Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

Well I guess sci-fi fans will have to hope on Cyberpunk 2077 picks up the flag instead.

Still, it's the best month for a long time to have a big AAA fail. Given that I also want to play Zelda, Horizon, Nier Automata, Dark Souls 3 DLC, Kingdom Hearts collection, I'll probabl manage just fine.

Kingdom Hearts especially is great for me because I only played the first game to the end. Only got half way through 2 and haven't played Birth By Sleep. So incredibly good value for money.

@NEStalgia P5 is the only option. It's Sony's killer app at this point (for me).

@Ralizah Hasn't it always been? We certainly don't buy these things for COD and Soldier Tank Battle Shooter 28!

I was trying to figure out what the hell that actually is.

I think it's just the animation for running down stairs that's failed to switch to the regular running animation.

@NEStalgia Last gen felt like a long nightmare for the video game world. Countless numbers of grizzled, violent white dudes murdering their way through hordes of foreigners/aliens/mutants/Nazis/etc on PS360 platforms, while Nintendo was busily working to make actually enjoying their games as difficult as humanly possible (why press a button to use an attack when you can wave a remote around in front of you like an idiot instead?)

Things are a good deal better now on the Playstation front, what with the apparent revival of big, ambitious Japanese console games. Even Sony's biggest contribution to the violent white dude" trend, Nathan Drake, eventually attained some level of self-awareness about the implications and destructive side-effects of his festive murder sprees in Uncharted 4.

And, of course, if the Wii generation was all about making games as hard to get into as possible, the Switch generation seems like the opposite: enjoying your games is easier than ever now that you can seamlessly transition between TV and handheld play. Although I'm mixed on the stealth return of Wii Motion Plus. We'll see: if they're limited to games like World of Goo that can't reasonably be played on the TV in any other way, then they just help to further increase the system's range of flexibility.

cough

@Ralizah

Yeah that does look good. And glad to have another Vita game. Doubt it'll be as epic scale as Cyberpunk though. They've said it's significantly bigger than the Witcher 3.

@jayzzx

It's the PS4 thread. What's confusing?

@Ralizah I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks last gen was a bit of a mixed bag. There were great games indeed, but I much prefer this gen, or the generations before the Wii/PS3/360 era.

@Dezzy Cyberpunk 2077 sounds really cool. It'll probably be the first AAA cyberpunk RPG we've ever had, right? I can't think of any other. Certain, much older games, along with indie RPGs like Shadowrun.

@Octane I mean, last gen had a handful of gems. Super Mario Galaxy is one of my all-time favorite Nintendo games, the 360 had some instant classics with Viva Pinata, Alan Wake, and Lost Odyssey, and the PS3 had some decent games I'd have loved to play, like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Ni no Kuni. In general, though? Yeah, the seventh gen was awful.

@AlexSays
There's already been a lot of changes at Bioware since EA bought the studio and that's exactly the problem. Wish it'd buy its independence back and try to get some former members of the staff to return. People can say what they want about MS, when Bioware was making games with MS as the publisher, the quality was much higher.

I'd say Mass Effect 2 is fairly cyberpunkish.
And some people would say Final Fantasy 7 is. Although that's more of a mixed bag. Midgar though.

The Gravity Rush 2 side story called 'The Ark of Time: Raven's Choice' is out now! Even better, it's FREE.

@Dezzy ME2 is a space opera. All the ME games are. ME2 definitely feels a bit grittier, though.

I would say during the Midgar portion of the game, FFVII feels like dieselpunk, but turns more into a science fantasy epic as it goes along. The first several hours of the game definitely nail that "high tech, low life" feel of the genre, though. And this is just reminding me what an insanely cool game FFVII was. What other games combine motorcycle chases, cloning, ancient prophecies, dragons, evil megacorporations, and theme parks?

Right now, indie games are keeping cyberpunk games alive. I'm in the middle of VA-11 Hall-A, a game where you play as a bartender in a classically cyberpunk setting and kind of get a front-row seat to the issues, social organization, etc. in such an environment.

@Peek-a-boo Perfect! I needed an excuse to turn my PS4 back on.

@Ralizah You forgot that cross-dressing part at the Wall Market where Don Corneo chose to bring Cloud (who was wearing a 'satin dress' and a 'blonde wig') into his bedroom if you were wearing all the right items!

Man, Final Fantasy VII had it all. It's still my favourite game of all time.

@Ralizah 7th gen was certainly a bore. I'd taken a long hiatus from consoles and gone PC only during what I'd consider the "golden age of PC games". I saw, during that time, a lot of shift towards the "brown shooter". In the beginning there was Doom and Quake.....and then it was Quake and Unreal and unreal added color and adventure and fantasy and was great. And then after that it became the online arena shooters.....and the began the era of war-simulation shooters. Sometime around the launch of the original XBox PC gaming got dragged into this pool of same-ness. It was clear Microsoft was intentionally funding things in the industry to align windows games and XBox games under the DirectX banner, and forcing a general sameness. By the time we got to the X360 (leading 7th gen) on the console side it borrowed all the bad, sameish, factory-produced games from the same handfuls of studios, and ignored the flashes of brilliance that had come in PC before it (all the RTS's, RPGs, random-weird-genre games and stuck with the factory-produced formula. It was MS that created that wasteland for gaming, and Sony had originally gone as different (and arrogant) as different (and arrogant) can get with the overpriced PS3, that was to be fair going to be a true console versus Windows-Lite on X360, but since they lost so much market share in that disastrous launch window, they had no choice but to follow along the MS route. Nintendo was just off swatting flies and flailing around They thought it was cool. I didn't even play past the Twilight Princess water temple until the WiiU version with real controls.

I didn't mind Nathan Drake though. I don't lump him in with the gritty brown-grey soldier genre. He was a nod to Indiana Jones from the very start, massive death pile or not, it was old-school action-flick fare, not the modern gritty games. It could have done without the zombies in the first one though. Sony and especially Naughty Dog has a serious obsession with zombies, and Naughty Dog's staff might want to seek counseling for that... I'm glad they eventually learned to keep their zombie games a separate thing.

But yeah, when I think 7th gen, it's war-sim, guerilla gritty soldier, aliens/mutants vs. soldiers, horror/zombie/blood-splatter games, pretty much universally. And waggling of course. Some soldier games are fine. That was a bit much.

@Gamer83 Bioware, like Rare, is no longer a company. They can call it Bioware all they want, but it's just an EA internal studio using the name they bought from Bioware. Anyone that gave it a soul is long gone. Not sure what happened with management in the last 2 games, the founders became different people which makes me think they were NEVER the real heart of the company. But the best we can hope is the old staff uniting under a new company rather than ever hoping to get "Bioware" back. The last "real" Bioware game was DA:O and that was partially already developed before the EA buyout.

@Ralizah ME2 was the only one with a good story, 1 had better character moments (but the story was "we're doing KotR without an SW license, eat that Lucas!" 2 had (by far) the worst gameplay though. The story in 3 went off the rails completely half way through.

I like FFVII but so much of it, like Ocarina is rose tinted glasses. The story/characters were second to none, but the gameplay had serious issues and dragged on badly. And the whole Aerith thing, though structurally and culturally amazing, was a gigantic, humongous, unforgivable gameplay flaw. Personally, FFIX forever, Kupo!

@NEStalgia Uncharted 4 was the only game in the series without completely hokey supernatural elements (zombie-vampire things, lost cities filled with weird Kratos wannabees) in the ending. Fantastic game overall, even if I'm not a fan of modern Naughty Dog in general.

I really liked the story in ME1. I mean, yes, it was clearly Star Wars without the branding, but I loved the way it transitioned from a general space opera feel to something almost Lovecraftian in nature when the reapers are revealed. ME2, even from the start, tried way too hard to be edgy and intense, and I couldn't really get into it.

What serious issues did FFVII have? Obviously it is dated in certain respects, but I think the core game still holds up extremely well. The materia system is STILL surprisingly robust. Fantastic characters. Interesting (if occasionally incoherent) storyline. One of the best OSTs in a series filled with fantastic music. The gated open world approach was incredibly well-done, as it directed game progression through the early hours while not making you feel like the gaming is artificially limiting your options.

The thing with Ocarina is that various Zelda games since have improved on it in almost ever way, while subsequent JRPGs have struggled to match the combination of memorable characters, solid battle mechanics, epic scope, and a huge production budget that made FFVII what it was.

@Peek-a-boo Although I love my Atlus games, I do feel like, in a sense, JRPGs peaked with FFVII. It was one of those rare moments in gaming when everything came together beautifully. In a very real sense, it was the first blockbuster RPG. The audacious advertising for the game in the U.S. helped seal the deal, in that regard. Check out one of these commercials for the game (and boy, it's shocking how willing they are to spoil HUGE story beats!):

@Ralizah Oh yeah I forgot about The hulking Kratos things in 2. 3 Didn't have supernatural things either....the "supernatural" things were in fact just hallucinations during a very brief segment due to the poisoned water and were just flame-wreathed human enemies that could teleport. I loved the whole Lawrence of Arabia thing in 3. Without Drake & Sully though I fear the game will be like Andromeda "Hey it looks visually the same, but without any personality!"

Reapers in ME1: Lovecraftian mythological plot device. Cool and creepy and exotic. Reapers in ME2: What's a reaper? Reapers in ME3: Reapers? Oh they're everywhere, pretty much just a trash mob, ignore them." The problem with really cool plot devices like that is their appeal is their mystery. When they decide to explain the mystery in detail, it's not as interesting anymore. I hate when Sci-Fi does that. A powerful ship that mind controls people for unknown mysterious goals is intriguing. A fleet of invincible super ships swarming the galaxy is kind of ho-hum story-wise. It also borrowed VERY heavily in story concept from Descent: Freespace/Freespace 2 (which is a much better series )

I love the materia system far more than the Jobs system of 4/Bravely Default, that's for darned sure! But the combat & item systems and the immense (unfun) grinding in the game, were certainly not "bad" but not worthy of the vast praise it gets either. To me, the combat was something you tolerated to see the great world and story.

In terms of the actual gameplay systems, I think Atlus RPGs actually stand out waaay above FFVII. They've stuck to mostly the same battle formula and refined it into a few very balanced systems for their franchises. FFVII was one of the first JRPGs that had any serious popularity in the US and any major marketing push, so a lot of people identify with it as their first JRPG and elevate it accordingly. Meanwhile in Japan it was always received as kind of "yeah I guess that's ok too". DQ always got the big Squeenix love there. Still does and always has. And for very good reason, too.

For me, personally, Squeenix RPGs peaked with Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and FFIX. Those were the games that got it spot on at every turn, with perfect balance and addicting gameplay and addicting stories. FFVII is great, I do love it, but I don't think it sits with the others. It took me a LOT longer to get into Atlus games, but once I did, they've kind of won my favor for what an RPG should do.

And then there's the boy band.

I do have my copy of XV. Notice my debate is on opening Horison or P5 first? Still have my Take Your Heart edition on preorder!

@Ralizah That commercial is funny though, it's so indicative of what was big and what was wrong with the PSX era. The actual GAME is not shown anywhere in that commercial. It's a collection of FMV cutscenes!

@NEStalgia Yes, Uncharted 3 didn't technically incorporate supernatural elements, but it did in a narrative sense. It was a bit of a cheat, actually, and I hate when fiction does this. It basically introduced a supernatural story element, reaped the benefits of that with cool teleporting genie dudes who shoot balls of fire, and then walks it back at the end and basically says "this can be explained away by saying that Drake was tripping balls through a significant portion of the game." That's lazy and an example of bad writing. While I generally prefer Uncharted 3 as a game, I respect the fact that, when UC 1 and 2 introduced BS monsters to try and making the climax exciting, they went all the way and just admitted that, yes, they were being chased by spooky scary vampire/Kratos things.

Uncharted 4, on the other hand, relies on excellent story pacing and character arc resolution to get its thrills at the end. The climax feels like the culmination of the themes and story threads that became interwoven over the course of the game, and less like they just introduced a plot device at the last second to give the adventure some sort of defined outcome it hadn't really deserved in the first place.

And yeah, I agree that horror elements lose their effectiveness when you explain them away. Horror is driven primarily by the irrational sense that something is deeply amiss in the world and that you have little to no control over whatever 'it' is. It's a genre driven by human emotion. The challenge is to make the creatures or objects that are driving this fear vague enough that they tickle the lizard part of your brain instead of your rational side, yet defined enough that you can still use them while crafting a coherent narrative. There's a reason Jaws was so scary, and it wasn't because they constantly flaunted the monster on the screen.

This is also why I don't consider games like Resident Evil 4 or Dead Space to be horror. Your characters are a little too well-equipped to deal with the menace confronting you to provoke genuine feelings of fright.

I would agree that Atlus games tend to be richer on the gameplay front, although I think that, unlike some of the best Square games, most of them tend to rely PRIMARILY on that aspect of their design, and lack some of the other virtues that have made so many of Square's classic games so universally beloved.

I won't deny that nostalgia is probably a big part of it. Same with any classic work of art. There's always an element of "you had to be there" when it comes to media that is really groundbreaking at the time. But I don't think that means that FFVII was just another bog-standard Square game, either.

I've never seen the appeal of Chrono Trigger, in all honesty. Same with Secret of Mana, but CT especially is so universally beloved, and I never found its characters or gameplay systems to be particularly compelling. Then again, I also dislike Radiant Historia and think Back to the Future is vastly overrated, so maybe I'm just picky about time travel stories (last really good one I've experienced was Steins;Gate, in my opinion).

I don't necessarily mind the boy band-ish nature of FFXV (I'm not a fan, but it's not enough to put me off the game entirely), but the way imperials constantly dropped in and scattered my group in the Episode Duscae demo made it a miserable experience for me, and I've heard that happens in the game proper as well. Also, simplistic action combat and a mediocre story? No thanks.

@NEStalgia A limitation of the era. In-game visuals were still too rudimentary to be very useful for advertising campaigns. Besides, it's hard to advertise an RPG on TV and make the gameplay look appealing at all.