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Liv: Hello and welcome to tonight's Roundtable! Thank you all for coming!
Liv: The subject tonight is RPG Cut-scenes.
Liv: Three main aspects of cutscenes in RPGs include frequency, length and quality, with length and frequency being rather dependent on each other.
Liv: Would you rather see a large number of short cut-scenes in a game, or less longer ones?
Liv: On average...
Christopher: Personally, I don't mind a few rather long scenes. They donft break up the gameplay as much as a bunch of shorter ones.
Adam: It honestly doesn't matter to me as long as they are well done with quality VA (if they have voice acting) and serve to advance the story in a logical way.
Liv: I agree that a whole bunch of random short ones tend to break up gameplay...
Liv: But they do tend to make the character easier to relate to.
Andrew: My feeling is that as long as the cutscenes are interspersed well and help the drama of the plot to flow appropriately, then the length isn't really an issue .
Derek: It doesn't really matter to me as long as they're implemented well.
Andrew: Like in FFXII...
Adam: Right. Implementation is key.
Andrew: I don't tend to be a fan of longer cutscenes since a lot of games tend to do them poorly.
Liv: I would agree there. Once you get over... say... 20 minutes, it gets a bit tedious.
Andrew: But in that game, the quality of the writing makes the cutscenes a lot easier to sit through .
Andrew: Although, quality or no, my mom still asked "what soap opera are you watching in there?" when she overheard one.
Adam: If they are done correctly and actually have a point towards the story, then length doesn't really matter.
Derek: Heh.
Liv: I guess one thing that I could say about really long cut-scenes is that they had better have a pause button of some sort.
Adam: Yeah. Snacks are sometimes needed
Liv: Because if you had to leave and you couldn't pause it, you would miss a lot of stuff.
Liv: That happened to me when playing Star Ocean 3...
Christopher: Oh, and NO long scenes before a tough boss.
Liv: Ahahaha, very good point! XD
Andrew: Mmm indeed... there's nothing worse than having to watch the same scene over ten or twelve times.
Andrew: Although most newer games tend to avert this through the option to skip.
Derek: Yeah, the pause ability is nice.
Adam: Yeah! If you HAVE to sit through a cutscene every time it can get frustrating.
Christopher: As long as you have a skip, I'm fine.
Adam: Especially if you die left and right.
Liv: Kingdom Hearts 2 was nice in this way.
Derek: When I beat Xenogears, something came up and I had to run off, so I missed the ending.
Adam: Good thing the last boss was easy.
Derek: And I had to replay the entire ending sequence again to see it.
Christopher: Actually, Xenogears was the game I was thinking of when I thought of cut-scenes before bosses.
Derek: It was long though.
Liv: I haven't played Xenogears...
Adam: Oh yeah. Having to scroll through all that text got to be annoying.
Christopher: Not to mention how slow it scrolled.
Adam: XS3 even let you skip the scrolling text cutscenes if you wanted to.
Adam: Very convienient.
Christopher: Yeah, that was nice.
Derek: Oh yeah, one of the spolier boss fights kept freezing the game for me.
Christopher: That happened to me in XS2...the cutscene before the final boss.
Liv: I really enjoy when they let you go through text faster... 'cuz it's always so much slower than I read.
Derek: And I had to sit through 30-ish minutes of text to get back to it.
Christopher: It would always freeze...I needed to skip it.
Liv: Freezing = the devil.
Christopher: Truth.
Adam: That just happened to me in BK Origins, and it wasn't even a cutscene.
Liv: My favorite types of cut-scenes are ones that actually don't go with the plotline, persay.
Liv: Sometimes I just like to watch the characters interact.
Christopher: I can't really agree with that.
Christopher: If something relevant isn't happening, it doesn't usually hold my interest.
Adam: Well, if it's developing the characters that's okay.
Liv: Yea...
Andrew: Yeah... I'm not a fan of the "hey, Vivi, let's pee off this bridge!" cutscene family .
Andrew: It just reminds me of annoying wacky interludes in anime.
Liv: I don't know. I just like to... get to know the characters more. As if... it were a TV show instead of a game.
Andrew: But I AM a bitter, bitter man... Andrew: So... Andrew: Perhaps you can discount my opinion. ^^
Adam: That's true, you are.
Liv: Ahaha, maybe that's why I *do* like them. I love completely random stuff.
Christopher: Hey, don't diss the pee scene!
Andrew: I didn't even know black mages COULD pee, though.
Andrew: It totally shattered my concept of the universec
Andrew: And so I hate it forever.
Andrew: As well as all cutscenes of its ilk.
* Liv laughs... a lot.
Derek: ......
Liv: This train of thought kind of takes us to the next sub-topic, so why don't we move on?
Christopher: Nice segue!
Andrew: You da boss, applesauce.
Adam: Um...word.
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