My Ideal Video Game: An Essay By Rina, Age 31
And the give me topics meme proceeds! Today's topic is from 
synecdochic, who asked, "The ideal video game company comes out with a video game that could have been tailored specifically to you and your tastes in games! What does it look like?"
oh boy do I have some thoughts on this!
It's funny how different this question is now than it was ten years ago, which has absolutely nothing to do with the way game technology has developed and everything to do with the fact that life looks pretty different at 31 with a full-time job than it did at 21 in college.
Technical/Mechanical Stuff
From a purely technical/mechanical standpoint, one feature I'd absolutely want it to have is the ability to save anytime and come back whenever I'm ready. (I am much better at playing games on systems that have sleep modes or save-anywhere because I'll dither about starting if I don't know whether the next save point is coming in half an hour, or three hours.)
More generally, I'm a fan of menu-based traditional JRPG combat, whether that's a la the SNES and Playstation Final Fantasy titles with an ATB system, a LUNAR or Lost Odyssey style "input all commands at the start of the round and they go off according to speed stat" (though in that case I'd want it to show me where in the battle order the action will happen), or a Persona-style hybrid.
I like games where characters aren't locked into one job class forever, but I also prefer that my characters not be so customizable that I'm functionally picking a skin for my battle-bot. I guess a good example of the kind of stuff I want to do is Blue Dragon's shadow-class system, or FF6's Esper stat boosts. (Going along with this: the female characters definitely need to not all be mages. Fuck that.) A perfectly acceptable alternative would be an FF5 or FFT-style job system, where with enough effort everyone can have everything, but it's ideal to specialize in the early stages.
I enjoy status effects being useful and buffs being worthwhile instead of taking up space in my spell list. I like varied equipment that I can use to build a team that's suitable for a given situation rather than everything just being the same (FF8, I love you, but....)
New Game Plus would be nice, since when I re-play a game I'm generally going for revisiting the story and maybe trying out some different combinations of skills that I didn't do before, but I don't necessarily want to invest in grinding again forever. (I had no idea how cool new game plus was until I actually had it. THEN I WAS ALL ABOUT IT.)
Some things I categorically don't want: I don't want the enemies to level-scale with me. If I'm stuck on a battle, I want to be able to go grind a bit and then come back and be better at it. Speaking of which, though, I like a balance when I'm grinding; I don't want to outlevel the content just by exploring, but I also don't want to have to sit down for an extra hour every single content-block to just keep up. Actually, I loved the way that Final Fantasy XIII did this, where your progression was hard-capped by story pieces but the challenge was finely balanced to account for that. (Though I could do with a slightly less on-rails plot in that case.) Alternately, a Persona 4 Golden style thing, where you can set the battle challenge level and the speed of grinding separately, would be ideal.
Also, keep your other genres out of my RPG. I don't want jumping puzzles; I don't want stealth/run-and-gun missions that frustrate me to the point of tears and make me call my paladin to beat them for me (yes, I'm still upset about the Jailer in Digital Devil Saga 2 and I'm never not going to be); I don't want my ability to clear the game to be dependent on my ability to hammer buttons in a particular sequence with no errors. I have played and enjoyed action RPGs (hi, Kingdom Hearts!) but it's not where my heart is.
Finally on the matter of technical stuff - I hate achievements that basically exist to make your life suffering. Especially if they have components that are easily missable. FF12, I am very much looking at you and your fucking bestiary and Esper and oh my god Yiazmat bullshit.
Story and Characters
I like complex stories that benefit from a second play-through so I can see where the groundwork was being laid for other things. I like not being able to twig to the final plot twist five minutes into the game. I like emotional stories that pack a serious punch (I play Atlus games knowing I'm headed for the gut-punch, okay. "OCTOBER AND NOVEMBER FULL MOON EVENTS" is all I have to say about that.)
I like well-rounded awesome characters with both strong points and flaws as my party members. I prefer not having a silent protagonist, actually; I like everyone to have a strong personality that interacts well with others (although the silent protagonist thing gives me some interesting toys to play with in Persona.) I love the party members in Dragon Age and Mass Effect and how they're fleshed out and how they will disagree with the PC's choices and that may in fact affect whether they stay in your party (although tbh I could probably do without "Character X will say sayonara if you do Y!" unless there are LOUD AND CLEAR signals that this will happen ahead of time; I don't want to get trapped into losing a character because of choices I made.)
Along the same lines, I don't like the "multiple possible variations of canon" thing that Dragon Age and Mass Effect do. Well, I take that back. I really like those games, but I can't fandom for them very easily because of my own particular set of neuroses and needs around writing and canon. I want all the characters to be defined, I want them all to be something I can look at and say "yes this is how they would do it" without having to wig out that someone's going to tell me I'm doing [the Warden, Hawke, Shepard] wrong. Because if this game is made for me, I want it to be something I can fandom for and fandom hard.
There are obviously archetypes that will always slay me and that I love having in my media - the broken knight (Kain, Seifer, Basch, Gabranth) and the ice queen lady (Beatrix, Celes, Lulu, Quistis) are two of my favourites, but I also adore the well-meaning rogue (BALTHIER ahem). I really don't want the teen boy ingenue a la Vaan or Tidus.
I like a big enough cast that I can pick and choose who to take with me (with the caveat that I want the battle party to be big enough to allow for bringing Character X for plot reasons without crippling my battle plans because I can't cover a necessary gap if I do), but I don't want it to get so sprawling that characters get short shrift on development (this is one of my few major complaints about FF6 and FF4.)
If the game is going to ship characters, I want it to be in a way that works for both of them instead of shoehorned into particular dynamics (and I'd like either outright-stated LGBT pairings or enough subtext to make a strong case). I actually prefer games that don't explicitly shove a particular pairing down your throat (here I'm thinking of FF6 and FF12 in particular). Mostly I want to see a strong team dynamic that I could play with in multiple different directions.
I guess what I'm really saying is that I want well-fleshed-out characters whose relationships are drawn in a way that suits the character and not The Needs Of The Plot.
Mop-up details: I would be happy with a soundtrack by Uematsu, Sakimoto, or Hamauzu, with preference for the former two. Character design: reasonable armor on all genders, and not Nomura. I prefer Amano's battlethongs to Nomura's abuse of belts and zippers. Voice actors: Ali Hillis, Laura Bailey, Liam O'Brien, Tara Platt, Troy Baker, and Gideon Emery all make my short list. Others to be filled in as necessary.
Oh, and if we're assuming that the script had to be translated - Alexander O. Smith and Joseph Reeder, plz. :D
....yeah wow that was a lot of feelings about what I do and don't like in video games.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1087431.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
synecdochic, who asked, "The ideal video game company comes out with a video game that could have been tailored specifically to you and your tastes in games! What does it look like?"
oh boy do I have some thoughts on this!
It's funny how different this question is now than it was ten years ago, which has absolutely nothing to do with the way game technology has developed and everything to do with the fact that life looks pretty different at 31 with a full-time job than it did at 21 in college.
Technical/Mechanical Stuff
From a purely technical/mechanical standpoint, one feature I'd absolutely want it to have is the ability to save anytime and come back whenever I'm ready. (I am much better at playing games on systems that have sleep modes or save-anywhere because I'll dither about starting if I don't know whether the next save point is coming in half an hour, or three hours.)
More generally, I'm a fan of menu-based traditional JRPG combat, whether that's a la the SNES and Playstation Final Fantasy titles with an ATB system, a LUNAR or Lost Odyssey style "input all commands at the start of the round and they go off according to speed stat" (though in that case I'd want it to show me where in the battle order the action will happen), or a Persona-style hybrid.
I like games where characters aren't locked into one job class forever, but I also prefer that my characters not be so customizable that I'm functionally picking a skin for my battle-bot. I guess a good example of the kind of stuff I want to do is Blue Dragon's shadow-class system, or FF6's Esper stat boosts. (Going along with this: the female characters definitely need to not all be mages. Fuck that.) A perfectly acceptable alternative would be an FF5 or FFT-style job system, where with enough effort everyone can have everything, but it's ideal to specialize in the early stages.
I enjoy status effects being useful and buffs being worthwhile instead of taking up space in my spell list. I like varied equipment that I can use to build a team that's suitable for a given situation rather than everything just being the same (FF8, I love you, but....)
New Game Plus would be nice, since when I re-play a game I'm generally going for revisiting the story and maybe trying out some different combinations of skills that I didn't do before, but I don't necessarily want to invest in grinding again forever. (I had no idea how cool new game plus was until I actually had it. THEN I WAS ALL ABOUT IT.)
Some things I categorically don't want: I don't want the enemies to level-scale with me. If I'm stuck on a battle, I want to be able to go grind a bit and then come back and be better at it. Speaking of which, though, I like a balance when I'm grinding; I don't want to outlevel the content just by exploring, but I also don't want to have to sit down for an extra hour every single content-block to just keep up. Actually, I loved the way that Final Fantasy XIII did this, where your progression was hard-capped by story pieces but the challenge was finely balanced to account for that. (Though I could do with a slightly less on-rails plot in that case.) Alternately, a Persona 4 Golden style thing, where you can set the battle challenge level and the speed of grinding separately, would be ideal.
Also, keep your other genres out of my RPG. I don't want jumping puzzles; I don't want stealth/run-and-gun missions that frustrate me to the point of tears and make me call my paladin to beat them for me (yes, I'm still upset about the Jailer in Digital Devil Saga 2 and I'm never not going to be); I don't want my ability to clear the game to be dependent on my ability to hammer buttons in a particular sequence with no errors. I have played and enjoyed action RPGs (hi, Kingdom Hearts!) but it's not where my heart is.
Finally on the matter of technical stuff - I hate achievements that basically exist to make your life suffering. Especially if they have components that are easily missable. FF12, I am very much looking at you and your fucking bestiary and Esper and oh my god Yiazmat bullshit.
Story and Characters
I like complex stories that benefit from a second play-through so I can see where the groundwork was being laid for other things. I like not being able to twig to the final plot twist five minutes into the game. I like emotional stories that pack a serious punch (I play Atlus games knowing I'm headed for the gut-punch, okay. "OCTOBER AND NOVEMBER FULL MOON EVENTS" is all I have to say about that.)
I like well-rounded awesome characters with both strong points and flaws as my party members. I prefer not having a silent protagonist, actually; I like everyone to have a strong personality that interacts well with others (although the silent protagonist thing gives me some interesting toys to play with in Persona.) I love the party members in Dragon Age and Mass Effect and how they're fleshed out and how they will disagree with the PC's choices and that may in fact affect whether they stay in your party (although tbh I could probably do without "Character X will say sayonara if you do Y!" unless there are LOUD AND CLEAR signals that this will happen ahead of time; I don't want to get trapped into losing a character because of choices I made.)
Along the same lines, I don't like the "multiple possible variations of canon" thing that Dragon Age and Mass Effect do. Well, I take that back. I really like those games, but I can't fandom for them very easily because of my own particular set of neuroses and needs around writing and canon. I want all the characters to be defined, I want them all to be something I can look at and say "yes this is how they would do it" without having to wig out that someone's going to tell me I'm doing [the Warden, Hawke, Shepard] wrong. Because if this game is made for me, I want it to be something I can fandom for and fandom hard.
There are obviously archetypes that will always slay me and that I love having in my media - the broken knight (Kain, Seifer, Basch, Gabranth) and the ice queen lady (Beatrix, Celes, Lulu, Quistis) are two of my favourites, but I also adore the well-meaning rogue (BALTHIER ahem). I really don't want the teen boy ingenue a la Vaan or Tidus.
I like a big enough cast that I can pick and choose who to take with me (with the caveat that I want the battle party to be big enough to allow for bringing Character X for plot reasons without crippling my battle plans because I can't cover a necessary gap if I do), but I don't want it to get so sprawling that characters get short shrift on development (this is one of my few major complaints about FF6 and FF4.)
If the game is going to ship characters, I want it to be in a way that works for both of them instead of shoehorned into particular dynamics (and I'd like either outright-stated LGBT pairings or enough subtext to make a strong case). I actually prefer games that don't explicitly shove a particular pairing down your throat (here I'm thinking of FF6 and FF12 in particular). Mostly I want to see a strong team dynamic that I could play with in multiple different directions.
I guess what I'm really saying is that I want well-fleshed-out characters whose relationships are drawn in a way that suits the character and not The Needs Of The Plot.
Mop-up details: I would be happy with a soundtrack by Uematsu, Sakimoto, or Hamauzu, with preference for the former two. Character design: reasonable armor on all genders, and not Nomura. I prefer Amano's battlethongs to Nomura's abuse of belts and zippers. Voice actors: Ali Hillis, Laura Bailey, Liam O'Brien, Tara Platt, Troy Baker, and Gideon Emery all make my short list. Others to be filled in as necessary.
Oh, and if we're assuming that the script had to be translated - Alexander O. Smith and Joseph Reeder, plz. :D
....yeah wow that was a lot of feelings about what I do and don't like in video games.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1087431.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.