What is the fascination about cinematic games?

[naruball]

sundin13 said:

naruball said:
The better question is, what is with all the hate cinematic experiences are getting?

How hard is it to understand that some people really care about graphics, story, music, a good and memorable plot while others, don't? Pushing a button is only a part of the gameplay. As for reviewers always giving cinematic games or games with good graphics good scores, Ryse would like to say hi. If anything, graphics are taken for granted and are completely ignored in most reviews in terms of the final score they receive.

And to answer your question, for many people like me, cutscenes create an emotional bond with the character. If it weren't for them I wouldn't have liked Ni no Kuni (or cared for Ollie's quest) nearly as much as I did. Same with Eternal Sonata and it's main characters. For me the story is one of the most important parts and cutscenes help a great deal with making me care about the characters. Reading a text is not the same, hence why I watch anime and not read manga.

But the point is that I get that other people care most about gameplay and I don't criticize them. Why do you fell the need to tell others that there's something wrong with their tastes in gaming and you don't simply realize that it's nothing more than "different strokes for different folks", as already pointed out?

Out of curiousity, if you and these people really care most about graphics, story, music and plot...why aren't you just watching a movie? Movies will always be better at being "cinematic" than games, but games have a huge bag of tricks that it can pull from to make engaging stories that are unique to games (the story isn't the problem...the way of telling it is). That is why I don't like the goal to be cinematic, even if the end result turns out well. 

PS: Cutscenes aren't the only way to tell a story. I consider cutscenes to be like exposition dumps in books or movies... its just a lazy way of getting information to the player because you don't have the skill to work it in organically. There can also be voice acting in games without taking control away from you as the character.

I think you misunderstood what I said. I didn't say that I don't care about gameplay at all; I meant that I care about those other things more than people that focus almost entirely on gameplay. It's like telling someone, if you care so much about music, why don't you listen to a song instead of playing video games?The answer is, why not both? 

As for why not just watch a movie, I'm not sure if you're serious, but I'll answer seriously anyway. When you watch a movie, you have zero interaction with the characters and zero effect on the plot. You can literally go to another room, talk to your friends, text etc and not worry that something will happen when you are away. With many video games if you don't pay attention to the cutscenes, you won't be able to find a clue that you need to progress to the next level or you might answer incorrectly a question that a character asks you later. That sometimes has an effect on the story or your relationship with that character. I also found myself several times wishing I could pause a movie and turn it into a game where I get to do the actions scenes myself. You don't get the same satisfaction watching a movie as getting some of kind of control of the action. 

I couldn't disagree more about the cutscenes being a lazy way to tell stories. Lazy is having walls upon walls of text as far as I'm concerned. They bore me to no end and I don't pay attention to them most of the time. Cutscenes cost a lot of money and require time. As for telling a story without them, I find the way that video characters in non-cinematic scenes moves unnatural and it's hard for me to take them seriously. The minute a cutscens stops but the story continues, everything seems awkward and fake so I lose my connection with the characters. This happened to me with Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2. The animation looked weird and I stopped taking it seriously.

The thing is, though, I get that people prefer manga over anime, books over movies. I don't criticize them (nor did the OP apparently) because I know that they like using their imagination. My problem is that people don't seem to get that just because they find cutscenes not a good fit for video games, cutscenes are necessarily bad and people who like them are wrong. There is no or right here. Simply people with different tastes. No matter how long the cutscenes are, the gamplay is always there whether it is pressing x  or having a deeper combat system.