Gamespy's 'Top 10 Ways to Know You're a PC Snob'

[A Black Falcon]

Background info: JRPGs I own (counting action-RPGs but not Zelda, to make an arbitrary division. No SRPGs.)

completed
--
Golden Sun -- got bored repeatedly and took long breaks so it took a long time to finish, but eventually I did.
Skies of Arcadia: Legends -- great game.
Tales of Symphonia (action combat) -- I was getting bored by the end, but managed to finish it.
Illusion of Gaia (action-rpg) -- lots of fun. Not too hard, good plot... just fun.
Final Fantasy Adventure (action-rpg) -- great game, one of the GB's best
Riviera: The Promised Land -- great and original!
Lunar Legend -- decent enough... autofight/save anywhere help. Utterly standard by JRPG genre conventions, but decent anyway.

incomplete
--
Golden Sun: The Lost Age -- Got 8-10 hours in. Pitifully easy. Got bored.
Phantasy Star 2 -- hard!
Phantasy Star 4 -- haven't played (and also hard)
Sword of Vermillion (actionish) -- too old fashioned to be fun
Secret of Mana (action-rpg) -- I really should play this more...
Drakkhen -- oldschool, not so fun (but for $2 who cares)
Lunar: Dragon Song -- decent, I'll pick it up again eventually
Children of Mana (action-rpg) -- kind of dull after a while
Sword of Mana (action-rpg) -- decent but not so great. I got bored.
Baten Kaitos -- boring!
Summon Night: Swordcraft Story (action battles like Tales of Phantasia but better) -- great, will finish eventually. More people should play this...
Persona 2: Eternal Punishment -- psx. Long. Might play more someday. Grind required -- tedious.
Star Ocean: The Second Story (action combat) -- great game, will definitely play more (got past halfway). More user control over character development than most JRPGs.
Grandia -- so conventionally dull in so many ways, but it can be kind of mindlessly fun I guess...
Koudelka -- kind of unique, I should play it more. Survival horror-ish atmosphere, movement grid in combat...

I don't think Survival Kids really counts. It's really an action-adventure, not RPG. I didn't finish it. I'm also not counting Alundra 2 (action-rpg, got bored, unfinished), or Brave Fencer Musashi (should play more, fun) and Threads of Fate (great game, completed). They're platformers really... same for Wodner Boy in Monster World, though that's even more of a platformer and less of an RPG than Threads of Fate is. Beyond Oasis might count too; it should if Secret of Mana and Illusion of Gaia do, but it feels even more Zelday than those two do, though. I haven't finished it, but I should once I play it again; it's short, and quite good.

Also not counting emulation, of which I have played a bunch of stuff but not come anywhere near finishing anything. I could comment on some, but I won't here.

Okay I'll drop Planescape, except for this. The focus on story shows we are looking at different aspects here.

Planescape, from what I've played of it, does have an interesting story. When I finally get back to it I intend on playing the rest of the way through. I do in fact value a good story in a game. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. But, a game can more than make up for what it lacks in an open free-interaction and choices in story with the rest of it's gameplay. I think perhaps you just haven't given these alternative styles a chance to rub off on you.

It's not that Planescape's combat is bad -- it's good, since it uses the Baldur's Gate engine -- but it is somewhat simpler. Most characters equip just one kind of weapon, like in a console game, so there is much less inventory management and choices in equipment and weapons to be made, removing a big part of most any PC RPG. The combat is also not that hard; there is no fight in the game that really stood out as "that was HARD!". Some were challenging, but not really hard. But even so there are some cool spells (a few top-level ones even have FMVs, for some reason, though you never need to use those spells...) and unique weapons... but it's about the story and characters, and it shows. The story, world, and characters overwhelm everything else in the game. It almost feels more like an adventure game than an RPG in some ways... anyway, you can't talk about the game without talking about the script. It would be pointless.

As for your point that a game can make up for a bad story with gameplay, well, yes. That was the theory behind every single RPG released in the '70s and '80s, after all: the story was a nearly irrelevant excuse to send you out there to kill things. And that does work, if the gameplay is good... but JRPGs usually have both linear stories and mostly hands-off character development. You often have only minimal actual impact on how your characters develop. You just give them their next (character-exclusive or class-exclusive) armor set in each town, buy their next weapon (unique to them), see the next plot point, and go on... what are you doing that actually makes them representative of YOU and not just "characters in a story you are following"? Sure sometimes I can get interested iin the story and it can pull you through the game, but so often the rest of the gameplay is so simple... sometimes I liked it anyway, but the fact remains that it is simple.

There is usually some degree of control, and there is the occasional JRPG which actually does do more, either in plot or in character development (but not usually in both...), such as Riviera for character development (branching paths along the way (that do not affect the outcome, just short alternate routes), the attraction ratings, etc), but it's not common.

I played Neverwinter Nights, at least. I'll tell you what I will of that. Does it have an "intricate and well developed system" underneath all the gameplay?

Yes, it does. Unfortunatly, it's underealized if you ask me. Now, I appreciate things like being able to unlock a door or set a trap, but that's not really combat, that's something else. I'm talking actual combat systems. I can also appreciate a million stats that each affect different skills, like accuracy with a bow or the strenth of a magic missile (for proper attacking of the darkness). That's not really strategy though. Those are statistics. Magic: The Gathering (which I have to say I DO actually have a deck of) gives an example of real strategy, and that's got basically two statistics and somewhat simplistic rules. What matters there is clever effects where you can be all like at 1 life point and after activating a series (of tubes) special effects, you can be all "and with THAT in effect, THIS, nullifying everything you did and turning THAT against you". I've never done that in Neverwinter Nights. In that game, it really was all about boosting my statistics in various fields using various equipment to get an edge in battle. Traps set before the battle, which may not even take place due to them, don't really count. Getting the drop with stealth for an initial attack is "cute" but I was doing that in Earthbound, I was doing that in Final Fantasy with certain equipment. That's not strategy.

Okay, let me put it this way. Maybe Neverwinter Nights should also be excluded from the list. I'll admit, I haven't played either of the Fallout games (watched a friend play a little of the beginning, though that doesn't really count).

Neverwinter Nights... I don't own it, but I did play the demo. And it does have that deep system underneath. The problem is, they give you only one character, pretty much completely sabotaging the D&D system. NWN 2 rectifies this -- you get parties again. NWN 1, though, just ends up as a mountain of hack and slash with a bad story (and the story, the single player game that is, is universally considered to be pretty bad). What fun. Yeah, that's why I never bought it...

Anyway, you do say some interesting things there. I would disagree about stats. Stats are, of course, the basis of D&D... stats and die rolls are the foundation of the system. They're the most important thing there is in the system, and there are a lot of them. Is this complexity necessary, or fun? Complexity for the sake of complexity is not always a good thing, after all... I would say that it is, most certainly. The fact that the game is based on a complex, consistent statistical model is extremely important, and is something that all PC RPGs do in one way or another (though many created just for games are not as complex as D&D, all the major ones have one). Console RPGs just don't usually have such complex statistical underpinnings, as I said, and it hurts the believability of the world.

Anyway, anything that affects battle is part of battle. These RPGs don't have some silly "battle mode" where you go to a separate screen. As such, why would something like a trap not "count"? That's silly... unlocking doors or detecting and removing traps aren't part of combat, though, for sure (though they are definitely part of the game, and the statistical model)

Looking at Chess again, that game has a lot of strategy and has almost no rules to it. A massive rule book doesn't necessarily make for a better, or more "in depth" game, except in the sense that it has a lot of rules. By the same token you can end up with a surprising level of depth with some basic rules so long as there is a lot of ways to vary those rules and stuff that totally violates those rules. Why not have abilities that defy the rules? It makes things more interesting if you have a pawn that can, for no good reason, change into a queen.

This is true of course. There are different ways of achieving a similar goal, and more complexity doesn't necessarily mean a better game. Chess is a strategy game though, not a role-playing game, so there is a difference there... since RPGs add things like hit points and character stats and all that, they are necessarily more complex games than simple strategy games like chess. There's no way to avoid that fact. As those two articles I linked say (read them, will you?), "RPG" means "levels and levelling"... whether that's a good thing or not is another question, but they do.

Still, would say that levels are not necessary. The first RPG (graphic adventure-RPG, actually) that I really loved was Quest for Glory I. Great game... but it has no levelling. You simply have stats that increase as you use them -- repeatedly try to climb a tree to improve climbing, run to improve running, etc. It was a great system that I thought worked well...

Another example would be Guild Wars. Signs say that Guild Wars 2 is going in a different direction, unfortunately, but Guild Wars has a low level cap of 20 which you hit fairly quickly. After that the game becomes a balanced game where your strategy -- the eight skills you bring with you and how you use them -- is paramount. They were consciously thinking of collectable card games like Magic, actually, when they made the game... and obviously I think that the system works incredibly well, given how many hundreds of hours I've put into that game (making it probably my third most played game ever after only SC and WC3, though I don't know the order of those three since SC and WC3 don't keep time logs...)... it keeps the focus on strategy and skill and not just levelling through that low cap and skill limit (eight only, can't change them at will, only in towns).

Also, looking at those JRPGs I finished and the ones I didn't, barring the games that I simply didn't finish because of boredom, many of the incomplete ones were ones that I felt required unnecessary levelling. I know I've said it many times before, but it annoys me... if I can get to the boss, I should be able to defeat them with enough effort provided that I've got a decent amount of consumables left (now there's one other thing GW did right... no consumables. Your health and energy auto-recharges when you're not fighting, and every class has healing skills. It made me never want to go back to the tedium of Diablo II's "belt and inventory full of potions" ever again...).

Guild Wars also, of course, has a base model. Enemies use the same skills you do and have levels just like the players...

I would have been bored from the very first Japanese RPG I played if there wasn't involved strategy I had to come up with to win. I really don't think you are playing them the right way. I think you are just sorta power leveling. You describe a "grind" but in something like Final Fantasy (for the most part) or Chrono Trigger, I never really had to grind. Further, if you never went on side quests, I'm not surpriused you never found the armor with special effects. For example, and I know you love this form of strategy, there's the stuff that cuts all elemental attacks by 50%, or absorbs one specific element, or a sword that gets a critical strike 70% of the time, or one that drains MP to do 4x damage instead of 2x during a critical strike, or something that makes you undead, meaning instant death spells heal them completely, but you can't use party-wide cure effects any more.

There's more to it than just items with special effects, though, as I've tried to say... just having those things doesn't mean that you have true depth. Not when those status effect things are usually the most useless abilities in the game, and don't work well on most of the enemies that they might actually be helpful against... and as for modifiers like those examples there, those are nice I guess, but it's not like it's really an important part of the game... in Guild Wars virtually all armor has modifiers (pluses and minuses), and those modifiers are balanced at the top level so that you can't just get a "+15 damage" without it being "while enchanted" or something. Kind of annoying really, but it balances things... anyway so, as it's so common, finding the kind of modifier or weapon addon that you like is an important part of configuring your character. The same goes for a Baldur's Gate style RPG, though in that case character level and how powerful the item is is much more relevant, since there is no hard level cap that you reach early on like GW has. Is that really true, though, in console RPGs?

Describe to me a scenario with deeply involved strategy in one of those games. Basically I'm saying I may have been playing these games "all wrong", a possibility you should consider when it comes to console RPGs. It sounds like you never once actually thought through a battle and just hit the "attack" command over and over again.

Usually that's all you have to do to win. In some games that's all you CAN do; magic is often limited and runs out fast, special abilities are also limited and need to be used carefully, only normal attack can be used most of the time against normal enemies in a lot of games... the games are often designed so that most of the time you don't use strategy. It just chews up time before you get strong enough to be able to face the boss.

Now, if I wanted to counter my own argument, it would actually be simple... I'd start talking about the JRPGs which don't follow all of those genre conventions. :) There are some. Of course, there are also some PC RPGs that don't follow most of those genre conventions either... but since there are more JRPGs than PC RPGs by a large margin, the unconventional console ones are more noticeable. And even those less conventional JRPGs still usually have set characters (even if you can configure them and choose their abilities, their basic character traits and classes are set) and a single main narrative that you can't really affect or can only minimally impact (or where you can get 'different endings' for different characters you end up with or whatever, but the main plot is always the same)... it's a rare JRPG indeed that doesn't follow any of these guidelines. More often it's just 'it follows some but not all of them'... which can be good enough, if the unique features make it truly different.