My absolute favorite Trump imbecility, and there are so so so so so (so)^inf many Trump imbecilities. He’s almost impossibly dumb, just like his voters.
When I was a kid, my local small-town library used to have a "reading competition" each summer. They would set up about 10 small interactive dioramas each with a different theme -- a ski hill, a dragon's cave, etc. You'd get a little paper cut-out figure that represented you on your journey through the competition.
At each stage, you'd do some activity on the diorama to determine what sort of book you had to read next -- i.e. a little spinner, or a launcher that would launch your paper dude into a bunch of cups each with a different topic written on the side. You then had to find a book at the library on the topic, and the librarian would gauge whether it was appropriately "difficult" for your reading level, or whether you were trying to read something easy just to progress faster.
Each time you finished a book, they'd ask you a few questions to ensure you read it, and then you could progress to the next diorama. If you completed the circuit, you got a star on the board and could restart from the beginning. Some kids would do 10 or more circuits in a single summer.
I had a blast with it. I lived pretty far away so couldn't participate as much as I would have liked, but kids in walking distance would sometimes read a book every day or two just to keep going. All those librarians are gone and the library has moved on to a different location, and I never did find out who was responsible for building all those dioramas every summer.
I loved trigger, got to play it on release. I loved Cross even more. I played that one about 5 years after its release.
Cross has this underlying sense of menace beneath the idyllic (and wondrous) atmosphere of the archipelago. I think it's incredible.
Personally I don't care much about stories in games. Most of them are awful anyways. I really gravitate towards atmosphere, and Cross has that in spades.
Cross does look very good, I can agree to that, but there are things that bother me severely besides the story, mostly how the gameplay is designed in a way where just smashing circle will win you any battle because Serge is ridiculously strong and mandatory. The element system is very interesting but outside THOSE TWO GUYS (you know who) and the final boss, you are never compelled to use it because the fights are so easy that it's just faster to have Serge cut everything to size. If you choose Glenn over Razzli (and if you choose Razzli you have to get Korcha) the game becomes even easier. And despite the huge roster of characters most of the times it's just more efficient to use Serge, Glenn and Kid/Fargo for stealing (if you want a 100% run).
Even if you go out of your way to use your favorite characters or try to use elements it just becomes slower but not harder. There's almost no reason to use the League of Extraordinary Accents. This game SCREAMS to have something like Lufia II's Ancient Cave where you can get some thrills with those mechanics. The fixed level system really works against it.
There's potential in there, but it feels like most of the mechanics shy away from using it.
Also, despite the music being great, the battles and boss battles reuse the same theme 99% of the time, which gets tiring fast. And the regular boss battle theme happens to be the worst track in all of the game (DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU! pirori pirori pirori~ DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU!)
But the worst part is the freaking dwarfs trying to give you the eco-friendly message about how humans are destroying the environment and whatnot...despite humans not even being industrialized in all of El Nido (except for those guys outside of time) and they say that while committing genocide against the fairies with heavy smog-spewing machinery and tanks. Like give me a break... Every human settlement in El Nido is comfy nature-friendly villages and you are giving me the talk while riding a freaking tank.
The thing I like most about the PS1 era of JRPGs is that a lot of them were highly experimental. Trigger is sort of the most-polished culmination of a style developed across 8-bit and 16-bit jrpgs. Games like Cross, FF8, the SaGa Frontier games, even Legend of Mana are where Square really started to experiment, and I'm glad they did.
Cross is mechanically a mess. My least favorite part is how you must equip eleventy billion elements, it's tedious as heck, and it sort of discourages you from trying other characters because even bulk-switching elements doesn't work well due to slot and native element differences.
It was also very slow by contemporary standards. That 10 second camera wag before every fight gave them time to load assets etc., but it is very frustrating to watch every time.
I still think the atmosphere shines brightly enough to surmount these issues. It's not just that the game is beautiful, it's that the vibe is completely unique to this day, imo. FF7 also had that undertone of menace and "something's not quite right here", but there was always at least one obvious threat. In Cross, it's hard to ever put your finger on what has really gone wrong for most of the game, but you can feel in your bones that something creepy is going on. The juxtaposition between that and some of the most beautifully poignant art and music on the PS1 just hit the spot for me.
> It was also very slow by contemporary standards. That 10 second camera wag before every fight gave them time to load assets etc., but it is very frustrating to watch every time.
I used to call that the "Sony-mandated camera spin" because I half-seriously thought that spinning the camera over the field and characters was a prerequisite for getting a PlayStation devkit in the first place. It's in so many JRPGs, it was in Bust-A-Move (Bust-A-Groove), the dancing game, when one character solos, etc.
Sony actually had policies like this; for example, sprite-based PlayStation games were popular in Japan but near-forbidden in North America, because SCEA's marketing strategy was to emphasize 3D polygon graphics and convey a sense that the world had moved on from sprites. Of course, much like modern mobile policies, if you were big enough the rules could be bent for you. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and other tentpoles could thus release sprite-based games.
Funny, I very much prefer Legend of Mana and SaGa Frontier (specially the first, has more robots).
The atmosphere in Cross is really good yeah, but the plot and gameplay issues really hold it back. I can forgive it being a bad sequel (mean-spirited towards Trigger at times for some odd reason) or having a silly plot, but I can't forgive the wasted potential. Feels like the director lost interest once the Radical Dreamers portion was remade.
Have you tried SaGa: Emerald Beyond? The SaGa series is by far my favorite jrpg series, and I feel like they just keep getting better. Scarlet Grace and Emerald Beyond had low production values but they are some of the most fun I've had with videogames ever.
> I have no idea. Its like reading a book and saying you don't enjoy the story; you're what, just there for the physical motion of turning the pages?
I think you were intending for novels, but poetry books typically don't really have much in the way of "story", just aesthetics. Even for novels, there are many that I primarily appreciate the prose. I love everything about the Kingkiller Chronicle books, but the prose itself is quite pleasant in isolation, and I could probably appreciate the books even if the story and worldbuilding weren't good.
Plenty of RPGs don't have much in the way of story. The story of the first Final Fantasy is nearly absent. Same with the first Diablo, and most roguelikes. Obviously, you can enjoy an RPG without caring for the story or characters, because the main point the vast majority of games is to play them.
If someone revealed to you that they enjoyed "You are a shark" as much as "Cave of Time", and after inquiring you learned that they don't read the page, they just skip to the decision, and backtrack if they get a The End:
Did they enjoy the game? If there are enough of these type 2 readers should the industry start catering to them over legacy type 1 page readers?
The point is that it doesn’t matter, they enjoyed it. The fun police weren’t invited to do an investigation, no matter what scenario or analogy is applied.
This isn't “I will play it my way”; its heres a BS reason why legitimate critique can be dismissed out of hand.
“Oh, but for me its not about of the food tastes good”
Ok. Sure. You do You.
…but if someone says: that meal was rubbish and tasteless, is it so outrageous to call out “but I don't care about the taste” as incomprehensible nonsense to the majority of people?
You can keep coming up with flawed analogies all you like, but it doesn't change the fact that a good RPG video game is a LOT more than a story.
Is is possible to enjoy the characters, gameplay, strategy, battle system, graphics, and music of a game while caring next to nothing at all about the story. I played a LOT of 16 and 32-bit RPGs in my day and found the stories and character dialogue in nearly all of them to be predictable to the point of cliche. There are rarely any unique plot elements to get invested in, rarely any characters who break out of their mold.
If you've seen one Hero's Journey, you've pretty much seen them all. But obviously you can still build a damn fine movie or video game around it.
(FWIW, I like coding but don't get very excited about algorithms or data structures. They are just tools to use on the way to making something useful in the real world.)
There is more than one thing to enjoy about anything and yes, someone may enjoy aspects you aren’t even aware of even if they don’t enjoy the aspect you think of as the core aspect.
You brought up the subject of food, but not everyone even agrees that taste is the most important element. For some it’s the social aspect of the meal. For some it’s the nutritional value. Some may only tolerate the taste of something but enjoy the texture or the warm feeling in their belly. People can also eat things they don’t enjoy but be glad they did for the experience of just trying that thing.
It isn’t outrageous that you don’t understand it. It does imply that you’re blind to all the other aspects of games that bring people enjoyment. You personally would probably be better off not trying to defend this and instead trying to understand the views others have. You could just ask the poster what he does care about in games.
> It does imply that you’re blind to all the other aspects of games that bring people enjoyment.
Like what?
I’m not making a sweeping generalisation here about how people play games. We’re talking about chrono cross.
For a story driven JRPG like CT / CC specifically, if you don’t care about the characters or story, there is no reason to achieve any goal in the game.
I’m not so proud I can’t admit to being wrong; but in a JRPG there is no game without the character driven story. If you imagine replacing Kid and Serge with cardboard cutouts labeled A-san and B-san, what are you enjoying about the game?
I can’t speak for the poster and I haven’t played that game, but I’ve played other JRPGs.
Here’s a list of some of the things I can enjoy in a game, JRPG or otherwise, that aren’t necessarily story or character related: technical details/neat hacks, novelty, atmosphere, gameplay/battle/magic/weaponsystems, exploration, finding secrets/special items, level design, enemy and boss design and fights, cinematography (framing, contrast, …), immersion, design elements, collecting things, trying to break the game, talking about the game with others, connection and comparison with other games and media, translation, acting, my mental reaction (turning my brain off/lighting it up) …
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