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GAF, is Xenoblade getting snubbed?
- Thread starter Malvingt2
- Start date
You could probably even say hypothetical A or S rank games can be overrated: maybe it really IS one of the best games you ever played! But there's hyperbolic statements that act as if it's one of humanity's greatest achievements and uhh, yeah, that sort of stuff is likely getting carried away.
(Although managing to create a virtual, interactive world of ANY sort is actually really damn amazing of an achievement, but applies to games as a collective whole)
In the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
Okay Xenoblade is like a charismatic guy with two eyes, but still.
Stats, leveling, some degree of equipment management and sidequests...
It's absolutely an RPG, even if it's lighter as an RPG than something like Xenoblade. Xcom I'm more likely to take issue with if anything, it's like a bizarre inverse of games like ME3 and Borderlands where on a cursory glance it absolutely shares more in common with RPG (Final Fantasy Tactics, Shining Force, Fire Emblem), but when you really get down to it it's undeniably more of a straight up tactical game than a real RPG.
Pretty much what I wanted to get at. It's absolutely a top tier game, but that's some of the weakest competition you can muster.
Wait? Stats? What stats, what leveling? None of that stuff really means anything. Hell, if all it took was gaining levels, then we could call Black Ops 2 an RPG. I just gained 5 levels in that game. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy Mass Effect 3 up until the end, but it's not an RPG. At some point I even stopped putting points into skills because it didn't matter at all. I did get good using a couple of guns and that made all the difference.
Xilium
Member
My issue with Mass Effect is that it is very incremental in these things. Most of your leveling amounts to small percentage increases in damage, resistance, ect. that you barely notice, especially since there's no opportunity to grind and become overpowered (so that you could actually see/feel the results of your leveling). The Mass Effect series (specifically 2 & 3) have always felt more akin to a Devil May Cry or God of War style game.
Dueck said:
Last I heard the game sold around 400k (give or take since it's all estimation), which is on par with your typical B-tier JRPG (Tales of..., Star Ocean, ect.) so I don't think it being on an HD console would have changed anything. Final Fantasy, Dragon's Dogma and Demon's/Dark Souls are the only JRPGs that broke into the mainstream on home consoles this gen (FF due to legacy and the other 3 due to having broader appeal among the WRPG demo).
John Harker
Definitely doesn't make things up as he goes along.
The Last Story was pretty effing good too 
If there ever was an shooter RPG, it is Fallout 3/NV. Hitting a person is determined by dice rolls factoring in player accuracy and distance but mostly your guns skill, as in there is actually a skill which is allocated a discrete, numerical value that factors in how well you are at performing the aforementioned skill. Not to mention all the other skills that can be used in non-combat situation. Also has an inventory and equipment systems.
Windom Earle
Member
This x1000, I have no clue why the game is so overhyped here.
The game is good, but that's it, not amazing or anything. It is very unbalanced and the battle system is crap. Put 120h into it. Oh, and those fetch quests...
nothing really that sounded so much like something from the mid-90s as that does, but i really liked colony 9 - night (although i guess you've seen this already).
this sorta has the same type of mix, but it's not as majestic
it's been a while, and i'm not as big a fan of the game as others. so that's all i can really think of.
This is more an example of how the lines blur increasingly, admittedly at this point half of "is it/isn't it an RPG?" falls on marketing, but I'd say ME3 does go a few steps further thanks to choices to make (for how ever much good they do), that there is some party management, and it's certainly got enough to distance itself enough from the likes of Gears of War (and pulling the dice rolls for hitting is crap, there've been plenty of hack & slash action RPGs that didn't depend on those at least for accuracy and usually that's just bad design period).
Actually, there's a lot of older titles that would probably be very dubious on how much of an RPG they really are if scrutinized, like the Ys games or Quintet's SNES titles. Nevermind when you start using different criteria and putting almost all JRPGs under the magnifying glass, especially true when they start being more experimental and stripping out equipment or even levels.
That's a really bad reason to disqualify a game, especially with how divergent some sequels (like ME2) were. Maybe take issue with the fact it didn't do enough relative to 2 and is arguably diminished, but ports/lighter remakes are where I'd turn the disqualifying-type arguments at, not sequels period.
It reminded me of PSO, personally.
In my opinion, the genre is pretty well defined. Baldur's Gate is an RPG, as is Xenoblade, The Last Story, the Tales Series, Skyrim, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, etc. Mass Effect isn't an RPG, but has some elements that are RPG light. That doesn't make it a full fledged RPG, though. I play Mass Effect the same way I play Gears of War and you can go through the whole game with the game simply handling your "levels" and never notice the RPG parts at all. I tried this, in fact, by not even bothering with putting points into anything. I'm good with the gun and a couple of abilities and that's good enough to win. Even the "quests" are nothing and don't really gain you anything. Mass Effect 3 is a straight up shooter.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with this. I had a lot of fun with it, but it's not an RPG.
Yet couldn't you go through quite a few RPGs ignoring various systems in favor of what does work or brute force, along with letting games like KotOR auto level for you? Just look at how people have finished Demon's Souls and Dark Souls purely by skill and at very low soul levels and sticking with one set of equipment through them. And like noted there are a lot of older action RPGs that are very, VERY light: Ys doesn't exactly have loads of equipment (it took until Ys Seven to actually change that) with minimal character building, and battles are much dependent on
When you break down what you're capable of it is absolutely on a different level from the likes of Gears, if you can ignore your special abilities and leveling that's more a failing on difficulty or balance than whether or not it's an RPG or not.
And admittedly to an extent I think it's just pointlessly pedantic to scream "but this isn't an RPG!" and seriously fight it unless it's outright bogus, like claiming GTA's an RPG or something. but this is part of why I said half of it is marketing: Bioware KNEW they sold the original at least as an RPG and needed to appease RPG fans with this, whereas I doubt God of War's developers really care. Plus literal role playing with your dialogue choices and crap, for whatever good that was.
walking fiend
Member
This.The Last Story was pretty effing good too
ignoring the systems does not make mass effect less of an RPG, there are a lot of Action RPG's you can beat without leveling.
You do enough of talking, leveling, questing and looting for it to be an RPG. The story even has (limited) player agency. Unless of course you have a very specific criteria that an RPG must meet that ME does not.
Being able to beat the game without leveling is irrelevant to being considered an RPG. That said ME3 is barely an RPG. While dialogue trees, questing and looting are usually conflated with being an RPG, what really counts is stats and skill numbers that serve as an abstraction of a character's skills. Most everything you do in the game is not dependent on these numerical values (because they don't really exist). How good Shepard is at shooting is dependent purely on the skill of the player and the gun s/he uses, not any stat point attached to how well s/he can shoot. The only thing that is remotely RPG is the Renegade/Paragon points you can accumulate, where options can be chosen depending on those innate stats (that are accumulated through player choice) to the character.
It is kind of alarming how IGN is handling coverage, what with not properly reviewing ToGf (though they aren't NEGATIVE from what I'm glancing) to brushing off PSP entirely. I'd understand this sort of mentality for smaller, indie games that might only see a few hundred, maybe a thousand or two sales period, but this stuff, and from as big of a site as they are?
Though at least RPGs have the excuse of eating a lot of time, and that may not mesh well especially with freelance work.
Hero of Canton
Member
Xenoblade's one of the finest examples of its genre in the past decade, right up there with the likes of Persona 4. Problem is, the JRPG just isn't fashionable any more. Any GOTY list decided by committee might have a couple of people strongly lobbying for it, but it's never going to hit top spot. Individual lists? Possibly. I think either TIME or Forbes had it very high on their list.
JRPGs rarely took those awards even in better times though, not unless it was a major Square/Nintendo title or it was platform specific (if you were to give a best PSP game of the year award I'm not sure how you COULDN'T give it to a JRPG this year, and I doubt there were truly better options last year).
grandjedi6
Master of the Google Search
Graces F doesn't deserve to be on any such list. And I say that as someone who played 100 hours of the game on chaos and loved it.
Combat is great, but GotY is for complete packages, and the characters and story was such bunk (except Malik and troll Richard).
Opinions man. They should at least give us the option to vote.
MegaKungFuRadio
Member
Xenoblade is like the prototype for a game that someone covering games would not play unless assigned to it. It's of a genre notorious for producing timesinks and t's on the Wii. JRPGs simply haven't earned the time commitment. Think of how the Endurance Run was born. Vinnie wanted to play Persona 4, but he knew he would never play it on his own time, so he decided to make it content.
I liked ME3 more than Xenoblade, but still feel weird about it winning genre awards over Xenoblade (though if it came down to it, I would make the same decision despite some reservations). I find Gamesradar saying that it was a strong year for RPGs, then giving the award to XCOM, which I feel is firmly in the Strategy category, particularly distasteful.
It's completely fair to not advocate something you haven't played, which I'm guessing is the case with a lot of people. Couple that with the variance of how you define "Best RPG" (Best game that's an RPG? Best game at being an RPG? Somewhere in the middle?) and taste (maybe they liked ME3 better than Xenoblade? I did.), and it's not surprising that Xenoblade isn't winning the category very much. I love when people perceive bias in others due to their own biases.
I liked ME3 more than Xenoblade, but still feel weird about it winning genre awards over Xenoblade (though if it came down to it, I would make the same decision despite some reservations). I find Gamesradar saying that it was a strong year for RPGs, then giving the award to XCOM, which I feel is firmly in the Strategy category, particularly distasteful.
It's completely fair to not advocate something you haven't played, which I'm guessing is the case with a lot of people. Couple that with the variance of how you define "Best RPG" (Best game that's an RPG? Best game at being an RPG? Somewhere in the middle?) and taste (maybe they liked ME3 better than Xenoblade? I did.), and it's not surprising that Xenoblade isn't winning the category very much. I love when people perceive bias in others due to their own biases.
Yeah, I'll definitely agree that Xenoblade is overrated. Played about 10 hours, got super bored and stopped playing. I can kind of see what people see in it but it didn't grab me in the least.
Then I'll go the extra mile and say that at this point the hate for ME3 is way overblown. You'd think that game shot people's dogs the way they talk about it. Yes, it had issues, but it wasn't close to the worst game of all time that people portray it as.
Then I'll go the extra mile and say that at this point the hate for ME3 is way overblown. You'd think that game shot people's dogs the way they talk about it. Yes, it had issues, but it wasn't close to the worst game of all time that people portray it as.
shira
Member
Canada
MegaKungFuRadio
Member
People are drama queens.
Uncle0wnage
Member
I think that in xenoblade's case, it's the fewest that yell the loudest. I thought the game was decent, but I did not enjoy myself while playing. To me, it was about as boring as FF13 but with awful fetch quests and gimped graphics. The battle system was clunky and wasn't fun to use. It's my opinion that this game gets way too much praise and that ME3 gets way too much hate. Should it have won an award? No, ME3 accomplished much more of what it was reaching for, so it deserved to place over xenoblade, but I don't agree that it should've won the whole thing. Just my 2 cents.
Barack Lesnar
Banned
Sounds like it's because it was an exclusive on a platform with a really poor overall library so the fact that a good game came along, again an exclusive, became amplified... it became overhyped. Lots of posts like yours in this thread lead me to believe that might have been the case.
Uncle0wnage
Member
If a game takes more than "x" amount of time to get even remotely enjoyable, it's the game that is the problem, not the players.
ha, you're probably right
we should stop getting our knickers in a twist over such things. Media -not just games- awards are almost always terrible for a lot of reasons
mass effect 3 failed to deliver on what was promised for the entire trilogy. only the krogan stuff really accomplished their goal. there was other stuff that was kinda neat, but it resorted to one-liner callbacks to previous action, and your choices didn't have the impact that was promised. me3 fucked up one thing, and it fucked it up real big. can't think of another game franchise where a sequel renders the entire series meaningless.
i enjoyed mass effect 1 a lot. i was really into the sci-fi movie feel of it, and so was bioware. then ea happened, and they were forced into the machine to crank 'em out. i liked me2 enough, but it was essentially mass effect: the continuing adventures, and ends with "OH CRAP! I FORGOT ABOUT THE REAPERS!" me3 doesn't have the sci-fi movie feel of me1, it doesn't have the character interaction of me2, and it doesn't deliver on the promise behind the trilogy. that's without delving into the shittier stuff in the game, like the ranking system, the actual endings being shit, and the story in general being a pretty big mess.
the game part of me3 worked well enough, but no one is playing these games for that aspect. if you really wanted to play a corridor shooter, you'd just pick up vanquish like any rational human being.
i enjoyed mass effect 1 a lot. i was really into the sci-fi movie feel of it, and so was bioware. then ea happened, and they were forced into the machine to crank 'em out. i liked me2 enough, but it was essentially mass effect: the continuing adventures, and ends with "OH CRAP! I FORGOT ABOUT THE REAPERS!" me3 doesn't have the sci-fi movie feel of me1, it doesn't have the character interaction of me2, and it doesn't deliver on the promise behind the trilogy. that's without delving into the shittier stuff in the game, like the ranking system, the actual endings being shit, and the story in general being a pretty big mess.
the game part of me3 worked well enough, but no one is playing these games for that aspect. if you really wanted to play a corridor shooter, you'd just pick up vanquish like any rational human being.
Augemitbutter
Member
why just Xenoblade? get Growlanser IV in there. i know it's on a handheld, but portables are people too.
it's a shame only GT mentioned Dragon's Dogma. give uninformed gamers a chance to get a taste of the best battle mechanics this year.
it's a shame only GT mentioned Dragon's Dogma. give uninformed gamers a chance to get a taste of the best battle mechanics this year.
I think a lot of the excitement and internet hype about this game came from the fact that it was critically acclaimed back in 2010 when it was released in Japan as well as the fact that console JRPGs were fairly unimpressive and outdated this generation.
Yeah parts of it remind me of PSO a lot , which is nostalgic. At the same time, the overall sound is very unique and what I think adds to the "alien" nature of it. It sounds odd but this track definitely immerses me into Mechonis Fields, I think it totally fits that area of the game.
Yeah parts of it remind me of PSO a lot , which is nostalgic. At the same time, the overall sound is very unique and what I think adds to the "alien" nature of it. It sounds odd but this track definitely immerses me into Mechonis Fields, I think it totally fits that area of the game.
Exterminieren
Banned
Sounds to me like you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and are latching on to anyone's opinions that back up the biases that you already have.
IMO, of course.
It's Heavy, don't pay him any attention.
Barack Lesnar
Banned
Really? This defensive?
Lots of similar posts like the guy I quoted, who played 120h. Just my observation.
MegaKungFuRadio
Member
Xenoblade is overrated, I only finished it.
Uncle0wnage
Member
It's not like he killed your dog. All he did was accurately summarize this thread.
No offense (well, some), but your username really ought not to be in red. Even if others are being a bit over the top about something here, a counterattack of "pathetic fanboys" and the rest of your rant is exactly the kind of thing GAF is usually good at avoiding. I don't know what mod powers you have or how that works, but I'm disappointed and think you set a rather terrible precedent.