Topic: 70 hr quest too long?

[Smash_Brother]

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Originally posted by: Ian Sane you won't notice it but there isn't just going to be games flying at you from everywhere unless you want to play THQ crap.  And if you get it on the Cube you're never getting another Cube game again so you've got all the time you need.

Actually, I got gamefly recently because of the sheer number of DS/Wii titles which I see as being well worth my time.

Even though I can't buy all of them, there are a LOT of Wii titles I'd like to try out, likely more than enough to keep me occupied into early next year at which point more will have launched.

[zakkiel]

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Didn't Miyamoto say he already vetoed an even more evolved story because he found it too complicated?

He's right. Good videogame stories are simple. They don't have to be shallow, and they should certainly not be cliche, but elaborate plots and twists are counterproductive. If TP is about the level of OoT with more character definition for Ganon, I'll be happy.

[Kairon]

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Originally posted by: zakkiel

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Didn't Miyamoto say he already vetoed an even more evolved story because he found it too complicated?

He's right. Good videogame stories are simple. They don't have to be shallow, and they should certainly not be cliche, but elaborate plots and twists are counterproductive. If TP is about the level of OoT with more character definition for Ganon, I'll be happy.

Quoted For Absofrickinlute Truth

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[Kairon]

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Originally posted by: Bill Aurion
That's absolutely not true...In fact, Miyamoto probably concentrates more on the "interaction" of characters than anyone in the gaming industry...

In that recent Iwata interview, members of the Zelda team talked about how Miyamoto sent them e-mails all the time that had subjects like "When I do this, I don't get a reaction from the other characters!"...Miyamoto is primarily gameplay, but he's also the King of Details...

Yeah, Miyamoto pays attentions to the small human interactions that actually shape our relationships and interactions to the game's characters. Other people think that character and story exists predominantly in plot twists and melodrama like that, but they're wrong. Essential Human experiences are created by the minutest details of our everyday lives.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[GoldenPhoenix]

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Originally posted by: Kairon

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Originally posted by: Bill Aurion
That's absolutely not true...In fact, Miyamoto probably concentrates more on the "interaction" of characters than anyone in the gaming industry...

In that recent Iwata interview, members of the Zelda team talked about how Miyamoto sent them e-mails all the time that had subjects like "When I do this, I don't get a reaction from the other characters!"...Miyamoto is primarily gameplay, but he's also the King of Details...

Yeah, Miyamoto pays attentions to the small human interactions that actually shape our relationships and interactions to the game's characters. Other people think that character and story exists predominantly in plot twists and melodrama like that, but they're wrong. Essential Human experiences are created by the minutest details of our everyday lives.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

Don't get me wrong I love Miyamoto and consider him the best dang game designer ever, but I have never felt he was particularly strong with creating characters that you feel for. I know in OOT I felt pretty disconnected from the NPCs, which I felt had pretty blah personalities, and characters like Ganon felt 1 dimensional (which is why I loved Wind Waker so much).


edit: A few exceptions to this are the girl from the forest temple who had to become a sage, that was pretty sad. Besides that I can't think of many characters I felt for, but he is amazing with atmosphere and emotion!
 

[couchmonkey]

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Originally posted by: Ian Sane

If any of you are concerned that you won't have time don't be.  The Wii is a brand new console.  All brand new consoles have a dead zone after launch.  Hopefully because you're playing Zelda you won't notice it but there isn't just going to be games flying at you from everywhere unless you want to play THQ crap.  And if you get it on the Cube you're never getting another Cube game again so you've got all the time you need.

Wii's dead zone kicks off with Wario Ware: Smooth Moves on January 7th.  Metroid, Mario, Batallion Wars, Super Mario Strikers, Sonic, SSX, and up to 7 new games from Ubi Soft are predicted to come out between then and May.  I will probably finish Zelda, but I have a feeling I'll be rushing through it unless Mario Galaxy is delayed.

[Ian Sane]

"He's right. Good videogame stories are simple. They don't have to be shallow, and they should certainly not be cliche, but elaborate plots and twists are counterproductive. If TP is about the level of OoT with more character definition for Ganon, I'll be happy."

A good videogame story is one you play, not watch.  There should be a vague mission, a setting, and an ending but the middle part should be created by the player.  The story is your experience playing the game.  So you don't remember when this plot twist occurs.  You remember that time you were just in the zone and slaughtered that dungeon boss that was giving you troubles.

[Smash_Brother]

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Originally posted by: VGrevolution A few exceptions to this are the girl from the forest temple who had to become a sage, that was pretty sad. Besides that I can't think of many characters I felt for, but he is amazing with atmosphere and emotion!

Saria.

And yeah, I don't remember becoming attached to the characters themselves, but the story carried a great deal of emotion for me.

[Hostile Creation]

I find that Zelda manages to construe quite a lot of emotional power without being very overt about it.  You get a lot of that at endings to the games (especially Link's Awakening), and with certain characters (Saria, Prince Komali, and others).  That's one of the things I love about Zelda, that they manage to do that.  I named some of the sadder stories in the series, but you get a lot of joy and connection with the NPCs, too.  It's great, how you start off not knowing anybody, but as you help them out (both for your sake and theirs) they come to know you, treat you differently, and you genuinely seem like friends.
And all of this without forcing it.  Genius in how subtle it is.

[couchmonkey]

Yes, Hostile, you are exactly right.  All it takes to make my heart swell is to hear that tinny seagull sound effect at the end of Link's Awakening, or to heart a few notes of a song from Ocarina of Time in Majora's Mask.

[Pittbboi]

"He's right. Good videogame stories are simple. They don't have to be shallow, and they should certainly not be cliche, but elaborate plots and twists are counterproductive. If TP is about the level of OoT with more character definition for Ganon, I'll be happy.”

I’m not entirely sure if I agree.  

On one hand, there’s very little I can offer in the way of criticism of the Zelda series, a feat in itself.

But, on the other hand, ever since I was young and first got my hands on Ocarina of Time, I’ve always been a little unnerved by how…deserted everything seemed to be.  I don’t know, maybe it’s because I was into Playstation RPG’s before I discovered Zelda, but I was always unnerved by these grand scale adventures and all these temples, but at the end of the day I felt like I was only saving the world for, like, 30 people.  It’s not that Nintendo should add loads of Final Fantasy-esque teen-angst or M. Night Shyamalan style cheesy plot twists. But, I personally think that technology is at a point that Nintendo can start embellishing the sense of immersion in Zelda by making Hyrule a living, thriving world that Link has to save, instead of a simple puppet stage backdrop for his adventure.

OoT had some memorable characters, but one thing I didn’t like was the fact that just about every character you meet that’s of any importance became too important.  There weren’t really any “ally” characters, or characters that were semi important but only for a certain aspect of the game. Every character you meet either becomes a main bad guy or a main good guy, and there really isn’t much besides them.  When you have to find the sages in the second half of the game, there was really no shock or suspense because you already knew who the sages were going to be, you just had to make your way to the temple were you knew they were trapped in in one way or the other.  Every possible important role is distributed amongst the relatively small roster of players, and the settings are usually more empty than not. The result, to me, makes Hyrule feel like a small community than an actual kingdom.  Don’t get me started on the big empty field.

And Ganon has to be the flattest, most boring manifestation of the concept “evil” in a game ever. I don’t know why they’re attempting to make the end of Twilight Princess suspenseful. Anyone who knows anything about Zelda knows that at the end we’ll be facing some form of a Ganon who really has no motive for why he wants to take over Hyrule other than “because I want to”.

I love Zelda because it has the gameplay aspect in the bag. But I notice that a lot of people complain about certain aspects of the game (dungeons, treasure hunting), that becomes tedious, and one way I feel this can be alleviated is if they provide a more compelling storyline/setting.

[Bill Aurion]

"Anyone who knows anything about Zelda knows that at the end we’ll be facing some form of a Ganon who really has no motive for why he wants to take over Hyrule other than “because I want to”."

I don't believe you actually played Wind Waker...

[Kairon]

I'm not so sure that the way to fix bad gameplay is to band-aid compelling story on top of it.

I can see where you are with OoT, but that was probably because of technical limitations. Majora's Mask has shown that Aonouma tends to go for more robustly populated towns and story threads, and this is also hinted at with some TP footage where we see plenty of ghosts and spirits for Wolf Link to interact with. I guess you could say that Zelda: TP seems to be going in a satisfying direction in this regard.

It's just that traditional Miyamoto-esque thinking would purport that gameplay and story are not seperate things that can cover up for each other, but rather are deeply intertwined. For example, the character of Midna in TP came about not because they wanted this character for story purposes, but because Miyamoto wanted something to ride on top of the wolf so that the player wouldn't become bored looking at a 4-footed animal from behind all the time. Only later did they create a story where Midna actually has a role to play.

Consequently, this thinking suggests that story should be naturally emergent from the gameplay. It can't be developed seperately and then bandaged on as a distraction to endless level grinding or item collection, it should instead be part and parcel to the what the gameplay IS. When nintendo gamers complain about poorly designed dungeons or excessive treasure hunting, they don't want the distant promise of a cutscene or the unfulfilling concept of a village full of people who are far away and inaccessible at the moment to distract them from these failings: they want these portions of gameplay to be essentially improved since compelling story and exciting settings should be natural by products of good gameplay.

... but this is only one worldview of videogames, the worldview adopted by raving Miyamoto fanboys like me who drink excessive amounts of Kool-Aid.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[Smash_Brother]

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Originally posted by: Bill Aurion I don't believe you actually played Wind Waker...

Or Majora's Mask...or Four Swords and Minish Cap, but those were more spinoff games.

Majora's Mask sure as hell wasn't Ganon...

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Originally posted by: Kairon Consequently, this thinking suggests that story should be naturally emergent from the gameplay. It can't be developed seperately and then bandaged on as a distraction to endless level grinding or item collection, it should instead be part and parcel to the what the gameplay IS. When nintendo gamers complain about poorly designed dungeons or excessive treasure hunting, they don't want the distant promise of a cutscene or the unfulfilling concept of a village full of people who are far away and inaccessible at the moment to distract them from these failings: they want these portions of gameplay to be essentially improved since compelling story and exciting settings should be natural by products of good gameplay.

The short version of what you're trying to say is that many games hold the story for ransom, the ransom being playing through hours of boring gameplay to see the next portion of the story.

From what I understand, Kingdom Hearts 2 and FF12 both do this, with the "introductory" period at the beginning being long and boring before you get to the good parts of the game.

[Pittbboi]

Wind Waker is definitely the exception. I was mostly speaking on the OoT, since I'm getting the feeling that TP will take after the style of that game.  

[The Traveller]

I think there may actually be multiple towns in TP, which will be really cool.

[Pittbboi]

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Originally posted by: Kairon
I'm not so sure that the way to fix bad gameplay is to band-aid compelling story on top of it.

I can see where you are with OoT, but that was probably because of technical limitations. Majora's Mask has shown that Aonouma tends to go for more robustly populated towns and story threads, and this is also hinted at with some TP footage where we see plenty of ghosts and spirits for Wolf Link to interact with. I guess you could say that Zelda: TP seems to be going in a satisfying direction in this regard.

It's just that traditional Miyamoto-esque thinking would purport that gameplay and story are not seperate things that can cover up for each other, but rather are deeply intertwined. For example, the character of Midna in TP came about not because they wanted this character for story purposes, but because Miyamoto wanted something to ride on top of the wolf so that the player wouldn't become bored looking at a 4-footed animal from behind all the time. Only later did they create a story where Midna actually has a role to play.

Consequently, this thinking suggests that story should be naturally emergent from the gameplay. It can't be developed seperately and then bandaged on as a distraction to endless level grinding or item collection, it should instead be part and parcel to the what the gameplay IS. When nintendo gamers complain about poorly designed dungeons or excessive treasure hunting, they don't want the distant promise of a cutscene or the unfulfilling concept of a village full of people who are far away and inaccessible at the moment to distract them from these failings: they want these portions of gameplay to be essentially improved since compelling story and exciting settings should be natural by products of good gameplay.

... but this is only one worldview of videogames, the worldview adopted by raving Miyamoto fanboys like me who drink excessive amounts of Kool-Aid.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

Of course gameplay and story should emerge from each other, but in my opinion they are still separate entities that come together for one complete experience, and Nintendo has definitely been a little slanted towards gameplay.

Over systems and installations, Nintendo has spent so much time working on the gameplay in the Zelda series that the experience is near perfect. But the story always seems, at least to me, to be developed only just enough to provide an explanation for why there’s this character named Link going around slashing things in temples and collecting gemstones.

Graphics have improved, gameplay has improved, but it seems to me that story really hasn’t followed this trend. This isn’t altogether a bad thing, because the basic story is still pretty compelling,  but the fact that the depth of the storyline really hasn’t changed much since the early Zelda’s may explain that empty feeling the later games have had.  Every character introduced has a specific role, several specific roles even. There isn’t much in the way of the innocent bystander. Your example with Midna suits my point as well. Midna is a character whose only purpose in the story is to keep Link from being boring.  Hopefully, there’s more done with Midna.

I think this is only going to become more of an issue the more detailed everything else about the series gets.  But fortunately it seems like TP is going to attempt to alleviate some of this sentiment.

[The Traveller]

Miyamoto : Story always takes a backseat to gameplay.  

[Hostile Creation]

Pittbboi, it's painfully blinding, how much there is wrong in that post of yours.  In my opinion, at least.
First off, let's point out that OoT and Wind Waker were directed by two different people, and the one that directed Wind Waker will be directing Twilight Princess.  So more than likely, TP will take after the style of that game and Majora's Mask, insofar as story elements go.

Secondly, I don't understand your gripe with the small world thing.  That applies to many Zelda games.  Let's look at Ocarina of Time, where you save a reasonable number of people, but it's not a massive, FF-size world and ultimately you get no recognition for it.  Or Majora's Mask, where you save a small world and at the end are placed back in your own world, alone again.  Or Link's Awakening, where you basically save no one whatsoever.
Zelda isn't about huge, apocalyptic battles and saving millions of people.  It's about the struggles of one person, Link, and the relationships he forms with the people he meets.

"Every character you meet either becomes a main bad guy or a main good guy, and there really isn’t much besides them."

This isn't even a matter of opinion, this is just plain false.
Darunia, Saria, Zelda, character like that are important, sure.  But each only plays a certain role.  And you have Impa, who becomes a sage but doesn't do a great deal beside that.  And what about the hordes of characters (Kakariko Village, various Zora and Gorons, the kids in Kokori) that you may interact with, or do things for, or have them do things for you, but who don't become major characters?  The carpenter's son.  Ingo.  The big Goron.  Not to mention the nameless gerudos and marketplace people.
Ocarina wasn't a huge world, partially because of technological limitations.  But it did have plenty of characters, of varying degrees of importance to the plot (or to Link as a character), and I think you're just overlooking that.  You're conveniently remembering those certain characters who became sages, and not the large cast of other characters.  You're looking at the important characters and saying only important characters exist, and that's simply not true.

The Windmill guy?  Dampe the gravedigger?  The Poe salesman?  The Happy Mask Salesman?  The running man?  See, plenty.

[GoldenPhoenix]

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Originally posted by: Smash_Brother

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Originally posted by: Bill Aurion I don't believe you actually played Wind Waker...

Or Majora's Mask...or Four Swords and Minish Cap, but those were more spinoff games.

Majora's Mask sure as hell wasn't Ganon...

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Originally posted by: Kairon Consequently, this thinking suggests that story should be naturally emergent from the gameplay. It can't be developed seperately and then bandaged on as a distraction to endless level grinding or item collection, it should instead be part and parcel to the what the gameplay IS. When nintendo gamers complain about poorly designed dungeons or excessive treasure hunting, they don't want the distant promise of a cutscene or the unfulfilling concept of a village full of people who are far away and inaccessible at the moment to distract them from these failings: they want these portions of gameplay to be essentially improved since compelling story and exciting settings should be natural by products of good gameplay.

The short version of what you're trying to say is that many games hold the story for ransom, the ransom being playing through hours of boring gameplay to see the next portion of the story.

From what I understand, Kingdom Hearts 2 and FF12 both do this, with the "introductory" period at the beginning being long and boring before you get to the good parts of the game.

Kingdom Hearts 2 took a bit to get started but I never thought it was boring, it just made me appreciate the overall story and characters, which is why I would have to put Kingdom HEarts 2 in my top 10, I LOVED the characters in that!

[Smoke39]

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Originally posted by: Hostile Creation
Zelda isn't about huge, apocalyptic battles and saving millions of people.  It's about the struggles of one person, Link, and the relationships he forms with the people he meets.

I totally agree.  Zelda games are much more personal experience, I feel, than massive "save the world" type stuff.  The focus is more on Link and the challenges he faces than on his ultimate quest.

[Ceric]

KH2 is Boring compared to the original.

[Nephilim]

TOS is proof a long game doesnt equal great, had about 5hours of pure bored

[zakkiel]

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But, on the other hand, ever since I was young and first got my hands on Ocarina of Time, I’ve always been a little unnerved by how…deserted everything seemed to be. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I was into Playstation RPG’s before I discovered Zelda, but I was always unnerved by these grand scale adventures and all these temples, but at the end of the day I felt like I was only saving the world for, like, 30 people. It’s not that Nintendo should add loads of Final Fantasy-esque teen-angst or M. Night Shyamalan style cheesy plot twists. But, I personally think that technology is at a point that Nintendo can start embellishing the sense of immersion in Zelda by making Hyrule a living, thriving world that Link has to save, instead of a simple puppet stage backdrop for his adventure.

So, more NPCs, make sure each NPC has a personality and backstory? I could get behind that, but I really don't understand what that has to do with the plot. Also, the NPCs are never going to number in the hundreds or thousands - there's a child-like narrowness to the Zelda franchise's focus that would be obliterated by Oblivionesqe numbers of people.  

[NWR_pap64]

While the first 3 hours of KH 2 weren't as bad as in other games (and like VGRevolution mentioned does add to the story) it was still cumbersome. By the end of the 5th day in Twilight Town I was itching to play as Sora and explore the Disney worlds, which is the main attraction of the game.