Rebuttal to "When RPGs sell out"

by Wisdom

The words ãhardcore gamerä always make me laugh. The mere thought of someone who thinks that actively playing RPGs, or any genre of game, for that matter, is ãhardcoreä is absolutely ridiculous. They are games, people, games that do not take years of training or discipline to master. Thereâs no such thing as a ãhardcoreä gamer. With that said, I will not refute the existence of avid gamers. Avid gamers, not stupid enough to think they have a niche within the gaming population÷i.e. the writer of the whose editorial Iâm refuting÷simply play RPGs. A lot. We like RPGs. Now everyone, repeat after me: WE ARE NOT SPECIAL. This attitude of pseudo-underground makes me sick, people. Games are games, and because a company makes a few bad ones does not mean that company ãsold out.ä Thatâs the damn dumbest thing Iâve ever heard in my life. Letâs start with kidmigaruâs first comment: how companies are trading quality for quantity. This is where, were we arguing face to face, he would receive his first black eye. News flash: the days of the SNES are ãgoldenä because THEY WERE ENGINEERED THAT WAY. Ever wonder why we have such fond memories of RPGs from back then? Because Nintendo screened the games to DEATH, and the ones that actually made it through, to be released in America, were damn good. Yes, people, Square has been making trash, (I accede completely to his point on Mystic Quest), since the day they came into birth.

The difference is, the American population never, ever saw it, and thatâs a good and bad thing. Moving on, letâs get into advanced graphics. People, people, people· give up this hardcore mentality! So what if a game is accepted on a widespread level? YES, Final Fantasy VII had great graphics. YES, Final Fantasy VII had gorgeous cutscenes that EVERYONE loved. But they didnât destroy the game! You think the fact that Square wrapped its gift in a beautiful package that the insides deteriorated at all?! People, Final Fantasy VII revolutionized EVERYTHING. It made the modern RPG. It forced all other game companies to wake up and realize that it was time to get serious. If you really want me to get into how Final Fantasy VII is, in fact, the RPG Renaissance, I will. Donât get me wrong÷there are BETTER games than FFVII. MUCH better games. (Gasp!) But NO OTHER GAME will EVER do what Final Fantasy VII did. It opened up an entirely new world to us, and now the ãhardcoreä gamers are scared that their underground movement, that made them so special, will suddenly be accepted and theyâll end up a part of the mainstream that they so vehemently oppose. While the avid gamers grin and think ãHey, if more people dig RPGs, maybe weâll got some more over here.ä The avid gamers were proven correct. In the wake of Final Fantasy VIIâs revolutionary effect on the American gaming population, Sony threw open its doors and invited all of the RPGs from Japan to try their hand at good olâ U.S. soil. Quantity for quality, you say? Tell that to any fan of Xenogears, which barely made American shores as it is. (And so help me if you say Xenogears substituted graphics for gameplay and storyline. Go sit in a corner if youâre that far gone.)

Youâre basing all of your gaming predictions on solely American forecasts. What you fail to realize is that youâre comparing American games now to American games THEN÷which were not nearly the whole of the games being released then. Now that the U.S. is getting almost every RPG released in Japan by Square, weâre getting the coal along with the diamonds. And for the record, I completely disagree with you on Vagrant Story. Thatâs another rant entirely, but you are, hands-down, the worst judge of gameplay EVER if you think of all games, VS lacked it. Either that or you had a week-long aneurysm as you were playing it. Those are the only possible justifications I can come up with.

As for your views on how everything seems to be centered on graphics nowadays, thatâs because you canât market a storyline. What are you going to, flash scenes of text windows on the commercial and pray the audience can read like lightning? They need something to pull gamers in, and graphics always have and always will do it. But all they ever can be is a hook, and I accede that too many companies forget that graphics donât make the game: storyline and gameplay are extremely important. (Which is why I was slightly disappointed by FF8. No, it wasnât the ãcomplexä combat or magic systems, it was the fact that battles took place every 1.38 nanoseconds and they were disproportionately hard. When the enemies are based on your main charactersâ level and heâs literally thirty levels above everyone else, youâve got some seriously unfair fights. Case in point: Ruby Dragons. It was so much fun entering a random battle to be nuked for 9999 points of damage before I even moved. You can guess how enthusiastic I was about the game after the 4th time that happened.) The only thing I think companies have ãsold outä on is their respective staffing. With all of the CG being produced nowadays, I think a few of our RPG companies have enlisted the help of two, possibly two-and-a-half, retarded translators. I mean, SOMEONE must have been smoking some seriously heavy chronic up at Square during Tacticâs translation. A few other glaring examples of how to butcher the English language: Wild ARMs 2 and Legend of Dragoon. These games were still loads of fun to play, and Legend of Dragoon managed to emotionally attach me to the characters more than FF VII did. (Sorry, people, but I cheered when Aeris died. The only time I got angry about it is when I realized getting her fourth limit break, which takes hours for that stupid *&(^, was all for naught. That pissed me off.) But horrible translations have got to stop. I would gladly hire myself out as a script reviser, if the actual translators are so damn illiterate. I mean, itâs one thing to have trouble conveying an idiosyncrasy of the Japanese culture, but to have idiotic and wholly childish grammatical errors EVERY OTHER word in a game is just pathetic. If someone had gone through and refined Legend of Dragoonâs dialogue, I swear to God the game would have been magnificent. So in other words, kidmigaru, youâre just completely wrong. These worse games have always existed, weâre just being exposed to them now, and the fact that not all of them are perfect shouldnât bug you so much. Youâre basically saying the games arenât as good, on a whole, as they used to be, but thatâs only because before we got the cream of the crop. The outliers weâre getting now are dragging the average down some, yes, but weâre also getting games that are significantly above the average too. The bar on all RPGs has been raised quite a few notches, and yes, graphics play a key role in games. But Square hasnât ãfallen from grace.ä (If it ever was in grace to begin with· itâs a game company for Godâs sake.) Their good games still shine as bright as the old classics ever did. And weâre getting more of those great games because consumer demand has risen, mostly due to those wonderful graphics. Man, if I have to endure incredible graphics to get a game like Chrono Cross over here, well, thatâs just a sacrifice Iâm going to have to make. (Oh yeah, and donât try to argue that all games focus too much on graphics and not enough on storyline. Read the editorial again if you didnât catch me addressing that, because I know someoneâs going to try and say I didnât.)