Wow, so in your opinion, all the work that went into the story, the battle system, the abundant hours of content, the voice acting, and soundtrack (all of which have been highly praised) were only done to "disguise the low investment in graphics".  Just... wow.  I would argue that Square put more care into some of those aspects than they do their "AAA" flagship Final Fantasy series.  I have often found the voice acting and dialogue in particular in Final Fantasy games to be so atrocious and off-putting as to make me not want to play the game regardless of how "pretty" the graphics look.  Some people appreciate the total sum of a game's parts.  I'd much rather the money I spend go to a total enjoyable package, rather than a game that took a lot of effort pushing graphics to disguise a low investment in the actual game itself.

You should probably quit wasting your time. It's clear at this point the dude thinks graphics and production values are more important than gameplay, story, longevity, or any other method of getting value. None of that matters to him if the game doesn't run at 60 FPS with photorealistic and physics intensive hair flow, it's not worth full price (Clearly a facetious exaggeration but the point stands.) That said, he has made it clear that a game's value should be directly tied to its budget, so a game with a 10 million dollar price tag should invariably cost less than a game with a 50 million dollar price tag; yet, in spite of that I guarantee he'd not be willing to pay 100 dollars for a game like Grand Theft auto V or Destiny in spite of their massive budgets. 

Fairweather consumer, I believe is one way of putting it. He wants every excuse to lower the price because he's cheap (he even said he rarely buys games at full price), but won't apply the logic he uses to go in the other direction. 

I, like most people, determine a game's value by its volume of content, price, hours of time it gets out of me, and quality of time spent with it. Octopath, so far, has excelled in all of those categories. I'm almost done Chapter 2 for all characters and I'm coming up on about 40 hours (I'm slow, sue me). yeah, that's worth it. Even if I stopped now - less than half way through the game and having probably seen less than a third of all the game's content - I still feel the full price I paid would have been worth it. 

So yeah, DonFerrari is CLEARLY a person who values graphics and production costs over fun factor or gameplay. Best to not keep indulging him. that's why I didn't respond to his last response to me; his worldview is so fundamentally flawed (or at least so distanced from my own) that I don't feel I can have a reasonable conversation with him about the subject. 

So yes, I DO feel that a game's profit should be linked to quality, not productuon cost. I DO think a game developed for 1 million should still make a tonne of profit if it's a good and appealing concept. Look at Minecraft; THAT game hit home for a lot of people despite it being a game that could almost be rendered on an N64. sure, the game was only 30 bucks (or 20 or 10, I don't know anymore' seen it everywhere from 5 to 50), but the game's core mechanic is the sort of thing you can get in a $1 mobile game.

That's true that art is in the eye of the beholder but all art has objective value as a product. There's some art that's only valuable in a certain market to certain people.

From what I know Bravely Default and Bravely Second were very good success and exceed expectations, so it wasn't just your purchase =) probably most that bought would also want more quality turn based JRPG.

From what I can gather, Bravely Second flopped in Japan and did meh in the rest of the world, though.

I hope the real animation doesn't take as much effort, because it look to ugly to have this much effort being throw at it =p

It depends on what you mean by production values.  When it comes to art and animation, both OT and the South Park games pale in comparison to games like God of War 4 or Zelda: Breath of the Wild.  South Park's art is like something a person drew on the back of a paper napkin.  But that is cool, because that is the look that they are intentionally going for.  OT is intentionally going for a 16 bit look.  Neither one is investing much into art compared to the average AAA game made today.

Instead the art of South Park is there to make a person feel like this is really a South Park game they are playing.  And players are hoping that the game is going to be just as funny as watching South Park.  Octopath is going for the 16 bit look, because they are telling players that the gameplay, story and music are going to be of the same quality as Final Fantasy 6.  In both cases the art is there to tell people what the game is really about.  The art is not the draw in itself like it is in a game like God of War 4.

That's what this discussion is really about.  Does $60 mean, that the game needs a huge art budget?  Or is it enough to be really exceptional in other ways like gameplay, writing, music, etc... without having a huge art budget?

Apparently, they have 70 animators doing episode for a week. Not sure what their salaries are, but I think episode costs around $1.3M (that is whole budget, not just animation). Not sure why it's that much, Star Wars: Clone Wars episode was $1M, SW:Rebels is $500K. Family Guy is $2M a pop, American Dad is $1M per episode (or other way around, can't recall). Lot of that money goes to actors, I suppose...

Yeah, South Park might not have high end AAA art budget, yet it is hand animated, and that still costs pretty penny - I'd wager much more than retro visuals of Octopath, given that  South Park (at least first one) is treated as lower cost AAA.

I think the whole problem with $60 is that it's accepted as sort of a ceiling (bar some fancy editions) - which in turn, at least in my view, should warrant a game that has both content and production values at highest level. Not just one...or the other. In the case of Octopath, from everything I heard, content value is quite high...but I don't think production value is up their with the best.

Let me give another example from fairly similar, yet different field - boardgames.
Content value would be how good the game is, how good mechanisms are and how well they click with a theme (if game is not abstract), how long the game is for what it offers, how replayable it is...and other similar things.
Production value would be amount of components, quality of art, quality of materials used for board, cards, tokens and inserts and such things.
So (and I'm speaking about hobby boardgames, what is often referred to as designer board-games, not mass-market ones) there is way more difference in prices - there's no artificial $60 cap like in video games - you can have games as low as $5 (for simple card games) all the way to $400 (Kingdom Death: Monster), probably even more.
It's not even uncommon that very same game is picked up by another publisher few years after initial release, made with higher quality components and art and than sold at higher price.

Video games, on the other hand, are stuck in the mass market - for example, Witcher 3 (game that I rate as 8/10) is high quality both in content and in production - yet it's $60 game, because of that cap that is there cause of mass market. If you take that $60 cap into account, you can understand why I think only highest quality content + production value deserves that price tag.

I can see why Octopath might be worth for many $60 - I'm guilty of similar thing with Combat Mission games (tactical simultaneous turn-based wargames) for last 17 years, games with high content value (for its genre), yet not that great production values - $60 per pop, sold only on their site - because they're worth that much to me - yet, not for a second, would I ever think that in this $60 capped video game economy, value of those games is actually that.

Apparently, they have 70 animators doing episode for a week. Not sure what their salaries are, but I think episode costs around $1.3M (that is whole budget, not just animation). Not sure why it's that much, Star Wars: Clone Wars episode was $1M, SW:Rebels is $500K. Family Guy is $2M a pop, American Dad is $1M per episode (or other way around, can't recall). Lot of that money goes to actors, I suppose...

Yeah, South Park might not have high end AAA art budget, yet it is hand animated, and that still costs pretty penny - I'd wager much more than retro visuals of Octopath, given that  South Park (at least first one) is treated as lower cost AAA.

I think the whole problem with $60 is that it's accepted as sort of a ceiling (bar some fancy editions) - which in turn, at least in my view, should warrant a game that has both content and production values at highest level. Not just one...or the other. In the case of Octopath, from everything I heard, content value is quite high...but I don't think production value is up their with the best.

Let me give another example from fairly similar, yet different field - boardgames.
Content value would be how good the game is, how good mechanisms are and how well they click with a theme (if game is not abstract), how long the game is for what it offers, how replayable it is...and other similar things.
Production value would be amount of components, quality of art, quality of materials used for board, cards, tokens and inserts and such things.
So (and I'm speaking about hobby boardgames, what is often referred to as designer board-games, not mass-market ones) there is way more difference in prices - there's no artificial $60 cap like in video games - you can have games as low as $5 (for simple card games) all the way to $400 (Kingdom Death: Monster), probably even more.
It's not even uncommon that very same game is picked up by another publisher few years after initial release, made with higher quality components and art and than sold at higher price.

Video games, on the other hand, are stuck in the mass market - for example, Witcher 3 (game that I rate as 8/10) is high quality both in content and in production - yet it's $60 game, because of that cap that is there cause of mass market. If you take that $60 cap into account, you can understand why I think only highest quality content + production value deserves that price tag.

I can see why Octopath might be worth for many $60 - I'm guilty of similar thing with Combat Mission games (tactical simultaneous turn-based wargames) for last 17 years, games with high content value (for its genre), yet not that great production values - $60 per pop, sold only on their site - because they're worth that much to me - yet, not for a second, would I ever think that in this $60 capped video game economy, value of those games is actually that.

A lot of people were trying to say it could would have like 35 hours of content, but that was early on.  Now that it has been confirmed to have well over 100 hours of content, they has since put their foot in their mouths.

The main thing I see being mentioned is the graphics.  But like you, an experience is not soley based on visuals, in fact, it has the least impact of all factors.  I even see people who used to hate 16 bit style games (younger crowed) pulling a 180 and loving it after actually playing the game.  However I have a feeling people trying to downplay it in light of a "console war" and are grasping at straws at this point.

Yeah, my step son refuses to try the demo and won't play Zelda Four Swords with me because the game has "little characters".  Kid has no idea what he is missing.

But yeah, I needed a good turnbased JRPG in my life.  Too many of them try to follow the action RPG model or MMO style model.  Nothing wrong with those games, but we need more turn based games as well.

To me, personally, it's ridiculous to put a lot of money and effort to have a poor look intentionally, but I do know a lot do it =] I rather invest on pristine and pretty