French noises: the game is blowing up and not without good reason. It’s beautiful (awful flickering hair TAA artefacts and weird gormless facial expressions aside), the story is more mature than the usual slop gamers settle for, the style is shamelessly traced from persona five’s notes but with unique aesthetic flair. I am a known “video game stories are mostly actively a negative addition” hater and I’ve been moved to tears. Shit slaps.
I just have one question, what is the point of all the hours you are meant to spend holding down sprint running backwards and forwards through a sequence of empty corridors waiting to find the next actually interesting thing? What does it add? The best defense I can think of is that it gives you time to listen to the great music?
The pacing is whack, it’s banging fight. 5 minutes twiddling a joystick and occasionally pressing X, banging fight, 5 minutes twiddling, amazing fight, story beat, time to stop having fun because the overworld section is next!
Can someone please explain?
deleted by creator
Sure but you’re not doing anything interesting during the walking bits. Most of the corridors are just kinda pretty in a repetitive way, usually characters aren’t saying anything to develop themselves, there isn’t any play it’s the corridors of an art gallery, the spaces between the exhibits.
Media tends to cut away from the dull parts of travel in order to express it as a sequence of highlighted challenges. Video game worlds tend to be extremely compressed and abstract for this reason. Like if you go play a link to the past there aren’t many areas where you solve the same challenge as a prior screen and there are only a couple with no challenge to overcome or thing to meaningfully interact with. That game still feels like an epic journey.
deleted by creator
A difference in lotr is that you aren’t required to do stuff and each vista is unique.
I guess what baffles me is there are no interesting decisions. I am never thinking or playing as there are no choices or consequences. Seeing another red tree or whatever is like oh ok. It isn’t telling a story, it’s not giving me insight into the culture of the land, it’s not teaching me mechanics or letting me practice, it’s not providing room for character dialogue it’s just a red tree and 10 costume bucks.
That they give you a sprint button is the game admitting that they know this is boring. there is literally a fast forward through the movement button, that it isn’t a toggle or default speed is itself strange.
I used to get into this argument all the time back when I cared to argue with people on CS forums. The complaint was always “why valve add graphic” and when you get down to the root of the argument the argument was always “graphic distracting and spending dev cycle on graphic means less dev cycle on gameplay.” When you take this to its natural conclusion CS becomes a game where blue squares and red squares shoot each other with exactly one gun inside of a single white cube with one bombsite on one side labelled with a black letter A and one bombsite on the other side labelled with a black letter B. Red team tries to plant the bomb and blue team tries to stop them. It’s still at it’s core CS it’s just simplified down to it’s purest essence. Nobody could possibly say that anything is wasted, but, it’s still CS. If it didn’t follow the basic rules of CS it would be a different game.
And it turns out that literally nobody would play that game. As soon as I describe that the backpedaling begins and well we need SOME graphics and we need SOME corridors just not THESE or THOSE graphics and not corridors like THAT. And yet as CS is today it’s still one of the most popular games in the world. So clearly these or those graphics and that type of corridor is working for it otherwise nobody would be playing it.
So it sounds like you want to play a game that is like my reductive description of CS but instead you just move forward to a black sign that has white text on it that explains the story after you fight a square of a different color than the last square you fought. Maybe you think it does need more. Just not the one specific thing you don’t think it needs.
Try framing it that way and see if it makes a difference.
It turns out that putting different things and pacing and a world to look at and imagine helps most people enjoy games. If you DON’T like those things that’s totally cool and good and I would encourage you to find games that are simpler in line with your tastes, or if there isn’t one, maybe you’re onto something groundbreaking and you should go make it. We’re certainly all allowed to have stuff we like or don’t but “why corridor!” is just as silly to most of us as perhaps “why story!” or “why any graphics at all!” might be to you.
I think that’s a bit of a strawman. I am genuinely confused by the number of dead ends, empty loops, samey visuals, and the sheer length of time spent holding forward in an otherwise extremely intentional game.
Obviously doom doesn’t work if you just put all the enemies on a flat grey plane. Also though doom starts getting worse at a certain point if you start reducing the enemy density by adding long sections between each fight. Those long sections might get better if you do something with them, like in doom notfour they have heaps of long empty sections at one point where they blather lore at you. I loathed that section but I wasn’t confused as to why it was there, they wanted to tell you a story once they sucked you in with boom boom pew pew.
So assume I am not stupid. Have you played the game? why are they as long as they are? as narrow as they are? as empty as they are?
deleted by creator
Something being there because it’s there is not really a reason to sink Dev time and resources into it.
Most games with a sprint involve decision making. Usually something like a timer or stamina system with some mechanical implication for depleting it. E.g. if I travel faster now I won’t be prepared for combat later. This balances player concerns about moving fast when feeling safe or fleeing, while making it interesting by punishing reckless use.
Most worthwhile game mechanics are like this. Sometimes things are just there for play, like jumping in MMOs which largely just allows playful social expression in an otherwise extremely limited media. Emotes in multiplayer games serve a similar purpose despite having no obvious mechanical link.
One case for a sprint without mechanical trade offs is player movement control. Less relevant on games with a controller input but sometimes there. Usual practice to to have a run/walk toggle button though, and just build the world scale so running feels good in almost all circumstances and turn it on by default.
Having never played it (just wishlisted it on steam, lol), maybe those corridors are to hide loading times? The first God of War did that same thing very well.
There are already loading screens everywhere. I guess it might be hiding terrain popin. You could just put the fights close though, or even back to back.
Story beat, chain of fights, story beat would be a strict improvement imho. Put all the pretty world stuff into the background of the fights/travel animations. It’s not like you can explore or interact with it anyway.
Like the game has a jump button and mechanic along with animations and mechanics for grabbing ledges. The sole purpose of this has been, so far, optional bad platforming minigames that give pointless rewards and/or jumping at and sliding off invisible walls in a sequence of corridors.
I’m at the end of the game, I didn’t notice any especially long corridors? Just seemed like pretty standard jrpg level design
I’m not a big jrpg person. Persona 5 seemed to have higher fight density and more excitement (random enemies, juking patrols etc), Pokémon has the trainer battles at a pretty high density. Xenoblade’s world is very full of enemies and X has challenging world traversal with navigational puzzles to solve. Also in all of these games I have the same question but to a lesser extent.
Maybe it’s standard for like ff or something. In which case, why is it there is just the same question.
Like is it fun? does it help the story hit harder? what is adding?
Can’t speak for Clair because I haven’t played it but generally it’s exploration, world building and world immersion. I am particularly fond of older JRPGs with a separate worldmap vs town/dungeon view because the entire world is constructed this way, you can place events and happenings in the story in their geographic locations and it just feels good to have a good feel for place and setting.
That’s how Clair is constructed yeah, overworld with dungeons. For the most part every little passage to explore has an item to find or is a shortcut back. The level design shares a lot with soulslikes too, woth the flags serving as bonfires to respawn/level up/refill your heals (though I have never ran out).
So there are sections of world building and interesting vistas or whatever. Then there are just corridors.
It’s not like, bingo card, dark souls or something where as you’re exploring some corridor you find an item with some implied story. Oh an expedition member ran from this monster I just fought, fell here, and dropped their shield or something. There are moments like that kinda, usually the entrances to boss arenas with corpse piles and shit. Mostly though it’s a narrow corridor, repetitive scenery, 10 costume bucks.
It’s also not well signposted where the useful or interesting exploration is (going forward/challenging fight) and where the 10 costume bucks dead ends are.
For me, I don’t need rewards or items or whatever on a path if what’s down that path is meaningful part of worldbuilding.
FF9 had tonnes of things like this. Treno in particular is a fucking maze with loooooooong empty pathways between parts of the city that are kinda annoying but it’s one of the most memorable locations for me because it was annoying… I wouldn’t change it. For a JRPG the architecture of the location is a memorable feature in a sense, and by architecture I don’t mean the appearance/art but the traversible paths of the area.
Haven’t played a ff game (tried 7, was a snoozefest and apparently that’s the peak of them?) so idk. Maybe it’s like dad game stuff.
The mindset of someone who would want to play power wash simulator vs practice an instrument/do decorative knotwork/crossstitch/bake/read/whatever is pretty much inaccessible to me. So I guess I’m must a mechanic pilled pacemaxer while you’re fillercore and vibing.
It’s bookreading vs extreme sports. Different tastes I guess?
I enjoy both though. For different reasons and different moods. You do actually have to genuinely get into a world and story in order to enjoy the quieter parts though. If you don’t, they do become a factor for burnout on those games.
I like chill as fuck games too. But like in slime rancher traversal is like the game and the mechanics support that. There isn’t (at least as of last time I played it) a part of the map where you go and play a bad piano rhythm game or something.
If fans of jrpgs just sort of expect filler wandering and half executed minigames and that’s the reason they’re there then it explains why human lives were spent realising them. I didn’t know what was a thing though.
It is there to allow the atmosphere created by the art, music & narrative to cook. From the other comments it sounds like it’s not landing for you but that is the purpose of that design, and really, the whole game. The experience would be completely cheapened by increasing the pacing to story/fight/story in a compressed environment.
They do that in the open areas though. Like they’ll put some enemies, a beautiful scene, maybe some dialogue (sometimes that hilarious thing where the game says “wow isn’t this game so beautiful”) and then it’s corridors again.
I love this game, it’s awesome. The corridors are weird though.
Are you pressing the sprint button?
Yeah, I don’t think holding a button is gameplay though
it literally is tho
Come on don’t be like that. What are you trying to do?
