My week in brief, now with bonus rant!
- Folklore sucks. More on that...*
- The Name of the Wind is fantastic and exactly the kind of fantasy I love.
- Rock Band, despite my earlier reservations, is addicting.
- Portal is fabulous but FUCKING CREEPY JESUS OH MY GOD. Also I kind of suck at puzzles. Especially ones that shoot at me.
- Good food is nomgood.
- Mother does not understand lolcats. We love her anyway. (After all, she did do the Caramelldansen dance, so she's already got internet brownie points.)
Well, it's happened. I've become a video game snob. I'm a terrible, stuck-up, elitist RPGer who can't appreciate anything that doesn't come with the name Square somewhere on the box. Or apparently, anyway, because there's no other explanation for why Folklore is the biggest disappointment I've ever had the misfortune to be excited about. But I wouldn't feel so betrayed and baffled if everyone didn't think it was awesome.
Awesome? I think not.
The story is divided into two paths: you have the choice of playing either a whiny girl who thinks every vaguely human-shaped rock she sees is the mother who left her/died sixteen years ago, or Gaius Baltar without the evil robot living in his head, which is basically like stripping him of everything that makes him interesting*. This alone is not a problem: the number of great games I've played that make me lol at their overly dramatic opening cutscenes is probably far greater than the number I've actually been able to take seriously. Though this is the first one to manage the Big No within two minutes, and by a nameless boat driver, no less.
As you can probably tell, the script is so-so, with Baltar having some semblance of snark that is unable to manifest due to having only empty shells of other characters to interact with. The lines you receive from NPCs while you're walking around town (particularly in the Elysium world, where you converse with extremely shiny goblins) are the kind of ridiculous stock dialogue I would expect from a Zelda game on the NES ("A girl just ran through here. I wonder what was wrong?"; "Do you know about [insert battle magic mechanism name here]?").
The voice acting is not the worst I've ever heard, but that's not saying much. Fortunately, you only have to listen to them talk during cutscenes that are actually animated, which is almost none. Apparently, a poll was done of next-gen console owners and it was found that most RPG players would prefer story/cutscene sequences played out to them in a series of static pictures moved across the screen in comic book form with awkwardly placed dialogue boxes. This is, of course, the most effective use of such a powerful new console engine.
Cheating at cutscenes like this a cheap shot and I find it piss annoying to play, and I'm also offended that they thought they could get away with it on a next gen console. I would let them get away with it if they were, say, Team Ico and had something else awesome to make up for it, but they don't. As a matter of fact, they instead have a far bigger problem to worry about. Other reviews say that the gameplay is great, but other than combat (which is entertaining enough, but nothing terribly new), there is no gameplay. The town-type settings you wander are restricted to linear paths layed out for you by your mini-map ala Final Fantasy X, now with even less environment immersion! There is nothing to examine; no side alleys and dead ends to explore; nothing reacts when you touch it. Indeed, you can't touch anything because of the invisible walls that are no more than two feet from either side of you at any given time. Baltar must be feeling incredibly claustrophobic.
Herein lies part of the problem: if you're going to put a game on a console like the PS3, you'd better justify doing so and actually, you know, make use of the engine. The only think Folklore has going for it here is color-saturated high-def graphics, which are lauded all over as the be-all end-all of the game, but frankly after the initial "Oooh, pretty," I really don't give a fuck about the environment if I can't interact with any of it. If I wanted fancy fantasy wallpapers, I'd go to deviantArt. If this had been released at the same time as it was only on the PS2, it still would have been weak compared to all the rotating camera games with vibrant and detailed worlds: Final Fantasy XII, for one, or Kingdom Hearts; it's weak even next to the Jak games or Star Ocean or well just about anything that's been released in the past six years. High pixel count does not a quality video game make.
I would be much more forgiving of this game if it were an early experiment on the Playstation 2 from six or seven years ago; after all, FFX did pull the linear path-and-map thing back in 2001... and got complaints for it even then. But at this stage, it's not "innovative" or "unique"--and oh god do I resent it being compared to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, games that actually DESERVE those titles--no, Folklore insists on moving backwards to revisit gameplay mechanisms that were abandoned long ago because they are no longer interactive and effective storytelling (if they ever were). Unless this game has some great epic gameplay secret still hiding up its ass, I've already seen structurally how its going to go down, and there's nothing innovative or even interesting about it. Nor has it even left itself any room for improvement as the game progresses. It's got nowhere left to go except in story and combat, and though the story does seem to have the potential to become something really pretty awesome, I don't particularly feel like slogging through all this shitty gameplay to get to it. I don't have enough time to game as it is, no way am I wasting it on something under par.
So in conclusion, really, my question is to all those reviewers I linked up there: What gives, guys?
*This is a lie; I actually think Baltar would still be a pretty awesome character without his personal brand of Batshit Insane (TM)--but you have to admit that it is Head-Six that makes him freaking amazing.
Oh man that was fun to write. I bothered more because I was enjoying the words than because I really give that much of a damn about the game. It felt like writing. Mmm, I have missed that.
- The Name of the Wind is fantastic and exactly the kind of fantasy I love.
- Rock Band, despite my earlier reservations, is addicting.
- Portal is fabulous but FUCKING CREEPY JESUS OH MY GOD. Also I kind of suck at puzzles. Especially ones that shoot at me.
- Good food is nomgood.
- Mother does not understand lolcats. We love her anyway. (After all, she did do the Caramelldansen dance, so she's already got internet brownie points.)
Well, it's happened. I've become a video game snob. I'm a terrible, stuck-up, elitist RPGer who can't appreciate anything that doesn't come with the name Square somewhere on the box. Or apparently, anyway, because there's no other explanation for why Folklore is the biggest disappointment I've ever had the misfortune to be excited about. But I wouldn't feel so betrayed and baffled if everyone didn't think it was awesome.
Awesome? I think not.
The story is divided into two paths: you have the choice of playing either a whiny girl who thinks every vaguely human-shaped rock she sees is the mother who left her/died sixteen years ago, or Gaius Baltar without the evil robot living in his head, which is basically like stripping him of everything that makes him interesting*. This alone is not a problem: the number of great games I've played that make me lol at their overly dramatic opening cutscenes is probably far greater than the number I've actually been able to take seriously. Though this is the first one to manage the Big No within two minutes, and by a nameless boat driver, no less.
As you can probably tell, the script is so-so, with Baltar having some semblance of snark that is unable to manifest due to having only empty shells of other characters to interact with. The lines you receive from NPCs while you're walking around town (particularly in the Elysium world, where you converse with extremely shiny goblins) are the kind of ridiculous stock dialogue I would expect from a Zelda game on the NES ("A girl just ran through here. I wonder what was wrong?"; "Do you know about [insert battle magic mechanism name here]?").
The voice acting is not the worst I've ever heard, but that's not saying much. Fortunately, you only have to listen to them talk during cutscenes that are actually animated, which is almost none. Apparently, a poll was done of next-gen console owners and it was found that most RPG players would prefer story/cutscene sequences played out to them in a series of static pictures moved across the screen in comic book form with awkwardly placed dialogue boxes. This is, of course, the most effective use of such a powerful new console engine.
Cheating at cutscenes like this a cheap shot and I find it piss annoying to play, and I'm also offended that they thought they could get away with it on a next gen console. I would let them get away with it if they were, say, Team Ico and had something else awesome to make up for it, but they don't. As a matter of fact, they instead have a far bigger problem to worry about. Other reviews say that the gameplay is great, but other than combat (which is entertaining enough, but nothing terribly new), there is no gameplay. The town-type settings you wander are restricted to linear paths layed out for you by your mini-map ala Final Fantasy X, now with even less environment immersion! There is nothing to examine; no side alleys and dead ends to explore; nothing reacts when you touch it. Indeed, you can't touch anything because of the invisible walls that are no more than two feet from either side of you at any given time. Baltar must be feeling incredibly claustrophobic.
Herein lies part of the problem: if you're going to put a game on a console like the PS3, you'd better justify doing so and actually, you know, make use of the engine. The only think Folklore has going for it here is color-saturated high-def graphics, which are lauded all over as the be-all end-all of the game, but frankly after the initial "Oooh, pretty," I really don't give a fuck about the environment if I can't interact with any of it. If I wanted fancy fantasy wallpapers, I'd go to deviantArt. If this had been released at the same time as it was only on the PS2, it still would have been weak compared to all the rotating camera games with vibrant and detailed worlds: Final Fantasy XII, for one, or Kingdom Hearts; it's weak even next to the Jak games or Star Ocean or well just about anything that's been released in the past six years. High pixel count does not a quality video game make.
I would be much more forgiving of this game if it were an early experiment on the Playstation 2 from six or seven years ago; after all, FFX did pull the linear path-and-map thing back in 2001... and got complaints for it even then. But at this stage, it's not "innovative" or "unique"--and oh god do I resent it being compared to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, games that actually DESERVE those titles--no, Folklore insists on moving backwards to revisit gameplay mechanisms that were abandoned long ago because they are no longer interactive and effective storytelling (if they ever were). Unless this game has some great epic gameplay secret still hiding up its ass, I've already seen structurally how its going to go down, and there's nothing innovative or even interesting about it. Nor has it even left itself any room for improvement as the game progresses. It's got nowhere left to go except in story and combat, and though the story does seem to have the potential to become something really pretty awesome, I don't particularly feel like slogging through all this shitty gameplay to get to it. I don't have enough time to game as it is, no way am I wasting it on something under par.
So in conclusion, really, my question is to all those reviewers I linked up there: What gives, guys?
*This is a lie; I actually think Baltar would still be a pretty awesome character without his personal brand of Batshit Insane (TM)--but you have to admit that it is Head-Six that makes him freaking amazing.
Oh man that was fun to write. I bothered more because I was enjoying the words than because I really give that much of a damn about the game. It felt like writing. Mmm, I have missed that.