<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I know some of you have been saying we need more in-depth plot, but my question is that would a better plot be necessarily a good thing? Would your average player even notice it? At least back when Star Ocean 2 was actively discussed, I noticed a lot of people missed some of the subtler points of the game. I'm not talking about the secret documents you've to decipher, since that's one of those things you can miss without being very thorough. I'm referring to how most people didn't realize Expel was actually Nede (of course, you can only see it certain combination of endings). That, I thought, was one of the finer points of the plot. Compare Nede (Expel) to Energy Nede, you can see that the Nedian's aggressive push toward technology and progress is responsible for their own downfall. It's more than just the fact that Nede has more trees than Energy Nede (they got a lot of those too). The two planets are just fundamentally different. The secret laboratory is only place on Energy Nede that is really not Energy Nede. It is sophisticated but it doesn't push away the nature. Now, I normally really hate the 'nature good, technology bad' theme, but this is different. The secret laboratory lab that houses stuff like space-time shield and whatnot coexists peacefully with a lush surrounding. The difference is that Nede (Expel) is not tainted by ambition, and while Energy Nede may have a lot of trees, the ambition of Nedians lead to its destruction as well (I don't really buy that 'a species that's not evolving is dying. Nedians screwed it up themselves and it's not because they didn't progress enough.)
Of course, there are also other elements like the irony how the Ten Wise Men are trying to get back to Nede, but they blew up Nede in the process. Anyway, my point is that if you put finer points like this in a game, a lot of people end up missing them, so is that really necessary? The Nedians were expelled from their homeland by their own action, hence the name Expel for Nede. But how many people actually sat down and think about why the starting planet in SO2 is called that? I sure didn't until I beat the game several times. Well, the Expel deal may not be the most incredible act of foreshadowing known to mankind, but it's at least one that's not transparent.
In fact, a lot of recent RPG 'plot' seems to fall into this category. FF8's Rinoa and FF10's Tida (Tidus) comes into mind. Rinoa has a dog name Angela, has angel wings on her clothing, and her limits is Angel Wings or whatever. Geez, I wonder what she could possibly symbolize. Tida comes from the word "Tide", uses a water sword, plays blitzball which is a water sport, and if you've been keeping up to date on Square wallpapers you'll notice that he typically appears by a watery area. He couldn't possibly have anything to do with water, right? It's true I don't sit down think about things like this the first time I played through the game, but after you've time to think about it, it's really dumb and makes you wonder why it's even there at all.
And then there's the other kind of plot device, which I call it the Eva approach. Throw tons of big words (preferably from the bible), talk about random important sounding stuff, and of course, always talk about killing God, and you get your instant RPG plot. Xenogears is kind of like this, and Xenosaga looks like it's going to turn out this way. My Japanese friend said the entire trailer is just a ton of key words that do not mean anything even if you can understand the language, since you've no idea what the key words actually mean. Lovely.
I'm all for good plot, but it seems like most RPG plot writers don't know what it means to have a good plot. If you can't pull it off successfully, I'd rather have your old good hero saves the world stuff rather than some cheap attempt to sound sophisticated that turns out to be not.</div>
Of course, there are also other elements like the irony how the Ten Wise Men are trying to get back to Nede, but they blew up Nede in the process. Anyway, my point is that if you put finer points like this in a game, a lot of people end up missing them, so is that really necessary? The Nedians were expelled from their homeland by their own action, hence the name Expel for Nede. But how many people actually sat down and think about why the starting planet in SO2 is called that? I sure didn't until I beat the game several times. Well, the Expel deal may not be the most incredible act of foreshadowing known to mankind, but it's at least one that's not transparent.
In fact, a lot of recent RPG 'plot' seems to fall into this category. FF8's Rinoa and FF10's Tida (Tidus) comes into mind. Rinoa has a dog name Angela, has angel wings on her clothing, and her limits is Angel Wings or whatever. Geez, I wonder what she could possibly symbolize. Tida comes from the word "Tide", uses a water sword, plays blitzball which is a water sport, and if you've been keeping up to date on Square wallpapers you'll notice that he typically appears by a watery area. He couldn't possibly have anything to do with water, right? It's true I don't sit down think about things like this the first time I played through the game, but after you've time to think about it, it's really dumb and makes you wonder why it's even there at all.
And then there's the other kind of plot device, which I call it the Eva approach. Throw tons of big words (preferably from the bible), talk about random important sounding stuff, and of course, always talk about killing God, and you get your instant RPG plot. Xenogears is kind of like this, and Xenosaga looks like it's going to turn out this way. My Japanese friend said the entire trailer is just a ton of key words that do not mean anything even if you can understand the language, since you've no idea what the key words actually mean. Lovely.
I'm all for good plot, but it seems like most RPG plot writers don't know what it means to have a good plot. If you can't pull it off successfully, I'd rather have your old good hero saves the world stuff rather than some cheap attempt to sound sophisticated that turns out to be not.</div>
