How can you watch that opening sequence…and think that it would be cool to suddenly stop and navigate menus, pausing to watch numbers rise out of people’s bodies?

How can you enjoy long stretches of strategezing and timing your moves to beat some ripped enemy and think that it would be cool to suddenly stop doing it yourself and watch the computer take over for you? If I wanted that, I’d rent a movie. Alot of these games are really about unlocking new abilities and then enjoying using them in combat (perhaps in cool combinations as well).

I’m being a bit extreme, but I don’t think the FF games have been strictly “turn-based” for a while. Usually your enemy can keep attacking you while you make your choices. (I think in the case of FF-X it was strictly turn based except that the order of the turns varied depending on the attacks you selected).

I see your point though. I sometimes wish that RPGs were more like Secret of Mana or A Link to the Past where you have a sense of moving around your enemy even though you make selections of weapons/spells from various menus. Chrono Trigger gave me that feeling too, even though the player doesn’t technically do anything to move the characters in combat.

(I should note that I have not played Lost Odyssey, but the synopsis sounds really cool. Kind of like the “Quantum Leap” style game I prposed to a friend in Junior High).

By Jordan on 03.08.07 1:26 pm

I’m not saying I want to sit and watch the guy doing cool stuff for the entire game—I’m saying I want to take over after I get my brief, extra-pretty demonstration. And it doesn’t need to be a competition between whoever is most twitchy on the buttons, as there are certainly other well-done examples of combat in video games (Bushido Blade comes to mind). You can build up abilities and combine them without having to slow down the action with a menu every few seconds, especially considering how many buttons (and possible button combinations) are on a modern controller. You can deal damage without having everything visibly abstracted to a number. Then it becomes less like a video game and more like a tabletop game.

That said … I never played Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger, so maybe I should look into stuff like that before decrying the entire genre. If I remember correctly, Knights of the Old Republic was at least a little better because people were still moving and seemingly active between turns. I guess it’s largely the unrealistic “let’s all take turns to do something” that jars me…

By Jason on 03.08.07 5:58 pm

[...] back, I complained that the Xbox 360 exclusive Lost Odyssey looked really cool, but the way the game handled [...]

By doombot » Lost Opportunity (Revisited) on 02.15.08 2:28 am