Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

But it actually was an order of magnitude (Or more) more difficult.

But it's not fair. It's hard for a lot of bad reasons, and that's never a good thing...not that you care, Mr. Brick Wall...

I don't get the praise that Valkyria Chronicles gets really. The story is bland with little to no interesting characters, gameplay mechanics aren't balanced well and the challenge is just broken. I honestly think that Awakening is a far better TRPG than Valkyria Chronicles will ever be. Not that chronicles isn't a bad game but not something great.

Atleast SEGA made a game that a lot of people liked except me.

The balance is a problem, but I could levy that criticism to Fire Emblem Awakening as well (The arenas and pairing system pretty much null a lot of challenge that game would otherwise have, even on Classic mode. Not to mention the DLC rewards and maps). But they would still be non-criticisms in the face of the fact that "Tactical RPGs" are just RPGs that require more thought and planning than ordinary RPGs. They're still RPGs at their core, and worrying too much about the strategy elements in a non-competitive scene is pretty useless as long as the game is still fun and rewarding in some way.

I actually agree that Valkyria Chronicles doesn't have a great story. It's generic and doesn't have many surprises. But again, Fire Emblem. I've played a good chunk of those games and outside of some charming character dialogue, they're pretty much your average child-friendly dime-store medieval fantasy story, and the stories even between games tend to blend together. If you know even a little about Medieval stratey and/or fantasy stories, you probably know how a lot of Fire Emblem games are going to go. Yet those games are still endearing, and the character interactions tend to be far more important than the plot itself, so FE gets a pass. VC I still don't mind since it feels like a more modern war story, which I'm more into, but I wouldn't blame anyone for saying they stopped caring about what happened in the cutscenes and focused on the gameplay.

I agree that Valkyria Chronicles is not a great Strategy game, but I do feel it's a great Strategy RPG, with a different take from Fire Emblem, but still just as enjoyable. If you want strategy first and foremost, there are far more complicated and balanced strategy games out there, that I can't even begin to list and comprehend. To put it quite bluntly, Fire Emblem is "My first Strategy game" compared to what else is out there, especially compared to a lot of PC games.

@CanisWolfred you seem to forget that Awakening was designed to appeal to everyone so the balanced is tweaked. In my first playthrough, its fairly challenging and the only times I felt it was frustrating was when in a few missions, it should have been defeat commander instead of route the enemy. The pairing system is completely optional and its not really needed if you feel its not needed because like I said, it was made to tweak the balance. I'm pretty sure that even if I can't make some sense for the pairing, someone here or anywhere will prove that pairing does offer some challenge because you're steps are limited if you do so.

Valkyria Chronicles on the other hand has a lot of stuff to be frustrated about. What's the point of certain enemies or other things shooting at you while you move to a distant location? If that's the case, then why can't Snipers or Tanks shoot back? I can understand lancers because of the way they were designed but why can't snipers and tanks shoot back when an enemy shoots them? This also frustrated me a lot because they still shoot even after you start target mode which made me lose my unit before I could even attack. Why can't my units attack the enemies when I and my units are close to the enemies when I'm moving a unit?

Fire Emblem only suffers from your decisions instead of cheap enemy knockoffs atleast in my experience in Awakening. In Chronicles, most maps drag and are just boring and it gets worse from the second half of the game where it asks you to do things that are just boring because of the maps being ridiculously long for bad reasons. Granted, this game being on PC and Awakening being on 3DS have maps that are designed to compensate the difficulty between the two systems, but the Maps in chronicles are neither fun nor memorable.

I have a feeling that unless I play a TRPG besides Fire Emblem, FE is probably the only series that gets the TRPG genre right.

And that excuses it how? In fact, the rest of your post is just "It's not Fire Emblem so therefore it's a problem". It's sounding more like you want Fire Emblem to be the only Strategy RPG you enjoy, and your shutting out everything else because it's not Fire Emblem. In fact, have you played any other Fire Emblem games? Or was Awakening your entry point?

Awakening is my first time into the series. To be frank, I played this game called battle of Wesnoth which was boring the first few hours I spent time on it. So I gave up that genre until I tried out Awakening and this game made me get into TRPG genre.

I just said that unless there happens to be great TRPG's out there that don't make it look like Fire Emblem is the only series that does that genre right, FE would probably be the best in that genre to me. I am also trying to elaborate how the system in Awakening is more balanced than Chronicles.

I am aware that Shining force is another TRPG that's owned by SEGA and I'm gonna try that series out soon but in the meantime, Awakening is still my favorite game period even when playing it on casual mode.

This is a perfect example where quality beats quantity. I can't seem to find a Vita game that sold around 5 million units rather than 1 million. Sure you will get games and if games is something of a desire, then obviously the Vita beats the 3DS.....in terms of quantity. In terms of quality however, the 3DS wins here simply because of few games that already convince gamers enough to the point that nobody cares about the Vita not even Sony themselves. So if a developer of a system isn't showing support on a system that you want to support, why defend it? I will admit that the Gamecube came nowhere close to the PS2 sales and that its underwhelming compared to the N64 sales yet the quality is still there in Gamecube and it had games that everyone liked. Thing is making games for that system isn't as cost driven as the Vita.

Another problem is the pricing of the system. Do you honestly think that people can afford a beast like that? I know my dad surely can't and so do I. Why would Sony be stupid to sell their own branded memory cards for the system which are just as expensive as the Vita itself just to store data in it? They should have just followed Nintendo's footsteps (But Nintendo would still win no matter what).

I saw your post earlier and I thought I'd want to argue about it but I guess people like you love something so much that I decided to leave it. But after finding out sales of the vita games, its so underwhelming that it makes me wonder, why support such a beast that's already costing developers a lot of money to make games for it.

I feel a lot of game companies simply don't know how to make games like first party game companies. The best example I can come up with is Final Fantasy 7 not being on the N64 yet the final release had like 3-4 discs or something(Atleast from what I heard). Didn't the N64 have additional slot that had more storage? If playing an RPG game couldn't fit into a 64 MB cartridge but something like Majora's Mask, F-Zero X or SM64 managed to make use of that space, then something's wrong with Square honestly. Sure there are articles that do explain this detailed but in that case, then why not just limit the game's textures to compensate for the speed? F-Zero X had horrible textures but yet the game ran smoothly right?

@Artwark I think the reason for all the Final Fantasy VII discs was FMVs taking up a bunch of space.

@BearHunger I don't think the FMV is what made them shift to N64 because I'm pretty sure that some games in the N64 did do that like Goemon.

Sure, some FMV's. But FFVII had many, many more. Plus all the animated full screen backgrounds(needs way more data than just 3D models and some textures) and music/sounds added a lot of data too.

which brings my point that many developers don't need that much of power. devs who just say that disc's are better than cartridges are really stupid because Sony did that for the PSP and it was stupid for them to do that.Square instead of using so much of unneeded FMV's could have just used small cutscenes instead to compensate with the technical limits. Look at chrono trigger as an example. The PSOne version while superior is still the worst because of its long loading times and cutscenes that honestly make me feel the SNES one did it right.

Here's one I'm starting to feel is true. Bravely Default is too long.

Ok, now here's the unpopular part. I'm only at chapter 2. Not the later sections everyone complains about, the early parts of the game are too long. If you're trying to make a retro Final Fantasy game, why is it so long? Final Fantasy IV and VI are like...20-30 hour RPGs? Not every game needs to be 100 hours!

Also, the Japanese voice acting is annoying. And I watch plenty of subbed anime, so I do feel I have a valid point here. It's hard to describe why but it feels so...over-the-top. But not in a fun way, more in a trying too hard way. It's like they thought they were acting in a play or something. Furthermore, the voice acting is part of the problem because it takes twice as long to go through the dialogue because they have to say all the dialogue instead of just you reading it. Honestly considering just skipping through the dialogue and reading at my own pace instead at this point.

Why would Square just call it Bravely Default? That is the oddest title of all the Square games I've heard of. I don't have the game but seeing this post already gave me a bad taste about the game.

As far as I know, it has to do with the Brave and Default battle stances that you can use.

To bravely default is to courageously do nothing.

Which... I guess sort of ties into the theme of the last 1/3rd of the game. A little. If you squint.

This has less to do with the storage medium and more to do with the fact that CT on PS1 is a very, very poorly optimized port. The PSN version doesn't run any better, even on PS3/Vita.

Anyway, FFVII is like 1300mb man. Typical N64 games were like 8-32mb. Those cartridges are ancient, tremendously sucky technology that doesn't exist anymore for a very good reason. Nintendo was insane to use them in 1996, and they paid dearly for it.

Well if you remove cinematics and musics most of the ps1 games do the same size of dozens of mb
The space of CD was mostly used for cinematics and musics, not to make more gameplay related content. That's why there isn't a big difference between the length of N64 games and ps1 games
And cartridges still exist and are still used on 3DS and Vita. Lot of people consider the experience on those machines more gamer friendly than home consoles since you don't have to deal with huge install and loading times. It's a matter of opinion in the end

I was speaking to the tech in carts of that era, which were way too primitive to be an appropriate storage solution for home console games at the time. There was no tech available that could have made those carts a better option over optical media. Nintendo themselves realized this and ditched them for their next console. ROM carts have really only made tremendous advancement in the last 10 years. 1996 was still a bad time to be using them for anything other than 8bit portable games.

The same can be said for the Genesis. Compared to the SNES in terms of power, its rather underwhelming and the reason why Final Fantasy and many RPG's were in the SNES was because of its sound hardware being better than the Genesis when in reality, devs can simply just learn the technology of the genesis and still make RPG's just as good as the SNES. But the one thing that I praise SEGA for this was that they actually made the hardware for the sound by themselves without using any of the sound chips from brands like Sony. Nintendo could have easily done what Sony did for the sound chip so why is it that they decided to ask Sony to make the sound chip instead?

I made an ISO from my CT disc to run with an emulator and though it did help, even that's still slow.

@Artwark: Sony is great with sound, why wouldn't they ask them?