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Guardian Frontier
An RPG with classic-style gameplay and a non-classic premise, inspired by the history of exploration and colonialism of the 19th century.
An RPG with classic-style gameplay and a non-classic premise, inspired by the history of exploration and colonialism of the 19th century.
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Who's your favorite VRP(Videogame Romantic Pairing)?
I think tv series have more potential for romance than movies, but I'm not really sure how well they fulfill it, because I almost never watch tv. I think that dating sims and visual novels are another area where the potential for well-done romance is really underexploited though, even though basically all dating sims by definition, and a huge proportion of visual novels contain at least token attempts at romance. There are a handful of visual novels where the character relations were really moving to me personally though, to a degree which I think was out of proportion to how well written they really were, if you discount the immersion from the interactive element.
Comics, I definitely think have more potential than movies and tv for romances, although I think video games could probably at least equal them. Honestly, a lot of my branching out into various media has been a result of running out of enough comics to read.
Comics, I definitely think have more potential than movies and tv for romances, although I think video games could probably at least equal them. Honestly, a lot of my branching out into various media has been a result of running out of enough comics to read.
Who's your favorite VRP(Videogame Romantic Pairing)?
Neither can I! That's the frustrating part. I feel like video games have a lot of potential for romance which has gone almost completely untapped.
I think that as a short form media with little capacity to show an internal perspective on the characters, movies aren't a particularly good medium for romance in the first place. Video games, which usually have narratives too long to be consumed in a single sitting, have more room to develop complex relationships, and the interactivity gives the player a greater sense of personal investment in the actions of the characters.
I think video games could contain romances much more compelling than you generally ever see in movies, which is why it bothers me so much that in practice, they don't. The time and talent pool that goes into writing movie romances is to what goes into video game romances more or less what the set of Olympic swimming candidates is to competitive bog snorkelers.
I think that as a short form media with little capacity to show an internal perspective on the characters, movies aren't a particularly good medium for romance in the first place. Video games, which usually have narratives too long to be consumed in a single sitting, have more room to develop complex relationships, and the interactivity gives the player a greater sense of personal investment in the actions of the characters.
I think video games could contain romances much more compelling than you generally ever see in movies, which is why it bothers me so much that in practice, they don't. The time and talent pool that goes into writing movie romances is to what goes into video game romances more or less what the set of Olympic swimming candidates is to competitive bog snorkelers.
What is the creepiest and most disturbing game you have ever played?
author=nhubiauthor=DesertopaReally really don't play Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer then.
Like, gameplay based on wandering dark hallways while being stalked by a murderer, not that scary. Gameplay based on stalking innocent victims down dark hallways and murdering them, that might creep me out. But then, I just wouldn't play it in the first place.
Yeah, I had a look at it while I was looking for downloads. If it's played for black comedy, I don't think it would scare me, but it's definitely not something I'd choose to play.
Deception was kind of interesting from a "force you to do bad things" standpoint, since the protagonist's hands are kind of forced by circumstance, but he's really plunged into it. But the delivery is weakened a lot by the state of the graphics and dialogue. Back when I first played it, there were definitely times when it felt kind of creepy (it helped that I wasn't very good at the game at the time, so I spent a lot of time feeling like I was in kill-or-be-killed circumstances with people stalking me around my castle who I had to murder before they got me first,) but revisiting it years later I wasn't really able to recapture that feeling.
Who's your favorite VRP(Videogame Romantic Pairing)?
author=LockeZ
Yeah, seriously. If you try to talk about romance in Lord of the Rings you're way more likely to get linked to https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1267534/1/Sauron-and-the-Ringwraiths-A-Love-Story than to have anyone in the discussion mention the name Arwen
Yeah, that's true. But if you discuss top movie romances or couples in most places nobody is going to bring up Lord of the Rings.
This might depend a lot on whether you're asking representatives of the general population, or representatives of a fandom, and I guess RMN is kind of a fandom population. But I've found it a lot harder to find a serious discussion or list of romances which were deliberately written into the games anywhere online than discussion of movie romances.
Of course, there are a lot more romantic movies than romantic games. But I think that's kind of sad, because I think movies are actually a much worse medium for romance than games are.
What is the creepiest and most disturbing game you have ever played?
I'm pretty much in the same boat as LockeZ on this one. I guess if I'm counting visual novels, some of the first-person depictions of mental breakdown in Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night were a bit unnerving, but generally, creeping me out in a video game requires making me do stuff I don't like the idea of. Like, gameplay based on wandering dark hallways while being stalked by a murderer, not that scary. Gameplay based on stalking innocent victims down dark hallways and murdering them, that might creep me out. But then, I just wouldn't play it in the first place.
Who's your favorite VRP(Videogame Romantic Pairing)?
You know, considering this is pretty much the inevitable state of any thread on video game romances, I think that says pretty sad things about the the state of romance writing in the medium. I mean, if you try to have a discussion on top movie romances, people can spend a while talking about romances that were actually in the movies. I think video games have a lot of potential as a medium for romance, but if you just look at what's actually written into the games, what have we got, really?
What are some really funny RPG Maker games?
I'll throw my weight behind the recommendation of Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle, since it's still one of my favorite games almost entirely on the basis of its comedy, but to toss in something that hasn't already come up in this thread, I thought Three the Hard Way had a lot of well done comedy, generally on a much higher level than the game's introduction, or anything on the game page, led me to expect.
General recommendation; if comedy, or writing in general, is a significant feature of your game, include some instances of dialogue or item descriptions or some other writing related thing among your page images. You can convey a lot about the quality of writing in a work with one or two well chosen sentences.
General recommendation; if comedy, or writing in general, is a significant feature of your game, include some instances of dialogue or item descriptions or some other writing related thing among your page images. You can convey a lot about the quality of writing in a work with one or two well chosen sentences.
Amount of Magic in Fantasy
If you deliberately make things opaque, which using a barrage of proper nouns which aren't indicative of their meaning is a great way to do, then you're going to have to spend a lot of time explaining stuff. But it's not that difficult to present the stuff in a way that makes sense in context.
To take a couple RMN games as examples, Manifest has a fairly typical fantasy RPG setting, with some particular worldbuilding elements which it explains at length because it doesn't do much to make them clear through context, especially when it's muddling the player up with a lot of nonindicative proper nouns. The Logomancer has a much more unconventional setting and premise, but it doesn't have to launch into any of the sort of extended explanations that Manifest does, because it presents the narrative in a way that makes it easy for the player to pick up the key points of what's going on.
I think that this kind of worldbuilding can be easier to pull off in detail when you're working in a text-intensive format, but personally, I wouldn't be interested in either a fictionalized history book or wiki unless it was tied into a narrative.
The third Star Ocean game (possibly the fourth as well, but I never played that one,) features an extensive encyclopedia system which provides background information about the characters, setting and technology, much more than could have been organically inserted into the game's narrative. And I mostly found it a pain, because there's so little to tie the information in to any part of the narrative that pretty much all of it ends up as fluff. The encyclopedia does practically nothing to shed light on why the characters act the way they do, why the events unfold the way they do, or why the setting demonstrates the qualities that the player sees, which they won't pick up from playing the game. Final Fantasy XII's bestiary did a better job shedding light on elements of the setting which the narrative might actually provoke some curiosity about, but I thought it was still a lot less engaging than setting information conveyed organically as part of the narrative.The End is a sci fi webcomic with extensive worldbuilding, which features a wiki to house setting information, but the wiki would have very little appeal without the comic to give it context, and the setting information conveyed through the comic is pretty much always more engaging than that which is conveyed through the wiki.
Also, I think that in some ways visual-heavy media like video games and comics have significant advantages over pure text media in conveying worldbuilding-heavy stories, because players can pick up cues from observation, whereas in pure text, events and appearances can only be shown in alternation. In a visual medium, if you say travelers are at risk of being attacked by zobs, you send some characters on a trip, and they're jumped by armed lizard people, the audience has immediately gained an understanding of what zobs are which would have been harder to convey in a pure text medium without interruption of the narrative.
To take a couple RMN games as examples, Manifest has a fairly typical fantasy RPG setting, with some particular worldbuilding elements which it explains at length because it doesn't do much to make them clear through context, especially when it's muddling the player up with a lot of nonindicative proper nouns. The Logomancer has a much more unconventional setting and premise, but it doesn't have to launch into any of the sort of extended explanations that Manifest does, because it presents the narrative in a way that makes it easy for the player to pick up the key points of what's going on.
author=Sooz
There's certainly subtle worldbuilding stuff one can do with an entrenched magic culture, but to show things on the level being discussed here, where it's made a major impact on all facets of society, would generally require levels of detail that are more appropriate for media other than videro gaems. (I could get behind, say, a wiki or a fictionalized history book, for example. That would be boss!)
I think that this kind of worldbuilding can be easier to pull off in detail when you're working in a text-intensive format, but personally, I wouldn't be interested in either a fictionalized history book or wiki unless it was tied into a narrative.
The third Star Ocean game (possibly the fourth as well, but I never played that one,) features an extensive encyclopedia system which provides background information about the characters, setting and technology, much more than could have been organically inserted into the game's narrative. And I mostly found it a pain, because there's so little to tie the information in to any part of the narrative that pretty much all of it ends up as fluff. The encyclopedia does practically nothing to shed light on why the characters act the way they do, why the events unfold the way they do, or why the setting demonstrates the qualities that the player sees, which they won't pick up from playing the game. Final Fantasy XII's bestiary did a better job shedding light on elements of the setting which the narrative might actually provoke some curiosity about, but I thought it was still a lot less engaging than setting information conveyed organically as part of the narrative.The End is a sci fi webcomic with extensive worldbuilding, which features a wiki to house setting information, but the wiki would have very little appeal without the comic to give it context, and the setting information conveyed through the comic is pretty much always more engaging than that which is conveyed through the wiki.
Also, I think that in some ways visual-heavy media like video games and comics have significant advantages over pure text media in conveying worldbuilding-heavy stories, because players can pick up cues from observation, whereas in pure text, events and appearances can only be shown in alternation. In a visual medium, if you say travelers are at risk of being attacked by zobs, you send some characters on a trip, and they're jumped by armed lizard people, the audience has immediately gained an understanding of what zobs are which would have been harder to convey in a pure text medium without interruption of the narrative.
Amount of Magic in Fantasy
author=LockeZ
Unsurprisingly, building a 100% alien civilization with no analogy to the real world isn't very common in any medium, since it takes hours of encyclopaedic explanations just to get to the point where you can start telling the story.
I don't think this is really the case. You can reveal a novel setting gradually by immersion, where the audience has to piece things together from what they observe. The visual novel Sharin no Kuni, for instance, is set in an alt-history world where the plot hinges heavily on a legal system that's significantly different from anything we have in our own world, but the story is still strongly character-based, and carried off without a bunch of infodumping to bring the audience up to speed. If anything, infodumping would have spoiled the effect.
author=Sooz
I feel like that level of focus on an element is really more appropriate in other media (chiefly the more speculative SF books) unless, like Pokemon, it is the sole point of the game. I think it's notable that those games use the modern world as a setting, as well as offering only the barest strokes of character: it leaves the least need for explanation, so the audience only has to figure out things to do with the pokemon themselves, and don't need to concentrate on anything else. Trying to make a player juggle a complex plot PLUS a super unfamiliar setting PLUS new game mechanics is just setting yourself up for failure, because most people aren't going to be invested enough to climb over that wall of information just for the sake of your game.
I think a good use of worldbuilding ties into the plot, so the audience learns about one as they learn about the other. You don't have to overwhelm the audience with information, you give them what they need to know as they need it, and if the story is interesting they'll stick around for more.
That said, I wouldn't try to introduce a game with complex worldbuilding and story, and gameplay as unfamiliar as Pokemon's was when it was new, unless the gameplay revolved entirely around the elements of the plot, because that probably would be distracting. But if I have to pick one between novel story and novel gameplay, I'd pick novel story pretty much every time.
Amount of Magic in Fantasy
There is the approach a lot of games take of using magic technology as direct emulation of real world technology. This may have been fairly original when it was first used, but it's gotten pretty stale by now. What I'd be interested to see is a setting that uses magic to make a world that's unlike stuff the audience has already seen before, rather than using magic in a recreation of a world that's already familiar.
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