He Frag, She Frag

Hey, Japan, we’ve had soundcards for almost two decades now – use them!

I was watching Jasmine play Lost Odyssey last night – a spiritual successor to the Final Fantasy games on the 360 – and I was [somewhat] shocked to see reels and reels of exposition done completely in text. Text! Text! How about flipping your four DVD’s worth of boring, emptily-rendered cinematics into some useful voice-acting so you don’t have to read the equivalent of two novels between each battle?

Someone tell me this, too; why does a game need to be 40+ hours long? Do you do anything diverse in those hours? No. You do line-up-and-whack-off grinds for a couple days between each asinine cinematic, which is followed up by – in Lost Odyssey’s case – pages and pages of textual storytelling. Apparently the main character, Kaim – an amnesiatic immortal – only has text-based memories, because each recollection he has is done in 5,000 words or less. That you have to read.

I have no problem with reading, don’t get me wrong. If the game were made in 1993, it’d be fine – but it drives me crazy when these JRPG’s – heralded as epics – get ported over here with polished creature designs, and nothing more. I don’t feel immersed in a cinematic expierence when the camera is fixated on the pages of a damn paperback for 15 minutes at a time. The ‘memory’ sequences don’t even have any stimulating visuals to accompany them.

This goes for you too, Nintendo. Make your damn Zelda games talk. It’s 2008.

Mass Effect did a fabulous job of blending movie with game. Japanese developers need to start appreciating the fact that video games are something we westerners do better, and improve their tired old RehashCraft.