I like these games. I do. But at the same time I don’t. They’re repetitive in the gameplay and it gets stale to the point where I never finish them.
Along with the Assassins Creed series, they have sucked me in and don’t deliver enough to maintain my business, yet a couple of months after a release when I see them go on sale the end up in my collection.
I’m hoping this news will end in an awesome game that I’m obviously going to buy and that I will actually finish, for once
Agree. I’m playing Far Cry 6 and somehow got the feeling it’s even slightly worse (more stupid) than the 5th entry.
The map is filled to the brim with NPCs and animals, yet I’ve rarely witnessed such a dead world. Not a single NPC has a purpose or life. Cars outside the render distance disappear from the game too: turn around and that vehicle is gone like in those 1980’s video games. Turn around again: new NPC.
Finished a checkpoint / road block: your car is gone Baddies reappear in enemy areas although I just cleared it out. Such a lack of persistence is almost an offense.
Not one car that doesn’t sound their horn at me because they think I’m trying to ram them off the road. Arcade games from decades ago were less dumb.
Ubi really need to scale down the size of these games and adopt a quality over quantity mindset. I’ve played multiple Ubi IPs and they’re the fucking same at its core.
“By partnering with the Cfx.re team, we will help them find new ways to support this incredible community and improve the services they provide to their developers and players.”
Allow me to translate:
“By partnering with the Cfx.re team, we will help them find new ways to bleed the community’s wallets dry and force servers to pay a cut of their monetization revenue and offer nothing substantial in return.”
Is this game much better than the demo? I played the demo with my kid and overall the couch coop game with the dog seemed much weaker than Pikmin 3. Maybe it gets better?
I didn’t play the demo but I assume it’s gameplay very early in the game. My review is that the game starts too slow which is probably what you experienced. Overall it might be worse than Pikmin 3 Deluxe but Pikmin 4 is still a quality game that gets better when you’re around the mid-way point. It’s surprisingly long too (going for all treasure, not speedrunning) and overall I think it’s worth the price.
Thanks for the update! Right now it seems kid lost interest because of no co-op, but I’m sure that will change with time. It really seems like a solid game.
The game is great and easily the best japanese fighting game experience for casuals. (Mechanically I prefer anime fighters though.) For once a Japanese game has all the bells and whistles instead of almost purely focusing on the multiplayer.
The cosmetics are what they are. At least it’s not p2w but it’s up to consumers to not spend if they don’t agree with paying more in a game they already bought.
Edit: downvote me all you want but the truth is that street fighter 6 was a very big step forward for japanese fighting games in terms of what they offer consumers. The fgc hasn’t had games that can truly appeal to and bring in new players so I can’t help but be happy for it. The only exceptions would be NRS’s games and smash.
I think it’s generally agreed that pretty much all our genre naming conventions are bad and alternatives exist. youtu.be/uepAJ-rqJKA has a pretty good description of an alternative, where you describe games by their core reason for play as opposed to mechanics or camera perspective
Lots of hobbies or industries have terms that are a bit off but accepted by everyone in the know as institutional knowledge. It’s no surprise gaming is the same and it’s unlikely to change 50 odd years in.
I heard that in the late 2000s the western gaming press had a very strong dislike for JRPGs, which led to Japanese developers treating the term as derogatory. And while I still think that ideally we’d have better terminology that would try to capture the differences between the games rather than their place of origin (the most famous distinction being that “western RPGs” usually let you create your character and treat them as a blank slate in the story, whereas “JRPGs” usually put you in control of a predefined character with their own motivations and actions in the storyline), I think it’s nice that nowadays there are developers who are actually proud of the term “JRPG”.
There was a strong dislike of JRPGs and Japanese games in the 2000s.
Development struggles
From what I heard is, during the shift to HD development in early PS3 360 era, many western devs switched to use Unreal engine, while Japanese devs were sticking to their in house engines. But, in house engines were not cheap nor easy to build / maintain, so they struggled to recoup their expenses.
One of their strategies is to make their games more appealing to the west, but they were kinda doing it from the lens of what they think American games are appealing, so we get games that weren’t universally loved, like
It didn’t help when we got bangers like Mass Effect trilogy, Skyrim, Fallout 3. So Square definitely disliked the JRPG term. However if you were to ask smaller Japanese devs at the time, e.g. ATLUS or Nihon Falcom, they’d probably prefer the term, because their ‘niche’ games (at the time), sold quite well while Square struggled.
Not a really descriptive term anymore
But you’re right, JRPG is non-descriptive when it comes to reviews. I’d prefer that reviewers have a small box that lists out the mechanics of the game, e.g. turn-based, random loot drops, predesignated character, linear dungeons, etc. But even nowadays reviewers are recommending games like Jedi Survivor, while the game is still a broken mess, which made me wonder what’s the point of reviews anymore?
It’s great when the devs like the term, but it barely helps anyone when reviewers use it. Not to mention the political tension when they use the term JRPG for games developed by Chinese or Korean devs.
Of course I haven’t mentioned that some reviewers were just racists fucks. Also it’s the period when Famitsu will just give any games 40/40 if the publishers bought enough advertisements from them, FF13 got 39/40, and Square was probably wondering why the games were not well received outside Japan
I think it doesn’t truly mean “Japanese RPG’s”, even today. There are lots of Japanese games that don’t get called JRPG’s even though they are RPG’s or have those elements (there is ambiguitiy in what an RPG is too, admittedly), like Resident Evil games and Dark Souls games and Zelda games and Pokemon. Dark Souls especially, since they have the character building and stats as well as the roleplaying.
People don’t call Elden Ring a JRPG because JRPG is supposed to mean one thing but really it carries a lot connotations about mechanics, graphics, and the derogatory connotations about quality.
And Pokemon! Pokemon is very clearly a JRPG in the mechnical and graphics sense, but it doesn’t typically get called a JRPG. I think this is because of the negative connotations of JRPG, personally.
And on the other hand we have things like Chained Echoes, which is in all mechanical and graphical ways is a textbook JRPG, except it’s not made in Japan at all, but rather inspired by Japanese games.
I agree this is complicated, but I found Jimquisition’s video on the topic really persuasive. I recommend that one even for people normally don’t jive with Jimquisition’s style.
Within any group, there will always be some who don’t find a term offensive even while others do, but I think probably the best outcome in this case is for the general populace to move away from the term, while leaving space for Japanese video game devs to reclaim it and use it themselves if they wish to.
Maybe it will truly lose the negative connotations with time, but I don’t think we’re there yet, when people are only just starting to sometimes acknowledge it ever had those connotations in the first place.
Granted, most genre words are vague and confusing as hell - JRPG isn’t special in that sense - but most don’t have the racist history/implications or negative connotations. And when I try to think of another genre label that is used as an insult, the first that comes to mind is Visual Novel, which is another one that is heavily associated with Japan.
The gaming press had a pretty strong dislike for Japanese games all together for a bit bar Nintendo titles. Thats why we ended up with that rough era where companies like Capcom were trying to make more western styled titles.
J action sounds right for metal gear rising and Bayonetta. It’s a lot better then trying to call it camera style common verb like fps, TPS. Our genres should really start focusing on player experience rather than basic mechanics.
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