Sora was in a coma for 358 days, during which Roxas and Xion were running around existing by leeching his memories (this...isn't exactly a spoiler, for anyone planning on playing it. It came out after the Roxas arc was resolved in KH2).
Dream Drop Distance is about Sora and Riku going on a dreamquest, where they "drop" into their subconsci.
Chain of Memories is a vague reference to how Namine is fucking over Sora throughout the game, and a title drop the last boss makes to mock him over it.
I dunno about Birth By Sleep for certain, but I know one of the characters ends up comatose by the end and his soul kind of floats off into Sora and makes him an eligible Hero Of The Series because reasons (this is also not exactly a spoiler, because it would have to make any goddamn sense in context first), so I guess that's it. He's probably going to wake up during KH3, because he got cut from Sora at the end of DDD.
It might also be indicating just how fucking long it'll take you to play through it, because it's very artificially long and tedious.
Like, the gimmick is that Organization XIII is sending you out on missions to all the hallmark postcard locations of the series. But the missions are all very long MMO fetch/kill quests of the same monsters over and over again, each world feels like it has to run the whole gamut of them, everything has a zillion defense and HP, and Roxas never really picks up any of the techniques that make Sora an unstoppable killbot.
Here's some advice. The KH2 Final Mix has all the cutscenes of 358/2. Watch those and never play the actual DS game.
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
@Kextruct, here's the thing. And let's not talk about video games for disabled people for now.
You want the intended experience of the game and the actual experience of the game to be a seamless thing. Where the former perfectly intersects with the other. And the reality of the thing is that being that seamless is just impractical in any artistic medium. It's not something that can happen, because no game can automatically adjust itself to its player moment to moment by being played. Some games tried, but it's not there yet.
I cite The Perversity of the Spectators a lot, and there's a good reason why; you cannot 100% predict how any member of the audience will react to any element, aspect, or even the whole.
Pretty much every game has an Easy Mode, or "let me get to the story" mode. There's a Hard Mode, or "I like playing the system and the loop." And there's Normal Mode, or "Give me both in equal amounts."
If you pick the second or third and you can't handle it, I can't say I have no sympathy, I will say that you chose poorly, and it's your own fault. Because you were not aware of your limitations. Somebody wants to try a spice level higher than what they're physically used to, they're going to suffer for it, and making spice levels lower on every count is just making everyone else miserable.
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
What's even more baffling to me is that Shepard somehow has an "image" of being an "unstoppable badass?" And like...no. There's no way I can see that, or have ever seen that.
Commander Shepard is not an "unstoppable badass." Commander Shepard is a loser who cuts promos for store clerks so she can get a discount. Commander Shepard lets fish die, and then gets a hamster. Commander Shepard buys toys, models of famous ships, including her fucking own. Commander Shepard can't fucking jump. Commander Shepard buys her own fucking guns. Commander Shepard makes a biotic charge on this particular platform in the Omega DLC and flies off the edge, careening to her death.
basically Shepard's badassery or lack thereof depends entirely on the player
Definitely, although I will say that there are a bunch of things (cannot jump, insta-death bugs) that are not in the player's control that definitely contribute to the lessening of Shepard's "badass factor."
Mass Effect taught me that people confuse childish aggression for badassery.
I agree. Renegade interrupts can be fun in the "haha I know you are but what am I?" sort of way, and there's a definite moment in Citadel with a set of consecutive interrupts. And those lines...are not good, no matter who is saying them. They were really dumb.
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
Okay I'm talking specifically about the threats that Shepard made to Clone Shepard and Brooks.
Citadel's writing is usually really good, spanning moments from the endearing-but-awkward to the ridiculous but heartfelt and "I-love-you-but-I'm-never-going-to-stop-giving-you-shit", and that moment to me was a specific misstep.
If you pick the second or third and you can't handle it, I can't say I have no sympathy, I will say that you chose poorly, and it's your own fault. Because you were not aware of your limitations. Somebody wants to try a spice level higher than what they're physically used to, they're going to suffer for it, and making spice levels lower on every count is just making everyone else miserable.
Man maybe I'm just tired, but seriously, fuck this fucking bullshit elitist mentality.
We've had this argument before and maybe it's not worth having it again, but i think you're being very uncharitable in interpreting Mach's post that way.
If you pick the second or third and you can't handle it, I can't say I have no sympathy, I will say that you chose poorly, and it's your own fault. Because you were not aware of your limitations. Somebody wants to try a spice level higher than what they're physically used to, they're going to suffer for it, and making spice levels lower on every count is just making everyone else miserable.
Man maybe I'm just tired, but seriously, fuck this fucking bullshit elitist mentality.
You can do better than this.
"difficulty settings exist for a reason and should be used" is not an elitist statement
Yeah he is. The game already has options to ease up. Don't make developers dumb down all of them for everyone else just because you tried something out of your league.
That's not elitist at all. I'm lucky if I can beat an FPS or cover shooter on Normal. But I'm not going to turn on Legendary and bitch that it's too hard until devs make all the modes too easy.
That said, people who give you shit about playing EASY MODO are also asswipes and you should throw water balloons at them. Not everyone is necessarily going to be good at a game at all, and not every experienced player is going to be good at every genre, but that doesn't mean they should be shut out of seeing all the cool stuff.
...okay, I read his comment wrong. My bad. Pretend there was less aggression in that post.
That said.
Yes, I still maintain that it's an elitist viewpoint. Games don't have to be hard. They don't. If a game wants to engage on any level other than being an expression of player skill (where a high barrier to entry is more acceptable), yes, it needs to have checks in place that allow players of all skill levels to have a complete emotional experience. Does this inherently equal a loss to games? No. You can have satisfying challenge in an accessible game. If, tomorrow, everything changed and game designers decided to make a concerted effort to make things more accessible, would there be a decrease of games with satisfying challenge? Almost definitely, because certain things like accessibility usually require something else to be sacrificed unless the designers are really skilled.
Is this important? Well, that depends on what you care about more: Having your skill validated in a medium where most encounters are designed in such a way that makes success always a possibility, or allowing more people to understand and engage with that medium.
why do you think that making games easier would get more people to play them?
I mean you're right games don't have to be hard, but also they don't have to be anything and I don't understand why you're trying to act like the existence of the Super Meatboys of the world somehow invalidates the existence of the Gone Homes of the world. I really just have no idea what you're getting at in general.
MachSpeed said:What's even more baffling to me is that Shepard somehow has an "image" of being an "unstoppable badass?" And like...no. There's no way I can see that, or have ever seen that. Commander Shepard is not an "unstoppable badass." Commander Shepard is a loser who cuts promos for store clerks so she can get a discount. Commander Shepard lets fish die, and then gets a hamster. Commander Shepard buys toys, models of famous ships, including her fucking own. Commander Shepard can't fucking jump. Commander Shepard buys her own fucking guns. Commander Shepard makes a biotic charge on this particular platform in the Omega DLC and flies off the edge, careening to her death. Anything can stop Commander Shepard.
Also this is taking things at super face value. Those actions you described are unintentionally incongruous with the image that the player is generally expected to have of the protagonist. Throughout the series the player is continually reminded how wonderful Shepard is, how talented and badass they are. It's how the character is postured in most of the advertising, for one. Clearly BioWare is not making Shepard "the kind of person who lets their fish die," that's just a thing that can happen. But it's barely referenced in the text and is just treated as a little extra thing that holds no weight on Shepard's character.
Kex, suppose i want to have a game that is not just a game, that has story and ideas and cool art and music, and i want to be able to explore an imaginary world as i play it, but i still want it to be, first and foremost, a game
and suppose i want this game to challenge me with multiple difficulty settings
is this a bad thing to want, in your opinion? am i wrong to want this?
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
Shepard has no character aside from what I make it. Aside from what you make it.
I guess she's an unstoppable badass to you, I guess there is the constant of "resurrected from the dead" and "savior of humanity" and "savior of the galaxy" and "can't jump," but everything else? The text is what the player creates from it.
Kex, suppose i want to have a game that is not just a game, that has story and ideas and cool art and music, and i want to be able to explore an imaginary world as i play it, but i still want it to be, first and foremost, a game
and suppose i want this game to challenge me with multiple difficulty settings
Kex, suppose i want to have a game that is not just a game, that has story and ideas and cool art and music, and i want to be able to explore an imaginary world as i play it, but i still want it to be, first and foremost, a game
and suppose i want this game to challenge me with multiple difficulty settings
I agree with what you're saying, and what I'm saying is that what you're saying is to a large extent being practiced in the industry already.
Hell, tons of games anymore let you customize the difficulty at any point.
I like what SystemShock did (even if I think the game itself has aged terribly) where there were different parameters you could set the difficulty for.
So if you wanted easy enemies and hard puzzles you could do that.
Bravely Default did that too. You could customize a bunch of different difficulty parameters, turn random encounters up/down/off, turn exp/gold gain up/down/off. It was kind of ridiculous, but whatevs.
i actually kinda don't like 'customize the difficulty at any point' (Skyrim had this) because i felt it cheapened things
i never use that menu option, other people can i guess, i kinda like to feel like if i've reached a certain point in the game it's cuz i beat all the challenges leading up to that point, and the idea that you could just clear all those challenges on a lower difficulty setting and then toggle to the one i'm currently on takes away some of that feeling of achievement
The second loop was cool, and it would've been nice to have the last one as an endgame sandbox where everyone stopped killing each other, but five was...yeeeeeaaaahhhhh. Especially since three and four were basically identical and didn't really add anything.
i actually kinda don't like 'customize the difficulty at any point' (Skyrim had this) because i felt it cheapened things
i never use that menu option, other people can i guess, i kinda like to feel like if i've reached a certain point in the game it's cuz i beat all the challenges leading up to that point, and the idea that you could just clear all those challenges on a lower difficulty setting and then toggle to the one i'm currently on takes away some of that feeling of achievement
idk, maybe this is dumb
I like that it exists but rarely use such things myself.
I agree with what you're saying, and what I'm saying is that what you're saying is to a large extent being practiced in the industry already.
Simply labeling a mode "easy" is not effective. Difficulty is subjective. What constitutes "easy" in one game is often completely different in another. Games also often don't communicate what each difficulty level actually entails: for example, Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 both operate on a D20 system and each level of difficulty vastly alters the skill ranks needed to perform tasks, but affects combat to a smaller extent. For this reason, the gameplay is radically altered but this alteration is not communicated to the player effectively. In Cave Story, Hard Mode prevents the player from upgrading health, which is a huge change, and again, is never communicated unless the player has prior knowledge of how the game works, whereas in, say, Minecraft, difficulty levels subtly alter several different variables, again, not communicated. Are you sensing a pattern here?
The player should be given adequate means to determine what level of difficulty is the right mix of empowering and actually doable for them, and the designers should determine the relative level of challenge the game should have as a baseline for players wishing to engage with a game on a level of storytelling in ludo. These things aren't strictly necessary for a game to work, and I'm not saying your super fun experience playing a game on easy or hard mode or whatever is automatically invalid, I'm just saying that designers actively attempting to understand their players' psychology w/r/t challenge rather than just switching a few variables arbitrarily and then arbitrarily slapping the labels of "WUSSBITCH" "Normal" and "HOLYSHITBALLSYOU'RETHECOOLEST!!!" on them will lead to more compelling games on the whole.
why do you think that making games easier would get more people to play them?
I'm not saying that designers should remove difficulty. I'm saying they should add accessibility. Players can force games to be harder in a million ways. It's a hell of a lot harder to find ways to make it more accessible to people of lower skill level.
Also a shitton of people simply can't engage with a large amount of games because they're too complex and difficult. This is nothing new.
I mean you're right games don't have to be hard, but also they don't have to be anything and I don't understand why you're trying to act like the existence of the Super Meatboys of the world somehow invalidates the existence of the Gone Homes of the world. I really just have no idea what you're getting at in general.
I don't think they do. I think a game like Super Meatboy is presenting itself as a means by which players can express themselves through skill and mastery, and as such is totally justified in being super difficult. But many, many games that are similarly inaccessible are not this style of gameplay.
Kex, I think you are being a wee bit pretentious right now. Like, you're making blanket statements without giving real examples, and then acting like other people haven't actually thought through their positions while doing that, and I really think you need to simmer down.
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
You know who gives a damn about difficulty labels? People who take things too personally.
Because this doesn't sound like a position that comes solely from theory. This is a position that comes from strong emotion.
I'm not saying that more accessibility isn't a good thing. It would be great if they listed out explicitly what the difficulty changes are (and often they do, I'm thinking of Fire Emblem and Bayonetta specifically).
I'm saying that you're arguing from a place of anger because I have never seen a label that says "WUSSBITCH." Furthermore, you place "Normal" among those labels, and I can't see the label "Normal" as anything but a neutral object. You clearly cannot, you see it as an attack on you. I've seen labels that are similar to these XTREME labels, but they have always been done so from a place of good fun, from a tone of joking around.
You're arguing unreasonable extremes because you feel unreasonably extreme about this.
Because diversity within a medium is a good thing.
With things like demographic representation absolutely, but that's not something you can solve by making games more "accessible", unless your definition of "accessible" is "make more protagonists not be middle-aged white dudes with stubble", in which case I'm with you, but that's a weird definition of "accessible" in a video game context.
Also a shitton of people simply can't engage with a large amount of games because they're too complex and difficult. This is nothing new.
Mostly people who would not be playing games anyway, I'd think?
The foremost game that comes to mind when I think of what you're talking about is Wii Sports, which is fine I suppose, but if all you're saying is 'there should be more games as accessible as Wii Sports in the world' than I don't understand what you're so worked up about, because there absolutely are and they're probably just going to make more because they sell so well.
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
Sredni: I think it's like...different people have different responses to stimuli? Like, I never would have guessed that Kex feels that "Normal" is some kind of insult.
Shepard has no character aside from what I make it. Aside from what you make it.
I guess she's an unstoppable badass to you, I guess there is the constant of "resurrected from the dead" and "savior of humanity" and "savior of the galaxy" and "can't jump," but everything else? The text is what the player creates from it.
This would be true, if Mass Effect were a series where the game dynamically altered itself to literally any character players wanted Shepard to be. Which a lot of people seem to think the series is, but let's be real. There are a handful of appreciably different characters that Shepard can be, but they're not a completely blank slate. They were essentially written as "supremely kind being" and "aggressive racist ornery bastard" with a few variables (gender, person they bone, past) that the player can pick between to provide context.
You know who gives a damn about difficulty labels? People who take things too personally.
Because this doesn't sound like a position that comes solely from theory. This is a position that comes from strong emotion.
I'm not saying that more accessibility isn't a good thing. I'm saying that you're arguing from a place of anger because I have never seen a label that says "WUSSBITCH." Furthermore, you place "Normal" among those labels, and I can't see the label "Normal" as anything but a neutral object. You clearly cannot. I've seen labels that are similar to these XTREME labels, but they have always been done so from a place of good fun, from a tone of joking around.
You're arguing unreasonable extremes because you feel unreasonably extreme about this.
To be fair to Kexruct there absolutely are games that do that. Not many anymore I don't think, but it was a thing and probably still is somewhere.
Marathon's minimum and maximum difficulties are respectively named Kindergarten and Total Carnage.
Granted Marathon came out 20some years ago.
Actually this seems to be endemic to shooters now that I think of it, because that one Wolfenstein game for the original Xbox had "Daddy Can I Play" as the lowest difficulty.
I'll go ahead and use one of my favorite examples. I love Ys. It's a series known for being bone-crushingly difficult. It also has even more ridiculous difficulty modes above that, one of which I've liveblogged here and likened to being sodomized with a cactus.
It also has easy modes where stats are scaled down, attacks are slower, and some patterns and gimmicks are omitted entirely. Easy is quite reasonable. Very Easy is frankly difficult to lose if you tried. If all you want is to read the story and moon over Dogi's rippling sinew, it can totally do that for you and nobody is going to stop you.
But I've also seen so many people on the Steam forums bitch and moan about how it's SO HARD and the game is TOTALLY BAD and the developers should be ASHAMED for not accommodating them. Someone will ask them what difficulty they're playing on, and invariably, they'll say Nightmare. It's like, what in the malodorous shit-filled canyons of Hell did you expect when you signed up for the highest difficulty on an infamously hard series?
^ American games are definitely worse about that. FPSes are the worst of the worst, since they're usually developed by frat boys for frat boys.
Comments
"Relinquish your weapons!"
"I'll relinquish one bullet. Where do you want it?"
i thought the exchange between Wrex and the cop was good, too: "Do you want me too arrest you?" "I want you to try."
i mean yeah ok this is not exactly how good role models behave, and would get you killed IRL, but that's not the point, it's just fun
Commander Shepard is not an "unstoppable badass." Commander Shepard is a loser who cuts promos for store clerks so she can get a discount. Commander Shepard lets fish die, and then gets a hamster. Commander Shepard buys toys, models of famous ships, including her fucking own. Commander Shepard can't fucking jump. Commander Shepard buys her own fucking guns. Commander Shepard makes a biotic charge on this particular platform in the Omega DLC and flies off the edge, careening to her death.
Anything can stop Commander Shepard.
Also this is taking things at super face value. Those actions you described are unintentionally incongruous with the image that the player is generally expected to have of the protagonist. Throughout the series the player is continually reminded how wonderful Shepard is, how talented and badass they are. It's how the character is postured in most of the advertising, for one. Clearly BioWare is not making Shepard "the kind of person who lets their fish die," that's just a thing that can happen. But it's barely referenced in the text and is just treated as a little extra thing that holds no weight on Shepard's character.
Then there are harder modes, for those who are (or wish to become) high-level players.
and suppose i want this game to challenge me with multiple difficulty settings
is this a bad thing to want, in your opinion? am i wrong to want this?
if so, thanks
i never use that menu option, other people can i guess, i kinda like to feel like if i've reached a certain point in the game it's cuz i beat all the challenges leading up to that point, and the idea that you could just clear all those challenges on a lower difficulty setting and then toggle to the one i'm currently on takes away some of that feeling of achievement
idk, maybe this is dumb