SHADOWTEXT'S PROFILE

Tactics Ogre: Knights of Lodis was sort of weird for me. The first time I played it, I just didn't care much. Didn't get into it, didn't care for it, felt like it was an inferior FFT or TO.


...then I went back about a year later and played it again, and oh my gods. Everything just clicked, and it's now one of my favorite games on GBA, and even pretty high in my favorite tactical games....maybe above the first Tactics Ogre, which I still haven't been able to finish.

Wow. Part of Wii's greater strategy to get the gamers who quit years ago to take up the controller again? Or in this case, the Wiimote?

Terin--you're confusing character archetypes with the characters themselves. Don't.

There's a huge difference between Bugs Bunny and Screwball Squirrel even though they're both funny animal Trickster Heroes (or at least, Trickster Protagonists), because of how the characters are performed and treated. I don't care if there's an outsider gimmick and amnesia in all three characters' pasts, you're making a huge leap if you're going to say that Cloud, Squall, Zidane and Tidus are the same character. Cloud and Squall you could get away with maybe--they've got a lot of similarities. Even then, though, Cloud's an angsty loner, but Squall seems like he might genuinely be depressive and autism-spectrum. Probably has Asperger's. Like an angsty Napoleon Dynamite. If he lived in this world he'd totally be a hikkikomori.

Even with archetypes, though, Zidane and the others aren't the same. Zidane is a Trickster Hero, and probably the only one who's been the protagonist in a main Final Fantasy game to date, unless you count Balthier as the true lead of Final Fantasy XII, which would be totally understandable because Balthier is awesome.

In fact, I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that Zidane's based on Sun Wukong / Son Goku, the Monkey King from Journey to the West. The monkey tail makes it pretty obvious, and the dude's bloody huge in asian folklore.

author=NightCloud link=topic=1340.msg21427#msg21427 date=1214293408
If you see a movie made based on a book, you will find that most of the people who read the book prefer the book over the movie. Ask yourself why?

Several reasons. One, it's better for their intellectual cred. Two, the effects on screen never match up to their imagination. Three, they go into a movie expecting to get the same sort of experience as they got reading the book, which is just insane. You're dealing with two entirely different media here, and if you try to play to the strengths of one medium in another, you're going to fall flat.

As an example, look at the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. I actually liked this movie, but basically no one liked it more than the book (now ask them if they prefer the radio plays or the books, you might get a different answer, depending if they've heard them). Mostly this isn't because of the cast or the performances or the special effects or the writing, which were all pretty good, but because the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a story that benefits heavily from a strong, constant narration--a huge portion of the jokes come from the narrator, and rely on the narrator's use of language and wordplay and scansion and things like that. None of these translate to movies well, because voice over narrators on film come out feeling hackneyed. The original radio plays get away with this because, lacking visuals, ongoing narratives are much more acceptable in that medium. Films don't have that excuse.

This doesn't mean that you couldn't have a movie that was better than the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or even that it would be any more difficult than writing a book that was better (which would admittedly still be all but impossible, but this has nothing to do with the medium), you just wouldn't do it by trying to emulate a book. You'd do it by making something that plays to the strength of film. There are all sorts of things film can do that novels can't, or can't do well at any rate. Tone of voice, line delivery, body language, the construction of scenes and use of camera for saying things that a book would have to do in a much clumsier way...

...video games are the same. They have strengths the others don't. Most importantly, interactivity. No other medium (unless you count Visual Novels as a separate medium from games, which I almost do) offers the option of interactivity, and there are no doubt hundreds, thousands of ways to exploit interactivity to create something that film or novels could never do in a million years.

...but people are so stuck thinking in the twentieth century and judging the artistry of games on their stories or their graphics or their sound. Very rarely do I see any real discourse about gameplay elements as works of art. And I find that very disappointing considering how avant garde the young intellectuals seem to pride themselves on being. Plenty of people will call Shadow of the Colossus or Okami or Metal Gear works of art....not many would call Kirby Canvas Curse one.

Skills-wise, don't worry so much about making sure the party fills every skill. I can tailor around missing skills. It's just party roles that'll be slightly more difficult to work around if we're missing any.