If you’re halfway through the MSQ then you’re already well into the parts people widely regard as good. If you’re not having a good time yet you probably never will.
I'd go as far to say Heavensward may be the benchmark for whether people will enjoy the rest of the game. It's where the voice acting and general presentation upgrades to a level that, to me, remained consistent throughout the rest of the MSQ.
Most importantly, at least to me, you get new plot twists to some earlier events which tells you A LOT about the narrative structure going forward. There's a reveal during the middle of Heavensward that basically killed narrative tension for me throughout the rest of the MSQ.
It's not that their direction there is bad, I had just gotten swept up in the "omg it gets so DARK" hype so I was dissapointed when it consistently walked back major events. It took me until the middle of Endwalker to realise "oh, right, that's not the kind of story and experience they want to tell".
Keeping details minimal because I can't for the life of me get spoiler tags to work on kbin:
In the middle of Heavensward we learn that a very dramatic death sequence that led to some major events was a ruse. The character is alive and things will quickly return to normal.
I get what they wanted, but big fakeouts like that are not my thing. It felt like the consequences were walked back so I could never take the rest of the story seriously. Anything bad that happens could just be reverted.
Endwalker has a point after a lot of stuff goes down where I was thinking "Yeah this is edgy and all, but they really held back from doing anything actually substantial" then we get introduced to a bunch of cuteness and silly things. It took until then to really settle with me that they mostly want to tell fun and uplifting stories, so making stuff look dark and dramatic but keeping the lasting impact down is more of an objective of theirs than a narrative flaw.
I can appreciate that, and a lot of other things about the game and its story, but that in particular is just not for me.
This whole thing is especially heartbreaking because at its core, the game is great. Running around and shooting feels better then Halo has in a long time. It was just ruined by corporate fuckery.
In a nutshell: corporate greed. The only part of the game that was live service was the paid cosmetics.
At launch, their entire idea of more ‘content’ was just visual cosmetics. If you look at their communications at the time it will all make sense.
They constantly referred to an internal ‘live service’ team separate from the rest of the game, and that team was effectively the ‘cosmetics team’.
People talk about contractors, but this was the real problem. They thought they could get away with barely adding any real content and selling tons of cosmetics.
I played onimusha 1 2 and 3. Every weapon was special. In onimusha 4, I kept getting inferior weapons, and having to grind out once every few levels to get good ones again. I think this problem stated between those two games.
Been trying to get into final fantasy XIV because of a friend. Kind of fun and I like that I can customize the HUD and the control scheme between the in-game systems and the steam deck controls. I feel like I’ve tried MMOs in the past and didn’t enjoy them, but this one seems all right.
The thing is, One Piece does get exponentially bigger and better as the story unfolds but if you don’t like it from the start then it probably just isn’t for you.
During the darkest moments the pandemic, I needed something to take my mind off of reality. So I skipped to One Piece 500ish and just started reading. Didn’t really love it, but didn’t really hate it. Then around 600ish, it started clicking. And then by 650, I couldn’t believe I was rooting for Luffy and the Straw Hat crew.
Now I’m at 1100 and part of the extremely annoying crowd who talk about One Piece.
Man I had the opposite happen. Really liked it up until 500ish where it became mass produced hype machine with the same copy paste genre elements and over the top plots that lasted way too long.
Now I’m at the end where they started unloading action and lore because it actually has a planned ending in sight, so I’m happy again.
But for 500 chapters I was very pissed off at the amount of time I wasted reading it. I signed up for fantasy naval action, not a 700 page fake love story with 500 separate characters in Candyland and the plot progression of a boulder rolling uphill.
To be honest, the episodes are like max 15 minutes of actual content if your remove the intro, outro and all the recaps.
But One Piece suffers from what every long anime suffers, long outdrawn stories that get stretched (pun intended) over too many episodes. There are arcs lasting over 100 episodes. In those episodes, not much happens, but always something happens to try to keep the interest of the viewer. But the main culprit are the flashbacks.
Flashbacks happen so frequently in those series, it is like reading a book and every couple of pages they copy one of their pages from a previous chapter in its entirety. I too can write a 300 page book like that.
Anyway, it should be illegal for people to recommend anything with more than a 1000 episodes.
One Piece has some incredible awesome moments, but the dull moments in between don’t make up for it.
Pretty overinflated number (most new players don’t really do a lot of side stuff until they get caught up on story) but yeah the new player experience could definitely be improved (more). I have more of an issue with how long it takes to get a decent rotation of skills. The early dungeons are very boring, even if it’s teaching you how to play the game.
lemmy.world
Aktywne