Thread 723913737

This is when video games were a truly unique medium.
Nowadays, games are ashamed to be games and are aiming to be movies, but back when you were playing a 5th gen game, an RPG in particular, you were pretty much reading an entire novel. The lack of voice acting helped, too. But at the same time, you weren’t just reading the text; the whole thing is presented and dramatized to you in an audio/visual manner, but not in a way where you're simply watching a movie like in modern vidya. Back then both the text and the visuals complemented one another. It wasn’t a movie, it wasn’t a book; it was an entirely new and unique experience, superior to both in my opinion.

>>723913737 (OP)
>The lack of voice acting helped, too.
Grandia had voiced parts for certain sections...

>>723914426
The thread is not about Grandia. The vast majority of games didn't have voice acting.

>>723914584
Not doing any favours by using Grandia as the prime example of this era, however much I may agree with the sentiment.

Gadwin's secret move!
DRAGON KING SLICE
What a cinch!

>>723914715
Voice acting wasn't even the point.

>>723913737 (OP)
Almost wrote this off as an old good new bad thread but I think there's something here.

IMO it felt like there was a brief time where a lot of games, particularly rpgs, had excellent screenwriting. Being inspired by stageplay, driven by the constraints at the time or not, helped a lot of these games feel more unique. Like older NIS games, where you'd be moving between setpiece to setpiece and after you've seen the main bits of the play unfold, you'd be walking around in them talking to the cast. In the newer ones the sets are threadbare and lose out to considerations made for gameplay.

https://youtu.be/Q1tAS5-YvDQ

Though, it's hard to explain how that'd be fundamentally different from a lot of games produced today. It's not like there aren't still screenwriters around. But, maybe it's because newer games are so overloaded with shit strewn around the scene and world to make it seem fuller that you lose sight of that directed focus of the things in the scene and the people interacting with it?

>>723915798
>old good new bad
always true btw

>>723915592
It's a part of your point though and it helps your argument by not having your prime example be something that directly contradicts what you're saying

>>723916047
once you've finished playing something it just becomes old

>>723916275
>It's a part of your point
it isn't
>directly contradicts what you're saying
and it doesn't
>the whole thing is presented and dramatized to you in an audio/visual manner

>>723913737 (OP)
4th gen cd addons and 5th gen rpgs were very much about voice acting, in Japan at least.

>>723914750
kids can do this? I only played the first hour of Grandia and these kids felt like normal kids to me

>>723915798
Development size or scope or whatever is the a big part of the problem. Old dev teams were a lot smaller so the scope of the projects matched. What's weird to me though is that no one in Square Enix has ever stopped and thought "wow, FFVII has sold more than any game we ever made, and the team did in 2 years with a fraction of the cost and people. Maybe we should return to form?" I suppose that is kind of what Octopath Traveler kind of is, but it's more of a skeleton of what it could be and SE is too cheap to put some flesh on the bones and go all-in on the game.

>>723917416
Big budget could go the other way though, a "big game" in one of these execs minds needs to have all the bells and whistles of every other big release on the market to compete. Most companies would be scared shitless of releasing something even as competent as ZA (which I frankly quite enjoyed) because it's missing a little house for every pokemon, decided not to include voice acting, doesn't have random npcs carrying logs back to the pokemon lumber yards, shit that truly doesn't matter but will get picked at by reviewers.