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| gorgeous
47th Post
 
Rare Customer
 
|  "Re(3):Is the DS really sold out in Japan?" , posted Thu 12 Jan 18:12
quote:
I'm disappointed in the Tales of the Abyss sales. I was hoping it would do as well as it deserves.
Ahh, it sold to the people who were interested. It was number one for a week, so there you go.
And!
And!
And!!
You're forgetting the most important thing. To paraphrase a, uh, journalist guy I know said in a column that, uh, hasn't been posted on a website yet, "Comparing the sales of a game like Brain Training to the sales of a game like Tales of the Abyss is a lot like saying, 'So yeah, it seems potatoes are more popular than magazines about cigars this quarter."
So!!
500,000 people is a whole hell of a lot for a game like Tales of the Abyss. I mean, I've never met a single person in a decade and change IN this country who's actually played, much less beat one, and I even work in a game company. So to think that one in four hundred people in this country has bought the game is, well -- there's more than that many people in a rush hour train, if that helps your perspective.
It might not!!
Tonight, I'm going to buy Ryu ga Gotoku! Just because I liked what Nagoshi said in the new Famitsu about how he would have quit if people were "too dumb to buy a good game", and I have enough points on my Bic Camera card to get it like half off.
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| Pollyanna 1591th Post
Red Carpet V.I.P- Platinum Member
    
    
    
  
| "Re(4):Is the DS really sold out in Japan?" , posted Thu 12 Jan 18:34
(I'm going to hijack this thread temporarily, because I wanna talk about ToA)
Ah, I thought ToA didn't sell so well for a Tales game. I know it sold well under what Namco "projected", but that's no surprise, I suppose. Some of that might be due to lingering bitterness over ToL. Or maybe that's a myth...
Have you finished ToA yet? I just finished today, including the Nebilim/group arena fight. I won the game on hard, but I had to beat Nebilim on normal. I'd love to play the game again, but it has ONE key flaw that's preventing me from doing so. I feel like the creators sometimes forgot that the players might actually want to play something.
I mean, some of the plot scenes went on for hours. That's fine...the story was good, but when you combine the lengthy scenes with the unecessary running around (how many times did you have to fly to Daart and go up the elevators in Bachicul?) and the skits, it made me antsy to get into a fight again. I feel like some parts of the story could have been streamlined for better playability.
Negotiating peace between the nations took hours and hours with no action whatsoever. I was tricked into thinking I was playing a game by being forced to fly to each location (rather than being teleported there), but in the end, that just made the whole process take longer.
Also...not enough boss fights! I don't want a maze without a boss at the end. PERIOD. I don't care if it's a larger version of something else I already fought, or it's a giant fly that doesn't need to be there. The boss fights practically made the game for me.
I'm sorry...I'm just babbling all of a sudden because I have no one to talk to the game about. I guess there were too many things I liked about it to list them all, so I just list my few complaints instead.
Like...too many skits about Van being dead/not being dead! ARGH!
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| gorgeous
48th Post
Rare Customer
| "ABYSS" , posted Thu 12 Jan 18:55
quote:
(I'm going to hijack this thread temporarily, because I wanna talk about ToA)
Ah, I thought ToA didn't sell so well for a Tales game. I know it sold well under what Namco "projected"
Yeah, Namco ALWAYS projects way, way, way too much. That's why we end up with bins full of Xenosaga Episode II and Namco X Capcom at Bic Camera two months after their releases. TotA will sell more than those two games, if only by virtue of the fact that it is so, so, so, so, so much better. And it has an excellent theme song.
Yeah, I beat it. Oddly, I started playing Rogue Galaxy again that very day.
The whole "No boss fights at the end of dungeons" thing was a little bothersome, though I guess that's part of the very, very slow movement to undermine and uproot the conventions of the RPG genre. Tales is doing it, actually, more actively than most. A lot of people (at least, well, me) consider Tales to be the most conventional and vanilla (white-bread-flavored, as I put it before (get it, the game makes you make your own sandwiches?!)) of all the modern RPGs, though hey.
That's what Legendia was all about. Changing stuff. Abyss is a little more subtle than Legendia. The 3D battle thing, for example. I mean, in one way, it's not nearly as new as you were hoping, and in another way, it's a lot newer than you'd think. It's all subtlety. Which is great (and unexpected) about a game where the battle system involves mashing buttons.
Regarding the town-wandering: at least the towns were nice. Did you play Radiata Stories? That game was an excellent town with an RPG battle system as a minigame. Abyss kind of reminds me of Radiata's spirit, which is a good thing and a boring thing all at once.
What they need to do is, well, do SOMETHING about the little "Okay, let's talk to your characters now" mechanic. You know. The press SELECT to view the talking heads mechanic. I'm not saying they need to get rid of it -- because it's lovely, it's the soul of the game, especially when they've gone through some pains to make the characters actually interesting this time -- I'm just saying they need to streamline it.
You know -- and it's really ass-backward and stupid on paper -- though one of the cool things about Rogue Galaxy is you get in fights even in towns. It's ridiculous because the townspeople all disappear; however, you don't mind because the battles are so fun. It's what you're hungry for.
A weird side-effect of this is what the back of the box (we're talking about Rogue Galaxy here) advertises the "live talk" system, which basically means your characters talk back and forth while you're running around, whether in a dungeon or in a town. What gets discussed depends on the team members you're using and the current storyline events of the game.
The problem with it is there's too low a CEILING. As in, . . . well, it's hard to explain in English. Bizarrely. I am better at concrete things in Japanese. Still, I'll try: there's not ENOUGH. There's plenty of DEPTH; just not enough HEIGHT. You see? The subjects are varied, and the characters SEEM to be interacting with one another, though only in the way a Furby SEEMS to be learning how to speak.
In the same way, the weapon customization, which is simple and crunchy, makes it just too easy to pump up your weapon to morbid levels. Having shops only sell limited quantities of each weapon is a nice promise that the game makes, that it's going to keep you on your toes, though in the end, it doesn't matter. Kind of like Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. Though you only have a set amount of D-counter to use before you die and it's game over forever, they really do give you way, way more than you'd need to be able to beat the game easily. So yeah -- in the case of both Dragon Quarter and Rogue Galaxy: they need sequels.
What they need to do for the "Active Talk" system is write full, whole dialogues. As you wander the towns, you'll get conversation cues. The characters will talk. Their lips will even move, if you look at them!!
And then Tales needs to adopt this. See, the reason they show the anime portraits during the talking system is because you can't see them during the actual game. If only the characters, as they walked around, looked exactly as they did on the box art (as in Rogue Galaxy), then it wouldn't be an issue. Your characters talk, you look at them as they're talking if you want to, you resume walking, the character you're using talks sometimes, too; you can make conversation choices as you walk, and . . . well, it'd be nice and easygoing. It'd make town wandering seem fuller. It'd also dull the effect of the music, I guess, though hey.
As for aching to get into another battle -- you know what I do? I have my guitar on my lap as I play any RPG. When I'm just wandering towns, I play the guitar. So if a trip in a town is taking too long, I put the controller on my knee, play a little guitar, and then go back to the game. It works great in Dragon Quest, when you're watching your party attack. In Tales it usually doesn't work, because the battles involve so much button mashing -- though, well, with the dialoges and such, and the long walking trips, it works just fine.
If you don't want to take up the guitar, I suggest something like, say, knitting?
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| Pollyanna 1592th Post
Red Carpet V.I.P- Platinum Member
| "Re(1):ABYSS" , posted Thu 12 Jan 20:01
I've played Rogue Galaxy, but I don't own it. My experience with it is limited to about 5 hours or so. My impression was that it was an exceptionally well put-together game filled with good ideas that didn't appeal to me. My opinions of it may be completely innaccurate in reference to the game as a whole, so correct me if my impressions are off. My concepts of it got "buried", so reading what you said is refreshing my memory.
Like you mentioned, the dialogue when you're walking around is a great idea, but I never once heard the characters say anything interesting. Kind of like ToR. The characters just didn't have anything good to say. I didn't dislike them, but they weren't much for talking.
In Rogue Galaxy, the fight system was fun and they did all sorts of neat little things with the enemies and bosses, but I feel like it was all covering up a system where otherwise you could just jam on a button and win. I liked how you needed different strategies for different enemies, and you had 2 weapons, and threw stuff around, but I felt like those elements were nothing but distractions. Or like...the battle system was a mediocre illustration with really fancy CG coloring, if that makes any sense.
I know you could say that you can pound on buttons and win the TOA fights just the same, but the boss fights were amazing in a totally different way. In the Rogue Galaxy boss fights, I thought "this is a great idea" or "isn't that clever"...and it was...but it didn't give me the same experience I had in ToA.
I played ToA on normal, then switched it to hard for (most of) the boss fights. I never stopped for experience, and every boss was like...it was like the best fight of my life. It was like...legendary. I would yell at my characters, cheer and curse my enemies (especially Synch). It was amazing. THAT'S what I want in a game...and I felt like it was like..."real". Not like it was novel or fluff. It made me get out of my chair. I LOVE getting out of my chair.
Oh, and before I forget...my impression of Radiata Stories was that the battle system was SO boring that nothing else could possibly make up for it. I loved the world, the style, the direction...everything. It had a nice feeling I haven't had since Popolocrois 2, but I just can't forgive that awful battle system.
But the towns were nice...and I like the towns in Rogue Galaxy, too. I like them because they make me feel like I'm somewhere. I thought "you know, these renders are actually really simple, but the world is believable."
I think the towns looked nice enough in ToA, but I can't say I liked them because they just seemed to get in the way. The loading times weren't a problem until you were looking around in town. ESPECIALLY in the Daart church. (Daart? Is that how you'd spell that?)
I think having the characters talk as they walked would cause as many problems as it would fix, but it's not like the skit system doesn't have problems anyway. I loved the characters so much that I was usually willing to stop whatever I was doing to listen to them. But...still...sometimed I would go halfway through a skit and then stop, because they JUST said whatever they were saying five minutes ago.
It's amazing, because I felt like the characters were like real people. They talked about things like people in their situation would...it's just...sometimes, I don't need to hear everything that everyone has to say. I felt like "yes, I understand that this is very interesting to you, but it's less interesting to me, and I wish you could walk while you were talking."
Even if I complain, I haven't liked an RPG cast so much in years. Luke is one of my favorite, if not my favorite main character ever. So many times in the game I just...I cried because I liked him so much.
I really felt involved with his struggle on a deep level, because sometimes I didn't know how to feel. Like about the replicas. I felt sorry for them, but I felt like it would be better if they all died. But then I felt guilty...like I had betrayed Luke for thinking that, because he was no different than them...he just had a more nurturing environment.
And Asch...I got so angry at him so many times, because he had such a stupid attitude, but at the same time, I had to think about how he felt. He and Luke going back and forth on who should die seemed ridiculous at first, but I starting realizing that Asch was jealous of what Luke had and felt that his own life had lost its value...like he didn't deserve to be "Luke" anymore.
Now I'm talking too much. I'll just say that I like talking to my roomate on "down time" on RPGs. If she doesn't want to talk, then it's no good, though. I guess guitars always want to talk, but if they're in my hands, the things they would say might be too distracting.
I wanted to talk about how RPG characters used to not talk to each other and what that meant in terms of using your imagination...but that would be too much text for now.
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| pointman_4000
14th Post
New Customer
| "Re(1):ABYSS" , posted Thu 12 Jan 20:03
quote:
(I'm going to hijack this thread temporarily, because I wanna talk about ToA)
Ah, I thought ToA didn't sell so well for a Tales game. I know it sold well under what Namco "projected"
Yeah, Namco ALWAYS projects way, way, way too much. That's why we end up with bins full of Xenosaga Episode II and Namco X Capcom at Bic Camera two months after their releases. TotA will sell more than those two games, if only by virtue of the fact that it is so, so, so, so, so much better. And it has an excellent theme song.
Yeah, I beat it. Oddly, I started playing Rogue Galaxy again that very day.
The whole "No boss fights at the end of dungeons" thing was a little bothersome, though I guess that's part of the very, very slow movement to undermine and uproot the conventions of the RPG genre. Tales is doing it, actually, more actively than most. A lot of people (at least, well, me) consider Tales to be the most conventional and vanilla (white-bread-flavored, as I put it before (get it, the game makes you make your own sandwiches?!)) of all the modern RPGs, though hey.
That's what Legendia was all about. Changing stuff. Abyss is a little more subtle than Legendia. The 3D battle thing, for example. I mean, in one way, it's not nearly as new as you were hoping, and in another way, it's a lot newer than you'd think. It's all subtlety. Which is great (and unexpected) about a game where the battle system involves mashing buttons.
Regarding the town-wandering: at least the towns were nice. Did you play Radiata Stories? That game was an excellent town with an RPG battle system as a minigame. Abyss kind of reminds me of Radiata's spirit, which is a good thing and a boring thing all at once.
What they need to do is, well, do SOMETHING about the little "Okay, let's talk to your characters now" mechanic. You know. The press SELECT to view the talking heads mechanic. I'm not saying they need to get rid of it -- because it's lovely, it's the soul of the game, especially when they've gone through some pains to make the characters actually interesting this time -- I'm just saying they need to streamline it.
You know -- and it's really ass-backward and stupid on paper -- though one of the cool things about Rogue Galaxy is you get in fights even in towns. It's ridiculous because the townspeople all disappear; however, you don't mind because the battles are so fun. It's what you're hungry for.
A weird side-effect of this is what the back of the box (we're talking about Rogue Galaxy here) advertises the "live talk" system, which basically means your characters talk back and forth while you're running around, whether in a dungeon or in a town. What gets discussed depends on the team members you're using and the current storyline events of the game.
The problem with it is there's too low a CEILING. As in, . . . well, it's hard to explain in English. Bizarrely. I am better at concrete things in Japanese. Still, I'll try: there's not ENOUGH. There's plenty of DEPTH; just not enough HEIGHT. You see? The subjects are varied, and the characters SEEM to be interacting with one another, though only in the way a Furby SEEMS to be learning how to speak.
In the same way, the weapon customization, which is simple and crunchy, makes it just too easy to pump up your weapon to morbid levels. Having shops only sell limited quantities of each weapon is a nice promise that the game makes, that it's going to keep you on your toes, though in the end, it doesn't matter. Kind of like Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. Though you only have a set amount of D-counter to use before you die and it's game over forever, they really do give you way, way more than you'd need to be able to beat the game easily. So yeah -- in the case of both Dragon Quarter and Rogue Galaxy: they need sequels.
What they need to do for the "Active Talk" system is write full, whole dialogues. As you wander the towns, you'll get conversation cues. The characters will talk. Their lips will even move, if you look at them!!
And then Tales needs to adopt this. See, the reason they show the anime portraits during the talking system is because you can't see them during the actual game. If only the characters, as they walked around, looked exactly as they did on the box art (as in Rogue Galaxy), then it wouldn't be an issue. Your characters talk, you look at them as they're talking if you want to, you resume walking, the character you're using talks sometimes, too; you can make conversation choices as you walk, and . . . well, it'd be nice and easygoing. It'd make town wandering seem fuller. It'd also dull the effect of the music, I guess, though hey.
As for aching to get into another battle -- you know what I do? I have my guitar on my lap as I play any RPG. When I'm just wandering towns, I play the guitar. So if a trip in a town is taking too long, I put the controller on my knee, play a little guitar, and then go back to the game. It works great in Dragon Quest, when you're watching your party attack. In Tales it usually doesn't work, because the battles involve so much button mashing -- though, well, with the dialoges and such, and the long walking trips, it works just fine.
If you don't want to take up the guitar, I suggest something like, say, knitting?
I think I understand. It does a lot of potentially interesting things (I dare not say innovative), but those things are not polished enough.
Sounds like Tales Of Symphonia.
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