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Showing posts from May, 2018

Making a Better Shin Megami Tensei IV

Shin Megami Tensei V is currently in development for the Nintendo Switch, which may come as a surprise to longtime fans of the series. The gap between SMTIII and SMTIV was a substantial nine years, jumping from the PlayStation 2 to the Nintendo 3DS. The advancements between these two titles were few, with the latter actually taking a step back in representing its monsters as 2D portraits, but SMTIV was still very much a gargantuan Role-playing game, featuring 70-90 hours of gameplay, a fully-voice-acted story, and many monsters to obtain and unlock.

Overlapping Narratives in The Alliance Alive

The Alliance Alive is a relatively new game, and those who have followed these articles know that its predecessor, The Legend of Legacy, has already been covered because of its unique elements. With a month of content dedicated to narrative elements, there is one particular aspect of The Alliance Alive that stands out in relation to many of its contemporaries- the overlapping narrative that takes place during the first quarter of the game. Although it certainly is not the first Japanese Role-playing game to implement the idea, the game revisits the concept at multiple points and benefits from the concept a great deal.

Hypothetical Episodic Content in Dragon Quest

It comes as a great surprise to me that Square Enix has announced the far-off Final Fantasy VII remake will be released episodically. While any story-based game- and Role-playing games, especially- can have its narrative broken into smaller pieces, the pacing and amount of content per portion in Final Fantasy VII is questionable, and not necessarily clean-cut. Unless, I don't know, you break it up by the literal CD swaps from the original PS1 release. While many games have attempted episodic release schedules in the age of digital distribution, there are very few that seem justified in doing so. An episodic game needs to have a structure in which each installment tells a concise narrative, no matter how much cliff-hanging the writers wish to create in order to encourage a player to buy the next installment. What is stranger- to me, at least- is that there are specific franchises that feel primed to adopt an episodic release schedule yet have not done so.

Narrative Bloat in the Pokemon Series

Pokemon is arguably one of the most popular and widely recognized Role-playing games in the world, which is quite a feat for a genre with relatively low sales. Its addictive monster-catching gameplay is by no means revolutionary, but it is bolstered by an approachable battle system and strong core mechanics that have more or less endured the span of twenty years through the introduction of additional wrinkles. For newcomers, these can be seen as a gimmick- something new that appears in each new generation that may appear frequently during the course of a playthrough. For high-level and professional players, they are aspects that define and shape the competitive metagame based on their permanence- or lack thereof, if you consider the weather wars of generation five.

The Risk of Franchise Reinvention

A name has been whispered on the tips of many tongues lately, one that, most recently, had a shift in philosophy. One of its recent titles focused more on telling a deeper narrative with a flawed, vulnerable protagonist. One with bolder, more fluid cinematics and animation, this particular series has also seen something of a scaling back in terms of depth while still leaning heavily on nostalgia, ultimately leading to some divided opinions on the final product. This game is not God of War. If that were the case, there would be additional mention of how its most recent entry has seen multiple claims of helping to propel the medium forward, which is something of an odd statement. From a storytelling perspective, this seems unfounded, however in terms of technical performance and visual quality, the game is certainly setting some new goalposts that are unlikely to be met except in the case of specific high profile studios. The game being described in the introduction is Metroid: Oth