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Helios on 06 March 2008
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twesterm said:
Smash_Brother said:
twesterm said:

FFVI has terrible (broken/unbalanced) gameplay yet it is considered by most as the best FF game and is on a good number of peoples top 10 list.

 

TB RPGs are the ostracized sex offender of the video game genre family, though.

All TB RPGs actually HAVE is story, so it's no surprise that people who play them overlook gameplay because they're playing for the story anyway.

Using it as an example when compared to a FPS RPG isn't a sound comparison. FPS RPGs are expected to have solid gameplay because otherwise the whole "FPS" part just makes zero sense.

For the record, I thought Bioshock was a great game, but it didn't blow the doors off storytelling or gameplay. I've seen both done better by the same group of devs.


 RPG's can actually have good gameplay, FFVI's just sucked because it was horribly unblanced and just not that good.

It's great that the game had 13 characters each with thier own story but not all those characters were equal.  Characters like Terra and Celes with their strong magic, Edgar with his good magic and insane tools, Sabin with his no drawback blitzes, and Locke with his super fast speed grossly overpowered characters like Strago, Gau, Relm, and the worst of all Cyan.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9YmtT5PC0

Also... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYDBR7Cs06o&feature=related

Of course, I only mean to illustrate just how broken FF VI's battle system is (even for a JRPG). Still quite fun, though.

Seriously though, when it comes to integrating story and gameplay, FF VI is still one of the best games out there. The Opera scene is easily the most famous example, but everything from the interactive skirmish/battle scenes to how your party is broken up/reunited at the halfway point are things that just plain don't happen in the average game. I wonder, how does the 'option' of gathering your lost compatriots during the game's free-form finalé stack up to Bioshocks effort? In a sense it is different, since you can only do the 'right' thing in VI, but it is also not so different in how it presents the player with an effort-reward kind of choice.

As for Bioshock, I can't say much, since I've only played the demo. I can say I was let down when Mass Effect failed to live up to Bioware's promises, but I won't get into that. I guess I still believe developers are making progress in how they handle the narrative in videogames. But then, I'm the kind of guy that settles for Nintendo's clever references to their past games (Galaxy is golden in that regard) and usually just take the story as a 'good enough' excuse for the action. It doesn't really need to be more than that, unless the game actively sets out to do something more than entertain me.