Maybe Square will turn around and start churning out great yarns this year with FF13... oh wait, that's coming out in 2010, my bad.

This probably would have carried more weight coming from Square or Enix a decade ago.

To be fair, Star ocean 4 does have some decent story moments to it.

The thing is, it also had some bad plot holes occasionally, and I still cant get my head around why 90% of the message boards I've sene are absolutely pissed off that edge actually feels bad after certain events in the game and has a period of self-loathing and low confidence rather than just laughing it off and raping reimi in front of the entire crew for a laugh.

In some ways, i think we don't see better plots in games because when a believable character moment like that happens, where a character feels actual remorse for an action, a lot of gamers these days write them off as being emo tards who should "suck it up"

After everything released after Square-Enix merged, there's not a whole lot backing up that statement. Incorporating the same crap into every game IS the problem here. You would think they would treat their better-known franchises with more respect, but Star Ocean: The Last Hope is aptly named.

Square-Enix has really dropped the ball and Atlus seems to be aiming to pick it back up. Persona 3 and 4 together are better than all the crap that Square-Enix has released since Dirge of Craperus.

This would seem like a lot of Square-Enix bashin' time, but I'm just another disappointed fan that has stopped supporting this corporate beast when their games just don't cut it anymore.

I should be fair: The talent could very well be there already (maybe even working at Square Enix) but it would take several small miracles to get around upper-level decision makers who favor the bottom line over quality narratives. These are the people that wouldn't know a good story even if focus groups and the marketing department joined forces and made a pretty flowchart.

It'll happen someday, but I don't expect it for a while. Video games are currently in the late high school/early college phase of life--fleeting moments of depth and maturity drowning in tits and pretentiousness.

Nothing good since FF12, it was beautiful.

I want Mischief Makes on DS ffs. Well Treasure was way more involved but still.

RPG stories are generic garbage 90% of the time. Anyone that disagrees probably doesn't read many novels. Not that the potential isn't there, but as of now? No. Not even close to truly well written.

Same for shooters, action, dating sims, etc.

Its been done, just not by Square.

And it probably won't happen since Square is perfectly happy to keep making the same shitty, cookie cutter drivel they always make because it sells so much.

@ Midget

Did we play a different Star Ocean 4? The story in that game was just awful.

i think storytelling goes in the following order: books -> videogames -> movies... what movie can rival the stories in some of the older final fantasy games? movies with brilliant stories aren't too common, i feel, yet the same goes for videogames nowadays. i feel like it's true that videogames really draw you in... even something like zone of the enders has a better more engaging story than most movies. of course most videogames have shit and/or no storylines, but i do feel like the fact that you can have 30-40 hours of gameplay in a videogame makes it so much easier to have a much more complicated story than you can in a 2 hour movie.

Infinite Undiscovery is like the exact opposite of Final Fantasy title-wise. First you got Infinite versus Final, which is pretty obvious. Then you have Undiscovery versus Fantasy. An undiscovery is like the opposite of fantasy, because when you discover something, it's like an adventure, like a fantasy. When you undiscover something, it's like the opposite of that. The end.

I think it all depends on the person, really. I prefer video games to movies because I like having the control of the story at my own pace. But I'm not much of a movie person, anyways.

@ Midgetsnowman : Because people are stupid and totally missed WHY he was acting that way. A good character acts that way when he really feels bad. Blowing up the world.. seriously. Who wouldn't fucking get the way he did? It isn't like he stayed that way the entire time. People just have to bitch and whine about everything.

@Kyo, No, I just felt it did have some good plot elements that were not strung together very well or even were downright cut down by other plot elements. It had the potential to be a good story, if they had just stopped making illogical decisions. Case in point, the fact that Edge at least reacted sensibly to fucking up majorly as opposed to how the rest of the crew were able to laugh off 6 fucking BILLION deaths in the span of a couple of minutes. And then act indignant that edge would have the gall to lash out, be emotionally unstable or otherwise emotionally dead after what happened.

Further exacerbated by fanboy tards screaming about how they hate edge for being an emo.

Someday videogames WILL exceed movies, because the player is literally a part of the game world; your decisions have an effect. The hard part is to break down that barrier, between the player and character on screen, and to embrace the COLLABORATIVE nature of the game itself. It will happen, but so often the actual game elements are what actually get in the way. I also think that, believe it or not, the length of video games work against them sometimes. Time =/= emotional investment; why do movies usually move us more than television seris? At some point the punchiness of a two hour movie is more accessible than a 40 hour slog through a video game, and that IS a big factor in emotional investment.

Square also has publicly admitted that they have a set formula for creating their main characters.

If I cared about Star Ocean in any way, I'd probably be pissed at people publicly discussing exploding planets and whatnot. Just sayin'.

As for video game storytelling, the biggest problem is pretty simple: devs are usually so focused on making the game a "good" experience for the player that they feel compelled to take fewer risks with storytelling. As a result, you get a lot of cliches that could be easily subverted but aren't, and very few genuinely surprising moments of real emotion. As long as developers confuse positive emotions with real emotions, we won't see nearly as many truly great stories in games as we see in other mediums. Think about, for example, how you felt when Aeris died. Now imagine that you could have saved her, but didn't make it in time. Oh, and it autosaves as soon as she dies. I submit that that moment would have been substantially more affecting. It would not, however, be a moment most devs would dare put into their games, because that would "negatively affect the player experience."

Not that gamers aren't to blame as well; the Star Ocean example is a good one. Equally important is the example of a game like Dead Spsce; I was often amused to see reviewers mention that Isaac felt "like a glorified repairman" at certain points, completely missing the fact that Isaac's job is that of - shock horror! - a repairman. But because the game didn't go out of its way to "make you feel like a badass," it was criticized.

So yes, this idea that the player is entitled to "feeling good" throughout a game is messing up otherwise interesting stories, and I won't stand for it any more.

[rousingspeech]Now who's with me!?[/rousingspeech]

Sakuchan, calm down. People can have their own opinions about something without being wrong.

Yeah, it's kinda weird hearing this come from SE, a company that hasn't been able to release an RPG as great as FF10 (FF12 was good as a game, but definitely not as an FF game. The characters were shit, and there was barely any good dialogue (kinda like SO4 lol)).

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