| F0X said: How do you figure? Last time I checked, Pokemon was one of the most accessible RPGs out there, and through some sort of black magic, one of the deepest as well. That doesn't smack of bad RPG design. |
A video game is the sum of all its parts. I like how people seem to give it a pass despite the fact that each and every 20+ hour single player campaign is absolute shit, and the competitive portion of the game is lying within that single player. It's not good as a competitive game, even in friendly battles between people you know, until you finish the game and make a proper party. The amount of time it takes to set up a decent party turns the game into a time sink.
So yeah, it has deep gameplay, but doesn't mean the game itself is any good because most of that deep gameplay is spent doing menial tasks in order to properly participate. Doing menial tasks in an RPG are boring rather than entertaining, it's not like you're trying to think of how to get this many units here by this amount of turns, you literally have an infinite amount of time to do these boring menial tasks. It also doesn't help that choosing and completing a single turn in that competitive setting takes around 20 seconds after the players take their actions, both players, before they can choose their actions again. Incredibly slow paced battle system.
So when I say Pokemon sucks, and it does, I'm looking at the entirety of the game and how much time you have to spend to actually get to the enjoying part of the game when you're playing pvp. If you're wasting time and not having fun getting to the good part, then it's not a very good game is it? Final Fantasy 13 would potentially be a great game then because I hear from everyone that it gets good once you're 20 hours in. Should I ignore the remainder of the game where it's not good only because I started having fun at the end?
So I'd rather play a single player RPG that may or may not have gameplay that's as deep, because that 20-60 hour play through I'm being entertained the entire way through. Rather than playing an incredibly boring single player portion of a competitive multiplayer RPG to possibly have fun with its incredibly deep gameplay for an incredibly short amount of time.
