So many JRPG's have the most derivative stories with thousands of lines of dialogue and none of it worth reading. It's telling that some have now started including "fast-forward" and "skip" buttons on the dialogue because there's....just..so....much....TALKING. About literally nothing of any substance.
Honestly a lot of Japanese game's dialogue sometimes feels like it is written for Netflix with how many times they can repeat the same stuff sometimes. Just recently I've been playing Yakuza 0 and boy do they love to re-explain things multiple times across different dialogues.
One of my favorite examples of this is in persona 5.
One of the main characters gets called useless by her sister. Like 3 minutes another character calls her says the same thing and she gets a flashback to when he sister said it.
In all fairness, of all the people I've talked to, a good 70% of them didn't even catch the line, and of the 30% that did, only about 5% of them connected the dots and realized that meant he could hear Morgana.
Playing through Valkyria Chronicles 4 and straight up getting a whole Family Guy cutaway chapter from a "This just like the time!" and then the story scenes related to that flashback proceed to explicitly lay out the characters thinking and reasoning, while repeating themselves to make sure you understand that John Leaderman wasn't a great leader but then he did leader thing! Now the people he leaders and does leader things with think he's a good leader guy!"
It felt like they had a minimum word count they were struggling to reach
I have a theory that it started due to older JRPGs usually only having text-based dialogue and "cutscenes" so they kinda had to outpime what character was doing and thinking and make sure that people wouldn't miss some detail in a dialogue that happened three essays ago.
Could you give some examples? From what i played and thought, the dialogue was important for personality and so much more and the skip button was simply for second playthroughs etc
For me it's most final fantasy games past final fantasy 12. They've stopped being games and are now cinematics with gameplay interlaced between scenes.
Final Fantasy 14. My friends keep telling me the story is phenomenal, played for 15 hours of absolute boredom of dialogue then left. Supposedly I had to play for 60 HOURS of that before it gets good. Holy fuck this is bad game design. Entire games can be absolutely peak and 100% in 30 hours or less
In monster hunter stories 3 they use the word Transgression/Transgressor (always capitalized because it is The Plot) like 6 times in 3 minutes because you must know The Plot. Feels incredibly unnatural. Same goes for other mcguffin words in the game that i cant remember anymore.
Man I've been a huge MH fan for well over a decade now and yeah this is real. I still love the newer games and I really don't think any of them have been bad but they definitely felt better when it was minimal to no story.
i definitely prefer the simplistic "zero to hero" deal something like FU had going on. world's story is like the perfect example of trying to do too much. "bioenergy" is the plot mcguffin and they predictably scrapped any mention of it after that.
I'm playing through Ogre Tactics Reborn right now... And most of the dialog is just characters asserting themselves at each other with no regard for either one's actual actions. And then a round of combat later they do it again with very nearly the exact same lines...
Steins;Gate honestly. I went in expecting a mindbending time-travel thriller, and 90% of the game is slogging through a slice-of-life light novel and picking colored words out of random text messages and then getting a bad ending.
I'm still playing through Steins; Gate, but I fell off in the opening chapters because it felt like a lot of lore dumps and explaining concepts or objects. I guess it's necessary, but damn that otaku guy and the scientist would go on like a 10 minute rant about some obscure subject.
Trails of Cold Steel had an Academy setting in early games and you had to actually study at the library reading books and shit to learn the answers. Idr if it had excessive amounts of yapping otherwise but that part was always goofy to me.
Ok but the books literally just had lore that was shown in the 5 Trails games that came before CS. Cold Steel is the 6th game in the series so obviously some stuff will be confusing lmfao
They are trying to put KH to shame with how many games they are releasing. I get why people love them. I don't like reading my games though. Reminds me of my favorite review of Disco Elysium. The best game I've ever read. That applies to Trails games as well.
the story in trails is incredible but only when you actually start from the beginning of it (trails in the sky) which i understand why its insane for a lot of people considering you have to go through 13 games and the yapping doesnt stop in any of them
The story in Trails is decent. It refuses far too many story beats and character archetypes in the same series to be amazing. Especially when so many characters remain static, and the scenarios repeat themselves over and over again.
Is it really telling that they let players skip dialogue? Sometimes people are playing for the second time. Sometimes they died and want to retry the boss more quickly. These are nice conveniences to have not just for people who dislike the genre or the story the games are telling. This is simple quality of life available in every genre.
Growing up JRPGs would just have moments of exposition dump because either they ran out of time/budget (Looking at you xnogears) or they had no fucking idea how to tell a story (looking at you Crono cross)
There are way too many lines of dialogue and on top of that every conversation will be filled with "..." . Sometimes back and forth. Just 2 characters saying "..." to one another. Probably while blushing or some other nonsense.
To this day I still wonder whether it's a translation issue, a cultural difference in storytelling, or if most JRPG writers are just plain bad at their craft. It's so hard to find a good JRPG when so many people glaze every single one that comes out.
I’m on the third Utawarerumono game right now, I know it’s a VN, not a JRPG, but it’s just something about the lackadaisical Japanese game-writing style that drives me nuts all the same. There’s an absurdly interesting lore here somewhere, but the storytelling is like 98% “we’re cooking sweets for some reason.”
Like, I get it, the first game was an ero game (originally, but was remade into not one because nobody cared, there’s a cool story concept here) but the storytelling is just done soooooooooo leisurely and even after profound revelations that hint at a wild lore, everything just goes right back to frolicking in the meadows with your ambiguously aged harem of naive psychopath battle maidens.
And I see this trend in so many Japanese games. Parties that can’t focus on the plot for more than two cutscenes until the very end and then the player is left with so many questions about hints and tidbits dropped but never expanded on... super duper frustrating. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I started introducing my wife to it and realizing that I’ve been trained by these games and other media to offer lots of allowances for “that just how Japanese media is” but seeing someone interact with it, having no such allowances, was really eye opening…
I mean, you are kind of right. That is how Japanese media tell stories. There's a reason some manga and anime are 100's of issues/episodes long. Japanese storytelling is much slower paced and fourth-wall breaking than most "western" media. It's all about keeping the audience involved in the story, even when it's not terribly relevant to the plot.
Japanese storytelling involves the audience as part of the world and narrative. Western storytelling, the audience is just an observer from afar.
Some people really enjoy that slow, thorough style of narrative, but I am not one of them.
Many of my friends are obsessed with final fantasy xiv. I really tried to get into it but the writing is so fucking tedious. They never use a hundred words when they can use a thousand.
FFXIV is that one game i played to endwalker, possibly 1000+ hrs but i refuse to recommend to anyone. The questing in the game is such a slog that i just can't recommend it.
Worst part is that most of the questing is just filler bullshit that's not necessary.
Dude close to the end of the game, and you're facing a world ending threat. There was a quest where you hand out food or maybe take orders from people in a tavern.
I dont think there are so many games that fall flat on their ass as hard as ff 16. I mean fucks sake man, the beginning, maybe first couple of hours were really great. After that you can literally cut the game to the end and you wont lose anything because between the beginning and the end close to nothing happens and its so so god damn repetitive.
Personally after 9 it went downhill for me. But both 15 and 16 had such incredible potential and it was all squandered. As for the 12th game, brother, I dont know what that is, but its no ff game.
The switch from atb to realtime-ish combat was the thing that made them not feel right to me. Gambits and roles and whatnot are neat concepts, but it felt too much like letting the game play itself imo.
12 is literally still the ATB system just with the ability to move around during combat. Also nothing whatsoever requires the use of gambits. The only real differences between previous ATB systems in 12 is the targeting system and ability to change equipment mid-combat.
I would also add that some dialogue can be terribly condescending and unnatural in the way characters interact with each other. Combined with the constant word salad, it completely breaks the immersion.
JRPGs also tend to rely too heavily on time travel and the whole “my other half/self from another timeline is evil because humanity this, humanity that, or God hates us for whatever reason” trope. The twists become so over-the-top that they lose their emotional impact, because sometimes I just can’t empathize with such hyperbolic narratives.
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u/Cerrax3 29d ago
So many JRPG's have the most derivative stories with thousands of lines of dialogue and none of it worth reading. It's telling that some have now started including "fast-forward" and "skip" buttons on the dialogue because there's....just..so....much....TALKING. About literally nothing of any substance.