LogFAQs > #977684029

adjl posted...

That the story needs to validate the gameplay at all times.

Thats what the gameplay coming first means. Everything in the game should support the gameplay. 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. The gameplay should be the cornerstone everything else is built around. The gameplay in an rpg sets up the fantasy of power for the characters.

adjl posted...

Avoiding that either means creating different cutscenes based on your performance in each fight (which is ridiculously labour-intensive)

It's really not that labor intensive in most cases. A few variations on voice lines and the characters standing instead of on one knee wincing in pain. A lot of games have similar minor variations in scenes that are self contained or maybe have 1 or 2 brief references later in the game. I'm not asking for every game to be baldur's gate 3 levels of variety.

adjl posted...

(boring, interferes with establishing the stakes well enough for battles to feel meaningful)

Worth it. Avoiding gameplay dissonance is more important than setting the stakes and plenty of games set the stakes without that. Like look at melania in elden ring. The latest populer "super hard" boss out there. The lore sets up her power, the opening cutscene sets up her power, and the gameplay reinforces those examples. What happens after the fight? She gives a death monologue and disappears. No player exhausted and panting or collapsing right after the fight or saying how difficult it was. The gameplay already told us how difficult it was and the lore and cutscene told us how meaningful it was.

Ideally in something with more defined player characters, they would be commenting mid battle on how difficult it is based on how the fight is going, something that only costs voice lines to do. Stuff like tales and xenoblade do this already, albeit fairly poorly and usually non specifically.

Basically the video game version of show don't tell.

adjl posted...

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.

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. 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. It was incredibly frustrating and completely took me out of the scene.

adjl posted...

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

Failure maybe, but not combat failure. These things didn't happen because of a lack of ability to defeat someone in a fight. And realistically the story of me as a player dealing with the enemies is probably more interesting than the static story being told. I'm really hard pressed to think of any jrpg stories that are good, even divorcing them from the games they are a part of. I think more evidence to back this up is anytime we get anime adaptations, even really good ones (like tales of zesteria), they fail miserably.

adjl posted...

Well, yeah. This is an anime/manga/JRPG topic, after all

There's more to those things than b tier shonen tropes and none of them are worth ludonarritive dissonance.

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 are just protecting bad writers and bad game design for I guess the sake of it.

adjl posted...

Because they want to. Simple as that.

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.