| cantaim said: I can agree with story and main cast complaints as it felt like throughout the game that they didnt want to commit to any one story line and deided that after most every major decision, things would just carry on as usual for the main cast. but I dont thnk all of the story was trash as talking to side charectors and no names gave me a very good idea about the state of the world and how it got there and I found that to be incredibly intriguing and interesting (the actual plot itslf should have been doing this but oh well).The law vs chaos mechanic I feel like is a rather easy fix in the sense that they should take out the hidden values or remove the two choices completly as I dont see a point of having these two decisions before me if the game isnt willing to tell me what is and is not affecting the scale on which they increase. I did not know though that they said they were fixing the over world though so yay on that note. Oh and when I said over world I was talking about the map as I found the on foot exploration sections of the game to be incredibly fun to explore and am in agreement with you that they should make that the primary way of moving around the world of IV:final. Lastly I will have to disagree with you on the smirk mechanic being a minor issue I found it to be one of the worst systems introduced in SMT IV and I'll probably go into more detail as to why that is tomorrow cause I am sleepy and cant properly express how bad of a system it is right now. |
Neither do I. I think most of it was great. I think the last 33% was bad, and most of it was because of how drawn out it was because of the LvC mechanic. I hated the false endings, too.
I don't think the game should tell you anything about how your decisions effect the world if it keeps MvC. What is even the point of having a morality system if you're told when and how it effects the world? That's not how morality in real life works, and it completely shatters any sense of immersion when a "choice" icon appears to baby you into a binary, black and white decision with binary, black and white conclusions. That's such a big reason why Walter, Jonathan, and to a lower extent Isabeau, are all ruined by this stupid mechanic. They get boiled down into training wheels to let the player know what path their decisions align with. If you pick law, Walter disapproves, Jonathan reasures, and Isabeau just stands there. If you pick chaos, Jonathan shakes his head, Walter pats you on the back, and Isabeau just stands there. Such a fucking lame way to force an already shallow mechanic into an otherwise expertly put together game.
If I were in charge, the game would have had only one ending, but there would be major points through out the entire game in which your decisions organically effected the world in a tangible way, with the game being entirely devoid of any hints that these branching paths even exist, so that they actually feel like consequences instead of choices. Main characters could die or not, villians could live or not, and they would all effect the tone of that unified ending depending on who is there. This way every player's experience in the game would still be different, but it wouldn't negatively effect the writing.
I honestly beat the game never really even paying attention to how smirk effected my battles, so that explains my apathy towards the issue.
