Karlina wrote:
Archmage Callinon wrote:
Quote:
Now, granted, I don't want something like Xenosaga (the first one) where you spend, say, 25 hours on a playthrough and 15 of them turns out to be watching cutscenes... that's a little TOO ridiculous.
A friend of mine once referred to disc 2 of Xenogears as a "semi-interactive Xeno-movie."
Xenogears at least gets to play the "ran out of time and money and had to fake it" excuse. Xenosaga did it intentionally form the start.
Xenosaga was also from an era where everybody was drooling over in-engine cutscenes that were almost as detailed as FMVs. Before Xenosaga and games around that time period, you did huge major events in FMVs, but the problem is FMVs were kinda jarring in the way that you went from pixel sprites to fully animated movie, not to mention you'd need a "fade to black", a couple seconds of loading, and then the movie started playing. It just felt... out of place in games that used FMVs for major cutscenes.
Well, the PS2 and its upgraded hardware came along, and now they could have in-game cutscenes that were almost as good as FMVs, so they started using those, and they used them everywhere. Many games had them, and some games like Xenosaga used them excessively to the point where you watched cutscenes more than you actually played the game.
And Xenogears... well, that's a sad tale about running out of money. That game would have been THE longest RPG in history and that would still hold true to this day excluding MMORPGs which are constantly updated with content added to it. Judging from the abridged cutscenes and lots of talk about events, I'm thinking Disc 2 should have been Discs 2, 3, and 3.5 at the very least.
Even with Disc2 being a "zip zip lemme tell you what happened zip zip", Xenogears is STILL a 30-40 hour game with the player easily reaching Level 70+ without doing much grinding whatsoever. If they had been able to release all of the content they had in mind, I'd think without any exponential ramp up of TNL values, the player would have easily hit Lv99 without doing any grinding at all by the end of the game and the game could have easily been 60-70h in length. Easy.
EDIT: Note, when I talk about how "long" an RPG is, I am talking purely the Main Story and not optional side-content. One could argue games like FF12 take a long time to "complete", but when the Main Story is only some 15h long and the bigger portion of the game is fetch sidequests, collect em all quests, etc, you can't really count that as being very long, as not everybody enjoys the 'gotta catch em all' type thing.
Edited, Aug 11th 2015 2:10pm by Lyrailis
