Lurker > adjl

YoukaiSlayer posted...

It's very difficult to tell that story as a game very well, because again, I AM the character.

Not really. You're choosing to play the role of a mostly static, pre-existing character. If you want a game where the character is actually a reflection of whatever you want them to be, go play D&D or another RPG that actually claims to offer that kind of freedom. You're not going to get that from a JRPG or other RPG where the characters and story are largely fixed, nor will you ever because that's just not the kind of game they try to be.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

What happens if I am smarter than they are letting my character be and I suspect that guy the whole time but theres nothing I can do about it?

What would you do? Stab him in front of all the townsfolk that believe he's innocent and get executed for murder? Insist to all the townsfolk that are pleading with you to save the neighbouring town that they're all stupid and you need to stay there and play Sitting on Your Ass Simulator 2023 so the BBEG doesn't get a chance to destroy yours? Start a fight with somebody who will almost certainly mop the floor with you unless you've been metagaming hard enough that you're in no position to complain that your metagaming isn't reflected in the canon?

If you actually do find a plausible alternative? Give yourself a pat on the back for being tremendously clever and go on with your life, letting the story play out as intended. It's not really a big deal unless the story gets really contrived.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If I were to play that same story AS Arvan though, I'd hate that

It's consistent. You're playing as him clinging to the hope that what you're collecting will work. Maybe it won't, and maybe you figure out that it probably won't, but you still hope that it will. No matter how much writing you read on the wall, you're never going to be certain that it won't work (at least, presuming the foreshadowing is just hinting that it might not and not outright telling you, since that would be bad foreshadowing), so putting yourself in Arven's shoes and hoping it will is perfectly plausible. It's still going to feel bad if the dog dies, because dogs dying always feels bad, but a story about a dog dying isn't exactly meant to be good feelings all the way.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

I can't think of several jrpgs that even have an interesting story, annoying twist or not.

Yeah, but you get upset if the story doesn't go exactly the way you think it should, so I'm not sure you're the best judge of that.

Xenoblade 1 is one of the best examples that comes to mind: You spend most of the game believing Mechonis and the mechon to be the enemy, but gradually learn that the Machina exist and that the people of Mechonis are also victims of this ancient war, ultimately culminating in forgiving Egil to break the cycle of violence and the reveal that the Bionis has been the real enemy of the world all along. At no point is it actually an option to *not* fight Egil and the mechon, given how much of a threat they pose, but as soon as you think the world is safe because the mechon have been neutralized, Zanza shows his hand and the pieces of foreshadowing you've been collecting all fall into place to reveal that everything you've done to date has not been working toward beating the real Big Bad. Most of that foreshadowing has been subtle enough to not give the whole thing away (though I will say I'm not a huge fan of Dickson's periodic "I sure do feel bad about being secretly evil lol" asides, given how hamfistedly they beat the player over the head with the idea that there's more to him than meets the eye), but it's all there and it all makes sense once you've got a bit of context to support it. Despite the truth of the world invalidating everything done to that point, however, it does not make that progress feel pointless, because everything led up to that revelation and to Shulk developing in a way that forced Zanza to take matters into his own hands.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

A lot of times much less important gameplay decisions negatively impact the story, like needing to visit every set piece location.

Yes, blatant padding can mess with story pacing a lot. Side quests also often do this, but I'm inclined to give them a pass because they're optional.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

The stumbling blocks should all be gameplay solvable. Thats why it's a game.

Or it's a game because the author felt that worked better for pacing and audience investment purposes than another medium would have, and limiting the story by removing all possibility of failure would be silly.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Yeah but the story isn't about collecting mcguffins to allow that operation to succeed. If it instead followed a doctor friend as they train for years to be able to do the operation and then it still ended in failure, it'd be a lot more frustrating. The story was never about saving her life to begin with.

Therein lies the twist: The story isn't actually what the characters thought it was at face value. By extension, the player playing the role of those characters also believes there's a different story being told until it turns out that they were working toward something else, sharing in the ignorance or deception that misled the protagonist and therefore in however they react to the surprise (and games are arguably better as a storytelling medium in that regard because the player is more invested in the characters' experience and will therefore react more strongly to major events). Many stories start out with a goal that ends up changing as you learn more about the world and what's going on, often invalidating the work you put toward the initial goal if you choose to frame it strictly in terms of immediate cause and effect, but on a broader scale that work ends up being progress toward realizing the truth of the initial goal and unravelling the rest of the story, progress that can't really be skipped because there's no other way to figure out the truth than to see the lie to its endpoint. That's all still consistent with playing the role of the character as they journey through the story.

That's not to say every such twist is automatically good, and there should be at least some foreshadowing to support it instead of pulling the twist out of nowhere (to return to a hypothetical variant where Arven's dog dies, that story should include finding some lore that casts doubt on the Herba Mystica's healing abilities or something that plants the suspicion that nothing could cure the dog, and throughout that Arven should be expressing those worries and talking about what the dog means to him and generally laying the framework for the story to actually be about processing his grief, not just say "Hey we're collecting mcguffins to cure the dog OOPS HE DIED BE SAD NOW"), but the bottom line remains that expecting all gameplay progress to work toward immediate success instead of encountering some stumbling blocks along the way to a grander victory is exceedingly limiting. That's not a good thing. Off the top of my head, I can think of several JRPGs where a twist like that played a huge role in making the story interesting (and one where it could have made the story really interesting, but the rest of the writing kind of ignored that the twist happened for some reason. Three guesses which game that is) and I wouldn't dream of gutting those stories just to more immediately reward players (except maybe that one).

YoukaiSlayer posted...

But you don't need to shake things up with the story. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If the story never gets shaken up, it is broke, or at least not very good. A completely predictable story can be serviceable, in a context where you don't particularly need a good story (like Pokemon or Mario), but it's generally not very interesting, and a story-focused game should have an interesting story.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

I would have been very pissed if my getting the sandwiches ultimately made no difference in the dogs health. Hell, I'd be pissed watching that in an anime. Don't waste my time on story beats that ultimately come to nothing.

But it doesn't come to nothing. It forms part of the characters' development in the grander scheme of things. Arven would be a different person for having tried and failed to save the dog than if he had just given up from the outset, and that would be the focus of a story where the dog died (again, not exactly original, but a well-established idea for an emotionally evocative story). Again, you'd eventually succeed, victory just might not look like you thought it would, which in a lot of ways is a significantly more uplifting experience than everything just going well all the time.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

To shift it again though, how do you feel about freiren airing right now? That's a show that realistically has no need for the characters to ever fail a combat encounter and it has quite a good story. I think it's even rated #1 on MAL right now, largely because of the emotional story.

Haven't seen it (or any anime in like 10 years, actually >.>), but I'm loosely familiar with the premise, and I'm sure it's doing a fine job without anyone getting beaten up. Combat failure isn't necessary to tell an interesting, compelling story, it's just one tool available to do so. I'm not about to suggest that every story should have a token failure to add dramatic tension, just that having failure isn't a bad thing and there's no reason to categorically rule it out.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Hell, iyashikei anime has proven people can enjoy a story with no conflict whatsoever, internal or external. Just pure pleasant escapism.

That's not so much enjoying a story, though, as it is enjoying that banal escapism. Even putting aside for a moment that there often is conflict (just nothing high-stakes) because that's critical to have any sort of plot whatsoever, people watching slice-of-life do so because they just want to chill out and laugh at characters dealing with boring everyday lives in ways that are kind of funny and/or charming. Nobody watches K-On or Lucky Star for the plot, much the same way that nobody plays Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley for the plot. Media that is more story-focused, however, does need to be held to a higher standard and its writers should strive to make their stories interesting. That generally means higher-stakes conflicts and unpredictability.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Something fantasy rpg video games are even more suited to.

Depends on the game. Something like Fantasy Life (which you'd probably enjoy, though that recommendation isn't very helpful with the 3DS eShop dead and the Switch sequel 6-8 months out) expressly bills itself as being a slice of life RPG, and accordingly it's a pretty chill, banal story where you're mostly just messing around with fun characters. That's exactly what it should be. Something like Xenoblade, Final Fantasy, or Tales, though, is presented as being an epic fantasy adventure, with the fate of the world on the line and deep secrets about its true nature to uncover. Give one of those a low-stakes story with minimal conflict, and you've got a problem. Those need higher-stakes conflict, unpredictable twists, and a genuine threat of failure, otherwise you end up with a story that lacks the credibility needed to hold up that pretense. "Fantasy RPG video game" covers a pretty broad spectrum of styles and themes. In some of them, scripted losses are indeed inappropriate and just serve to artificially lengthen the game in a way that feels contrived and awkward. In others, they're a useful tool for developing dramatic tension and preventing the story from becoming predictable.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

I'm leaving out a little bit but not enough to make a difference...

Yeah, that sounds stupid. As I've made clear, I don't mind scripted losses as a way to use failure as an interesting story element, particularly when a typical playthrough isn't going to encounter any ludonarrative dissonance in the process because it's been balanced properly, but that just sounds like a story where the player character's involvement doesn't actually make a difference, and that's just plain bad writing. Stories in games should at least make some effort to involve the player, even if they don't perfectly reflect the player's actions at every turn. Otherwise, there's no investment in the story.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

It's really not. Most of these games have you win like 90% of the time.

And it's that other 10% that shakes things up. I'm not about to suggest that the whole story should be an alternating series of failures and triumphs, just that having failures and major challenges in there is more interesting than winning 100% of the time.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

And honestly, the arvan story in scarlet/violet was pretty good and a nice example of how you can still explore characters and story despite not losing.

It was good as a long-running side quest (which is kind of how all three "Roads" were framed, actually), but if you gave me a game where the entire main plot was "Meet dude, find out dude's dog is sick, collect items to cure dog," I'm not going to praise that game for having a good story (and not just because sad dogs are often a really lazy way to add emotional impact to a story). It's a compelling side plot and he and his dad's backstory made for interesting characters and world-building, but it's just too limited to be good as a main story.

Building on that example, though, it wouldn't have ruined the story if the dog actually ended up dying despite your best sandwiches. Pokemon would never go there, of course, but that would pivot the story into helping Arven grow as a person past the loss of that proxy for his father. That's still a worthwhile story (if perhaps not very original, given that that's the plot of pretty much any young adult novel with a dog on the cover that's won any sort of literature prize), even considering that you lose out on the gratification of saving the dog that you were hoping for. You still end up ultimately winning, which is the ultimate goal of the game. Victory just doesn't necessarily look like you expected it to.

agesboy posted...

golden sun dark dawn................................................

Xenoblade X was the first one to come to mind for me, but Dark Dawn is also up there. At least there's some hope for a Xenoblade Y, but I've pretty much given up on Golden Sun at this point.

agesboy posted...

i think if you metagame and beat a fight before you're supposed to (or on ng+), the reward should also be metagame-y like stat boosters or accessories. story concessions should be made if reasonable, but in a LOT of them, they're foundational

It's fun when that happens, but I'd consider that more of an easter egg than something I would ever expect. It kind of hinges on the intended loss being relatively low-stakes so you don't end up undermining the story by removing it. I also very much expect dissonance on NG+, because NG+ is generally meant to be a matter of trivializing the gameplay so you can rush through the story again, so I don't particularly mind it there.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

That doesn't make sense. The two are related.

"Related" doesn't have to mean "perfectly consistent at all times." They should try to be consistent whenever possible, but the occasional failure in that regard isn't the end of the world.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Frankly, I don't need greater depth.

That's fine. Many would disagree. Deeper stories are great, even if that's not something you particularly value.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

The game I was playing that prompted this was light hearted fun until you autolose in the cutscene, twice, get captured by the bad guy that has no reason to keep you alive, escape, immediately attack the bad guy without any new power ups from when you lost last time, beat him, beat the real final boss in the gemaply, but then lose in the cutscene AGAIN just for the gods to come down and beat it for you. The end. Wtf was I even there for?

That does indeed sound silly. Assuming it is indeed as bad as you're describing and you didn't just miss plot points that made it more justifiable (which seems unlikely because I don't think justifying that final boss nonsense is even possible), it sounds like that was an example of scripted losses done poorly and I'd likely share your frustration in your position.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

We don't actually get the middle ground games I'm fine with, outside of MAYBE atelier games (although the ones I've played still follow this). We either get pokemons level of nonstory or this exact same heroes journey that forces you into a low point, usually due to a loss and capture at around the 60-70% mark.

That's the thing: A story in which nothing ever goes wrong for the protagonist so long as you win every fight is Pokemon levels of non-story. You aren't going to get stories that satisfy your insistence on never having a narrative failure without stripping out so much depth that they stop being interesting. Exceptions are always going to be very rare because it's hard to do anything surprising or compelling with "I win all the time."

YoukaiSlayer posted...

But games ARE.

Right. So test yourself with the game and be rewarded with the story. If you don't like the story you're rewarded with, that's just the nature of surprise rewards like that, so you've just gotta roll with it and let that guide future purchasing decisions (namely, avoid games from franchises that have a history of stories you dislike).

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Your words, not mine.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

All of the stuff I'm doing in the gameplay is to avoid that loss, so when it can't be done, it makes my investment in the gameplay pointless and it just becomes busywork in the way of a static story

That was just the continuation of your logic. If the plot not going your way is enough to make you consider your investment in the gameplay busywork in the service of a story, that means you're only ever viewing your investment in the gameplay to be busywork in the service of a story that you hope goes your way.

Enjoyable gameplay is its own reward. Embrace that instead of expecting immutable stories to twist themselves to heap more rewards on you. You'll have a much better time that way.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Yes but is how every GAME should end.

And that's just lazy writing. Why even bother having a story at all if you're going to insist that every possible story beat goes in the party's favour so long as the player does well enough to move forward in the story? At that point, you might as well just be playing Mario: If you win, you save the princess, otherwise you get nothing. Why bother with greater depth than that if the only thing you want from the story is a pat on the back for winning?

YoukaiSlayer posted...

The same way every test you perform perfectly on should result in a passing grade.

I can't think of a single game ending that wouldn't constitute at least a "passing grade." Not games that actually have endings, at least. I don't think we need to count blatant sequel bait or otherwise unfinished stories in that.

Moreover, stories aren't tests. Even in games with variable stories and impactful choices, those choices and/or your performance are more about shaping the story than securing some sort of absolute perfect win where nothing has gone wrong. The handful of stories that actually treat it like that tend to be pretty lame, with no interesting twists or developments because you can see everything coming.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

most of the time it doesn't really change any motivations or goals.

Off the top of my head, none of Xenoblade 1 would have happened if Metal Face lost the first fight against him, none of the entire Golden Sun series would have happened if Isaac and Garet beat Saturos and Menardi in that first fight, the first fight against Yggdrasil in Tales of Symphonia is unavoidable from a story perspective and would have made the whole game a lot shorter if you won then... It was even critical to Xenoblade 3's story and themes (most notably, Noah's development into a protagonist that could actually win), though that's not nearly as obvious at face value because very little of Xenoblade 3's story and themes are obvious at face value and you were too upset about the game to bother digging further into understanding it. There are certainly many cases where it's just a lazy way to write a transition into the obligatory JRPG jail scene, but it's still ridiculous to suggest that antagonist victories aren't significant to the plot, especially because even those lazy examples usually end up being an opportunity to explore more about the villain's motivations and/or the nature of the world you're trying to save.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

About the xenoblade 2 stuff, I'm aware the need for a sacrifice CAN come up unexpectedly, but it doesn't NEED to and the plot would have been totally fine if that just didn't happen. If they just escape the space station thats already blowing up anyway.

Most of any given story doesn't NEED to happen. Heck, the game didn't NEED to be made in the first place, if we want to talk about genuine necessity. That was, however, the story they wanted to tell, and within that story, the World Tree collapsing after the Conduit stopped powering the station and that presenting an apocalyptic threat to the world below was entirely consistent and reasonably foreshadowed.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

You also wouldn't necessarily need as many different scenes as possible. The way optional characters are typically handled is their lines are written and just not said if they aren't there. You only really need variance if something would produce a different result, like in this case, but even then you can probably use all of the characters interchangeably. Even the default wind blade could probably chuck you across the gap for that matter.

You might not actually need 2e46 (39!) copies of each scene, but that's still a significant amount of variability to put in. Given how much easier it is to just write a story that doesn't need to acknowledge any other rare blades than to put that kind of variability in, I'm not remotely surprised they went with the former.

And again, it's entirely a moot point. Pneuma wasn't going to change her mind either way, so the only thing that would change about the scene is that Rex got talked down on her side instead of with the rest of the party. Even then, I don't think even that would have happened, because as I mentioned before, he *did* try to cross: He tried his grappling hook, he asked Poppi, and it stands to reason that he would have tried other blades if he hadn't been talked down following Poppi's refusal. What you're proposing is that he should have ignored every person in the party telling him to listen to Pneuma and thrown a tantrum of trying every blade he could until he made it across (to, again, accomplish nothing), which is... just a bad idea. Forget talking about plot consistency or whether that's fitting for the character, that'd just be a terrible scene.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Not to mention it's a game, I already won, why aren't you giving me the happy ending I earned?

Because that's not how stories work. Not every story ends with "and they all lived happily ever after the end," nor should you expect them to because restricting yourself to that is just lazy writing.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

And that theme of accepting not saving doesn't make any sense at all. You said he accepted he couldn't save her, and then...went to save her.

It's accepting that he could fail to save her without compromising his identity. His identity up to that point was pretty thoroughly just a generic unflappable shounen protagonist: He helped everyone he met and everyone's life was better for it. When he completely failed Pyra like that and couldn't see a way forward, he just wanted to dissociate from the whole situation because he couldn't handle facing such a failure. He moved past that after everyone punched him in the face and found the motivation to go find Pneuma's sword, and that development subsequently got showcased by him accepting that the last moments of the game were an instance where he couldn't save Pneuma (and, in doing so, demonstrating that he was strong enough to carry Alrest into the future without being discouraged by the inevitable failures along the way).

In chapter 7, it wasn't a matter of accepting that he couldn't save her, it was a matter of finding the motivation to try again after failing. He found it(/had it knocked into him), then he saved her. Then when Pneuma sacrificed herself at the end, he was able to draw on that growth to find the motivation to build a world without her instead of sinking into despair.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Pneuma just activates a 5 minute self destruct. Could have just left after initiating that.

I expect Aion can only run with one of the two Aegises inside, hence Malos stayed in it for the final fight instead of just setting it loose to nuke everything while he chilled in Elysium.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

And why would a space station designed to be automated and work by itself for thousands of years not be designed with a way to deal with the world tree falling on the planet? For that matter, why would it just collapse without power in the first place? It should just remain dormant.

I'm pretty comfortable accepting that the original designers didn't plan for all of humanity to be wiped out in a genesis event that forced Earth into a parallel dimension, leaving the Beanstalk to run autonomously for tens of thousands of years before eventually the omnipotent power source keeping it all going vanished into another dimension. That's a little beyond what most building codes expect engineers to consider,. I'm also pretty comfortable accepting that the station relied on some active stabilization to keep it orbiting in the correct position, which would have relied on the Conduit's power and therefore failed catastrophically when the it vanished. From there, it makes sense that it would escape orbit if the "trunk" were severed (and this is explicitly mentioned in a side conversation), and in turn that it would fall if the "trunk" were pulling on it.

YoukaiSlayer posted...
A person who merely sees the gameplay as busywork for the static story is just never going to see eye to eye with me.

That was your logic, not mine. I see plenty of value in gameplay. I just don't get upset and ignore all of that value when a cutscene exists that doesn't tell me I'm doing a good job. The melting health bars do enough of that to satisfy my ego.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

It also wouldn't gut the vast majority of these stories that would still function just fine if that section of the game was straight up removed, much less altered.

Most stories would be pretty significantly altered if an instance where the antagonist won was removed.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If you want the boss to feel threatening, make it threatening in the gameplay.

They do, unless you deliberately break the game such that they aren't.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

And again, getting captured and not killed by the boss already makes them far less threatening. Any story with high stakes doesn't allow for a loss.

Sure it does. Being captured is usually a lazy cop-out, I agree, but last-minute escapes or saves allow for losses despite the boss being a genuine, high-stakes threat, especially if getting away and being unable to stop them causes them to destroy whatever you failed to protect.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

You talk as if you know all of the people that like to be overpowered in these games, but I don't think you do. I'm pretty sure more of them are like me than you suspect.

Obviously I don't know all of the people of any given subpopulation, by virtue of there being a lot of people in the world, but the vast majority I've observed are happy to shrug inconsistencies like this off as a minor annoyance, not feel as if the entire game has been ripped out from under them because one time a cutscene told them they weren't omnipotent.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Ah, more of "90% of the game is non canon IN the game". It's such a stupid argument. It's not even ludonarrative dissonance at that point, it's just straight up narrative dissonance.

it's kind of inevitable with how Xenoblade 2 was designed. To have a different version of each cutscene for every possible combination of those 39 randomized rare blades, you'd need more cutscenes than there are stars in the universe (squared). Does that mean the game's core gameplay design was a mistake? Arguably, but given that this one instance of "he could have used one of their powers to jump over there and not actually change anything about the situation except needing to jump back in a minute or two" is the only point where it actually caused a "problem," completely overhauling the core gameplay design to fix that "problem" would be pretty silly.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

It was blowing up anyway.

It was collapsing. The debris from a space elevator/station hitting the ground would have been apocalyptic (which is why every other Gundam series does some variant of it >.>), hence the need to annihilate as much of the column as possible to allow the station to drift free.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

She wasn't even the only person to stay behind to do it.

She used Aion to do it. In the entirety of Alrest, there were exactly two individuals that could operate Aion, and the party had just finished killing one of them. I'm not even sure who you're trying to suggest could have done it, because this is just straight up false.

YoukaiSlayer posted...
"And honestly, yeah, if they really had to be sacrificed, it would have been better if they'd gone out together instead of completely trampling the main characters will."

Absolutely nothing about Pyra or Mythra's characters as presented prior to that moment suggests that they would have been okay with Rex throwing his life away for no reason, nor would any of the other party members.

YoukaiSlayer posted...
"The bigger issue though is why make it require a sacrifice to begin with? That wasn't inherent in the problem. They didn't go up there on a suicide mission expecting to sacrifice someone."

You can end up having to sacrifice someone without the characters planning to do so. In this case, the station's collapse was foreshadowed by a couple of side conversations (one of which I believe requires KOS-MOS, so it's not exactly the most accessible), plus simple physics.

YoukaiSlayer posted...
"The themes of the game aren't about sacrifice and moving on or anything like that."

The only piece of actual character development Rex gets is learning to accept that he can fail to help somebody without losing his entire identity (specifically, in chapter 7 after Pyra is taken and he gets all mopey but eventually everyone talks him into trying again). Being willing to let Pneuma sacrifice herself instead of putting the entire world at risk trying to come up with a solution that makes him feel less like a failure is 100% consistent with that growth. This also sets him up as a foil to Jin, whose inability to move on from Lora's death pushed him to the point of seeking absolute oblivion by ending the world, and in turn establishes a parallel between Pneuma's and Malos' characters (Pneuma wanted to save the world because Rex loved it, Malos wanted to destroy it because Jin hated it). Amalthus' entire motivation as a villain also boiled down to being unable to accept that bad things were happening in the world, so again, Rex being able to accept losing Pneuma sets him up as a foil to Amalthus as well.

2 had themes other than that, certainly, but characters' response to loss and hardship was a major one, shaping most of the main character and especially villain arcs. With that in mind, Rex losing Pneuma (to a semi-voluntary sacrifice or otherwise) and still being willing to move forward is 100% consistent with one of the game's major themes. Heck, I might even go so far as to suggest that Pneuma sacrificing herself without telling Rex that she would be reborn a few minutes later could have been part of the Architect's plan, as a final test to ensure that Alrest would be safe in the hands of Rex and his friends because they wouldn't fall to the same nihilistic despair that defined Amalthus, but that's reading pretty deeply between the lines.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Creating an inconsistency that damages the gameplay fantasy would necessitate putting something above the gameplay.

Damages, but doesn't destroy. The damage is brief and not unexpected for those that have deliberately broken the game. Choosing to momentarily damage the gameplay instead of completely gutting the story isn't putting the story above the gameplay, it's minimizing the total harm done. Even more so where it doesn't damage the gameplay itself, only the power fantasy, and even then only for people that need every aspect of the game to reinforce that fantasy at all times.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If the gameplay is non canon, why is it even attached to the story?

Because people like grinding to become overpowered in RPGs. Limiting that for the sake of the story takes that away from them. And limiting the story for the sake of making sure everyone is validated for whatever grinding they do creates weaker stories. The compromise is to expect people who grind to become overpowered to be satisfied with the validation the gameplay already provides them, which is pretty reasonable.

Note that I'm not saying that all gameplay is non-canon. Just gameplay that involves deliberately deviating from the story, which is by definition always going to be non-canon because you're deliberately deviating from the canon.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Really? All of the blades would have chosen not to help? All 39 rare blades with their different personalities and values wouldn't have helped him close the gap?

Canonically, Rex's only blades are Pyra/Mythra, Roc, and that one common wind knuckle blade he gets in chapter 2 (and also Nia, but that's a bit different). Roc doesn't have the Leaping field skill (note that every time you jump a large gap in the field, it's a combo of Wind Mastery and Leaping), and the common one's abilities are randomized and therefore non-canon, so canonically, no magic flying powers.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

And it would have completely made their attempted sacrifice to protect rex impossible if rex was able to jump the gap. Rex doesn't even TRY to do it.

Really? Putting aside the fact that Rex *does* try (he tries the grapplling hook, then asks Poppi for help and is refused, then is talked down before he can try anything else), think that one through: Pneuma tells Rex that she needs to stay behind to annihilate the world tree to prevent it from destroying the world (not just saving Rex). Rex jumps over to her. She then... tells Rex to go back? Rex being over there doesn't eliminate the need to save the world, nor is he going to change her mind. The best he's going to accomplish is to sacrifice himself with her, and it stands to reason that she and the rest of the party would have talked him out of that, so why bother spelling out that exchange? The only issue with that sacrifice was that it was immediately rendered moot by Pyra and Mythra coming back (which is something they should have mentioned to convince Rex to leave, further cementing that it was an afterthought that got tacked on after finishing the rest of the ending). *That's* what made it feel stupid and contrived, not the fact that Rex wasn't able to stop them.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Their constraint is to keep telling the same story in the same way with superficial differences.

That's their choice. That's not being constrained, that's just being lazy and unoriginal. Insisting that they be allowed to be lazy and unoriginal is the exact opposite of a constraint. You can then subsequently criticize them for being lazy and unoriginal, but that's very different from outright saying "you're not allowed to put X in a story."

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Maybe if any of them were actually writing interesting stories you'd have more of a leg to stand on

If they aren't interesting, why care about them so much? Why not just skip the cutscenes and eliminate the whole issue?

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Thats what the gameplay coming first means. Everything in the game should support the gameplay.

No, it means that you strive to make enjoyable gameplay even if that creates some inconsistencies with other elements. Trying to be consistent is still good, but putting gameplay first just means that your first priority is making enjoyable gameplay.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If anything has to be sacrificed it should be anything other than the gameplay, whether that be story or realism or character development or world building.

And in cases like this (again, where it's done properly, not poorly), the sacrifice made is that moment of ludonarrative consistency for a small handful of players who have already been deliberately deviating from the narrative for the sake of indulging in more gameplay. That moment of inconsistency - experienced only in edge cases where the player has already been introducing other inconsistencies - is a much more reasonable sacrifice than taking chunks out of anything else in a way that will make them less enjoyable in their own rights for the vast majority of players.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Worth it. Avoiding gameplay dissonance is more important than setting the stakes

It really isn't. Establishing meaningful stakes is a fundamental requirement of having a story worth caring about. A moment of dissonance for a handful of players who already shouldn't mind that dissonance because they've deliberately created it (reminder: if you're doing side quests, that's you saying "hang on, immediate world-ending threat, I want to go collect some pickles for this dude") is very much not worse than stripping out the stakes that make a story worth getting invested in.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If my character has the power (and reason) to go through the maintain, or jump over the river, then I will complain about them finding a bridge or way around the mountain.

And they don't, in this case. That's the point: The grinding you've done does not establish a canonical power level. It can't, because you're dealing with a static story that can't change in response to you. Canonically, you're too weak to win the fight in question.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

In fact, one of my biggest story complaints in xenoblade 2 is rex not jumping over the relatively small gap in the space station. Something he canonically should be able to do with ease at the point.

Using the grappling hook that they showed failing, or using the power of the sword waifu who was deliberately withholding that power in that moment? Neither of the abilities Rex had that gave him that kind of jumping power were available to him in that moment (and, extended further, it stands to reason that any other blades that might have helped would also have refused once they realized the situation). Moreover, even if he had figured out some sort of contrived way to get across, it wouldn't have changed the outcome of the scene, so why contrive one?

YoukaiSlayer posted...

You talk about how constraining what I want to do is while endorsing them sticking to the same exact formula every single time. That's far more constraining than what I propose even.

"You should never put X in a story" is always going to be infinitely more constraining than "it's okay if you put Y in a story," no matter what X and Y are, by simple virtue of the fact that the former is a constraint and the latter is not.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

As a piece of commercial entertainment, this is not a good enough reason for me, or at least not a reason for it to be beyond criticism. And if you really wanna make it simple, then I want them not to, simple as that.

And that's fine, but your position of "the protagonist should never lose in the story" is taking that opinion to an unreasonable extent. You asked why developers insist on putting scripted losses in games where it's possible to overpower the fight and contradict the story. The answer is that losing can make stories interesting, being able to become overpowered is interesting, and provided the scripted loss is balanced such that the only people that overpower the fight are those that have deliberately engineered that contradiction (and therefore accepted the dissonance in all other aspects of the game), that contradiction isn't a big enough deal to be worth sacrificing the story they want to tell or the game they want to make. If one plot loss makes you upset enough to ruin the whole experience for you, that's on you and you can't expect people to give up writing interesting stories to cater to that.

If you want to move past that dissonance, try framing the scripted loss as a plot device instead of a real fight. You know you haven't failed as a player by losing the fight. Just hold on to that knowledge and enjoy one-shotting the next thing you fight.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Then why tell that story as a game in the first place?

Because they want to. Simple as that.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Ultimately, the thing being talked about here is a game so the gameplay should come first.

And you're complaining about entirely the opposite of that: That the story needs to validate the gameplay at all times. If gameplay comes first, gameplay is its own reward and you shouldn't need the story to remind you that your numbers have gotten big. You yourself said (to paraphrase) "if the story doesn't constantly tell me how awesome I am, all that gameplay in which I became awesome was just pointless busywork in the way of that story."

YoukaiSlayer posted...

That too is quite annoying. This doesn't even require overleveling. Often times the enemies that are supposed to be tough just aren't as tough as some other enemies that are supposed to be average. That should be avoided as much as possible. You need to think of the fact you are making a game, not just writing a book.

Avoiding that either means creating different cutscenes based on your performance in each fight (which is ridiculously labour-intensive), never having the party respond to how difficult a battle was (boring, interferes with establishing the stakes well enough for battles to feel meaningful), or taking away the player's ability to grow at their own pace (which means it stops being an RPG altogether). Alternatively, you can just accept - as most players do - that sometimes you'll get inconsistencies and move on with your life knowing that that's just a quirk of the medium. Given that anything other than the latter would be extremely limiting, I'm happy to go with that.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If the ground or a river start kicking my ass, I'll complain too

What do you think walking around a mountain or having to find a bridge is? You walk around the mountain because you're too weak to go through it. You look for a bridge because you can't swim well enough to cross the river without one. And you lose to unbeatable bosses because you're not strong enough to beat a plot device. It's a static part of the game that you'll never be able to beat. Failing to beat it therefore isn't a real loss any more than you should feel humiliated by having to find a bridge.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

I was refuting your point but you can have him roll into town saying he will destroy your town and he's already destroyed the last 15 towns and you've been dealing with his lackey's and refugees from the previous towns if you want an example that can easily work and not be boring.

Or the lazy but classic he comes to town and destroys it while you are gone. You come back to burning rubble and dying loved ones and vow to either get revenge or stop him from doing this to anyone else.

And those are both failures on the protagonist's part, so we're back to protagonist failure being essential for an interesting story.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

It doesn't have to be easy. Even if you brutally struggle through, if you won, you expect to actually win. It's frustrating when that doesn't happen.

Properly balanced, you won't win unless you've deliberately broken that balance somehow (in which case, that's on you). Not all games with scripted losses balance them properly, and there are examples like Xenoblade 2 where you actually have to win the fight but the cutscene still plays out like you lost, but those are examples of it being done poorly and I'm not trying to defend those.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

This is the level of writing we are trying to protect?

Well, yeah. This is an anime/manga/JRPG topic, after all. The trope of fighting the big bad and getting an edge over him, only for him to say "I guess it's time to start taking you seriously" and immediately winning isn't exactly original, but it does help to establish the big bad as a legitimate threat at a personal scale instead of just some nebulously powerful evil hiding in a distant castle. I don't mind that. Not every story has to be completely original and avoid cliches at every possible turn.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Here is the core of our disagreement. I don't think this is true. If anything I'm more invested in the gameplay than the story. There's a reason pokemon with it's dogs*** story has the highest selling console exclusive of all time. It's the gameplay, the fantasy of in that case raising your pokemon to become powerful.

And that investment in the gameplay always comes with the caveat that the story generally will not support you becoming as powerful as the game permits, a caveat which most people accept as an inevitability of a static story. Even without considering scripted losses, if you invest more heavily in developing your character than you're expected to, you're going to get some dissonance between how powerful the story says a boss is and how powerful you find it. You grind out bonus content and overlevel yourself because you like exceeding expectations like that. Fundamentally, you easily finishing a boss fight and the characters saying "that was hard" in a cutscene is no different from you easily finishing a boss fight and the characters losing in a custcene: it's all just the story being unable to reflect your gameplay because it's a static product.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Factually untrue. In fact I'd argue most games let you beat every enemy in every encounter. It's usually only an issue in rpgs where they don't let you.

Every *enemy*. Very few games let you beat, say, the ground, or a river, or a house. Scripted boss fights aren't real enemies. They're plot devices disguised as enemies.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Not really. It just requires the threat of something going wrong. You could argue the threat itself was failure to prevent the threat from existing I guess, but you can solve the threat before any damage is done.

That's generally a pretty boring plot. Some guy rolls into town and says "I'm going to destroy the world in a week muahahaha" and then you go beat him up before the end of the week? That's not an overly compelling villain. Villains (and threats that are less clearly personified) are significantly more interesting when you actually see what they're capable of and when they've actually caused harm, and plots are significantly more interesting when you get some twists and turns as far as the antagonists' actual plans and motivations are.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

I don't expect them to do it retroactively but I definitely want them to do it going forward and if thats too much work, then just make the only path the one where I don't lose.

And that's needlessly limiting and absurdly egocentric. Round and round we go.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

I've seen quite a few people voice annoyance with the "win in the gameplay, lose in the cutscene" thing. Even people that don't do any sidequests.

If people who haven't done an unusual amount of sidequests are finding it to be a problem, that's a scripted loss that's been done poorly. Done correctly, a player who does a typical amount of sidequests (generally, any that don't involve going too far out of the way and/or look at first glance like they're going to be particularly interesting) should either get nearly one-shotted (if the devs want to go the surprise route), or be fighting desperately for their life in a battle they ultimately lose (if the devs want the player to experience the same despair as the characters). If the typical player finds it easy to "win" the fight, then that fails to communicate the intended point, which is a bad thing (and yes, many games do miss the mark in this regard).

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Off the top of my head I remember dunkey complaining about it in one of his xenoblade reviews.

Xenoblade 1 did it pretty well. Scripted losses stopped at 50% HP before being stopped by the boss saying something to the effect of "Enough! Time for me to take you seriously!" before unleashing a party wipe (which is very stereotypically shounen, but that's JRPGs for you), so even if you were strong enough to not lose normally, the fight actually went the way the story suggested.

2, however, was indeed bad for it. Notably, 2 didn't have scripted losses, it had boss fights that you had to win, but that were still followed by cutscene losses (or at least something going wrong in the cutscene in a way that would have been more consistent with losing the boss battle). That was dumb.

3 was in a weird place. It handled scripted/cutscene losses the same way that 1 did (triggering a cutscene interruption at 50%), which was fine, but because such a massive percentage of the party's damage was back-loaded into chain attacks that typically got triggered before the 50% mark and those chain attacks weren't interrupted the way regular fighting would have been, a competent, appropriately-levelled player can pretty easily blow up the whole remaining health bar without giving the cutscene a chance to trigger. That definitely felt weird.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Yep. All of the stuff I'm doing in the gameplay is to avoid that loss, so when it can't be done, it makes my investment in the gameplay pointless and it just becomes busywork in the way of a static story that could be better told in a different medium.

Your investment in the gameplay is always just busywork used to move through a static story, in games with static stories. That's true regardless of how many times the protagonist fails over the course of that story. And in every game, there are going to be things you can't beat regardless of how powerful you get, so this notion that you're grinding to win every single time is inherently flawed.

Failing to win a fight against an unbeatable boss is functionally no different from failing to win a fight against the ground: It's not a real fight. That's not a loss that should bother you.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Conflict does not require failure.

It requires something to go wrong, which by extension constitutes a failure to prevent that thing from having gone wrong.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Feel free to add alternate routes that have plenty of the player failing, but leave me one that doesn't punish me despite success.

You want the developers of every game whose story you have a problem with to put in all the necessary work to rewrite the story, animate, and potentially voice a brand new cutscene just to pat you on the back for becoming overpowered? You think that's more reasonable than, say, getting over yourself and not thinking in terms of being "punished" by the existence of a story that doesn't fellate you at every possible turn?

YoukaiSlayer posted...

I imagine that feels dissonant to most players, even ones that struggled through the fight and barely won.

And most of them respond to that dissonance by shrugging it off as a consequence of having a static story in a variable game. If they acknowledge it, it's to be amused by the fact that they've become so overpowered that the game had to cheat, not to get upset that their power fantasy is "ruined." That's not to say there aren't scripted losses that are totally bullshit or otherwise more frustrating than they ought to be, but as a concept most players accept it as a minor annoyance in service of a more robust story, rather than being personally offended by it.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Yes absolutely. It literally just takes one. The moment the illusion of my power in the game is gone, it's gone. I'm no longer a character progressing through the world, I'm a viewer of a story sitting in my chair in my room. All of my investment in getting stronger is gone and if I'm already stronger it retroactively makes it feel like it was a waste of time.

Despite the fact that you did one-shot them, you just didn't get a cutscene patting you on the back for doing so? The cutscene validation is that important for you?

YoukaiSlayer posted...

You are literally so overpowered that the only way to lose is to give up.

Hence you don't actually "lose" when you lose an unwinnable boss fight. The character just suffers a setback. Being guaranteed eventual success doesn't mean nothing can ever go wrong along the way, nor should it.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

To suggest that the gameplay and story be married is silly?

To the point of stripping out every part of the story except "once upon a time there was a dude who won the end"? Absolutely. You need some kind of conflict to make a story worth telling. Abandoning that just because a handful of people might cheese the game so hard that the gameplay side of things no longer reflects that conflict

Obviously, that's an extreme, but that's the logical endpoint of the idea that the story needs to reflect the player's mechanical strength in every capacity. There need to be limits on that mentality, and those limits are going to be set according to a typical first playthrough rather than a completionist one or one by somebody that's already mastered the game.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

My gratification isn't beating the big bad, it's not losing to anything.

Hate to break it to you, but sometimes, stories aren't all perfect happy endings at every step of the way, regardless of the medium. They're never going to be, so if that's the kind of gratification you're looking for, you might want to steer clear of games (or any piece of storytelling media) that actually try to tell interesting stories.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

A loss is something that needs to be undone

And, generally speaking, the narrative direction after that loss does exactly that. It may not make it so you never lost, but it makes it so that loss never mattered, which is generally more of an interesting story than "nothing ever went wrong now you win yay!". That's really just how life in general works: You can't change the past, so you instead change the future so the past doesn't matter.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Well therein lies the problem. It usually IS enough, they just won't let me win yet. Usually by these points in the game you are already strong enough to beat the final boss.

Mechanically, sure, but not narratively. Mechanically, you can beat most final bosses at level 1 with no gear (or whatever state is analogous to that for the game you're playing) if you really know what you're doing. To suggest that the narrative should support that, however, would be silly.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

The reward for playing well is winning the fights. Very observable because if I play poorly enough, I lose the fights. Separating the gameplay and story so heavily that success in one doesn't positively influence the other is bad IMO.

If you lose winnable fights, you fail to progress the story. If you lose unwinnable fights, you progress the story. Winning boss fights is not inherently its own reward, it's a prerequisite for accessing later content and ultimately completing the game. Losing an unwinnable boss fight robs you of that immediate satisfaction, but it's still a success in the sense that you're moving the game forward to your ultimate victory. Scripted losses are (virtually) never a matter of "you lost, game over." They're always just one step toward the ultimate success of beating the game. That's not a failure, it's just progress where your gratification gets delayed a bit.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If you were to have a choose your own adventure book but no matter what you do at a certain junction, the story only takes negative turns, then why make it a choose your own adventure in the first place?

Because you want to write a CYOA, but don't feel the need to make absolutely every story beat be a positive one. "Negative turns" does not mean the story ends in failure. It just means something goes wrong for the protagonist. If nothing ever goes wrong for the protagonist, you've got yourself a Mary Sue.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

So me, except it's not for me because they just ruin the fantasy of that anyway.

One boss fight that you still one-shot but that then goes into a scripted loss "ruins the fantasy" of one-shotting everything else before and after that? Despite that failure not setting you back in any way?

If a scripted loss actually undoes your grinding or anything like that, yeah, that's a problem. But developing your character to a point where you overpower the core game content just means you remove any challenge left in progressing through the core game. Losing in a battle that's a scripted loss doesn't impact that at all, because the scripted loss never actually had any challenge in the first place (which is the biggest problem with them: people look forward to boss fights because they want to be challenged, scripted fights deny that and should therefore be used sparingly). You lose, the cutscene plays, and you keep roflstomping every other enemy between you and the next cutscene. The loss doesn't reintroduce challenge.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Maybe if these scripted losses were happening early in act 1.

Not at all. "Oh no I'm weak at the beginning" is kind of a given. "I've gotten so powerful but it's still not enough" comes as a surprise, an opportunity for the character to grow in a different direction, or a reveal about the true power of the antagonist. That's used to kick off a new story arc; a scripted loss at the beginning just kicks off the story as a whole.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

A game is testing the player, if the player never fails, the player should never be punished.

You're not being punished. From a gameplay perspective, the reward for playing well enough in an RPG is advancing the story. In this case, "well enough" is a very low bar because you don't actually need to win the fight to get that reward, but either way you're being rewarded with story progress. That the story takes a negative turn doesn't turn that reward into a "punishment." You're not "punished" for turning the page if a character dies in a book you're reading.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Then who is that option for?

People who want to overpower the core game content. That can be a bit of an issue when the side content rewards you with interesting story content as well as gameplay rewards that mess with the balance of the game (this is one of Xenobalde 3's biggest flaws, for example, since its sidequests are amazing story-wise but overlevel you such that developing classes becomes hard), since then you have to choose whether you value side stories or proper balance more, but it's still a pretty universally accepted truth that if you do all of the side content, you're going to have an easier time than intended with core content.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

doing everything leads to dissonance with the story

Realistically, this is always going to be the case regardless of how well-balanced the rewards are (or if there's a system like Xenoblade DE's expert mode where you can store exp from sidequests to level/delevel at will). Unless there's no urgency whatsoever in the main story, deviating from it to do side quests is inescapably going to come with some dissonance. "The world is in grave peril and will be destroyed any minute!" "Hang on, this lady wants some eggs." You can sometimes mitigate that by doing sidequests during a lull in story tension, and some games manage to tie sidequests into the broader story in a way that helps further, but inherent in the very idea of side quests is the choice to spend your time doing something low-stakes and optional instead of the higher-stakes main quest. By choosing to do side quests in the first place, you've already made a conscious decision to play the game in a manner that's dissonant from the main story, so what's a little dissonance in power level going to hurt?

YoukaiSlayer posted...

At the cost of destroying the gameplay fantasy. What is the goal of rpg gameplay? It is to become powerful.

And having a scripted loss as part of the story is part of that. Losing gives you a baseline to compare yourself against. When you later become powerful enough to beat the thing that beat you before, you feel a greater sense of accomplishment than if you just beat it outright.

Does it always work? No, particularly in cases where the player actively tries to become much more powerful than a typical player would be at that point. Sometimes, the loss just feels contrived and can do more harm than good to the power fantasy. It's particularly frustrating when you blow a bunch of consumables with limited availability on the fight trying to win it, only to find out you were never expected to. Generally, though, it doesn't interrupt my power fantasy so much as it reinforces it by making me laugh at how the only way the game could beat me is by cheating.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Which is what they should do in a game.

"The protagonist never loses" is exceedingly limiting, narratively speaking. You can make it so that every loss is a cutscene with no battle attached to it without subjecting yourself to that narrative limitation, but then you fall into the issue that the player's going to see that loss coming if they don't get a chance to fight (unless you also get a bunch of cutscene victories, ). Properly balanced scripted losses keep the tension up by making you believe there's a chance of winning right up until your struggle ends in failure, at which point the plot joins you in that failure.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

But what IS the intended power level?

Depends on the game. Generally speaking, it's not going to be balanced around people who have done all the side content. If it were, that wouldn't be side content. It's also often not going to be balanced around doing no side content, since that's not an overly realistic scenario. Usually, that's something you figure out with playtesting, getting a sense for how much side content players tend to do and tuning the bosses and side content rewards around that (this is something you do with any content, really, not just scripted losses).

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If they don't want me to become powerful by that point in the game, then don't let me.

You've gotta take some responsibility for that yourself. You know full well that games aren't (and never will be) balanced around 100% completion and whatever power level that gives you, especially in games that are relatively open-ended and let you go off on wild adventures before advancing the story. You should expect that doing so is going to give you a power level that's inconsistent with the story. If you don't like being more powerful than the story expects you to be, don't deliberately seek out every available optional power-up opportunity before advancing the story.

Entity13 posted...

It's like a DM in a tabletop game who cannot accept that a level 5 party defeated the BBEG and has to pivot the situation accordingly.

To be fair, that's just inextricably inherent in video RPGs. Some offer more narrative flexibility than others, but there's always going to be a limit on how flexible the story can be when the only available possibilities will be those explicitly added to the game files. JRPGs in particular are generally quite static, narratively speaking, and by now that's just what's expected of them. It's CRPGs that fill the niche of offering more narrative flexibility.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Ugh, why is it so damn hard for RPG makers to not have me lose in the cutscene, especially to people far far far weaker than my character.

Because losing creates desirable dramatic tension, but they want to tune the boss to a "typical" player power level so it feels more like they're legitimately losing the fight. That means players that have gone out of their way to push significantly past that power level are going to mess with it, but those players have already made a conscious decision to mess with the game's balance, and in doing so they've chosen to change the difficulty they experience so it doesn't line up with the narrative, so they can't really complain.

Mostly, it's an inevitable consequence of having a static narrative laid over a variable gameplay experience. They could avoid it by just not having scripted losses, and there are certainly cases where scripted losses are done poorly (like it's fairly easy to "win" even at the expected power level, or you get a game over if you don't lose at the "right" point), but it's such a common bit of ludonarrative dissonance at this point that I certainly have no issues looking past it.

That's... surprisingly comprehensive.

https://imgur.com/aHVKGF0

Yeah, that one doesn't sound half bad. Probably not great, and very much in line with the 50's/60's trend of "hey look try making everything with this convenient canned food," but from an era that brought us "put mayonnaise in everything" and "put everything in jello," you could do a whole lot worse than a deconstructed chicken quiche.

Darth_CiD posted...

i dont like the ones which are just perform same glitch 50 times in a row until they finally teleport to the end game flag or whatever.

Those are interesting in their own way, but for the sake of actual rankings and competitions I definitely agree differentiating between those and glitchless runs (though "glitchless" can be tricky to define).

Capitalists hate him! Click here to find out why!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13pgxOCHKh0

https://imgur.com/8fQ3Sfv

Apparently I'm double posting.
https://imgur.com/f1k9EDH

darkknight109 posted...

I mean, honestly, in most professions today how much you actually know from rote memory is probably a lot less valuable than how adept you are at finding the information/methodology you need from available sources (mostly online) and putting them into practice. Speaking from experience, even doctors and engineers frequently use Google (or technical equivalents) on a regular basis.

Precisely. Outside of emergency situations or other cases where there's significant time pressure, already having the necessary knowledge is only marginally more valuable than having the background and skills needed to procure and/or synthesize the necessary knowledge. People freak out when their doctor Googles their symptoms, but they miss the fact that that doctor is significantly better than they are at curating those results to determine which ones are worth considering and what the practical implications of those results are. Being a professional is more about knowing how to handle information than being able to recite it.

I don't remember if this one has shown up in these topics before, but it's a perennial favourite of mine:
https://imgur.com/133GwBu

Grendel_Prime posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/15582af6.jpg

I'm in this picture, and I don't actually mind it.

pikakaeru posted...

so it was just viral marketing? thats douchey of him

It's awfully low-stakes to consider it "douchey." The absolute worst thing that's going to happen because of this is that a few people are going to see the news that he's giving up the smoke late and their friends will laugh at them for having missed the resolution.

https://imgur.com/HRtC1QX

Kissinger? I 'ardly know 'er!

My friends and I tended to devolve into spamming that one grab Link has that's particularly good for ring outs, since none of us were good enough to consistently break grabs. That got pretty cheap.

https://imgur.com/Xg0sDDx
And the back cover:
https://imgur.com/FcwQ5mc

That's one way to make caramel.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

Oh they'll be fucking fertilized if I have any say in it

*concerned honking*

darkknight109 posted...

plus however many might have hatched from the geese a-laying over that timeframe.

The incubation period for goose eggs is 28-35 days, so you wouldn't see any hatch within the six remaining days of Christmas. You might see some a few weeks later, but if all 42 gees are a-laying, that relies on them having been fertilized before being given to you (unless you have your own gander a-spooging).

BlackScythe0 posted...

Uh do you really think a handheld could use a disk drive?

That's what the PSP did, for better or worse.

speedpunk posted...

What's wrong with carts?

At the time, carts offered faster data transfer rates, but had less storage capacity, were significantly more expensive to manufacture, and were harder to program for. You also didn't really have the option of multi-disk games (Rare was experimenting with the whole "Stop n' Swap" thing with Banjo Kazooie, which might have been a solution for multi-cart games, but it never took off), which was a pretty substantial handicap in an era where big JRPG's were selling systems.

Indeed. You don't want to be bored, but boring is only a problem if you actually need to impress other people.

Related:
https://i.imgur.com/nlxmD53.png

Side note, this subreddit is a gold mine:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ididnthaveeggs/

Go me, I guess.

But yeah, Mugi best girl. Possibly because that's one of very few episodes that actually leans on a single character's personality to carry it instead of the chemistry between everyone, and where it stands out as being a particularly great episode, that means Mugi stands out as being particularly best girl. But I'm probably overanalyzing it, given that it's K-On.

That does sound familiar. I want to say episode 14? We are talking like 10+ years ago, though, so I don't know that I'd put much stake in my ability to remember specific episode numbers.

Italians visit places that are more vampire-friendly. It's just narrow-minded to suggest that they're intrinsically safe from vampires..

That was also my opinion until one episode (roughly halfway through in the second season, I believe, but it's been many years) that's pretty much all Mugi, after which Mugi was best girl.

It is indeed a pretty well-balanced cast, though, with the show's enjoyability hinging more on the chemistry between them than relying entirely on one or two strong personalities to carry it.

Mugi is still best girl.

SinisterSlay posted...

I mean we're at a point that dollar might as well be the lowest amount.

Selling for 1.50? Why not double the package, change $3, and save the planet by cutting your packing nearly in half. The shrinkflation is the opposite we should be doing. Right now they are just filling the packaging half way to trick you into thinking it's the same amount.

Nah, a dollar goes too far. Pricing an item at $2.50 instead of $2 or $3 is a meaningful choice. It might not affect consumers all that much (see: my calculation that rounding normally would reduce my expenses by ~0.016%), but for retailers selling hundreds or thousands of those items 20% more/less is a very big deal (more than the entire profit margin, in many cases). It also messes with sales tax, since any base price close to an even dollar would very often get rounded back down to that dollar and wipe out the tax on cheaper items.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

I thought some countries rounded to 5 or 0 whether or not it was cash, but it's been like 15 years since I've traveled to another country that wasn't Canada, so I might just be remembering wrong. In Canada's case though yeah it's not that big a deal if card transactions still go to individual cents

Canada doesn't round for non-cash transactions (which is why I can do this exercise with my bank/credit statements), but admittedly I'm also not sure if other countries do. The only one I know for sure is that Australia automatically rounds down in every case, but I couldn't tell you if that's only for cash transactions or not. It's only really necessary for cash transactions, but it wouldn't be surprising if it were applied to other retail transactions for consistency's sake.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

I did some math based on some figures I googled and Walmart would get an extra ~$170 million a year if they gained just a penny from each transaction being rounded up in the US. That number is already so unfathomable to me I thought fuck that, then I googled some more and apparently they get 600 billion in revenue a year, so that really is pocket change to them. Good lord.

This shit should be round down for that reason though, I know it isn't going to affect my wallet much, but these corporations don't need anything more

Remember that every transaction being rounded up by a penny isn't overly realistic. For starters, that requires every transaction to be in cash, and while there are a few holdouts who insist on using cash as often as possible who will bear close to the maximum brunt of whatever personal loss rounding can create, cash transactions are always going to be a minority on the broader scale. Beyond that, with normal rounding, the difference is going to range from -2 to +2 cents, with a small bias toward retailers making more because of the prevalence of $X.99 prices (I don't have any concrete data for this, but intuitively, I believe it's more common to see people buy 1-2 things at a time than to buy 3-4 without it being a larger trip. I could be mistaken and I welcome correction), and that means it'll mostly even out. For those that care enough to min/max it, there's also the option of paying cash for cases where it rounds down and using credit/debit for cases where it would round up since the consumer has the power to make that decision. All of this adds up to substantially reduce the retailer's gain below the hypothetical maximum.

That said, I do like the round down approach. Not only does it always work in the consumer's favour (indirectly benefiting customer service staff that consequently don't have to deal with Karens that don't understand how rounding works freaking out over a nickel), businesses generally won't even feel the loss because it's absorbed by the benefits of cash transactions. Not having to pay the 3-4% credit cards often charge is a much bigger deal than losing 2 cents per transaction, so making cash purchases more attractive by giving them an inherent "discount" works out in their favour (to the point that many businesses already give discounts for using cash). Bonus points where it's mostly smaller businesses that benefit from that where the Walmarts of the world have been able to negotiate lower credit card fees with their larger market shares.

Before Canada got rid of them, I've been given a single penny as change before, in cases where the after-tax cost came out to a value that would have lined up with an amount of cash I had if not for the 99 cent thing (like a $60 game coming to $69 after tax, except it's actually $68.99).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Oh, I don't disagree with you.

But the problem is, in life, what's actually true rarely matters when compared to what people perceive as true. Which is part of why emotional arguments are almost always more effective than rational ones.

Humans are feeling creatures who actually figured out how to think, but we don't do all that well with the thinking a lot of the time.

This is a very easy emotional argument to shoot down, though. Most people will leave it at "it adds up" even if they agree with abolishing the penny because they haven't done any concrete work to prove what they believe to be intuitively true. I have, and the conclusion is that in the absolute worst case scenario of me doing every single transaction in cash and the policy being to round up in every case, that would end up costing me an extra ten thousandth of what I spent across ~400 transactions in a year (or about 12.5 minutes of work, assuming 52, 40-hour weeks). And that worst case scenario is all but impossible (as far as I know, everyone that's abolished the penny either rounds normally or rounds down in every case), with slightly more realistic hypotheticals either being an order of magnitude more trivial, or being trivially beneficial to consumers and notably beneficial to businesses because it encourages cash payments.

Sure, people will still stuff their fingers in their ears and act like their opinions matter even when indisputable math proves that they don't, but there's no reason to tolerate that when the math is this straightforward. Those rounded pennies simply don't add up, so if somebody tries to insist that they do, don't accept that.

Out of curiosity, I just did the same exercise for normal rounding to the nearest dime or quarter to simulate abolishing the nickel and dime, respectively. That gave a total annual loss of $1.20 for abolishing nickels and $2.45 for abolishing dimes, for a respective 0.0024% and 0.0048% of my total expenditures (assuming 100% cash transactions). I think there's a legitimate case to be made for getting rid of all small change, though in that case it would pretty much have to be normal rounding because the automatic round down option would probably exceed what businesses save with cash transactions (especially businesses selling a lot of <$5 items). There might even be a case for ditching cents entirely (a gain of $8.30 or 0.0163% for me), but I think that's probably too far because businesses that deal in smaller transactions rely on more granularity than that in pricing their stuff, plus on smaller transactions that rounding could wipe out sales tax entirely.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The problem is you need to round off, and no one on either side of the deal wants to be the person who "loses" from the rounding

For the sake of quantifying it, I just took my 2019 books (I kinda fell off the bookkeeping wagon, that's my most recent file) and rounded every single transaction to the nearest nickel to represent what would have happened if all of those transactions had been cash (they're taken directly from my bank/credit statements, so aside from a couple instances of withdrawing/depositing cash, they were all electronic). In that year, I spent just shy of $51,000 dollars. If every single one of those transactions had hypothetically been made in cash and therefore rounded to the nearest nickel, the total difference would have been...

Drumroll please...

A loss of 50 cents for me. An increase of less than 0.001% in what I spent that year. I simply cannot abide such a crippling loss.

If the policy were instead to always round up (rare) or always round down (more common)? Rounding up would cost me an extra $6.50 for the year, rounding down would save me $6.75. Both extremes come in at 0.013% of that $51k, and in the latter case, businesses actually probably don't lose out by rounding down because they're generally already saving considerably more than the maximum loss of 4 cents per transaction by not having to pay debit/credit fees (and, in fact, many businesses offer discounts for people paying in cash for that exact reason).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Americans are probably one of the most economically/consumer-obsessed cultures on Earth, it's not a shock that we'd be the most resistant to that sort of change.

And that obsession is idiotically blind to the reality of the numbers involved in this matter. Accepting "it's just the culture" instead of pointing out just how utterly trivial the difference is (even before considering the fact that actually using pennies requires enough extra labour to negate those few cents of savings) makes no sense and perpetuates a substantial amount of wasted government money. Resisting the abolition of the penny is stupid and should be called out as such every time somebody says "it adds up" and thinks that's the end of the thought that can be put into it. It adds up to a fart in the wind, and inflation means it's only getting windier.