Tucson, AZ Social/Rankings Thread (Updated 5/7/10!)

they always refer to quina as s/he, meaning they don't know the gender

so yeah, joey's pretty much right

of course im always right tai ha! hey does anyone here play tales of symphonia besides tim and me?

I played through it twice. I miss it, maybe I'll get my roommate to start playing it.

dude! i just started playing it last night hahaha. its pretty awesome so far, cant wait to get balls deep in it :3

Regal combos ftw

i played through it once, and i was thinking about playing it again recently with some ridiculous NG+ upgrades through the grade shop

It's true BW3 got his **** handed to him on a silver platter

(for those who don't know)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqMkKZj1OO0

As we can see there, Vivi did rock him for a second but in the end the BW3 just messed himself up (the face was great btw).

Go Simpsons! WOOOO!!!!


Oh and although we could make a trip out to AZ, you guys coming here would be all the sweeter because getting that much time off of work is near impossible at the moment)

tales of symphonia (the first one) is better than any final fantasy game im sorry but its true and ive played them all except 13 cause its garbage and 11

some would say ToS wasnt the best from the series O:

I like eggs

AXE 09 said:

I like eggs

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I like cereal

tales of symphonia was an amazing game with a great storyline IMO, great replay value too i'll have to play it again

Cereal!!!! Now!!!!

I found FF1 and 4 more enjoyable than ToS.

In other news; Tim is here. Come smash, people.

FF1 and 4 are my two favorite FFs

coop and i are gonna smash tomorrow afternoon, hopefully jade and enrique will go too. did xander/ tim wanna come? anyone else? I have my house in the west side (near campus) but would be willing to go somewhere else too, just let me know any ideas

when you guys plaing? im busy until abou 630 i think but ill be close by ill be just west of the 10 on broadway

you guys are all crazy! ive played all the final fantasy's ToS is just better

FF7 is phenomenal and was revolutionary. I haven't played ToS so I cannot judge, but is it another rpg that took the already used formula and gameplay and attempted to make it their own instead of making a new formula like the FF series did?

And people are bashing on 13 but in truth it tried to attempt something new instead of redoing what they and every other game does. I can't remember which reviewer said this (G4 maybe?) but it was something along the lines of it not being a necessity for the FF series, they could have stuck with the old stuff and made it work great, but it was what the genre needed.

The only thing arguably more appealing about Tales of- games is the fighting system. Otherwise everything else about them is worse, especially the dialogue (not saying FF lines are great, but Tales is downright poor).

you rpg playing kids need to play Legend of Dragoon on PS1.

yeah the dialogue was pretty bad but the story was amazing! and legend of dragoon is pretty cool it was talked about in ToS 2

ive heard amazing things of legend of dragoon, but unfortunately never got around to playing it

ToS is just Norse mythology inspired. The battle is certainly more engaging than any FF game... FFVIII was terrible for me with the button mashing. I love FFVII mostly because of the soundtrack.

Lufia II was like my first so it has a special place in my heart. It's like old school Golden Sun.

ive never played lufia but golden sun was pretty cool has anyone play chrono trigger?

I have Chrono Trigger *****

TommyDerMeister said:

you rpg playing kids need to play Legend of Dragoon on PS1.

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I did. Besides the fact that the last boss fight took and hour or so, it was a good game.

Funny fact for while i'm still meatriding the FF series. The creators of legend of Dragoon admitted that they intentionally tried to copy the FF series because of their love for it and that game was more like a tribute to that series.

WARNING: Do not read if you do not have very much time to spare. It is a long post. Also, know that this is much influenced by reading this article. If you disagree with what is said in this post, you are disagreeing with Alex Kierkegaard much more than you are with me. One more thing. I do not believe the Final Fantasy series is bad. Heck, I want to continue playing through them all as I have started doing so since Spring of 2010. But calling them RPGs is a bit...I can't think of a word for it. They're really in the strategy-adventure genre. And I want to continue playing them for the storyline, not the role playing aspects.

I read something interesting about how Role Playing Games really aren't what we define them as, aside from say D&D.

I'll outline a few of article writer Kierkegaard's points.

Technically...Final Fantasy is not a Role Playing Game.

Encyclopædia Britannica said:

Role-playing games are games in which players assume the roles of fictional characters and collaboratively create stories. Players determine the actions of their characters based on their characterization, and the actions succeed or fail according to a system of rules and guidelines. Within the rules, players can improvise freely; their choices shape the direction and outcome of the games.

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Dungeons and Dragons would be an RPG because you can, in effect, choose the course of the plotline with your character decisions. It actually has humans controlling the game, so there is much more free will with how the story goes...it isn't strapped to the limits of artificial intelligence.

"The Western Approach to CRPG's (or, An Exercise in Futility)"

Kierkegaard said:

What chance would the players have to make decisions and act them out -- in other words, to role-play -- if they were denied the ability to express themselves, and if their actions were limited to inventory-management, battle tactics, and wandering around static maps?

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Final Fantasy (at least so far, the ones I have played, FFII (IV in Japan), FFIII (VI in Japan) and FFTA seem to have very little Role Playing aspects. They all require you to take control of a party, which rules out oodles of role-playing. There is very little strategy involved in the first two Final Fantasy's I mentioned, and some in FFTA, though it has the word Tactics in it's name...it better have some. The progression through the game focuses entirely on "skillful inventory management and tactical thinking". Note that Final Fantasy is Japanese though. More on that later.

Kierkegaard said:

What chance would the players have to make decisions and act them out -- in other words, to role-play -- if they were denied the ability to express themselves, and if their actions were limited to inventory-management, battle tactics, and wandering around static maps?

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Kierkegaard said:

Before long, CRPGs had become something of a joke in the role-playing community, whereas in computer gaming circles the term "RPG" had been debased to a euphemism for a genre that contained a varying mixture of strategy, action, and adventure elements -- everything, that is to say, except role-playing.

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Kierkegaard said:

[E]ven games like Fallout (1997) and Planescape: Torment (1999), as well as Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series, came nowhere near enough to be considered true RPGs -- though it has to be said that they at least tried harder than everything else.

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And allow me to include Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (II, much less so though).

Kierkegaard said:

Because by employing extensive dialogue trees in conjuction with multiple story paths, or simply by allowing the player more freedom in choosing the order in which to pursue the various quests, they were able to approximate to some small degree the feel of a true RPG -- to give players a little taste of what these games are all about. We are still talking about strategy games here; even in a title such as Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001) you are still spending most of your time managing your characters' inventory, directing tactical battles and navigating dungeons -- all the instances of role-playing to be found in even the best-of-the-best CRPGs hardly ever amount to more than a few minutes in total. But those few minutes were enough to conjure an illusion of role-playing; to make one feel as if they played some part in steering the stories of these games towards their eventual outcomes. And the players loved them for it.

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"The Japanese approach to CRPGs (or, Making Numbers Go Up)"

Kierkegaard writes that the Westerners always knew what Role Playing Games were about. They messed up, knowing this, but even so they began to get extensive dialogue trees like Torment, which is a start.

Kierkegaard said:

But the Japanese designers who set out to make their own CRPGs had no such understanding. They played Wizardry and other early dungeon-crawlers, and then sat down in smoke-filled izakayas and exclaimed, "So this is what a role-playing game is then!"

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Kierkegaard said:

Hydlide (1984) and Courageous Perseus (1985), the first Japanese CRPGs (hereafter referred to as JRPGs), were quickly followed by Dragon Quest (1986) and Final Fantasy (1987), the huge success of the latter effectively dooming the genre in Japan for decades. Had player reaction to these first efforts been unfavorable, their designers would have sat back and re-examined their choices; perhaps they would eventually have sought out and studied the second- or third-generation Western CRPGs (which were already starting to move away from dungeon crawling by offering the player the occasional choice), and things would have likely turned out very differently.

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However, they kept selling and they kept being made. He states how Western games have continued to evolve toward the original goal of an RPG, creating games like Fallout. Japanese RPGs have gone around in circles without any direction toward a goal.

But games like Final Fantasy and its endless sequels had to be justified in some way. They did this by creating hours and hours of anime cutscenes with voice acting and instrumental soundtracks.

Kierkegaard said:

And the results of this unchecked and wholly misdirected "evolution"? They can be clearly seen today simply by contrasting the kinds of questions asked by fans of Western and Japanese CRPGs on the launch of a new title. While the former are eager to know about the character creation process, non-linearity, multiple endings, and whether they can be evil, the latter seem to care little about anything besides the names of "character" designers and music composers. Market economies being what they are, everyone ends up getting what they asked for.

To be sure, there have been exceptions. Chrono Trigger (1995), Star Ocean: The Second Story (1998), Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (2003) and others, contained some elements of role-playing (though, it has to be said, nowhere near as many as the best Western CRPGs). But the exceptions were always one-offs and were hardly ever followed up, and every JRPG that took timid steps to introduce a little taste of role-playing, by way of some form of open-endedness or non-linearity, was quickly driven from the shelves (and from the public's notice) by fifty others that were little more than pure strategy games with elaborate cutscenes.

Because even if you are prepared to accept that Final Fantasy is a strategy game and that the "RPG" stamp on the box is some sort of a mistake -- a cute Japanese misnomer, perhaps (let's not forget that the Japanese have yet to get their heads round the concept of genre: according to Capcom, Devil May Cry 3 belongs to the "Stylish Crazy Action" genre, and Success's turn-based strategy game Operation Darkness is labelled as a "Horror Simulation RPG", for christsake) -- you still have to face the fact that -- even as a strategy game -- it fails miserably (except perhaps if one assumes that it's directed at mildly ******** nine-year-olds).

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To sum up what Kierkegaard says next is that the Japanese may as well reinvent the movies.

Kierkegaard said:

If you read reviews of such games you'll have noticed that reviewers usually spend half their wordcount namedropping "character" designers and music composers, and the other half discussing battle "systems".

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Kierkegaard said:

Even players who are right in the middle of a hundred-hour JRPG often have little idea of what the hell is going on -- and who can blame them, as it turns out they don't need to! They mash a button; random numbers keep flashing all over the screen; and if they happen to die at some point they simply double back, kill a couple hundred more green slimes and try again.

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He continues on to say that the development of each battle system every game or two also entirely misses the point of Role Playing.

Kierkegaard said:

whether a longsword does 1d12 or 2d6 points of damage is irrelevant. That's why table-top role-playing systems often remain in use for decades -- what would be the point of coming up with a new system for every single adventure? And if every other week the players were obliged to trash the old system and learn a new one, when would they find time to actually play anything?

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He goes on about MMORPG's simply trying to make money with powerlevelling and hoarding absurd trinkets and how we haven't made much progress in 33 years. And you may read the rest of that if you like. Let me just outline a couple more key lines.

Kierkegaard said:

Role-playing versus action
Stats alone do not a role-playing game make
Role-playing versus strategy
In CRPGs, stats MUST be hidden from the player (there is absolutely NO REASON why the player should have to see any numbers on the screen)
The tyranny of the cutscene

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OkamiBW said:

WARNING: Do not read if you do not have very much time to spare. It is a long post. Also, know that this is much influenced by reading this article. If you disagree with what is said in this post, you are disagreeing with Alex Kierkegaard much more than you are with me. One more thing. I do not believe the Final Fantasy series is bad. Heck, I want to continue playing through them all as I have started doing so since Spring of 2010. But calling them RPGs is a bit...I can't think of a word for it. They're really in the strategy-adventure genre. And I want to continue playing them for the storyline, not the role playing aspects.

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P.S. This is not directed towards any one individual or group of individuals, nor is it meant to produce a flame war. It is just on the topic of RPGs.

DerpDaBerp said:

The only thing arguably more appealing about Tales of- games is the fighting system. Otherwise everything else about them is worse, especially the dialogue (not saying FF lines are great, but Tales is downright poor).

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WHAT?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM8nsOiX7xg

How dare you! This is brilliance!

smaaaaaaaash

I sorta skimmed your post, Rob.

Alex Kierkegaard just seems like an angry, pretentious douchebag who's mad because of a semantic issue. However, his incredibly fancy sounding last name helps his argument a lot. I also giggled at his MapleStory reference in there.

GamerGuitarist7 said:

smaaaaaaaash

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<marquee></marquee>

Rob, your warning at the beginning wasnt needed. I quickly skipped your post when i realized how long it was. Lol

Twin_A said:

FF7 is bad, but revolutionary. I haven't played ToS so I cannot judge, but is it another rpg that took the already used formula and gameplay and attempted to make it their own instead of making a new formula like the FF series did?

And people are bashing on 13 but in truth it tried to attempt something new instead of redoing what they and every other game does. I can't remember which reviewer said this (G4 maybe?) but it was something along the lines of it not being a necessity for the FF series, they could have stuck with the old stuff and made it work great, but it was what the genre needed.

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Fixed your post for you, since it's misinformed.

jetfour said:

ToS is just Norse mythology inspired. The battle is certainly more engaging than any FF game... FFVIII was terrible for me with the button mashing. I love FFVII mostly because of the soundtrack.

Lufia II was like my first so it has a special place in my heart. It's like old school Golden Sun.

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Lufia 2 is my third favorite RPG of all time.

Rubyiris said:

Fixed your post for you, since it's misinformed.

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You cannot revise with subjectivity.

FF7 is bad and nothing will change that.

..........ok

You're ********, Xander. FF7 is one of the best games of all time!!

Look 7 wasnt that bad it was the hype that killed it. FF8 Was horrible I would play 7 over 8 anyday not to mention the horror of 12 and 13 cause those were pretty but thats about it. Square has gone down the drain and the only hope I have is that they don't **** up kingdom hearts.

But Super Mario Rpg was hands down one of the best