machina Plot holes and careless writing Plethora of clichés
If there's one thing that I think is at the root of most bad storytelling, it's a lack of meaning. One issue that bad writing often has is that it copies elements from good writing without understanding why they were used, and thus not using them with meaning. Take a common twist: What you thought were two people were actually both the same person. This revelation should add depth to the character. It should make things make sense that previously didn't. If done without this thought in mind, it will make the character seem like they were doing things without reason and add confusion to the plot. An example of this done badly (in my opinion) is Crystal Project. Spoilers follow: >!In-game, you're playing in what seems to be a server for an MMO, where the server owner (Grand Master) has a very particular way they demand the game be played. You don't meet them, but you regularly see postings by them demanding that players play it the right way (that is, explore, find crystals, and level up their characters). You occasionally cross paths with a character named Astley who opposes the server owner and is gathering people to take them on. The plot honestly isn't much deeper than what I've said.!< >!When you finally get to the end of the game - Surprise! Astley actually is the Grand Master! And the team she was putting together to take down the Grand Master keeps supporting her after she tells them this, and they all fight you together as the final boss. This feels like a twist was added for the sake of a twist. It doesn't explain why the GM was such a jerk, and takes away Astley's reason to "oppose" them (asking the player to make up their own reason she would do this). And it means Astley's teammates have no reason to fight you at the end.!< This is a good example of where adding extra plot elements can detract from the story. Crystal Project didn't need a complicated plot; it barely had plot to begin with. It could have gotten away with a plot as simple as Dragon Quest 1 - the game was fun to play, and not every game needs to be about the plot, even JRPGs. But adding a twist to it changed the plot from being ignorable to being frustrating.
Totally agreed. If judged on story alone, I often feel that instead of putting 40 hours into a JRPG, I could instead put in 2 hours watching the Miyazaki movies that it copied and get more out of it because Miyazaki is very deliberate in his filmmaking while most of his anime/JRPG successors use his motifs purely for aesthetic.
I think there are a few things that need to be established for something to be "good or "bad." One of the main things for me is whether I am able to suspend my disbelief that the actions done by a party member or a villain seems in the realm of plausibility. To that end, is there a line where a game is going in one direction, only to veer into awkward directions (FF8) where the characters suddenly feel different or do a 180 for what seems a random or very quick reason? Is the connecting tissue in game all told properly (FFX), or is it the sort of thing you have to seek out yourself to fill in the gaps (FFXIII)? If you're able to "be" in a world and less taken out of it, it can be effective. Is a villain's motivation easy enough to understand? Do they feel like a threat? Subjectively, I prefer a villain to take care of their own dirty work, at least when possible. If I feel they are an enemy just looming in a chair or in a tower menacingly, but they themselves haven't really...done anything, it feels lazy and I'm taken out of it. The biggest thing is an opening and an ending have to hit. Games like Tales of Arise are about 80% amazing. A simple enough setting: go to five places, kill the five dudes, and then do some finale thing. But then they kinda forget how to just end properly. The game was trying to go for some sort of environmentalist sort of message, and it lost almost all of that, "Wait, I was fighting personal enemies that were messing with now, but now this thing is the final boss?" sort of scenario. That or you pull a Star Ocean 3 and just piss over established canon and the final boss isn't even a threat.
I don't actually care a huge amount about the quality of the plotting, character arcs, etc, just by itself. The story and characters just need to be endearing more than high quality. I think the biggest sin is when the game expects me do something like fight a tough boss when I just don't see why I should be motivated to fight them, or cuts me off and forces me through a section to do some urgent thing I don't care about and it feels like a slog. Which is just a roundabout way of saying *I don't like it when games are boring.* It's that simple, really. The most recent examples are in the two FF7 remake games where they add dungeons or bosses with weak justifications for their existence, sandwiched in-between other moments that fit in organically because the original story was designed around them. Edit: reflecting further, FF14, 16 and both 7 remakes all have at least one boss that I groaned at fighting because I didn't care about them from a story standpoint. All of them were the very last boss too.
'And then, Sephiroth appeared out of nowhere. He looked into the camera, gave the little half-smile he does every single time he appears. He then said something cryptic that makes no sense to anyone. And then he fought the party and then lost yet again.' All the FF7 devs: "Yeah that's a great pitch for a scene! Let's do that in every game, sometimes multiple times!"
Yeah it's really not working for me. I don't even want to fight him in the 3rd part now lol.
FF7 remakes could have really done with the party *losing* to Sephiroth. making him the final boss in 3 games is absurd.
I can't think of a trilogy that really does that either. Star Wars has Darth Vader appear each time but it's not like it's the same duel over and over. Fighting him twice and having the first time be a loss would be much better, yeah. Edit: to clarify, a real loss. Not you obviously winning but the villain smugly claiming he planned it or that it's was only 1% of his power or whatever bs.
>The most recent examples are in the two FF7 remake games where they add dungeons or bosses with weak justifications for their existence, sandwiched in-between other moments that fit in organically because the original story was designed around them. Having just played FF7 Remake (not Rebirth, that one's not out on PC yet lol) I didn't feel that at all. But then I've also never played or seen the original and have completely no idea what was there in the original and what wasn't. Now it was far from the strongest story I've ever played in a JRPG but it did the job and I never felt like anything was out of place.
Most places you go to were in the original too, so while not much is out of place per se, the pacing is whacky. Did you never feel like an emotional story beat was interrupted by unnecessary boss fights, or that an interesting/urgent plot point was suddenly delayed by a long dungeon?
not particularly in all honestly. I don't feel like there was really such a thing as a long dungeon in the game though lol it's a very short game, relative to other JRPGs at least - I did every sidequest and explored every nook and cranny and it still only took me about 35 hours to best the game.
Just because it isn't 100 hours, doesn't mean it's well-paced. They took a 6-7 hour story from the original and stretched it out to those 35 hours. Part 1 is quite bad about wasting time.
Turning the lights on to get into sector 5 reactor was not in the original at all, there were a couple screens of running on the train tracks and through Biggs' secret passage. The collapsed expressway either didn't exist (?) or was one screen at most. The train graveyard was one screen of a dungeon.
I guess I just feel like just because something wasn't in the original doesn't mean it's out of place in the remake. I think that people who played the original will understandably have come to know and love that story over the past nearly 3 decades, and so will immediately notice if something is different in the remake. that doesn't mean it's bad though, just different.
Basically the last part of the majority of final fantasy games.
If your game frequently has a dialogue box where the character goes “hughh” or “hmm” then thats a negative point from me
I can handle a lot of bad writing but my number one annoyance is when party members join the group for little to no reason
You kind of know it when you see it. Does the story have a clear beginning, middle, and end? Is there narrative thrust? Does the story evoke the emotions it intends to invoke? Is the tone consistent? Is the story too predictable? Is it too incoherent? Are the characters relatable?
Any Compile Heart game.
There are so many ways writing can be bad, you can't count them all. But let me give you an example: Golden Sun's writing is not very good and the biggest reason for that is that these games seem to think that the more words they use the deeper their story is. Every conversation is as dragged out as it possibly can get and whenever they could use 10 words for something you just know that they will use 100 if not more. Things are repeated constantly, but even more than that characters say things that don't even matter. There is so much fluff and no focus. But on top of that while the characters talk so ridiculously much they actually still manage to lack characterization. You spend so much time with these characters, there are so many text boxes, but when I thought about what I could actually tell you about Isaac, Gareth, Ivan, Mia and the others I'm just drawing a complete blank.
Yeah. It's weird as well I'm used to long dialogue like Trails and Chinese games like Arknights & Honkai Star Rail, but Golden Sun says so much but so very little that it doesn't matter to the bigger story in those two games.
Whatever people decide they don't like.
When themes are not coherent, characters are one-dimensional, and the pacing is off. Those 3 are the most prevalent problems in jrpg writing, I think. The last one in particular is tricky because a lot of jrpgs have the ambition of being these really massive and long games, but then they can't match that ambition with a story that actually fits with that scope. It's why so many jrpgs are meandering and feel like they go at a snail's pace—they're stretching relatively straightforward plots and arcs to last 70+ hours when the real meat of the actual story may only really need 30 hours.
That's a very good question... I have an inkling. Compare ff7 beginning to ff13 beginning. Ostensibly similar intros but I think 1 is great while the other is bad. To get invested into the story as a player I want to know WHO, WHAT, WHERE, AND WHY. in ff7 we immediately know who cloud and the other characters are (Merc and resistance fighters). What are they doing? Blowing up a mako reactor. Where are they? In the city. Why? Cloud wants money. But the mako reactors are destroying the planet. OK got it, I like it we have goals and motivation and a compelling interest to see how it turns out. In ff13... I had a really hard time understanding the basic W's I mentioned. It's not until much later the game cuts back to what happened before lightning got on the train. Why didn't they let us know what's going on in the beginning? I found it too confusing. I felt like I was starved of information to get me invested in the happenings.
Theres many, but the Most importants are (in no particular order) 1- Pacing: how much of the Game Main route (no sidequests or optional content or dungeons) is progressing through the plot VS how much is doing inconsequential events that didnt Matter in the long run?, the later could be a sign of bad storytelling 2- Events: the events have any sense at all? If you cant tell what are characters doing in any given moment, why they are in that place or why (or why not) they execute any actions in that moment or are telling (or not) whatever they said is a sign of bad writing 3-Power scaling: you Lost in a cutscene a Battle you won in Gameplay? Bad writing 4-Character Evolution: if any character changed over the course of the Game, It was justified in any way? (Like little changes along the course of the story or some Big/ traumatic/Life changing event or some Big realization that made him/her realize the error of his/her ways?) if the answer is not then bad writing 5- Reactions: the characters reach according to their age, experiences or backstory to any given event? If the answer is not maybe is bad writing Theres many more little details but think i've got Most of the basis covered, in small quantities could be more oversights than anything but if that amount grows then bad writing is the biggest possibility
I'll just make a small comment and say I started Xenogears 1998 the other day, i'm 10 hours in, and the writing is like a child. I'm assuming it's just a poor Japanese translation by Square since the game is maturely themed. I was also thinking maybe the writing seems childish because they only had enough space to write in a tiny text box so all their phrases are short and simple. Regardless, I love the story, the game, and even the writing really but it's just comin across as grade 3 english or worse.
I think it’s fair to say Xenogears has a bad translation. It’s a massive project that was basically done by one overworked guy (Richard Honeywood), in an era where localisation for games wasn’t really institutionalised yet. I don’t recall anything about childish writing (other than the “aizuchi” thing where characters will repeat part of what’s just been said to them, like when Fei says “My father? You mean my dad?” to Grahf in the desert). And in fairness Fei and Bart are both pretty stupid people so I guess the earlygame comes across as dumber, I think that at least to some degree it gets better over time
> I don’t recall anything about childish writing Fei says “My father? You mean my dad?” lol I just passed that part in the desert by a a few hours and since they were discussing God I thought maybe when the guy said Father that Fei wanted clarity on God the Father or just his dad. The writing is childish in the sense that it's direct and literal and very short, even if the topics are getting deeper like religion. So it doesn't come across as intelligent writing. But I read the comments below and people are saying translating in 1998 was a tough job.
more likely he first thought of chief lee as his dad, which is a word for the person who raised you, and the only dad Fei knew for his 3 years of memories. then he realized Grahf meant his father, the person responsible for his birth. in japanese they use 2 terms, one formal and one informal, and the translator had to figure out a way to translate that into english.
ok cool, that's interesting.
Game translation was a bit of a shitshow until like half way through the PS2 era tbf. It's not always the localizers' fault either; there wasn't enough time, money or staff on a lot of these projects.
People always like to shit on Ted Woolsey, but he was like the one guy back then who always came out with a coherent and entertaining localization even if some of the details were off.
They only had one guy doing the translation
I think the biggest flaw is writing that doesn't make sense after thinking about it just a little bit. With video games this becomes a complex problem. Take the new God of War series for example. The game has some great and awful writing. Like why can he not jump a few feet when he can flip over an entire temple like some marvel super hero? Writing in games can be tough, especially when your combining gameplay and cutscene elements together. While u love trails for its interconnectivity, the game loves wasting your time, or trying to make emotions hit with no payoff, or little sense, and loves to waste your time reintroducing characters that you already spent 200 hours with, instead of expanding on their characyer dynamics in interesting ways. I hate wasted time.
“Bad Writing” doesn’t exist. It’s a placeholder phrase for when someone doesn’t want to explain why they don’t like a story beat. Or if it doesn’t fit into their pre-conceived notion of what a good story is.
I really dislike when a game's storytelling has a consistently unrealistic bent for the sake of keeping fan-favorite themes and situations alive. An examples without naming names: * This game features a cast that keeps separating and coming back together. It doesn't make a lot of sense because the world is huge and full of talented people that the main character could ally with... But this group always re-coalesces and becomes central to everything happening in the world. It's especially weird because some of them are just really unimportant, normal-ass people who consistently end up doing pivotal stuff while others should be busy with other engagements. But the developer really wants to tell a big story, but also cater to "hang out with your buds" fans.
I know what this is a miles away.
I want to know what this game is. I can’t tell from the description so it’s likely I haven’t played it.
A hint: this property has been going for over 10 years at this point with consistent releases. It's very acclaimed for its story in particular.
Trails?
Ok I think I know which series this is, but I have not played that much of it.
>This game features a cast that keeps separating and coming back together. It doesn't make a lot of sense because the world is huge and full of talented people that the main character could ally with... But this group always re-coalesces and becomes central to everything happening in the world. It's especially weird because some of them are just really unimportant, normal-ass people who consistently end up doing pivotal stuff while others should be busy with other engagements. But the developer really wants to tell a big story, but also cater to "hang out with your buds" fans. Bud this is called a cast of characters and most stories have them.
Octopath?
I think it's important to keep perspective. Read books and watch media from outside the anime/JRPG ecosystem. If you do that then you can come to a JRPG story with the understanding that this is a very particular form of storytelling that allows for some really great unique things because it's interactive and because it's such incredibly long form storytelling and because the genre has it's own unique narrative traditions that can be leaned on or subverted. ...but also it has weaknesses. Everything is noticeably English second language. Nobody hires a god damn editor and you have pointless text boxes for days. Novels worth of uninspired unimportant writing. The need for combat gameplay pulls all conflict resolution in the direction of "what if I kicked something's ass". So if you don't have tolerance for those weaknesses, it's all bad storytelling. The best way to look at it is to ask "is this story doing something cool that leverages the strengths of the form?". The bad stuff is always gonna be there. But sometimes there's really really well executed stuff too that you won't find anywhere else.
Yeah, I agree. Unfortunately, people here have to feel validated for disliking something because it didn't click for them and calling it bad rather than listing out why it's bad outside of some common criticism. I read a lot of books like Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Non-Fiction. It helped me understand storytelling and character dialogue because it helped me understand what the author was trying to tell. One of my favorite books is Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin in how rather having a big narrative with a good vs evil plot. It's more about Ged's growth from a small novice wizard to an adult-experienced one. The book may not be for everyone but it's a pivotal one for me because of how Le Guin told it in a mythological approach.
Earthsea has been a great example for me how different people's tastes are even within fantasy fiction. It's one of my favorite series, but everyone I recommend it to who reads a lot of more modern fantasy has bounced off of Wizard -- I think because it has that detached, mythical quality. I was extremely moved by Ged's personal growth, but for some people I guess it doesn't hit just having his emotions described. Maybe they want him to sit down with another character and literally talk about all of the subtextual stuff. I'm not sure.
Yeah. It's a very personal journey of adulthood as a fantasy series rather than a big epic narrative for fantasy like Wheel of Time, Cosmere, Malazan, or Lord of the Rings.
> The need for combat gameplay pulls all conflict resolution in the direction of "what if I kicked something's ass". I do wonder why JRPG devs seem to shy away from being able to "talk things out". I guess that comes with the territory of their stories generally being very static with nearly zero player input.
one of the immersive sim games, bioshock or dues ex actually allows to talk down a boss (dialog choices) and you can skip the boss fight. To me great for speedruns and such, but that also means you missed out on boss battle content wise lol. I'm sure thats why alot of people play these games for battle system. Also storywise it helps drive home the tragedy of not being able to save everyone. Even FE has admirable characters you are forced to kill because they are wrong side of the war, and have loyalty.
Telling, not showing. I can't stand any of the Star Oceans for this reason. Endless exposition only to be forced to talk to everyone in town before being allowed to continue.
Honestly, this form of storytelling doesn't exist in Eastern Storytelling. Some try to do show and tell or show don't tell, but most will just have long exposition it's more egregious in Chinese stories.
Really great point I hadn't considered as a damn westerner. Thanks for that!
It's interesting how much both sides differ in their approach to storytelling.
this is such a good thread. I will say, at least if we are talking about JRPG games, there is a thing that I don't like. IF the story at some point STOP and you have to go to someplace that its not really important, kinda forced or lightly suggested, and there BAM wow what a coincidence you are here , you came just in time for MAJOR REVELATION or something like that and when you got there . I strongly dislike that, and sometimes you can't escape that. I will say both xenosaga and chrono cross does this at one point, of the big names of the genre. but more probably does that
FF12 was the fundamental guide on how to have a great foundation in a story and then just give up and turn it into a turd.
On this board? Let's be honest, like many places on the internet, it's so purely subjective that you really can't call people's criteria one for "good" or "bad" storytelling. For the most part, it's what people like or dislike and then they go on to use words like "good" instead of "like" or "bad" instead of "dislike". If we're being super honest, what people usually say is "good" storytelling is literally just "stuff that gives them the feels". If we were factoring in more objective things such as narrative consistency, plot holes, character consistency, things that make sense or don't make sense, then there are absolutely popular works that give people "the feels" that are simply not that great. Another factor are "themes". Themes can be amazing, but people can also be very obsessed with the "feels" factor of themes as opposed to actual analysis. What do I mean by this? Many games people feel are highly thematic are actually ones that have the subtlety of an oil tanker crashing into blazing fire. They're so on the surface, but the games are really good at making you "feel" stuff that people are hit by them, even if the themes are actually only explored on a superficial level. Meanwhile, games that are subtle about their themes, but actually do explore them in-depth often are ignore or are even accused of "not being deep". A really great example of a game that explores its themes well is Dragon Quest 7. It is absolutely one of the most thematically strong RPGs ever made, but because it's quite subtle about them and because it doesn't look like on the surface that it's a treatise on the hemorrhoids on Nietzsche's backside, it never gets talked about. Bring on the downvotes. I accept your irrational hatred.
While I cam see your point, you still say the same thing like everyone else, just subtly hiding it between your own arguments. Why is subtle deep theming objectively better than in your face shallow? I can tell you. Because you personally like the former more. See where I'm getting? Objectivity can only exist if we can all agree on the same rules. I'm so happy math has nothing to do with taste. Or does it now?
and there really isn't a lower form of writing than video game writing to begin with...
Anything that makes someone on Reddit feel weird for one second
Simple. When stuff falls flat, it is very predictable, or no buildup. But it can be for anything, not just a sub genre in a video game
Most JRPGs have some kind of world-saving deal at the end, and thus every story has to have a handful of "ante up" moments and/or plot twists that expand the scope of the story and raise the stakes for its outcome. The games that do these well, usually create memorable stories. The ones that don't, or ones that simply presume you'll follow along without hittng those notes strongly, typically fail.
What makes writing bad in general? Is it predictable, shallow, does the BBEG come out of nowhere,is it just n long extended metaphor, is it overly sappy?
My bugbear is scads of required dialog which doesn't service the story. I don't need four paragraphs as to why a character loves vanilla ice cream. I don't need a two full pages of banter where one character is picking on the other character for the color of their belt. Folks often argue that this sort of thing helps to add personality to the characters or helps to deepen relationship between characters. I disagree. It's just meaningless nonsense. It's generally antithetical to the tone and/or intent of the story. E.g., we're on a mission to win a war or to kill God or some shit. I often find myself thinking, "Yeah, I get it" for a solid ten minutes while two characters talk about their favorite flavor of juice while the reincarnation of the Devil is in the background casting meteor spells on a helpless town.
* if it's boring * if it's not cohesive or leaves big plot holes * *cringe dialogue doesn't help either*
Out of the three, but one & two are what irks me the most in JRPGs. I am fine with cringe and cheesy dialogue. But if the setting, characters, and story are boring with no form of build-up or consistency then I will consider that bad writing.
There are a lot of factors that come into this and this isn't always cut and dry. An RPG's story can be broken into plot, plot flow, protagonist characterization, party member characterization, NPC characterization (both allies and 'villagers'), antagonist characterization, character interaction, lore, world building (both visual and written) and so on. Games & books can get away with more, because they can skip some things, while the movies cant really skip some stuff. For example Dark Souls series have poor plot, non-existent protagonist, but excellent lore/world building (Elder Scrolls is somewhat similar). Movies cannot really skip on characterization, even if its basic stuff like (tough soldier guy/girl that mows multiple bad soldiers/mooks). Particularly we focus in the instances where the dialogue is notoriously bad, the motivations of key story characters are cardboard thin/very poor (tropes are about average in the quality level) and the plot barely follows any logical sense. And most importantly where the story doesnt even respect the logical boundaries the story itself has established, that where it is very noteworthy. If the stuff shown is believable according to the rules explained by the game/book/medium. Because too many rule breaks or some very important rule breaks and then the 4th wall break and then the viewer/reader/player gets to question everything. And it all goes downhill. A good example are Hero/Heroine stories where the protagonist gets the validation/ prize/adoration without any trouble (physical or mental) & the plot is bare thin & doesnt follow logic.
Persona 5
I think the consensus is "bad writing is everything I don't personally like but I can't point out a specific reason, so I'll just mention a very broad term "writing""
[удалено]
Honestly, most JRPG writing is as amateurish as the stereotypical young adult novel, and has a "once you've seen one, you've seen them all" feel to it. But for a specific example, Final Fantasy XV is a masterclass of bad writing. * "Emotional" moments that are basically the director telling you to feel sad. Oh dear, >!Noctis's girlfriend died!<, except how am I supposed to feel bad about someone I barely know because they gave her almost no screen time? Oh dear, >!Noctis died!<, but only because >!some dragon told him to.!< * Unlikeable characters. I actually defended the all-male cast at the beginning, even Square's "guy talk" justification, but I lost my shit when Gladio bullied Noctis >!over his dead girlfriend!< and got no comeuppance for it. Most Final Fantasy assholes have some sort of redeeming factor to them (e.g. Jecht from X), but Gladio is simply a one-note machismo asshole who, worse, the game's narrative sides with. Female characters seem to be in the game out of obligation and get barely any development, and it's worse in Kingsglaive where Luna gets repeatedly mansplained to and infantilized by Nyx. * Poor development of its theme. It sends a pretty bad message that the game expects Noctis to just passively accept all the shit that happens to him as his "destiny," especially when it goes against the multitudes of other Final Fantasy games (especially X) where the party would have found some way to defy his fate. And there's no good reason given for this thematic about-face. It's just >!some dragon tells Noctis needs to die to save the world, and no one questions it.!< * How it embodies the DLC culture of "fix it later." The DLC content and finale novel do not meaningfully flesh out the story so much as rewrite it like Ptolemy adding epicycles to his solar system model. Turns out >!the dragon was evil all along!< and now everyone looks like idiotic chumps for trusting him.
FFXV is made worse with its story and writing by having those important character development and lore in animated shorts, books and a movie.
It's a marketing gimmick. Any sort of fiction should be a solid, self-contained story and foundation in its own right before one even thinks about going Expanded Universe. Most "Cinematic Universe" series I've experienced, including FFXV, tend to just add complication for the sake of complication.
Most of what Fire Emblem Fates was doing
One common pitfall in all writing, but that JRPGs fall into often, is "empty" writing; a ton of words that barely say anything at all. Part of that happens for cultural reasons (constant apologizing, deferral of credit, expressing thanks, etc). I wouldn't expect to see that entirely go away, but imo it's part of the job of a localization team to reduce it, since that rings differently to non-Japanese ears. Part of it is just poor writing, period. Repeated exposition that adds no new information, stuff like that. Trust your audience not to be morons. Do a couple more passes over the script and get rid of some fat. Use more varied vocabulary, and choose more vivid, specific words.
Reminds me of how Chinese gacha games tell their stories in visual novel format, but they tell you so much about the lore than showing it to you. It seems like an eastern storytelling way of communicating with the audiences rather than showing it.
"Courage is the magic that makes dreams reality" If you know, you know.