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Post by JDarkside on Feb 27, 2015 6:30:54 GMT -5
That would be true if the acting and dialogue wouldn't be so laughable most of the time. Like in Blazblue P4A Ultimax was also a huge mess, and I swear that Arc Systems had something to do with it. The villains are just SOOOOOOOOO bad, and they really fucked up Adachi's character. Sure, he was fun, but he was originally an attempted rapist and serial murderer who simply decided to just let himself be punished and did feel guilt about betraying his partner, though it was never said. Ultimax basically made him Kumagawa from Medaka Box and played him up for comedy, when his real personality is that or a pathetic child with a self-loathing complex. Like he'd give a shit what Sho did with his life. And don't even get me started on Sho.
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Post by nightdreamer on Feb 27, 2015 8:00:38 GMT -5
Sho was really bad, I agree. I even mentioned him as the worst character to come out of 2014. He's like, what if we shoehorn a really corny 'evil' character from Blazblue into Persona lore?
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Post by nightdreamer on Feb 27, 2015 8:15:38 GMT -5
You know, there's a couple of genres where I find the existence of stories to be far more annoying: racing and platformer (and I guess you can add those Tony Hawk games too, I don't know why American Wasteland needed it). Like in Need for Speed for the former. In latter's case I find myself skipping through all the cutscenes in 1001 Spikes, and another offender is Sonic, a property that's been an exceptionally obnoxious with its story bits even though it always has had awful, terrible, oh-God-who-wrote-this script. Their stories are way more irritating than in fighting games because they actively INTRUDE your playing.
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Post by JDarkside on Feb 27, 2015 8:22:46 GMT -5
I like a good story in a platformer, if it's called for.
I also adore the story in Shadow the Hedgehog because it's such a goddamn mess. It's a thing of terrible beauty.
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Post by nightdreamer on Feb 27, 2015 8:29:28 GMT -5
Your adoration for Shadow the Hedgehog's story is similar to mine for Blazblue. Blazblue feels like the kind of writing of a 14 year old who just saw Evangelion and thinks he can 'out mind-blow' Eva with exceptionally corny sci fi concepts. It's the Picasso of corniness!
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Post by bakudon on Feb 27, 2015 8:55:51 GMT -5
I can see why one would not put much emphasis on a fighting game story, especially if one is mainly interested in the competitive side. I would also agree that since AI is unlikely to be anything like a human player, a single player mode is unlikely to help much in the competitive side apart from maybe helping you put them combos into memory. However, I don’t really see why this would absolutely need to be so. Like, it’s conceivable that you could write a decent storyline for a fighter. Likewise, I don’t see why you could not create a valuable single-player experience around a fighter. I think the best approach is to stop thinking of single-player as something that only exists to replace a human opponent, and making it fun on its own, with a different set of sensibilities than what would apply for a pvp game. Actually, this is exactly what earlier Soul games did, and I enjoyed them for it. Looking at contemporary reviews, I was hardly the only one.
Of course, that’s not to say every game must be like that. But personally, I mostly play games for the experience, which is why I want my games to have some sort of story, no matter how strenuous. This is why I love 80’s–90’s games with lots of feelies and lore in the manuals, and don’t play abstract puzzle games and the like that much. So, I personally would appreciate the effort on the part of the game makers, and it really doesn’t need to be Nobel material to make me happy.
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Post by Bobinator on Feb 27, 2015 9:56:47 GMT -5
I'll come out right now and say this: The only fighting game that wasn't from Netherrealm that I thought had a remotely decent dedicated "Story" mode was Skullgirls, and even then, that had issues. The standard arcade mode with intros, endings, win quotes and so on, that's fine. But I've never really been big on the visual novel sort of deal where you just have two character portraits standing still and trading dialogue. I mean, I can understand that's what's cheap and easy to do, sure. But I just think that games that follow that method are generally really hard to follow along with.
I'll also say that the problem with most Japanese fighting games is that they're incredibly hard to keep up with. Even for Street Fighter, there's so many extra details that they don't tell you unless you dig deep online, or go out and buy things like art books that give you tidbits about the characters the game certainly won't tell you about. The ASW games are even worse. For both of their main series, they keep redoing the story mode throughout the series, meaning that you're basically expected to play through story modes again and again to have any idea what's going on. Not to mention they hide extra plot stuff in their merchandise that's never going to leave Japan, anyway, which I'd say is a really bad thing to do. It just feels like nothing is ever actually explained.
I've always felt that the Mortal Kombat series, in general, has had a pretty good storyline, compared to its competition. It can be somewhat cheesy at times, sure, but I feel like they've put in a lot more effort than most when it comes to expanding on their universe. It's even to the point they've even done (mostly terrible) side-games just to expand on certain characters and events. And, as I've said, the story mode for MK9 was amazing, and it's something that I wish more fighting games would actually try. The only real issue with MK's plotline, really, is that it's somewhat hard to tell which of the endings, if any, actually happen or not, although the fact that the game has a canon story mode helps.
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Post by Dingo on Feb 27, 2015 10:21:03 GMT -5
The story in fighting games is not important. I find the character interaction between SNK characters to be fairly interesting, though I'm bias. I do enjoy the overarching story line of the Orochi Saga (Kof '95 - '97), but it's mostly just a few bits and pieces of story that you get from specific team endings. The Sacred Force Team (Kyo, Iori, Chizuru) ending in KoF '97 is really great.
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Post by nightdreamer on Feb 27, 2015 10:21:07 GMT -5
By the way, and I could bring this up on the Mortal Kombat X thread when I'm not lazy, but I'm kinda digging the prequel comic book DC's been publishing. I also really enjoyed some of the character specific King of Fighters manga from the 90s.
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Post by Allie on Feb 27, 2015 12:10:51 GMT -5
I'll come out right now and say this: The only fighting game that wasn't from Netherrealm that I thought had a remotely decent dedicated "Story" mode was Skullgirls, and even then, that had issues. The standard arcade mode with intros, endings, win quotes and so on, that's fine. But I've never really been big on the visual novel sort of deal where you just have two character portraits standing still and trading dialogue. I mean, I can understand that's what's cheap and easy to do, sure. But I just think that games that follow that method are generally really hard to follow along with. I'll also say that the problem with most Japanese fighting games is that they're incredibly hard to keep up with. Even for Street Fighter, there's so many extra details that they don't tell you unless you dig deep online, or go out and buy things like art books that give you tidbits about the characters the game certainly won't tell you about. The ASW games are even worse. For both of their main series, they keep redoing the story mode throughout the series, meaning that you're basically expected to play through story modes again and again to have any idea what's going on. Not to mention they hide extra plot stuff in their merchandise that's never going to leave Japan, anyway, which I'd say is a really bad thing to do. It just feels like nothing is ever actually explained. I've always felt that the Mortal Kombat series, in general, has had a pretty good storyline, compared to its competition. It can be somewhat cheesy at times, sure, but I feel like they've put in a lot more effort than most when it comes to expanding on their universe. It's even to the point they've even done (mostly terrible) side-games just to expand on certain characters and events. And, as I've said, the story mode for MK9 was amazing, and it's something that I wish more fighting games would actually try. The only real issue with MK's plotline, really, is that it's somewhat hard to tell which of the endings, if any, actually happen or not, although the fact that the game has a canon story mode helps. ASW stuff like GG and BB are the WORST precisely because of the aforementioned merchandise (Drama CDs and "Light Novels"). BB is such a clusterfuck that people like to pretend is brilliant because they don't want to admit that it doesn't make any damned sense, and was just ASW throwing 50 different types of shit at the wall and scrawling a pseudo Da Vinci Code (or whatever) out of the remains of whatever didn't fall to the floor.
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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Feb 27, 2015 13:06:36 GMT -5
I've played Guilty Gear, Guilty Gear XX and BlazBlue for a combined total of a lot of hours, but if you'd give a pop quiz on the story of those games I'd probably get an F-.
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Post by susanismyalias on Feb 27, 2015 13:56:42 GMT -5
Well it's not that complicated, you see the story of guilty gear is simply
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Post by JDarkside on Feb 27, 2015 14:09:03 GMT -5
Well it's not that complicated, you see the story of guilty gear is simply Even the devs have admitted that they haven't made an actual story, only a rough idea of a concept they never did anything with.
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Post by susanismyalias on Feb 27, 2015 14:24:36 GMT -5
That's incredibly unsurprising.
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Post by Échalote on Feb 27, 2015 14:30:45 GMT -5
GG's story mode's conditions for some of the good endings were also a complete mess: lose battle X on purpose, then finish battle Y with move Z, that sort of thing. (damn it, i can't write GG now without thinking of that other thing )
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