The Other Worlds Shrine

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  • Forsensic Analysis on the Dreamcast

  • Because playing them is not enough, we have to bitch about them daily, too. We had a Gameplay forum, but it got replaced by GameFAQs.
Because playing them is not enough, we have to bitch about them daily, too. We had a Gameplay forum, but it got replaced by GameFAQs.

 #131942  by Zeus
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 10:07 am
Man, I loved my DC. So many excellent games for it and no one gave it a shot aside from us hardcore gamers. That system wasn't even out for 2 years and I ended up with 90 games for it (about a dozen imported) and it had some of the best games of the generation (Soul Calibur to me was the best fighting game until Soul Calibur 2 came out).

And I must be one of the few who has fond memories of his Saturn. That wasn't a particularly good system technologically but it had some awesome games for it. And if you imported, it had EASILY the best fighting games on it 'til the DC took over that crown.

 #131955  by Mental
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 11:17 am
the DC was most underrated and i want to buy one at some point, i bet someday they'll be worth as much as they were when they were being actively sold. i had fun times on my roommate's dc at stanford...man.

the 360 is sort of morphing into a spiritual successor to it, i think, though, so that makes me VERY happy.

 #131956  by Mental
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 11:18 am
@Zeus: my Saturn was the shit. i wish to god sega had been able to actually get other developers to make games for it. >:(

 #131958  by Flip
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 12:11 pm
Seek has been MIA a little... one would have thought he would be involved in some of the threads of late.

 #131962  by Julius Seeker
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 1:49 pm
I do think it was a combo of poor timing and the boot disk.

Anyway, I read the article. To this day Skies of Adcadia remains my favourite RPG, and Soul Calibur my favourite fighter. Sega is starting to recover, though, with knew highly discussed upcoming franchises.

 #131964  by Zeus
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 2:03 pm
Legend of The Seeker wrote:I do think it was a combo of poor timing and the boot disk.

Anyway, I read the article. To this day Skies of Adcadia remains my favourite RPG, and Soul Calibur my favourite fighter. Sega is starting to recover, though, with knew highly discussed upcoming franchises.
Sega releases just as many duds as it does hits. But it is doing relatively OK as a publisher.

 #131966  by bovine
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 2:41 pm
Replay wrote:the DC was most underrated and i want to buy one at some point, i bet someday they'll be worth as much as they were when they were being actively sold. i had fun times on my roommate's dc at stanford...man.

the 360 is sort of morphing into a spiritual successor to it, i think, though, so that makes me VERY happy.
Replay wrote:@Zeus: my Saturn was the shit. i wish to god sega had been able to actually get other developers to make games for it. >:(
look at me. I am making a post.

I now have another point to make, possibly at someone new, now I have just pressed the edit button and gone back to my old post to add to it.

Oh look at me, editing once more. Now I can say that since I have three separate things to say in a row before anyone else has posted, I can make all of these statements in the nice, comfortable setting of a single post. No multiple posts streaming down the page to take up bovine's valuable scrolling finger. I can say all I need to say in a single post. Look at me, I'm the fucking king of posting town. Postington some call it.

 #131967  by Shellie
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 2:44 pm
:love:

 #131968  by Don
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 2:59 pm
That's a lot of words for saying 'yes and no' in the article. It's some very generic stuff where they blamed everything and nothing as the reason for the demise of the Dreamcast.

Dreamcast failed because it didn't have good games, though even if it did the piracy issue would've finished it off in at least Asia. Every good game for Dreamcast had some kind of fatal flaw besides Soul Calibur and fighting games aren't what you build a system on. Skies of Arcadia looked awesome but had no gameplay. Phantasy Star Online played awesome offline but was unplayable online (cheating, monthly fee, impossible to actually type coherent words in any meaningful time). Grandia 2 had great gameplay but no story (though it was accidentally good at certain times). Sonic Adventure didn't strike me as anything special. I don't even know why people would buy stuff like Power Stone. The Dreamcast library is simply absent of your generic, mindless million copy seller, like say Dynasty Warriors.

Even when viewed as a cult system, most of the so called cult games simply aren't very good. Skies of Arcadia was horrible when you actually have to get off the airship, which is about 85% of the whole time. It just happens that the airship parts are so good you can just forget about how bad the rest of the game was. I showed my friend the final airship fight against Xelos (I think that was his name) and he fell asleep halfway because you can only hit a guy with a million or so HP for 3000 damage a round (which could take 2 or 3 minutes if Xelos used one of his long animation attacks) and the whole fight takes 45 minutes even if though it's almost impossible to die. I enjoyed Skies of Arcadia, but people are way too forgiving on some really glaring flaws to the game simply because the game looks totally awesome.

 #131972  by Mental
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 4:16 pm
bovine wrote:
Replay wrote:the DC was most underrated and i want to buy one at some point, i bet someday they'll be worth as much as they were when they were being actively sold. i had fun times on my roommate's dc at stanford...man.

the 360 is sort of morphing into a spiritual successor to it, i think, though, so that makes me VERY happy.
Replay wrote:@Zeus: my Saturn was the shit. i wish to god sega had been able to actually get other developers to make games for it. >:(
look at me. I am making a post.

I now have another point to make, possibly at someone new, now I have just pressed the edit button and gone back to my old post to add to it.

Oh look at me, editing once more. Now I can say that since I have three separate things to say in a row before anyone else has posted, I can make all of these statements in the nice, comfortable setting of a single post. No multiple posts streaming down the page to take up bovine's valuable scrolling finger. I can say all I need to say in a single post. Look at me, I'm the fucking king of posting town. Postington some call it.
this also doesn't need responding to.

 #131976  by Lox
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 4:55 pm
bovine wrote:No multiple posts streaming down the page to take up bovine's valuable scrolling finger.
Don't get cocky. It's not that valuable.

 #131989  by bovine
 Mon Feb 02, 2009 8:44 pm
Zeus wrote:And I must be one of the few who has fond memories of his Saturn. That wasn't a particularly good system technologically but it had some awesome games for it. And if you imported, it had EASILY the best fighting games on it 'til the DC took over that crown.
and back to actually contributing to things...

The saturn was engineered to be more of a 2d machine than the playstation, and with the move to 3d games (mostly), the saturn really fell flat. Obviously you see some gems like guardian heroes, dragon force, the superior SF Alpha/Zero series (on the saturn as opposed to the PS), the marvel fighters, and three dirty dwarves on the 2d front, and then NiGHTS, the virtua fighters, the panzer dragoons (and saga) being the only worthwhile 3d releases.... you can see how they just couldn't compete on the 3d front with sony and nintendo who really pushed 3d (even though there were all those AMAZING 2d rpgs on the PS).

It's sad that most of the truly great saturn games (princess crown *drooooooooool*) will be out of my linguistic grasp and I'll have to settle buying them in japanese (or their japanese psp versions) and never really understanding them.

 #132018  by Julius Seeker
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 3:01 pm
Bottom line for me was a lot of DC games were fun. On Grandia 2 and Skies of Arcadia... I didn't find G2 to be fun or a world I wanted to visit, I loves SoA's world, and I found almost all aspects of the game fun. Any flaws with the game didn't matter to me. G2, I recall it had a good autobattle system that you could use to win almost every battle... FF8 came closest, someone should make a game where you fight only major bosses but don't need to slaughter hordes of peons throughout the game in order to stay fit enough to get through.

I thought software was sufficient in availability, hardware sales were alright, but people were getting DCs just to pirate software.

 #132019  by Shellie
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 3:03 pm
I remember playing a lot of Tony Hawk, Crazy Taxi, and Boom Boom Rockets. I think we had an emulator for it for nes and snes games as well.

 #132021  by bovine
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 3:41 pm
in terms of the Dreamcast, I didn't get one until well after it crashed and burned, so I don't have any sort of appreciation for it. I though the controller was awful, the memory card and rumble pack still being seperate and requiring batteries was stupid, and a large percentage of the games were awful. Anything that was good either continued on in sequel form (SC) or got ported (SoA, G2, and kinda jetset radio). It was the Saturn that suffered the most since pretty much none of the original IPs that hit it really found a home anywhere else, the exeptions being the panzer dragoon on the xbox and the nights game on the wii (or the remake of the original nights for the ps2, but only released in japan).

I think the dreamcast is overrated if anything.

 #132022  by Flip
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 4:28 pm
bovine wrote:in terms of the Dreamcast, I didn't get one until well after it crashed and burned, so I don't have any sort of appreciation for it. I though the controller was awful, the memory card and rumble pack still being seperate and requiring batteries was stupid, and a large percentage of the games were awful. Anything that was good either continued on in sequel form (SC) or got ported (SoA, G2, and kinda jetset radio). It was the Saturn that suffered the most since pretty much none of the original IPs that hit it really found a home anywhere else, the exeptions being the panzer dragoon on the xbox and the nights game on the wii (or the remake of the original nights for the ps2, but only released in japan).

I think the dreamcast is overrated if anything.

Some of those complaints were due to the available technology for its time. Rumble and mem cards were innovative ideas (staples now) that simply couldnt be done without triple A's since Lithium Ion and charging wasnt as prevalent. The same can be said for Sega CD and the 32X since they all needed their own AC adapter (you need 3 huge outlets!!) I think Sega tried too hard and it backfired, unfortunately.

 #132023  by Mental
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 4:32 pm
i will forever love the dreamcast due to its flourishing piracy scene...yes, me, the great sanctimonious anti-pirate...but my friend's full book of cds was awesome.

i still buy all the ip i can, when i can, if there's a legal channel, but i did have to cop to this one.

 #132024  by bovine
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 4:35 pm
the ps1 already incorporated rumble into their controller and the n64 didn't need batteries for its memory cards. Sure the whole "minigames" thing for the VMU was interesting, but entirely throw-away. The rumble pack and VMU should have been able to be powered by the system through the controller.

 #132025  by Kupek
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 5:00 pm
The Seekrshank Redemption wrote:someone should make a game where you fight only major bosses but don't need to slaughter hordes of peons throughout the game in order to stay fit enough to get through.
One was made, and it was called Shadow of the Colossus.

 #132034  by Zeus
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 8:25 pm
Seraphina wrote:I remember playing a lot of Tony Hawk, Crazy Taxi, and Boom Boom Rockets. I think we had an emulator for it for nes and snes games as well.
I think you mean Chu Chu Rocket. Boom Boom Rocket was that shiet game on XBLA from EA that came with the Arcade disc.

Lotus and I had that Crazy Taxi challenge going, that was fun as fuck (moreso that I won :-). And I put in a good 100 hours into MvC2, my fav fighting game of all time, and probably equal to that on Soul Calibur. There were SOO many great games in the less than 2 years that system was out. It's a shame it died

 #132035  by Zeus
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 8:26 pm
Kupek wrote:
The Seekrshank Redemption wrote:someone should make a game where you fight only major bosses but don't need to slaughter hordes of peons throughout the game in order to stay fit enough to get through.
One was made, and it was called Shadow of the Colossus.
Listen to the PhD student. Colossus was one of the best games of last generation and it was nothing other than finding and beating 16 BIG ASS bosses. It was incredible.

 #132037  by Zeus
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 8:34 pm
bovine wrote:I think the dreamcast is overrated if anything.
It's only a small core of fans who "overrate" the DC. It's a mostly forgotten system by the majority of gamers (and ex-gamers). But if you look at the games that system had (I'll send you a list of the ones I have sometime) in the short period of time it was out and I don't think there's been any system that compares in its first two years. There are tons of classic and just awesome games even if they weren't too popular or were vastly underappreciated. Sega probably released its greatest diversity and arguably greatest quality of games on that system, many of which most haven't heard of. And it's still probably the best system for fighting games and one of the best for shooters. Not to mention it was the first to have truly arcade-perfect ports.

And read that article, it truly was ahead of its time in a lot of ways on a hardware front. Sure the VMU was a gimmick and the rumble was stupid. The controller that looked stupid is actually the inspiration for the Xbox and 360 controllers and was insanely comfortable. And games looked great on it, far better than the first-gen PS2 games. Hell, Soul Calibur 1 is still a pretty game considering its age, as good as most PS2 games. And that was a launch title.

If anything, that system was vastly underrated. And this is coming from a former Nintendo-bitch who didn't like Sega growing up.

 #132045  by Mental
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 8:48 pm
Zeus wrote:
Kupek wrote:
The Seekrshank Redemption wrote:someone should make a game where you fight only major bosses but don't need to slaughter hordes of peons throughout the game in order to stay fit enough to get through.
One was made, and it was called Shadow of the Colossus.
Listen to the PhD student. Colossus was one of the best games of last generation and it was nothing other than finding and beating 16 BIG ASS bosses. It was incredible.
someday those dudes will make something just a touch less artsy and more mainstream and i will be hooked like crack. sadly i turn out to be a fairly visceral gamer in the end...trying ico was like watching a beautiful painting that made me ashamed that i wished i was playing something like god of war instead. i turn out to be less of an arthouse gamer than i would have liked.

 #132052  by SineSwiper
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 11:12 pm
Sword of the Berserk was probably the only good game on the Dreamcast that I could play through. Grandia 2 had a shitty story, agreed. Like Don was saying, the rest of the library was flawed.

 #132055  by bovine
 Tue Feb 03, 2009 11:51 pm
Zeus wrote:The controller that looked stupid is actually the inspiration for the Xbox and 360 controllers and was insanely comfortable.
The controller itself was nothing revolutionary, as it was just a slightly altered version of the Saturn 3d controller. The saturn's version even had a removable cord slot so you could possibly put expansions in (though I didn't ever see anything happen with that).

Image

Image

EDIT

also, who's great idea was it to put the cord at the bottom?
Last edited by bovine on Wed Feb 04, 2009 1:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

 #132059  by Blotus
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 12:54 am
I now know where our great divide lies, Bov. Yet your words make me want to revisit the DC so that I may validate my nostalgic love for it. I wish I'd never sold it... so... nostalgia wins and you're worse than Hitler :)

 #132065  by Julius Seeker
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 7:22 am
The cord fits into a slot at the top.

 #132080  by Julius Seeker
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 1:17 pm
Kupek wrote:
The Seekrshank Redemption wrote:someone should make a game where you fight only major bosses but don't need to slaughter hordes of peons throughout the game in order to stay fit enough to get through.
One was made, and it was called Shadow of the Colossus.

That is one I've been recommended in the past, I'll pick it up some time soon and try it out.

 #132082  by Zeus
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 1:47 pm
SineSwiper wrote:Sword of the Berserk was probably the only good game on the Dreamcast that I could play through. Grandia 2 had a shitty story, agreed. Like Don was saying, the rest of the library was flawed.
You're kidding me, right? Did you even play Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Seaman, Ikaruga, MvC2, RE: Code Veronica, Mars Matrix, Bangai-O, or anything other than Beserk on it?

When I get home I'll get a more comprehensive list of what great games there really was on that system.

EDIT: Oh, Record of Lodoss War was a great Diablo-like game too.

 #132090  by Don
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:17 pm
Besides RE I'm willing to bet the average guy has never heard of these games and I don't know why they'd care. Aside from Soul Calibur at best you named some cult games that someone who is particularly into something special might like, but that's not how you build a system around.

And the thing about cult games is that there is probably something about them that sucked which is why they just remain a cult game, not mainstream. Of course nobody in the cult wants to admit that their cult game might be inferior to a mass produced million seller, which is why cult game stay as cult games. Even Skies of Arcadia can be considered a cult game as the game was fundamentally flawed in a serious way that tends to be overlooked by its fans. When people have to ask you why does Grandia series have no story and you have to answer something like 'because the gameplay is awesome', you know you got a problem. It is easy to blame the world for being against you, but cult games are usually the way they are because of the game maker, not because the world is out to get them. If Grandia series actually had a story, or if Skies of Arcadia actually had something to do when you're not in an airship, they wouldn't just remain as the best game you've never heard of/played.

 #132092  by Kupek
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:39 pm
Don, Zeus' point wasn't that the DC should have succeeded, but that despite its failure, it had some great games. Then he listed the ones he liked.

 #132095  by Zeus
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:45 pm
Don wrote:Besides RE I'm willing to bet the average guy has never heard of these games and I don't know why they'd care. Aside from Soul Calibur at best you named some cult games that someone who is particularly into something special might like, but that's not how you build a system around.
Crazy Taxi wasn't exactly "cult", it was all over the arcades and even had a sequel on the Xbox. Neither was Marvel vs Capcom 2, it's a very popular game with fighting fans.

At the end of the day, what I was referring to was how there was a shitton of great games for that system as a counterpoint to Sine's "Beserk was the only good thing on the system". Sure many haven't heard of a lot of them because the DC was largely ignored by the masses once Sony announced the PS2, but that doesn't preclude it from having some great games.

And that's what this entire thread was originally about, how good or under-/overrated the system was. We know that most haven't heard of most of the games since the system was a failure.

 #132102  by Lox
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 4:16 pm
Kupek wrote:
The Seekrshank Redemption wrote:someone should make a game where you fight only major bosses but don't need to slaughter hordes of peons throughout the game in order to stay fit enough to get through.
One was made, and it was called Shadow of the Colossus.
A friend of mine JUST picked that game up on ebay and beat it. He loved it. I watched him play it and it looked like fun even several years later.

 #132104  by Don
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 4:51 pm
Kupek wrote:Don, Zeus' point wasn't that the DC should have succeeded, but that despite its failure, it had some great games. Then he listed the ones he liked.
And my point is that these games aren't really that great, despite the fact most people may have never heard of them.

 #132105  by Kupek
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 4:57 pm
Don wrote:And my point is that these games aren't really that great, despite the fact most people may have never heard of them.
To Zeus, they are great games.

 #132106  by Don
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 5:55 pm
Kupek wrote:
Don wrote:And my point is that these games aren't really that great, despite the fact most people may have never heard of them.
To Zeus, they are great games.
How does that have anything to do with the fact that Sine and I thought the library is flawed? Does his opinion overturn ours? It's very easy to argue most of the DC's library had some kind of problem. In fact that's about as true a statement as you can make in something that's usually very subjective. You can't deny stuff like Grandia had no story, or PSO(nline) wasn't playable online, or Skies of Arcadia had nothing outside of airships. That doesn't mean they can't be great games but having a crippling weakness tends to prevent the game from achieving any kind of mass recognition.

You can choose to overlook a game's weaknesses, but in the case of DC they're very glaring that it's hard to pretend they're not there. That's not to say they didn't have some great games but when your most recognizeable RPG is an online game that realistically cannot be played online, that really doesn't work out too well.

 #132107  by Zeus
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 7:18 pm
Don wrote:
Kupek wrote:Don, Zeus' point wasn't that the DC should have succeeded, but that despite its failure, it had some great games. Then he listed the ones he liked.
And my point is that these games aren't really that great, despite the fact most people may have never heard of them.
That is a matter of opinion. There are many that agree with both of us

Out of sheer curiosity, how many DC games did you sit and play? And what kind of games do you like?

 #132110  by Don
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 8:29 pm
Zeus wrote:
Don wrote:
Kupek wrote:Don, Zeus' point wasn't that the DC should have succeeded, but that despite its failure, it had some great games. Then he listed the ones he liked.
And my point is that these games aren't really that great, despite the fact most people may have never heard of them.
That is a matter of opinion. There are many that agree with both of us

Out of sheer curiosity, how many DC games did you sit and play? And what kind of games do you like?
PSO, Grandia 2, Skies of Arcadia, Soul Calibur, MvC, Power Stone, Sonic Adventures, the new Rival Schools game (whatever it was called), and probably some others. Half of them I got bored after 30 minutes.

Even a failed console has millions of guys who brought it so finding 'many' guys who agree doesn't mean much. There are even more people who have never heard of the games you mentioned and obviously they won't think very highly of a game they've never heard of so if you want to look for a majority opinion the obvious answer is that these games aren't too great.

Of the games I played considerably and actually enjoyed on DC:

Soul Calibur was great but you cannot build a system around a fighting game. It's never been done before and I don't think it will ever work. Do fighting games even sell a million copies? I sure don't remember seeing any fighting game on Sony's Greatest Hits.

PSO was great except the Online part was unplayable, negating its entire reason for existence. It also had the dubious distinction where PSO volume 2 on the GC managed to take the same game and made it worse. It was a great offline customizable Diablo 2 clone, and probably worth it just for the value of that. But the O in PSO does stand for Online, so it's hard to say it succeeded as a game when the key feature of the game isn't actually playable.

Skies of Arcadia basically turns into a cycle where you go to one of the continent with Aika's amusing rendition of what to expect, and you get to fly around for about an hour through some really awesome looking place, and then you realize you have to get off your airship and get into some stupid looking dungeon that serves no purpose other than to waste your time. Then you finally do finish the dungeon and get to get back to your airship again, and the cycle repeats eternally between awesomeness and mediocrity. The boredom part of Skies is so mind numbing that the only character that wasn't in my party I remember are Galcian, Ramirez, and Gregorio. I think there are supposed to be other guys you meet, but it's all just a blur because all the awesomeness of the game is spread out through a ton of boredom.

The game takes way too long before you acquire the upgrade that lets you bypass regular enemies in the airship. The coolest part in Skies of Arcadia is just to fly around for no reason and check out the world. But you can't do this until you get the upgrade to fly above/below the clouds. That wouldn't help the dungeon crawling parts, but at least you can actually play around in the world. And it's pretty dumb you basically have to be either submerged or above the clouds the whole time and see basically nothing and then dive/rise back in to your destination. It should really be that once you get the Delphinus you should no longer have to fight random battles on your airship (you have the flagship of the imperial navy, after all) and can just cruise around the world at your leisure.

Grandia 2, like I stated, has great gameplay but no plot. I don't mean a bad story. There are some time in the game where you're not even sure there is a story at all. It has the questionable distinction of being the Grandia game with the most accident moments where there appeared to be a story. Aira, Melfice, and that Malrog guy all appear to accidentally have a story. Of course you quickly realize that it is only a pure accident but in some sense giving you a false sense of hope that there might be a story makes it worse than any other Grandia game where they don't even pretend there's a point to the story.

In particular it's pretty heinous that Aira's story is so good that it tricks you into thinking there might actually be a point to all the parts of Valmar. The fight is also extremely challenging provided you didn't specifically level up to counter her advantages. It's a fight where if you're at an appropriate level it's not guaranteed you can beat it but yet it doesn't defeat you by being cheap. Taking the story and the fight itself as a whole that fight has to go in about top 5 in RPG in terms of presentation, and because of that Grandia 2 peaked way too early (Aira is 2nd out of the 7) and there is nothing but letdown left in the entire game.

 #132114  by Kupek
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 9:57 pm
Don wrote:
Kupek wrote:
Don wrote:And my point is that these games aren't really that great, despite the fact most people may have never heard of them.
To Zeus, they are great games.
How does that have anything to do with the fact that Sine and I thought the library is flawed?
I'm assuming that Sine, true to form, has not played most of the DC library that he's evaluating.

 #132116  by Flip
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 10:08 pm
Lox wrote:
Kupek wrote:
The Seekrshank Redemption wrote:someone should make a game where you fight only major bosses but don't need to slaughter hordes of peons throughout the game in order to stay fit enough to get through.
One was made, and it was called Shadow of the Colossus.
A friend of mine JUST picked that game up on ebay and beat it. He loved it. I watched him play it and it looked like fun even several years later.
Yes, yes, and yes. We talked about it on this board, but maybe not enough. It was one of the few super secret gems on the PS2 that was commonly overlooked. I only played through it once, but now since i forget most ways to beat the bosses, i def need to pick it up again. Great game that, at times, will beg you to look up how to beat the bosses on GameFAQs, but dont do it. Be a classic hardcore and figure it out, much more rewarding.

 #132123  by Julius Seeker
 Wed Feb 04, 2009 11:05 pm
I don't know. I found the towns and cities very interesting In Skies of Arcadia. I also remember dozens of characters, many of which recruited to the crew and used to populate the town you build. I also found the dungeons much more interesting than Grandia 2's for example. Although I will admit the Dreamcast version's encounter rate was too high; this was the only real flaw, fixed in Legends (along with plot holes surrounding Ramirez, the Empire, and Galcian).

The game was pirated to hell, people are surprised I actually own a real copy of the DC version.

I also don't think all cult games are necessarilly flawed, nor do I think wouldn't appeal to more given proper marketing. Chrono Trigger in North America is a great example; a 13 year old port slaughtered the original in sales.

 #132128  by Don
 Thu Feb 05, 2009 12:51 am
The Seekrshank Redemption wrote:I don't know. I found the towns and cities very interesting In Skies of Arcadia. I also remember dozens of characters, many of which recruited to the crew and used to populate the town you build. I also found the dungeons much more interesting than Grandia 2's for example. Although I will admit the Dreamcast version's encounter rate was too high; this was the only real flaw, fixed in Legends (along with plot holes surrounding Ramirez, the Empire, and Galcian).

The game was pirated to hell, people are surprised I actually own a real copy of the DC version.

I also don't think all cult games are necessarilly flawed, nor do I think wouldn't appeal to more given proper marketing. Chrono Trigger in North America is a great example; a 13 year old port slaughtered the original in sales.
I remember seeing this review on Phantasy Star 4 or 3 on some magazine, it showed this guy walking next to this town, with thought bubble "I need to buy some telepipes", and then a random encounter appeared. He killed those guys, next frame he accidentally walked one step the other way, got another random encounter. After that it shows a frame of him saying "I think I was supposed to go to this town for something but I can't remember now", and I think after that he walked one step the right way and got yet another random encounter.

That precisely sums up Skies of Arcadia's problem. The random encounters are simply way too much, and after a while you stop remembering what the game was about because random encounter is all there is. It gets a little bit better when you can avoid enocunters in the overworld, but it's a huge distraction. The story was okay, and the characters might even be good too, but it's hard to remember anything after the mindnumbing number of ranodm encounters.

FF9 had the same problem where excessive encounter rate means at the end you don't actually remember what happened in the game.

The Grandia series, on the other hand, makes no attempt to pretend there's some sort of story. But I think from a gameplay view it is just about right. The engine plays very well, and the number of random encounters is about right. It's just too bad there isn't anything besides the gameplay in the Grandia series.

And I don't see how CT can possibly be a cult game. It is definitely mainstream. I don't think cult games are bad, but people who like cult games are very blind to the shortcoming of their cult game.

 #132134  by Zeus
 Thu Feb 05, 2009 9:39 am
Flip wrote:
Lox wrote:
Kupek wrote: One was made, and it was called Shadow of the Colossus.
A friend of mine JUST picked that game up on ebay and beat it. He loved it. I watched him play it and it looked like fun even several years later.
Yes, yes, and yes. We talked about it on this board, but maybe not enough. It was one of the few super secret gems on the PS2 that was commonly overlooked. I only played through it once, but now since i forget most ways to beat the bosses, i def need to pick it up again. Great game that, at times, will beg you to look up how to beat the bosses on GameFAQs, but dont do it. Be a classic hardcore and figure it out, much more rewarding.
It cracked 250k sold here in North America so it wasn't exactly "overlooked". It just didn't sell nearly as much as it deserved to while other tripe sold incredibly well.

And I agree with the GameFAQs thing. I musta spent hours on some of the bosses trying to figure out what to do (including the snake one in the cave....I couldn't believe that's what it was). It's so much more rewarding and it's actually the entire point of the game. Using a FAQ to figure out how to beat a boss takes away half the game.

 #132135  by Zeus
 Thu Feb 05, 2009 9:42 am
Don wrote: FF9 had the same problem where excessive encounter rate means at the end you don't actually remember what happened in the game.
What? I had zero issues remembering anything in FF9 and never remember the game becoming a drag to play due to the insane encounter rate. To me, FF7 was FAAR worse with the encounter thing, particularly near the end when you're making your way to Sephiroth. I was just doing everything in my power to run from every fight just to end the game 'cause it dragged so much and you fought every 7 seconds. FF9 was easily the best of the PSX FF games and should have been FF7 in more ways than one.

 #132144  by Don
 Thu Feb 05, 2009 1:53 pm
Zeus wrote:
Don wrote: FF9 had the same problem where excessive encounter rate means at the end you don't actually remember what happened in the game.
What? I had zero issues remembering anything in FF9 and never remember the game becoming a drag to play due to the insane encounter rate. To me, FF7 was FAAR worse with the encounter thing, particularly near the end when you're making your way to Sephiroth. I was just doing everything in my power to run from every fight just to end the game 'cause it dragged so much and you fought every 7 seconds. FF9 was easily the best of the PSX FF games and should have been FF7 in more ways than one.
I'm not sure how you remember things but it's widely acknowledged FF9 had the worst enemy encounter rate out of all the recent FFs. And some of the stuff you fight at the end are actually pretty tough too. The only hard part in the last dungeon in FF7 is if you got Master Tonberries, which have always been more like a boss than a random encounter in all the FFs.

 #132145  by Zeus
 Thu Feb 05, 2009 2:06 pm
Don wrote:
Zeus wrote:
Don wrote: FF9 had the same problem where excessive encounter rate means at the end you don't actually remember what happened in the game.
What? I had zero issues remembering anything in FF9 and never remember the game becoming a drag to play due to the insane encounter rate. To me, FF7 was FAAR worse with the encounter thing, particularly near the end when you're making your way to Sephiroth. I was just doing everything in my power to run from every fight just to end the game 'cause it dragged so much and you fought every 7 seconds. FF9 was easily the best of the PSX FF games and should have been FF7 in more ways than one.
I'm not sure how you remember things but it's widely acknowledged FF9 had the worst enemy encounter rate out of all the recent FFs. And some of the stuff you fight at the end are actually pretty tough too. The only hard part in the last dungeon in FF7 is if you got Master Tonberries, which have always been more like a boss than a random encounter in all the FFs.
Not my recollection at all. I remember FF7 and Xenogears being far worse with their random encounters. It could also be that I actually enjoyed the battles in FF9 whereas I couldn't wait to run away from the battle system in the other two games. But FF9 never once felt as though it was hindering in any way due to the random encounters

 #132147  by Julius Seeker
 Thu Feb 05, 2009 2:08 pm
FF7 has very slow battles, slowest in the series. FF9 has some nightmarish locations with the encounter rates, like the Lifa tree. Skies of Arcadia's original version is fairly bad, but if you find it necessary to play without then Legends has a lower rate than most RPGs as well as faster battles than the original.

 #132148  by Don
 Thu Feb 05, 2009 2:34 pm
I think most of the fights in FF7 must assume you have some of the really good enemy skills, like Beta, which basically kills just about everything. Otherwise it can get somewhat tedious. FF9 doesn't have any easy way to clean up the stuff you fight unless you're in Trance. I remember running away from most fights until you get Super Saiyan Zidane who can kill like anything in one hit in random encounters.