>>1586479 >Because by that, you can basically turn them into anything you want as long as you have a fine sized community who shares the same thoughts I'get it what you talk nowadays, with all this thinking and political ideas, I think they try to show their politics and ideologies in video games, but in the past they used to do the same but without so much real politics. >WoW lore (yes, the Ally vs Horde lore) In WoW the lore didn't make much sense and sometimes you could get information from speculation from the devs or from reading npc and quests and when not from the books that over the years became almost mandatory. the mmo itself has books inside to read. The problem is that a lot of lore was sometimes created by the community (ally and horde) and then the devs added it, but then it went from being speculation to just another addition. It used to be more fun when it was mysterious and awesome, then it all ended up in miserable insignificant or cut quests or horrible raids. I really enjoyed the non-canonical wow roleplaying guide which had a lot of fun stuff in it. things are done on the fly back in time, not determined by a book. not everything needs to make sense, just work or be a mystery. >Yume Nikki the same thing happened with yume nikki i think that wikia fandom and communities sometimes screw up the community and that sense of lore creating more of a lore than a speculation of the nonsense of the stories that are supposed to be made that way because of lack of information, wishes or own will of the devs or because they want to add something later or they don't know what to do.

>>1586620 I don't know what they call that trope but I guess it's just political and community thinking and something influence on the game development and the other is similar to God of the gaps maybe... >Also I think we should have raided sylvanas, killed her, humiliated her and hung her head on a stake at the entrance of Stormwind and Orgrimmar.

>>1586479 >become injured >strawberry jam in your eyes >jam goes away after a little while; no longer injured That's probably my most hated with only a few seconds of thought.

Guns being peashooters vs enemies It's a GUN!

>>1586781 So many 2000s shooters had this fucking issue, what the fuck were they thinking is beyond me. That and shotguns only useful at point blank. Half Life 2 with some damage and AI mods plays like a fucking dream.

Not a trope, but more of a pet peeve of mine is when a developer states that "real life is boring". You can just tell they're urbanite retards who have never left their grey jungle.

>>1586479 I don't get how you go from something being influenced by thoughts/belief to "in the end it's all fake"

The word "trope" is pretty gay to begin with

>>1586924 >You can just tell they're urbanite retards who have never left their grey jungle. Even in an urban grey jungle you can find funny/weird shit like any city in South Florida for example. It's just nihilistic and unimaginative bullshit for non creatives that can't branch out of their own perspectives and assume their own empty lives is the same as everyone else's.

>>1587213 There's so much cool shit IRL I just don't understand how can someone voice such a retarded statement.

>>1586924 I have a particular distaste for disingenuous people that argue against any semblance of realism in games. There's so much that you can do to make a game realistic and inspired in real life, with a lot of complexity and nuance in just the right way, to then get niggers immediately retorting "BUT HAVING INVENTORY LIMITS IS BOOOOOORING", mainly from the fact that they hate being limited in games. Limitations are the heart of creativity and fun. That webm from Gaben saying that "realism isn't fun" is one of the stupidest cognitivehazards in the internet right now and so many people bite it, it profoundly annoys me with the results because now so many games are this grey, uninspired blob of nothingness.

>>1586928 If you not thinking about them, they will just poof out of existence and nothing will happen, or again, thinking they're some kind of harmless hot anime girls and they will change to be like that. It kills any kind of conflict and connection to the characters by learning this fact, as the reader. To the point you get apathy at worst, which is the writer's death wish. As a example: Why should I care about any fictional monsters if I can just use my "psychic" powers to turn them into dust? When 80% of said stories forward was how big of a deal these kind of "threat" is. Even worse if this piece of information was beating out over and over, while the writer is too much of a pussy to even show us the result for the sake of "mystery", which is very ironic. And again, it's also a lazy way to write a explanation so that you won't need to be creative about it. >>1586924 >>1587249 >>1587566 I think it's thanks to trash like Life is Strange are how some people ruined the perception of it, even Gabe himself. But yeah, it's mostly said by hacks who have zero creativity. Fucking TF2 and L4D2 are realistic than any of these uncreative slops who claims to be as such. Fucking Pokemon has more real life animals as much as fantasy ones, yes, a Rattata and a Ursaring are just cartoonish depictions of a rat and a bear. They're as ordinary as ours. You just give them Flamethrowers. Hell, I'd say that most normal types are just normal animals you encounter in the wild, just more cartoonish and stylish. But they're still the way they are depicted. Again, a Rattata is still a rat, a Radicate is just the fat one.

Speaking generally, I dislike time consumption as a metric of "content/value" or "difficulty". A game you can sink a lot of time into because it's engaging is not the same as being deliberately designed to waste your time.

I hate it when you fight some ultra-powerful boss character and beat them, only for them to then say, "Heh, not bad. But I was only using 1/1000000th of my strength!" and then run away for some contrived reason. It makes the whole thing feel pointless.

>>1587889 It's even worse if they suddenly wipe your party in one turn, and then asspull a reason to not just kill you right there and then.

I've grown to dislike crossovers, particularly the kind that don't mesh together at all. It comes off as masturbatory, with nearly all of it being tasteless fandom circlejerk and corporations baiting the kind of people who want everything they enjoy to match their eclectic merch hoard. I'm kinda okay with crossovers that actually work, like when they share the same tone, a similar setting, and already have a lot in common. But it's obnoxious when they're too lazy to commit to it and have to fuck up a character's personality to make them fit in, or make up an excuse plot like "They all got sucked into an unfamiliar world together" or "The universes are combining and making bizarre amalgamations of the landscape". By extension, I also dislike multiverse stuff, as nearly all of it is lazy writers wanting a soft reboot or a variety pack of themes to work with. Funny enough, I think YIIK is the only exception, as it's the only series I've ever seen do something meaningful with the concept.

>>1588382 Hit the nail on the head as to why I dislike modern Smash Bros. They started taking it too seriously, which is why the original 2 are the best IMO.

>>1586479 >Everything was actually built on the ruins of an ancient precursor civilization! Makes me cringe every time.

>The church is actually evil! It was fine in 90s when it was still a fresh plot twist, but everyone can see this coming from a mile away nowadays. It's actually more "le subverting le expectations" if the church is actually the main good guys.

>>1588382 I'M GONNA YIIK IT OUT

>>1588914 It's rare but I like when it's a dogmatic sect within said religion.

>>1590378 "The church is actually evil!" works best when you're playing a priest or paladin, and your faith empowers you to defeat the corrupt sect.

It's less of a story trope and more of a gameplay trope, but the idea of healers just being support bitches and sitting there and doing nothing when not healing, or only having healing kits. Or only having the job to heal. Divine magic is cool, earth elemental magic is cool, paladins and crusaders have been a thing for ages, and a priest or priestess can be trained in self defense. I don't really know where this idea even originates from. Final Fantasy always gave white mages incredibly powerful offensive spells (Glare and Holy in the first game, later games gave them aero/stone/water and more powerful versions) to use when not healing AND gave them the ability to heal undead to death. WoW could be another origin point but I'm not too familiar with that. DnD always had clerics doing smite and being melee fighters. This concept just mystifies me, and while it's somewhat dying off in recent years I wonder where it even came from in the first place. Another trope I don't like so much is the girlboss of recent years. Incredibly flawed female characters that are presented as 100% correct and right in their ways despite being awful people, sometimes even outright villains treated as heroes. Even seen this trope in some Japanese games like Tales of Arise with Shionne being an insufferable cunt yet the story or other characters never calling her out for her bullshit, but the writers did say they took Life is Strange as inspiration so maybe she's just a mirror of Chloe. >>1590378 >>1590485 Yeah that's the best way to do the trope. Or at least have the villainous turn cause a massive schism in the church that has to be dealt with. The other way it can work is the church being "evil" is just extreme methods of dealing with a potential threat or greater foe.

Cryptics work especially as well being tulpas. OP is a hackfraud and a faggot

>>1591044 What, do you have a cryptid tulpa? Is she nice?

Not entirely sure this is a "trope" but the existence of a few different branches of magic existing, only each of them does the exact same thing with a different color scheme instead of actually capitalizing on the differences in elements and being creative in the design of spells and magic. You know, magic? That thing that's beyond limitation and allows for practically anything to happen? You want item and object conjuration, intangibility, illusionary control of perception and Jedi mind tricks, enchantments that turn something into a living familiar, transmutation, blood pacts with distant ethereal powers and the unending fount of power limited only by your imagination and mastery of the material world itself? Fuck you, here's a fireball and a snowball. And maybe electricity too.

>>1588900 I actually like this trope but i think it is overutilized in vidya.

>>1588900 >-t. broccoli head

>Character dies in water >Like, not from drowning, water is just an instant death hazard What, is my character made of sugar or something?

>>1591044 t. Fatenigger

>>1588900 t. Cave Johnson

>>1588900 >t.American

>>1590865 Doctors in war were rarely issued weapons and usually heavily protected by the Geneva convention, faith healers were men of God and ascribed heavily to never doing harm and being pacifists. It's not really hard to understand where the trope comes from when 90 percent of our organized religions preach peace as a core tenet.

>>1588900 To be fair this is quite common i real life.

>>1592165 It's a constant unless you're an African nigger or an American

>>1591335 I'm willing to give some leeway for basic projectiles in magic-heavy games, but the spells should at least have visual variety and arc variety in that case, like lightning spears VS soul arrows VS fireballs in dark souls. Otherwise this trope sucks and is usually the sign of an uncreative dev or dev team. >>1592119 I guess? I don't see people citing it like that though. It's also a mentality thing in MMOs and multiplayer games too, which is the more bizarre part of the equation, especially if those games actually give you good offensive tools as a healer or support archetype/class/char/etc. Ideally priests with vows of pacifism or doctors like that that wouldn't be on the fucking front lines alongside the fighters either, outside of rare situations like combat medics or the occasional group of soldiers shipped with a priest for morale. Rather, they would be near them at best or not retreat in time. Either way the idea is lame from a gameplay perspective in video games. It can work well as a writing tool, but they need to do more than be a heal bitch in the moment-to-moment gameplay such as use buffs or aggro manipulation. Healers that can actually slap people around, with magic or otherwise, tend to be much more fun to control and have the added gameplay depth of balancing supporting oneself or allies and dealing damage. >>1592165 Yeah I don't get his beef with that one unless he's talking about hyperboria-tier civilizations. Even then, it can work well in a post-post-apocalypse setting provided the story leading up to it has tons of hints of said past civ existing.

>>1594085 >priests with vows of pacifism or doctors like that that wouldn't be on the fucking front lines alongside the fighters either, outside of rare situations like combat medics Frontline combat medics were literally throwing themselves on top of soldiers under fire during the entirety of WW2. They couldn't shoot back at all due to their own pledge to "Do no Harm" and that's a real scenario from direct conflict IRL. Parties in MMOs are literally organized like military squadrons too. In fact, they're there to combat stuff directly on the frontline just like a squad would and as you yourself mentioned, there's combat medics. That's literally how things are in civilized conflicts. I see 0 issues with having dedicated healer roles, especially in worlds where healing can keep up with direct damage and is usually much safer than throwing yourself on top of your hurt friends, as I'd bet you if we had crazy nano-tech healing we'd have real time healers in combat in pretty much just the same way. >I don't see people citing it like that though Basically all media where we have a dedicated healer, they go out of their way to mention that healing is pretty much all they can do. In fact, it's the exception to have a healer archetype that can do more than healing, and all associations are inspired heavily by our modern standards for healthcare and assistance being something of an "abnegation of yourself". >from a gameplay perspective This is more nuanced, however. I'm with you blaming shitty devs that accepted that the healer role is for women and thus they capped it of all complexity for accessibility. Clerics in Pathfinder are the shit in that they can heal, but are also versatile with their magic, but I don't really find odd to see fully focused healers as you do.

>>1586669 I'm reminded of the annoying sounds that play when your health is really low. A constant, high-pitched noise is distracting to notice while roaming around with only 1 HP left.

>>1595587 Geez, I forgot how bad this was. Super Metroid low health sound, I'm sorry for thinking you were annoying.

>>1590865 yeah clerics being relegated to healsluts and pacifists are gay. this is honestly feels more like an MMO thing but the japanese pushed this trope a lot more thru the 80s/90s, especially in vidya, i find (FF1's white mages barely have weaponry, they wear robes, they have only two offensive magics like Dia and Holy, etc). if you've played TTRPGs, you'd be shocked at how absolutely shite they are offensively in most modern RPGs, especially how OP Clerics are in most DnD editions. Hell, even Warhammer Fantasy had a class/unit called the Battle Priest who'll cave more skulls than they heal. Im not sure why they were made that way considering even Dragon Quest and Wizardry Priests are formidable back then. it's more likely the designers who followed the weakass healer tropes for the games lack any ttrpg experiences when making them i think

>>1595587 WAKE UP ANON IT'S TIME TO GET READY FOR SCHOOL

>>1587566 >BUT HAVING INVENTORY LIMITS IS BOOOOOORING It is

>>1586929 Frequently used incorrectly, likely because of TVTropes.

>>1588900 >>1594085 I like the trope when main character lives in a medieval/fantasy world, but then reader/player discovers that world characters are in is either post-apocalyptic earth or earth exists/existed in that universe, and has remnants/travelers or artefacts from our "old" current day world which may or may not exist anymore. Bonus points when characters do not have a clue about current days earth at all and for them it's all a precursor civilization or myth stuff, but it is obvious for a player. I don't know how to call this trope though.

>>1596490 Low IQ

>>1586790 > Half Life 2 with some damage and AI mods plays like a fucking dream. Recommend me some.

>>1597684 Check the Workshop Use the Rebalanced Weapons mod and follow the instructions in the page. Change the Half Life 2 game you're playing when ingame to make sure the script is on. Then get the better AI mod, that's it.

>>1586479 >choosen one trope Like whats the fucking point, if the story is rigged for your favor? Underdog hero all the fucking way!

>>1587695 >If you not thinking about them, they will just poof out of existence and nothing will happen, or again, thinking they're some kind of harmless hot anime girls and they will change to be like that. It kills any kind of conflict and connection to the characters by learning this fact, as the reader. To the point you get apathy at worst, which is the writer's death wish. I don't know dude, sounds more like you just came across an absolute dogshit implementation of the idea and it soured it for you. None of those negatives (which do suck) are implied by the base concept. >>1591335 this is mostly because of developers getting brainwashed by "design wisdom" about things needing to be balanced to be fun, which is an ethos that inherently pushes them away from making unique things because differently colored damage is way easier to equalize in power compared to actual magic. >>1598083 sadly the underdog hero usually still becomes a choosen one in all but name because not doing that requires more writing ability. You might end up even worse than the acknowledged choosen one because if you are bringing up the concept by name these days there is probably a thematic point or two about rising to the occasion in there.

>>1586638 > >>1594502

>>1586924 Spoken like an urbanite retard >swimming in reef >notice shark in the distance >it turns and swims away >such excitement >out hiking >fall and sprain ankle >backtrack and limp back to civilization in 5 real-time hours >in a video game >much fun >>1587566 If you listen to what he actually said, it's about in tradeoffs between interactivity and realism, interactivity is preferable. A stealth game without flaws in the security detail would be impossible to play. >>1587695 Looking to real life for inspiration isn't the same thing as striving for realism. The former is pretty much a necessity for anything other than abstract games, the latter needs you to carefully cherry pick and curate which parts of real life you want to emulate. >>1587695 "Influenced by human thought" doesn't mean "can change them into whatever you want if you think at them hard enough". >harmless hot anime girls >a fine sized community who shares the same thoughts as you i.e porno >>1586479 <I'm gonna change the bad guys with the power of porn You couldn't post something more reddit if you tried.

>>1605938 Forgot vid

>>1605941 This went viral on >shitter and for some reason normalfags, and I'm taking GIGA normalfags who only play GTA and sportsball, got very pissy about it.

>>1606037 It's like they WANT to go through their grueling burgerflipping jobs in their free time too!

>>1605938 >>1605941 >>1606037 Realism needs to be balanced with playability. Suspension of disbelief needs to be upheld; i don't want to ride a dragon in the next BF title, no matter how fun it might be. >>1606068 People who play power washing simulators are not humans.

>>1609143 What's your opinion on Voices of the Void? If you've played it? it's a job sim game but it's in a paranormal setting.

>>1609544 I wonder how many people know VOTV is a rip off recreation of a game called Signal Simulator? It's taken on such a life of its own I'm unsure if that's still common knowledge.

>>1609544 With my 10 minutes of google-fu sparring with the topic, I'm gonna say it seems entertaining. Being a researcher is inaccessible to enough of the population to make it an interesting job to simulate, and with the added horror/sci-fi elements it looks like it wouldn't be too boring, I might give it a try. I'm talking more about the retards that play the cooking simulator games and don't even know how to make toast. Being a researcher as depicted in the game requires dedicating several years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get to that point. Making toast requires bread, a pan, and like 10 minutes. Even easier if you have a dedicated toast-making appliance, which most people do.

>>1595587 Personally, I prefer Pokémon alarms to the forced loud heartbeat thumping in those situations.

>>1606037 The funny thing is that those games are just depicting reality in the most boring manner while still being arcade garbage. >>1609544 >>1609615 >>1609639 I'm more into something like GMOD RP Speaking of some madlads released a standalone GMOD RP game with visuals inspired by the Half Life 2 Beta. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2773280/ANEURISM_IV/

Unlocking a useful item just after finishing the game. Why some devs give you an item when you have nothing to do?

>>1605938 >"Influenced by human thought" doesn't mean "can change them into whatever you want if you think at them hard enough". You should make the argument that it doesn't ALWAYS mean, because the former are separate. If your character(s) have psychic abilities, for instance. <reddit This isn't 4/v/ nigger. >>1598187 >I don't know dude, sounds more like you just came across an absolute dogshit implementation of the idea and it soured it for you. None of those negatives (which do suck) are implied by the base concept. Yeah, the base idea can work if it's focused more on the main characters and that the creatures were some kind of boogeyman. You know, character focused where the "monsters" are reflections. Except if said "monsters" have their own civilization, culture and such. The same as ours. Even having their own personalities. You get the idea. It's a broken record at this point. And if it was just one game/book/whatever if it has that, then I would had called it shit and moved on. Except I encountered the same negatives in some of the JRPGs.

>>1610087 I like that when it's something fun for New Game+

>>1605938 >>1620944 You didn't understand what I meant at all, Half Life itself was much more grounded and "realistic" than thr majority of FPS games at the time.

>Heavily armored character >Devs decided to be faggots and make the character a cunty british female Not a single woman I've ever met in all my years on this horrible planet have EVER been strong enough to be comfortably mobile in even half the armor these characters wear. Yet I'm supposed to smile and accept that Sarah "Yew got a loicense fo that tv" Smith is able to use it easily. If bitches want me to accept them girlbossing it up in heavy armor maybe those skanks can start by being able to open their own jars and move their own furniture up flights of stairs.

>>1605941 He's correct, having the world react to the players choices does make it alot more interesting even if sometimes it's exaggerated

>>1586790 Damage sponges are shit in any game. It's not hard, it just makes an encounter with an enemy take longer. Too long in some instances. >>1621178 I'd say power armor could easily fix that, but power armor tends to look like shit with modern vidya art styles, like everything else.

>>1621212 Damage sponges are fine to bosses with a variety of movesets.

>>1586479 >You spend the game killing thousands >Get to the final boss >"I wont kill you or I will be as bad as you!"

the forced lost trope, the game forcing you to lose because their story of cucking is too important. I'm looking at you WWE 2kwhatever. Go fuck yourselves and I hope you fall into the ground. Also something that upsets me is something I've seen in Yakuza 6. You have been beaten? Of course you stand up once again even if I have just one try.

>>1622149 There's a level in Hotline Miami 2 you're not at all intended to win Withdrawal, but if you do it slightly alters the game's story.

>>1587249 What you said just reminded me of Gold and Silver. This game has so many unique pokemon on it's own, even more in the prototypes where it could be easily be used in the final game. Yet in said final, it's almost filled with Kanto mons while it's OCs are either a few in between or to end game. Why the fuck did Game Freak made such a retarded decision?

>>1622108 Boss fights are fine, especially if they have a two-stage or three-stage system to them. G-3 and G-4 Birkin in the RE2 Demake is still shit >>1622149 >the forced lost trope, the game forcing you to lose because their story of cucking is too important A few older JRPGs like to do that in the prologue. Golden Sun comes to my mind right away.

>>1622149 How did you feel about the initial post-tutorial Genichiro fight in Sekiro? It's still technically a forced loss for story purposes (you can't be named one armed wolf with two arms, after all) but winning is acknowledged in the cutscene. People generally seem to appreciate it but I have also seen arguments that it doesn't really matter because the end result doesn't change.

>>1623264 It should give you a useful item to reward such a feat. I'd rather have that than a cutscene honestly.

>>1623273 One thing that'd probably get more angry feedback than not with that is that forced-loss fights are naturally not replayable because losing progresses the game. It's not like having a single chance to get an item per NG cycle is a new or poisoned concept but it'd still be weirdly unusual because no other missable thing works that way in any of these games. i.e. you normally only miss something by doing something else before getting it or choosing to recieve an alternative, rather than because of failiure.

>>1622162 That's the one with the obese cobra guy right? Yeah he gets killed by Three Blessings instead after pocketing a disc for later investigation, and said disk ends up stopping their plans after being discovered by police who found the body. Pretty neat little bit of storytelling. >>1622149 I'm fine with this if the game acknowledges your victory in some way or even has special bad ends locked behind said victory. Like how Bravely Default 2 has the protagonist get seduced/possessed by Edna if you kill Adam early (in a fight that's even harder than his intended boss fight in the story), or how Tales of the Abyss has the cutscene after a certain forced solo fight play out differently if you win, with the main character getting disarmed and outplayed through overconfidence and then getting his ass beat instead of outright getting his ass beat. But having it just be "haha fuck you, you lose" and play the same win or lose is boring. I think the worst is giving bosses infinite health for that, especially in action games. Gets comical with a fight getting dragged out for so fucking long and ruins tension.

>>1586479 I hate the mandatory underground level with undead enemies Underground levels are usually the most dull and dreary level in the game, and undead enemies are usually the most tedious and boring enemies to fight against Mix those two and voila, you have shit

>>1661897 Not really, some catacombs and cave levels can be pretty cool, issue is that 90% of games just make it an excuse to make a lazy dark hole with reused assets.

>Game has collectibles >Collecting them all gives you no ingame reward <You got a cheevo are you not happy? FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT FUCK MICROSOFT

>character acts like a massive asshole through 90% of the game >fights your party, talks shit, steals from you, helps the big bad, etc. >oh they had a change of heart toward the end of the game >you literally cannot choose to not forgive them, you HAVE to accept them and help them because the script says so Absolute nonsense, let me hate. Give me a alternate story ending where I tell them to take a fuckin hike and I'm not punished with a bad route end because I wasn't a doormat to 1 dickhead.

>>1622143 >final boss murders literally millions >catastrophic death count, the world is forever changed >every single time they were spared prior, they went back to the same shit >you get the bad route ending if you kill them and stop the cycle I swear some of these ending must be written by the villains themselves

>>1676775 >>1676785 I'm unfamiliar with these tropes, sounds like you're talking about a specific game.

>If you kill them.. You're as bad as them.. Whenever a hack writer pulls this shit, ask them their opinion on Nuremberg, you'll quickly find they do not authentically believe that shit at all. This trope is near exclusively used to cuck their characters.

>>1677942 Same kind of people who live in gated communities but then push for open borders.

Why is it that almost every mainstream JRPG makes the most boring character their main protagonist most of the time, in many cases being a literal mute?

>>1622143 Were all 2 thousand of those enemies in a state of being unable to fight when you killed them?

>>1677981 Self insertion

>>1676775 It seems like its just a lazy way for writers to try and make the player feel accomplished or powerful because someone that was once an enemy wants to join your group instead. It would make a lot more sense for the character to be outright rejected, like you say. And it would actually be more satisfying to see that character try and change himself, maybe help the main group from the shadows, do the exact opposite of what he did up to that point to prove that he has changed. Then, and only then, does everyone consider offering him a position on the team. The only thing stopping writers from doing this is laziness, or maybe incompetence in some cases. >>1677981 Another anon beat me to it, but yeah, it is a way for players to self-insert. The character usually has just enough detail and concrete backstory to make his/her presence in the story reasonable, but beyond that, most is left to the player's imagination. And to make that easier, they don't want the character to speak for the player. Literally. Do players actually find this helpful for self-inserting? Do players even like it? I'd want to see a study or survey if there has ever been one.

>>1677747 MMOs where antagonists are reintroduced as allies in later xpacs (WoW being the biggest offender I know), Any series with a recurring antagonist that the protagonist is too much of a pussy to kill (does not count antagonists who revive after death ala Ganondorf or Sigma), others I'm probably forgetting. >>1677997 If the game would give me the chance to disarm, persuade, or avoid enemies, this wouldn't be an issue.

>>1677981 >>1678006 >>1678024 Even in that aspect fails 80% of the time, for the early times it worked because you can actually customize your party for your liking, i.e Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and these stories are so primitive yet open-ended for the sake of your imagination. At the time where people's standards were low until the Playstation bought to stores. But after those games, the genre as a whole just looked at it's bones and just stick to it, instead of learning why it was so effective in the first place. Hell, you can keep your protagonist to be actual character while being a self-insert as long as you add the ability to actually change the character more than just names and/or stats. It's how fucking FPS games are so popular in the first place. Now, back in the day, it was excusable because at the time where everyone was trying something new, it's how some games aged poorly, because we, as gamers, didn't thought about the insane random encounter spam that was Battle Network 2, or R-E in general. It's now a excuse by hack writers to not put the effort to make it interesting, there are a lot of silent characters who are far more cool than most of RPGs, yes, even western ones are guilty for this.

>>1678100 >If the game would give me the chance to disarm, persuade, or avoid enemies It’s harder to non-lethally incapacitate or avoid 50 men going out of their way to kill you than it is to do so for one guy.

>>1605941 I get his point but I'm peeved because Half Life changed shooters forever in a way I didn't really like compared to UT or Doom

>>1677942 This is used to pacify white people

I know 8chan threads won't get archived any time soon but still a bump.

>The very end of your completion grinding is a broken powerup/item/upgrade that you will never use because there is nothing else for you to do. >Reused art assets of characters/objects for different games in the series. >The "point of no return" save block where the rest of the game is inaccessible up to a certain point. >The pity system letting you through a challenge because how dare you try to git gud at the game. >Have the ability to inflict status aliments to anything other than the most important enemies in the game. >Progress paths/items blocked by multiple progression triggers/upgrades back to back.

>>1677981 >>1678117 Western games used do this, too, and not just RPGs. Remember, until I think the first Black Ops, virtually all of the Call of Duty games had faceless mutes for protagonists, and Mason was the gimmick for that trend changing. Games like Half-Life and Halo were strange semi-exceptions, where Gordon Freeman has a face, but no voice or personality aside from comments made by other characters, and the Master Chief talks in cutscenes but has no face. At least when RPGs use voiced dialogue, it's an excuse to save money on a voice actor (or two) saying all the potential lines. Fallout 4 and the Mass Effect series have less overall dialogue options due to that. Part of the reason why it's weirder for JRPGs to do it is because the ones I've played have scenes where the protagonist could easily fucking talk like everyone else does (and there's no voiced dialogue), but then their character model will just gesture or their sprite will run in place, and then another character react and say, "What? You're saying...?"

>>1711155 >The very end of your completion grinding is a broken powerup/item/upgrade that you will never use because there is nothing else for you to do. I HATE THIS WHAT'S THE FUCKING POINT?

>>1711609 >WHAT'S THE FUCKING POINT? NG+(++++)

>>1597650 nah

>>1711716 Shit for brain retards can't handle this

>>1711609 >>1711696 That only works when there's a NG+ option or a secret superboss. On a similar note, I hate how JSRF just ends after you beat the final boss. You can unlock all the characters, finding all the graffiti souls and clearing all the challenges in the process, tag everything in the open world, and then there's FUCKING NOTHING. The game is dead once you 100% it. Jet Grind Radio meanwhile has an arcade style NG+ loop, so you can experience any part of the game with any character, with a scoring system to give you something to work towards even after 100%ing it. Why did they fuck that up in the sequel?

>>1712007 Because it was rushed out the ass and SEGA wasn't sure if it would sell well (it didn't).

>>1605938 >You couldn't post something more reddit if you tried. You're welcome to go back there since you brought it up you dumb nigger

>>1587249 Usually from low iq basement dwellers who don't engage with anything beyond their 3 doujins. And their opinions on anything reflect the same quality of intellect that you expect as a result

>>1605938 Man, you need to appreciate the small things in life more

>>1676785 Same reason why I dropped undertale. Fuck that game and its cryptic moral system

>>1712527 Undertale is worse, it's entirely written as a gotcha moment and it intentionally baits you into being "evil" the first time around like it's clever. It's just a stupid moral system in the first place. It came out at just the right time when it was in fashion to criticize morals in video-games, then you throw a kid inside a monster filled cave where the first thing the majority of them do is literally attack you (as in, if you do nothing you literally die), then the game chastises you at the end for killing the sad sad monsters that often tried to murder you first. God, I fucking hate tumblr and reactionary leftists, it's really hard to find a dumber breed.

>>1677942 Well there's a way to go about that trope when it's not about letting the villain off the hook but rather about the hero himself not becoming corrupted. See Lord of the Rings for the non retarded version: <'What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!' >'Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.' <‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’ >‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in. <‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’ >'Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many – yours not least.' In fact a running theme in LotR is the struggle between doing the good moral thing and the pragmatic thing for the cause of good at least initially. It makes total pragmatic sense to give a powerful weapon like the Ring to Gandalf or Galadriel or to some High Man like Aragorn or Denethor and have them break and throw down Sauron forever. And that's how it would begin.

>>1622312 They probably didn't want to overwhelm people with a ton of new mons, and wanted to ease them into it. Plus, Gold and Silver were technically marvels since they were experimenting with shoving all of Kanto into the post-game. A flex by the late Satoru Iwata to show off some new tech that allows faster decompression of data.

>>1713472 I don't think that critique works, when the game also offers you the Mercy option, and tells you how you don't have to actually kill your enemies to win the battle. If there was no Mercy option, and you, as a player, were forced to kill the enemies then you would have a point. That's the problem I had with Spec Ops The Line's white phosphorous scene, in that they chastise you a lot for doing it, but the game also forced you into doing it. There were no branching paths, or ways to avoid it, yet the game constantly calls you out for killing those poor, innocent NPCs civilians.

>>1713472 >the game chastises you at the end for killing the sad sad monsters that often tried to murder you first Toby got kinda assblasted by this critique, as evidenced by one of the bosses in Deltarune trying to kill you after you spare them, and calling you an idiot. In any cast, most “messages” in stories are immensely retarded when viewed through the in-universe lens <you don’t need superpowers to be a superhero >no, actually, you do need superpowers to wrestle a living tornado. No amount of kung fu or gadgets will mitigate this. >advanced sci-fi tech that doesn’t and probably can never exist is functionally indistinguishable from superpowers

>>1596490 If it's to force backtracking for no reason, it's boring. It didn't belong in Souls and I'm glad they got rid of it from Demon's to Dark Souls. But if it's to create challenge by having the player deal with limited resources before they can resupply, it's good.

>>1712496 If anything those actually have some imagination, it's the drones that consune nothing but the trendy thing in a pathetic attempt to fit in with the masses that state that kind of shit, and unfortunately there's shittons of them working in vidya companies nowadays.

>>1713745 >the game also offers you the Mercy option Yes, but the entire point is how the entire thing is built with the tone of the creator being a smartass and making fun out of you for playing games normally as if that makes him this intellectual genius, when basically everything in the game points you towards just killing things that try to kill you first. It's was a boring meta commentary back then, it's still a boring meta commentary nowadays, especially when you consider that the monsters openly attack you and tumblr sucked this game off to the point of exhaustion as if they're brilliant and toby fox is the second coming of jesus christ. Fucking bioshock had a more sensible approach to give you an open option to either be evil or be good, and it still fell into the most classic blunder of all morality dichotomies in video-games which is >being good actually reaps you the most rewards which is blatantly false in real life and entirely defeats the purpose of pretty much all moral/ethical dilemmas presented in video-games. Being good is meant to be annoying, a pain in the ass, and basically unrewarding in the short-term that games happen, if at all. Evil should be the default path, the easy and simple way out of shit is just to shoot them, and it should also be the most rewarding in pure resources, only then that would be an actual moral dilemma. In most video-games with choices, being the "good guy" when you have the option to be evil is the most rewarding path in pretty much all ways which is absurdly unrealistic and utterly annoying.

>>1714758 I don't like Undertale at all, but I think you're being a little biased on it's moral system. The game doesn't exactly "Reward" or "Punish" you for pursuing any of the available routes, none of them are presented as a narrative gotcha, specially when the game makes itself clear on the fact you have a choice between fighting and acting and you have to go out of your way to pursuit both Pacifist and Genocide; No Mercy ends up being pretty lukewarm instead, which is kinda the point since Undertale goes for the moral conundrum. Also, I have a couple issues with you painting good will on a bad light as far as gaming AND real life is concerned. 1. While I agree Good choices being favored over Evil choices is bad design by principle, I don't think favoring Evil choices is any better. What a designer/writer should strive for is a balance between the Good and the Evil, where you pick one side or the other based on which you agree with the most, with moral challenges that attempt to turn you into the opposite path and rewards that fit your gameplay style the best. Deltarune actually manages the latter pretty nicely, where playing offensive gives you rewards that will help you being more offensive, while playing pacifist gives you rewards that will help you on non-offensive ways; either way you are presented with the dilema of "which one do you prefer as a player the most?" which I think it's neat. 2. In real life, being a good or bad person is both rewarding and punishing depending on the circumstances. Sometimes you wont get your way unless you are either nice or awful to people, your actions will always have consequences and you will be rewarded accordingly in most situations. Like gaining someone's trust for being chill will make this person help you big time, or fighting your way out of a situation will make it so you don't become a target in the future... or it could be the other way around and you can be taken advantage of for being nice and get into more troubles for being awful... Point is that the world isn't as black and white to say good = lame / bad = cool. ...also, it might be just me, but when you say something like >Evil should be the default path, the easy and simple way out of shit is just to shoot them your rant kind of sounds like you don't like the moral dilema in games to begin with, whether is made poorly or not, which is fair, but... in that case, what are you even complaining about anymore?

>>1715970 Sorry, I won't go into too much detail as I'm a bit tired at the moment, but I appreciate the long post >none of them are presented as a narrative gotcha At the very end of the game flowey explains what LV stands for and very clearly makes fun of you for really thinking it meant anything else. At the very least I find that to be a "gotcha moment" even though you do have the option to be merciful the entire game. In particular, the game only really shoves in your face that you can be merciful in 2 ways, with Toriel bashing your face in that you should do that, and at each boss when you get the opportunity to be merciful, but with the generic enemies, it's not as obvious and it's very likely you'll kill at least one enemy through your first playthrough which leads flowey to be a smartass. That's what I mean by a gotcha and it's what 99% of normal playthroughs will face in the game. It's pretty much designed to do that. Delta rune did at least improve on the moral thing by making it more obvious what's the main purpose of the game, there's no gotcha anywhere from what I can see. >on evil I do like moral dilemmas, and I understand about balancing things, but most games that people suck off for being "intellectual" and "thought-provoking" aren't anywhere near as that because it's pretty obvious that they implemented things biased for good. Call it cultural, or maybe call it the fact that games are meant to be fun and make you feel good in the first place, but I find this kind of "deflection on the weight of morality" that most games do just to bias good annoying. If a game that presented choices on morality was truly to be "thought-provoking", at the very least it would lead you into a zone of discomfort where you truly have to gauge between good and evil and your own individuality as a player, not just have play pretend roleplaying and still reap a ton of rewards in whatever route you go to, just because that's kind of what games are for. >real life We're already teetering on the edge of turning this into not-videogames, but, just to leave my point of view clear: It is clear to me that being an evil person is much more individually rewarding throughout your entire life than being the goody two shoes games want you to be, but it's important to note that it's not about just being an asshole in general and just pushing people away but being strategically evil. Doing away with morals has a lot of benefits which is why we can notice a trend of certain (((individuals))) reaching positions of power, along with the correlation in sociopathy and money/power. As in, assume a smart independent being that acts in intelligent ways, as much as you could consider my own view on society as a huge commie in the sense that I just wish things were good and people were decent to each other, I have no doubts that in a society with mixed morals as our own, being an individualist bastard is the only real way to rise to the top, because the more "optimal" long-term abnegation that leads to the whole tide rising takes a lot of fucking work, whereas just being evil and reaping the rewards is quick and easy.

>>1716214 >We're already teetering on the edge of turning this into not-videogames You're the one who started this >schizo rambling IDK man I think you just had a shitty day and you're bullshitting on everybody that being the bad guy is the "correct" choice, coming from some nerd from a mongolian basket weaving forum. Don't give me wrong, I fucking kill you if you actually did something to me and my wife. You get the consequences regardless if you get "quick rewards".

>>1715970 >where playing offensive gives you rewards that will help you being more offensive, while playing pacifist gives you rewards that will help you on non-offensive ways I don't think that's a good approach either, since it locks you up in a play-style. A better moral system would be one, in which if you only choose the "good" options you get rewards in <important_choices> 1 3 5 and 7 while only choosing the "bad" options will net you rewards in <important_choices> 2 4 6 and 8. The rewards will also be different, like say a good weapon from choice 1, and a good helmet piece from choice 2. Now just to balance things out, and not make the "best" playthrough to be one in which you choose both good and bad in an attempt to min-max, doing so will just piss everyone off, and the 2 camps will unite to fight against you, or something like that. This is just a rough sketch, and needs to be refined, but hopefully you get the idea. Though, honestly the games with the best moral systems, are those that don't have one at all, and just go on faction/party-member reputation, so things like Dragon Age Origins, and the first Witcher game(haven't played the other). I will always remember in DA:O, where I had to choose if I should let the dwarves to continue making golems or not, as there were pros and cons to both options, and the game never really told you which one was the "good" choice. I could argue that it's okay, to continue making golems, as long as the people volunteer for it, or they death-row inmates, plus if we don't have the golems, then the Darkspawn might kill us all, and that's not good either. Of course I can also argue that the "good" choice is to destroy that device, as in the long run it will just be used to silence any opposition to the king who might be extremely corrupt, and if the dwarves are too strong ,they might invade the human kingdoms with their golem army, so we are trading one evil with another. It's things like this, we we still have arguments about Stormcloacks vs Imperials, or which Fallout faction should control New Vegas.

>>1678117 >the genre as a whole just looked at it's bones and just stick to it In what language is this is a common saying? I'm genuinely curious, no bully.

>>1711155 >>Have the ability to inflict status aliments to anything other than the most important enemies in the game. >>Progress paths/items blocked by multiple progression triggers/upgrades back to back. Are there examples of games that *don't* do this? Other than straight action games (shooters/fighters) for the second one.

>>1717147 SMT for the status thing, it's a curveball for the people randomly popping in because the game expects you to debuff bosses and buff yourself or get wiped otherwise. Thankfully Matador is there to teach you about this through concussive therapy.

>>1717147 For the latter, most adventure games don't. Normally once you get a progression item, exploring a previously locked area should get you at least something worth noting (like a branching path or a minor item) instead of another wall "for later" immediately afterwards. The scenario I presented is actually very specific to some Metroidvanias I played, Environmental Station Alpha and Samus Returns to name a few. As for the former, I'd argue Dragon Quest V does give you the ability to inflict status on major encounters, but I'm not too far into it to say for sure. Earthbound also does to my knowledge? And Mario & Luigi definitely allows you to debuf major encounters.

>>1716214 Not going to argue too much on the first part because you do have a point on Undertale's moral system being overall iffy in any possible aspect, both in gameplay and in storytelling... and I also never did a No Mercy run; heck, what I know about Genocide is purely second hand lmao. >it's not as obvious and it's very likely you'll kill at least one enemy through your first playthrough which leads flowey to be a smartass. I see what you mean by calling this a gotcha, but have you consider that one bit of narrative bit being less of an author gotcha and more of a character gotcha? Storytelling works in a way that character and author don't necessarily reflect each other's thoughs. I can see that gotcha being less of Toby calling you a fool for playing the game "unintendedly" and more so of Flowey doing so... Cause I dunno, the game makes itself very clear as far back as the trailers that it's pursuing a moral-based type of gameplay (an undercooked one at that, but I digress), so calling blame on author for a character's words on this regard doesn't feel right to me. >If a game that presented choices on morality was truly to be "thought-provoking", at the very least it would lead you into a zone of discomfort where you truly have to gauge between good and evil and your own individuality as a player You do have a point there and did say as much, there's an imbalance in which choices are favored and that is not good neither narratively nor in gameplay. Then again I kind of get it when going out of your way to do the long path regardless of morality should be met with a worthwhile reward in any context, so I suppose this is where the bias comes from? Not a good solution, but you can see where it comes from, this is why I also mentioned you're better off keeping things balanced give players rewards and consequences akin to their choices instead of favoring one or the other. >Doing away with morals has a lot of benefits which is why we can notice a trend of certain (((individuals))) reaching positions of power, along with the correlation in sociopathy and money/power. I meaaaan... if you want to go that route, morals between groups don't necessarily align with those of other groups, so even if one group act lawful towards each other with good will in mind, that doesn't mean their actions wont have consequences on others. Morality is sometimes a hierarchy in which we will always step on someone's toes regardless of awareness or even willingness. Heck, even in politics, where the system is built around "working together" (eg, nepotism, asking/doing favors, etc...) instead of doing your own thing. >being an individualist bastard is the only real way to rise to the top In my personal experience, that's not true, I say this because the best things that have happened to me came from being thoughtful of others instead of thinking about myself; while the worst things also came from selfish thinking. It's not always this way for sure, in some situations one is more favored than the other, but at that point we are dwelling into the intricacies of human society and that is more of a tangent lmao. Point is: Humans and morals are not as black and white to say one behavior is certainly more favored than the other. >>1716688 >You get the consequences regardless if you get "quick rewards". Also that. Actions have consequences, specially chaotic actions.

>>1716754 >I don't think that's a good approach either, since it locks you up in a play-style. Does it, though? Well, the point I was trying to make was accounting for the player always being given the choice to pick one option or the other rather than locking them to a set path, that way the choices, rewards and consequences always reflect what you want to make out of your playthrough. Think about it like building your own stat build in RPGs where you choose to go offensive, defensive or both. You can say this idea is more about gameplay and less so about storytelling, but I honestly think that's a much better approach. >Though, honestly the games with the best moral systems, are those that don't have one at all Given how poorly has been implemented for both storytelling and gameplay, you might as well not have it in the first place, yeah. I do like to be given choices and make my own playstyles, and you can achieve that without needing to make a whole trolley problem about it lol.

>>1717437 You said that in Deltarune if you play offensive, then the game will give you items to enable even more offensive play, and vice versa for pacifist. I haven't played Deltarune, so I will just assume that as you progress through the game, the encounters are more and more difficult, so you need those items to keep things on a level playing field. In this case, the optimal playthrough would be to just stick to one playstyle, because otherwise you will get fucked by the hard encounters, so it makes no sense to suddenly change from pacifist to offensive. If you want an RPG example, think of something like Elder Scrolls, in which the more you use a weapon, the better you get at it, but there is only a limited amount of enemies to fight in the entire game, so if you are mid to late game and want to change from Bow(skill level 80) to Sword(skill level 10), you will be unable to fight anything with the sword, as all the enemies you can fight are high level monsters that receive 0 damage from your sword. In this case, you are stuck with the Bow, as the game gives you more and more rewards(Perks) for using the Bow to keep up with the enemy level scaling. From what I remember, this is also how Persuasion worked in Mass Effect 2, in that you needed high points in either Renegade or Paragon. There are limited amount of events that can raise these stats, so you are better off sticking to either Rengade or Paragon if you want to pass speech checks in that game. The game is rewarding you for sticking to one morality, and as such makes you stick to it until late game.

>>1586924 >Not a trope, but more of a pet peeve of mine I'm pretty much the same place as you, but with the whole "black and white" issue when it comes to writing in general, and no, I'm not talking about "villain for the sake of it", but rather this retarded argument between wherever or not a character should have this reddit postmodernist influence where any character should have "deep" lore >You MUST give a villain sad backstories so that we can make him RELATABLE >Nooo we don't need to it makes the villains pathetic losers and IRL they are evil for NO REASON And both are stupid and you know it's the case, because it boils down to personal preferences, and by that, there's no real question behind any of this. It's all shitflinging by underage and manchildren using dogshit marvel movies as ammo for their shitty argument. And rarely use other piece of media to use a example for, while funnily trying to ignore other stuff that contradicts their said argument. (For example, the infamous "I'am Evil" quote from Hannibal and used it as evidence for "evil for no reason actually works!" despite it already stated that he had a childhood ptsd). And how naive do you have to be if you genuinely believe that "something comes out of nowhere". Evil is born out of personality, born out of trauma, born out of loss. Y

>>1586479 >Niggers

>>1738384 Paint that banana white and giive him some sunglassss and you have a good post.

>>1738262 >Evil is born out of personality, born out of trauma, born out of loss. Y OH SHIT SNIPER TA

>>1738262 Not really, there are plenty of people who do crimes for purely selfish reasons.

>>1740790 >for selfish reason Thank you for agreeing with my points lol

>>1586620 >i think that wikia fandom and communities sometimes screw up the community and that sense of lore creating more of a lore than a speculation of the nonsense of the stories that are supposed to be made that way because of lack of information, wishes or own will of the devs or because they want to add something later or they don't know what to do. It's fine as long as anyone is aware that it's for the sake of fun and aren't genuinely believe that it's what ACTUALLY happened. Sometimes it's really not the case. When a fanfiction becomes so popular, it's considered "canon" regardless of contradictions. And when a new info is dropped, contradicting their believes, the fanbase will call the author a hack, this is a retcon, etc. Because the community surrounding it are mentally ill, and I don't mean it literally or as a troll, they're born schizophrenics, they genuinely believe that this box must have LAYERS of hidden shit that they must hunt for a "bigger picture". When in reality it's all made up by retards for making this "box" seem to be more than what it actually is, and a lot of their "evidence" are hilariously bad.

Optional challenges and collectables unlocking FUCKING NOTHING. No, I don't care for achievements, you can shove them ALL up your ass without lube. If you don't want to to put unlockable bonuses and bonus content in your game, then don't have bonus challenges at all.

>>1755459 Reminds me of all those DMC V "fans", who were shocked to learn that Vergil did not actually sit on a plastic chair.

>>1755508 I want to think up other games this applies to >Earthbound >Undertale/Deltarune >FNAF (for some reason??) >Yume Nikki >Touhou Can anybody think of others?

>>1756016 -Metal Gear -Final Fantasy -Halo -Devil May Cry -Resident Evil -Megaman

>>1756016 Bugthesda games before Skyrim or Fallout 4 Silent Hill Metal Gear Solid Most Fighting Games

>>1756016 Really anything popular that has a significant story/lore can apply.

>>1755473 I get the sentiment, but... what about challenges that exists solely for the sake of distracting you from the main modes? Think about the challenges from Megaman 11. The only thing they give you is bragging rights, essentially, but they are fun for a change.

>>1757221 it's not like in cuckchan where a thread dies quickly. A thread can live through years.

>>1755508 >>1756016 I like to think of another subset of this type of "fan" >Huge Fire Emblem fan, admits to have only played Three Houses >Huge Armored Core Fan, only played VI As in, they claim to be huge fans of the series, but only played the latest game in the franchise, and have no interest in playing the other games, because "they are too old", or "too clunky", or "the graphics are bad". Now, I have no problem with people playing games in a series out of order I started with Fire Emblem on the GBA, but I would prefer if they called themselves Fire Emblem Three Houses fans or Armored Core VI fans, as in they are fans of those particular games, and not the entire series. There is also the question of what percentage of the games in a franchise you need to have played/finished to call yourself a fan let's ignore secondaries for now. Can you be called a Final Fantasy fan if you didn't play XI or XIV because MMOs are not your thing? What about the older games, does it count if you only played the remakes, like say, the IV remake on the DS? What about spin-offs, do I also need to also play most of them, or am I fine with just the mainline titles? What if I really liked Final Fantasy, but after XII I thought that the series went to shit, so I didn't play XIII, XIV, XV and XVI? Would I still be a fan, even if I don't like the series anymore, or do I get a special label like pre-XIII fan kind of how some Star Wars geeks get called prequel fans, or pre-Disney buyout fans? Anyway, I basically played, though not finished, all the games in the first 3 gens of Armored Core, and a bit of VI, and personally I don't feel comfortable to call myself an AA fan, until I have played gen IV and V, though I am fine with skipping the PSP spin-off.

>>1757247 >What if I really liked Final Fantasy, but after XII I thought that the series went to shit, so I didn't play XIII, XIV, XV and XVI? Would I still be a fan, even if I don't like the series anymore? The fitting description would be "I don't like the current direction, so I'd stick to the old ones". Basically every other community that a franchise has gone to shit, it's not a new concept. Doesn't mean you must suck their aged milk just because you're a "fan".

>>1757272 Sure, I agree there is no reason to mindlessly consume product, though what I was trying to talk about was about how much of a series can one be invested in, and still be considered a fan. You posted a Touhou image, and that's a good example of a community that is in almost constant friction with what they called "secondaries", people who claim to be fans, but never played the games, instead engaged with other media like manga, artwork, songs, official or unofficial. In the end, even though there might be a corporate interest in creating this idea of a "fan" as someone who consumes product, even without that, people in a community understand stuff like a real fan as opposed to a fake <game> fan that has never played the game. I realize that there is no hard science, as in you have to play at least 51% of the games in a franchise to be called a fan, and that it may all be subjective, still it's something that I sometimes ponder upon.

>>1757247 These are good questions. I'd argue that you do not have to play all the spinoffs, or even any of the spinoffs, to consider you a fan. Of course, it also depends on how large the series is. The larger the series, the more acceptable it is to have skipped some entries, especially spinoffs. I strongly doubt there are more than one or two people on this board who have beaten every single Mario or Sonic game, simply because there are too many. Even just the mainline games would still be tough to do. Of course I have, though. There are people on this board who seem like big Castlevania fans, but when I mention all the ones I've beaten (which isn't quite all, but getting close), it seems like I've beaten more than everyone else here. I don't think that means there are no Castlevania fans on this board. I think remakes count if the remakes are very similar to the originals. If you beat Super Mario Bros Deluxe, or the version on Super Mario All-Stars, then that counts. If you beat Final Fantasy VII Remake, that doesn't count, because it's really a different game. There are edge cases, like Ratchet & Clank 2016, but I'd edge on the side of caution and say those don't count. Too different. That said, if a game is different enough, even if officially counted as a mainline entry, I think you can count yourself as a fan if you skip it. I love Zelda II, but I can understand if someone else loves the entire series and just isn't into it, since it's so different. I think the Final Fantasy MMOs are perfect examples of games that might be officially counted as main entries, but are really so different they're effectively spinoffs, and can be treated as such. But then Final Fantasy in general is such a long series that I think it's fair to call someone a fan even if they haven't played every single mainline entry. If you sat through like ten very long RPGs, you might be missing many entries in the series, but I think it's fair to call yourself a fan. Someone might be a bigger fan, but you've invested maybe hundreds of hours. I think you count. I've 100%ed every single Zelda game except for Zelda's Adventure, because I can't be bothered to set up a CDi emulator. I played the remakes of the other two CDi games, and I think those count. I think I can still call myself a Zelda fan. In fact, I think I could call myself a Zelda fan like a decade ago when I had still only beaten the first five or six games in the series. And I still haven't read all the manga. So does that count? Maybe I'm not really a fan. Actually, fuck it, I'm going in the other direction on this one. I've 100%ed every single Sonic game, watched every show/movie, read every comic/manga. I even read Ken Penders' original book, The Lara-Su Chronicles. It's by law the official continuation of characters that began in Sonic comics. I hereby declare that no other Sonic fans exist except me, because I'm very confident that nobody else has bothered with all that shit. Sonic '06 isn't even a relatively bad entry in the franchise once you take it all in. But actually I just realized that I haven't read all the chapter books and Choose Your Own Adventure books they released back in the '90s. I read the Sonic & Knuckles adaptation chapter book, and the Choose Your Own Adventure Metal City Mayhem, because I had them as kids, but I remember that was #2 in a series of CYOA books, so I must be missing some. So I guess I'm not a real fan. Maybe once a franchise gets big enough, nobody is a real fan of it anymore. Or alternatively, if a franchise gets big enough, it's reasonable to say you're only a fan of one corner of it. If there is a distinction in eras, or styles, and you're very into one but ignore the rest, I think that's fair. While I think Classic Sonic fans actually are often casuals in disguise, there obviously are real ones, because they made Sonic Mania, the best game in the series. I can totally understand why someone might prefer 2D Zelda over 3D Zelda, and even ignore 3D games but continue playing the 2D ones (however, I also feel like if you like 3D Zelda but dislike 2D you're a filthy casual). The Star Wars example is appropriate. Real Star Wars fans hate the Disney movies. Perhaps there are fights between those who like the prequels and those who don't, but I'd count them both as real fans. If you like the Disney movies you're not a real fan, you're a casual who clearly never liked the originals that much in the first place. If you did, you'd be disgusted by the new ones. Same obviously goes for things like Star Trek. I think TOS is way better than Next Gen through Enterprise, but I'll respect fans of that as real fans. But if you like Discovery or anything after, you're not a fan. I guess actually maybe I exclude people from being called fans not based on what they haven't consumed, but based on things they like that disqualify them. I'll go so far as to say that if you like The Simpsons Seasons 13+, you aren't a real fan. I know fans do argue about the Mike Scully seasons (9-12), but the series gets way, way worse with 13, and that showrunner, Al Jean, just stayed on forever after that. There's a single Mike Scully episode in Season 14 ("How I Spent My Strummer Vacation"), and it's way better than anything else post Season 13, even though it's not great. That's the only episode from Season 13 or later that you're allowed to like.

>>1756016 It's justified with Touhou since the fan content is 10x better than the actual games.

>>1757316 I know what you're talking about. I thought it was good to add a trivia. >>1758875 >It's justified with Touhou since the fan content is 10x better than the actual games. I also know yours and I understand what you're coming from. Since ZUN did fucked up currently, especially the whole Beast Pack shit, but to me, before PCB it was truly special. Yeah they're not "masterpieces" but they're solid and memorable in it's own right, especially the retro ones. They're like Super Metroid, timeless classics which you can enjoy even to this day. They had charm and passion, which I can't say to the recent titles, with the whole same face copypaste portraits (except 20 turned out really fun).

>>1738262 >IRL they are evil for NO REASON The cognitive dissonance some people have, treating reality like fiction and vice versa, absolute lunacy. >>1757247 OH BUT ANON, NOTHING EXISTS EXCEPT THE MOST RECENT ENTRY ERGO YOU'RE WRONG! I hope that trend dies one day, just so there can be a tiny bit more honesty in the world, like as you said they could just confess to only playing the latest game and I wouldn't have as much of an issue. I also really want that mindset to cease for fighting games, but that would be going against an industry mindset rather than a community mindset, which is a lot harder to fight back against >>1758678 >It's by law the official continuation Penders lost any "legal jurisdiction" over the series once Sega gave him the boot, nobody sane would disqualify someone for not reading that. >Ratchet & Clank 2016 Definitely doesn't count, it's not Nu-Trek or Nu-Wars levels of bad, but it's clearly inferior. >The Simpsons Seasons 13+ That was probably my first exposure to the series as a dumbass kid, couldn't remember any off the top but I'd probably rewatch and go "oh yeah, uhmmm, 6/7 outta 10, I guess". You think people will start pushing back the start date of "Zombie simpsons" once they get older, maybe to the first post Movie seasons? Hell most "megafans" I hear from point to S9 being the start of the decline already.

>>1758678 Thank you for the input anon, I mostly agree with what you said, and yes the length of the series does matter. For instance, if it's just one game, like say Undertale, then I think the minimum required for someone to be a fan is to have played the game, at least for one ending. Now I think there should be two more criteria for someone to be a fan. First is to actually enjoy the game you are playing, or at least play the games out of enjoyment. Now why would anyone play all the games in a series if not out of enjoyment? Maybe they have to because they are game journos, or want to make a series retrospective on jewtube, or in other words money is involved. They might end up liking them, and become fans, but they could also end up indifferent or hating them. For instance, me and a friend have decided to go through the Bungie Halo games and do the co-op campaigns. None of us had played Halo, so there is no nostalgia, I mostly suggested doing it, to see what the fuss is about the games. We already decided to play the games, so it doesn't mean we will actually like them. As such, liking something is very important, even you said that someone who likes post-Disney Star Wars is not a real fan and you didn't just say "watch", but "like". Now I think it's fine to dislike some entries in a series, or even be critical to the entries you do enjoy, as that is the only way devs could improve, it's just that it has to be honest critique. Second of all, to distinguish between someone who just finished the games, and a fan, that person should be able to describe in some words what he liked about the games, or what was good/bad with them, without having watched some jewtuber explaining it to them. It's fine to watch or read what other people think of X series, and it's also fine to agree with them, but you should also be able to form your own opinion. I gave the personal example with Armored Core, I haven't played gen IV and V yet, so I don't consider myself an AC fan, but I can talk about how the games evolved through Gen I to III, or how it's a bit sad that VI simplified the AC building a bit too much, with the removal of the radar unit, or a unit to mitigate the stagger mechanic, the same way you had the Radiator to mitigate the Heat mechanic in Gen II - III, or those floating mines you could throw. On the other hand, I can also understand how they tried to remove a lot of the fat, though I think they cut some of the meat as well, as I do understand why they removed the hover legs, as they weren't all that good and I only ever used them for some niche missions that involved water. I could go a bit more on this, but I think you get my point. I am also sure you could write paragraphs describing Sonic and Mario, but you don't have to, I believe you. I am sure someone will also complain that I called them gens with roman numerals, instead of the indian ones, because only with 5 and 6 did they use the roman ones, or that I even used the term "Gen", my defense is that I got corrupted by Pokemon discourse.

>>1759471 Simpsons fans are extremely autistic and shouldn't be taken seriously. People should make their own judgments on what's good or not, deferring to a circlejerk's opinions is just a cheap way to outsource critical thinking. I found a good amount of episodes to enjoy up until season 15 (Swartzwelder's last season of working on the show). After that it was just tolerable until the season 20-somethings, 2014 was probably the last "tolerable" year for the simpsons imo before it started being full-blown propaganda (not to mention the voice actors clearly started showing their age at that point onwards).

>>1759471 >Penders lost any "legal jurisdiction" over the series once Sega gave him the boot The whole reason why he even won the lawsuit in the first place was because Archie lost the contract. Allegedly, Penders took it to sweep the case. Even then, most of Penders' characters are just recolors, meaning that Sega can make 100+ Knuckles if they want to. I'd rather have Penders than Flynn tbh

>>1759471 >I also really want that mindset to cease for fighting games, but that would be going against an industry mindset rather than a community mindset, which is a lot harder to fight back against Especially now that fighting games are all about online, and have practically given up on single player content, the whole point is to just follow the trend of whatever everyone else is playing, which is almost always going to be the newest entry. I like games from this genre, but I suppose that with its inherent focus on multiplayer, it was always destined to become total cancer. >Penders lost any "legal jurisdiction" over the series once Sega gave him the boot Penders never worked directly for Sega, he worked for Archie. But actually, due to Archie losing the original copy of his contract, he managed to convince a court that he was a freelancer who merely sold his comics to Archie, which meant he owned the copyrights, and therefore any characters invented in them. The recent book he released was actually mostly reprints of Sonic comics, and somehow Sega hasn't sued. Maybe they figure it's just not worth the Streisand Effect. But the point remains that it does have an original story at the end, continuing from where Penders left off. And according to the courts, it's legal and legitimate. >nobody sane would disqualify someone for not reading that. We're talking about hardcore Sonic fans here. Do you consider people with extreme cases of autism to be sane? Call me insane if you will, but I would disqualify myself if I just ignored it. After reading every other comic, including every Sonic related comic Penders worked on, and then hearing him talk about this new comic for over a decade, of course I had to check it out. And the original stories in it are extremely short, so it's not like it takes long. Penders' last story was set in the future, and is largely about Knuckles' daughter, Lara-Su. But at the end King Sonic has to go back in time to save the day and the timeline gets warped. This was followed up on in one arc by the next (and current) writer, Ian Flynn, and honestly that arc is fucked up and sucks too. In that new timeline, Shadow is king instead of Sonic, meaning he married Sally. Anyway Shadow is a despot, so Sonic has to overthrow him and become king again. But it's not like he goes back in time and makes it so Shadow was never king. He just takes over the kingdom and marries Sally, but now has to live with the knowledge that Shadow fucked his wife for 25 years. Also his kids from the old timeline were erased so he has them again but now they're younger since he wasn't king anymore in the time when they were originally born. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this is the worst story Flynn ever did, but he is mega autistic and wanted to wrap up the future storyline, and he did. And to be fair, Penders loves having Sonic get cucked, so I suppose this was a thematically faithful continuation. Luckily, this entire future timeline gets erased from history a few years later. Penders' follow-up to his own story, which we waited almost 20 years for, was actually only the intro to a story. A prelude. The vast majority of the book is reprints of old issues, and then he threw in essentially a backup story at the end. But the main thing he does is establish that the timeline getting warped at the end changes everybody to be legally distinct. Those disgusting character designs? They're on purpose. Everyone got warped so they don't look quite as much like Knuckles anymore. And Rotor Walrus, who is a main character in his story, but originally from one of the 1993 Sonic cartoons (and thus Penders cannot claim to own him) gets turned into a rhino instead. Why he did this, when he still has the audacity to publish reprints of old Sonic comics, seems a little baffling to me. If he can publish old stories with these characters, he might as well publish new ones as well. I'm sure neither would actually hold up in court if Sega bothered to sue, so maybe he does understand that and is trying to not push them too far. Luckily for Penders, he is not at all interested in actual Sonic characters. They were always just springboards for his stories about Lara-Su and Knuckles' other relatives, who were actually characters he wanted to write about before, and only made them Knuckles' relatives as an excuse to sneak them into the original comic. Rotor is the only one left over, and it wouldn't surprise me if Penders kills him off rather quickly, assuming he ever gets another volume out. He claims he is going to soon, but it took him ten years last time. And we'll see how much of the next volume is just reprints instead of original stories. >(Ratchet 2016) Definitely doesn't count, it's not Nu-Trek or Nu-Wars levels of bad, but it's clearly inferior. Yeah it's inferior, but I wouldn't say offensively so. Some of the original levels it has are okay. I'd say it's worth playing as an epilogue to the series. But I'm not bothering with Rift Apart given how insufferable modern Insomniac is. >You think people will start pushing back the start date of "Zombie simpsons" once they get older, maybe to the first post Movie seasons? I'm sure people try now. I never missed an episode until like 2015, but eventually I had to admit that I was lying to myself for over a decade. But when I looked more closely, I realized that you really could tell a difference between the different showrunners, and it was Al Jean, who took over as Showrunner for Life in Season 13, who really sucked. >Hell most "megafans" I hear from point to S9 being the start of the decline already. This is true. They don't like the showrunner before Al Jean, and I can understand their sentiment. But I'm choosing to be a little more forgiving. I'll give the show a few extra years. I can still enjoy Season 9-12, even if not as much as before. The thing is, at the time I thought The Simpsons declined slowly, but in retrospect, I can see a clear dividing line. Many dividing lines, whenever showrunners changed. But even being generous, I have to admit Al Jean is too far for me. He sucks. >>1759912 I remember when they switched to HD in like 2009 I tried to convince myself it was getting better, but really that was just when they decided to start referencing old episodes more, which made me think they gave a shit and were trying again. Of course now I realize that referencing old things doesn't mean you're like the old things, or even that the people who made the references really liked what they were referencing. >2014 was probably the last "tolerable" year for the simpsons imo before it started being full-blown propaganda Yeah 2015 is when I gave up, so maybe you have a point that that's when I couldn't even tolerate it anymore. But I still argue that the same problems all got way way worse with Season 13, and just kept declining from there as Al Jean just got more and more into his ass-groove. >>1760271 >I'd rather have Penders than Flynn tbh Hey, come on, let's not say things we can't take back. I get how it's easy to criticize the current guy, and easy to forgive the guy who got fired 20 years ago, but let's be serious here. Sure, Flynn had Sonic get cucked one time in an alternate future timeline that got erased, but that was only because he was wrapping up a Penders story. Penders, the very first time he got to write an extended arc, invented Geoffrey St. John, a character whose entire point was to cuck Sonic, and make Sally all excited about it. This is the guy who had Sonic cuck Tails. Who had Anti-Sonic cuck Antoine, and Anti-Antoine cuck Sonic. (Why didn't he just have Anti-Antoine cuck regular Antoine and Anti-Sonic cuck regular Sonic? Wouldn't that have been simpler?) You know what's fucked up, though? That story that got Penders fired, where Sonic cried on the cover with an invitation to Sally's wedding in his hand? I actually think it's Penders' best story. It involves all that cucking I was just talking about, but after 200 issues I was Stockholm Syndromed into it. It did effectively utilize a great deal of the comic's history, of different character arcs. Unfortunately, that's just because he was effectively setting up the cuckoldry for about 200 issues. But since that's apparently what Penders likes to do, this was his best attempt at it. I do think Flynn has gotten too slice of life lately, and focusing too much on OCs, but a lot of the actual problem is with Evan Stanley's issues and characters. Similarly, sometimes Penders gets credit for things that Karl Bollers wrote, since they both wrote stories at the same time, and Karl Bollers was a much better writer, even if he also did absolutely insane stuff sometimes. Also I don't like that Flynn dedicated two years of stories (2011-2013) to having Sonic and Sally back together, when they had been broken up for like eight or nine years by that point (which was very good since it kept things closer to the games' status quo), but luckily the Penders lolsuit made Sega squash that idea right before it could finally come to fruition. It's weird, because Flynn also did a story where Eggman determined that Sonic is a personification of chaos, and alters his plans accordingly. And I do think that that's a proper understanding of the character that not many get. But he didn't really know what to do with it, and then started writing Sonic like a little bit of a pussy instead. But again, a lot of that perception is really from when Evan Stanley is writing.

>>1760792 >Hey, come on, let's not say things we can't take back. I don't want Penders to come back making Sonic comics. I'm saying this because Penders' at the very least he made hilarious dogshit. Like the entire cuckoldry saga you mentioned, he's the sole reason why Archie Sonic got such scrutiny for better and worse. Plus, the lawsuit wasn't just out of his "creative differences", but rather how Archie treated their employees like trash, so he and other writers are stand up against them and Sega for not doing something in these situation. Say whatever you want about the guy, I don't agree with rest of his schizophrenia, like how the entire concept of Echidnas are his holy shit. But he had the right call to sue Archie for it. And again, what he claimed were his Knuckles OCs, unlike many Sonicfans and even you would tell so. >when they had been broken up for like eight or nine years by that point (which was very good since it kept things closer to the games' status quo), but luckily the Penders lolsuit made Sega squash that idea right before it could finally come to fruition. Except it was Flynn who scrapped that idea during reboot because he was a huge Sonamy faggot. It has nothing to do with the lawsuit. Here's the thing: Sega OWNS the TV show characters, they even own Archie characters, the ones who weren't made by Penders and Karl of course. Even Scourge is a Sega character. Meaning, someone would pick up a character at their library and would use it if they want to. The whole reason why we won't get other memorable characters is because how they would fit in the story and why they should when there's Shadow or Knuckles. Or make their own characters which is how IDW did. And speaking of which, Flynn did as much of a fuck up with the writing as Evan. He's the one who thought it was a good idea to write a scenario where Shadow is a cocky retard in the middle of a zombie invasion. He's the one who made Sonic into a pussy capeshitter, he ironically made Sonic so out of character, despite he's such a huge sonic game faggot, while injecting capeshit onto him despite it does not belong. And he had the nerve to blame Sega for his mistakes. And it's not the first time he did this. He came up with this "mandate" nonsense when he was at his peak at Archie. To excuse his questionable writing and why Sonic is the way it was during the Meta era. Despite it's all by Sonic Team's awful ideas running through their veins. >But again, a lot of that perception is really from when Evan Stanley is writing. It's an bad excuse, he could had cleaned up her mess like how he did with Penders years ago.

>>1760920 >he's the sole reason why Archie Sonic got such scrutiny for better and worse. For better? That's Flynn's doing. Flynn did do great stories on that comic. Back then he seemed to care a bit more about tying into the games, as well as other older adaptations. But then I'm still hesitant to blame him now. I did enjoy the arcs he did about Fang not too long ago. I'm just super bored by everything Stanley writes, including the characters she invents. It seems like many of them may be gone now, but then in the latest issue she invented another new one. I really hope that new one doesn't stick around. >Plus, the lawsuit wasn't just out of his "creative differences", but rather how Archie treated their employees like trash, so he and other writers are stand up against them and Sega for not doing something in these situation. Sega has nothing to do with how Archie treats their employees. But also no, because Penders' claim is that he wasn't a real employee, but a complete freelancer. It's obvious bullshit. And while Archie does notoriously treat their employees like trash, the lolsuit had nothing to do with that. The owner of the company would go around grabbing dudes' junk and brag about how they couldn't do anything because she's a woman. That's right up Penders' alley, he loves that kind of feminism, and it's showcased in his stories. And if you're just referring to wanting creators to own their own work, then Ken Penders is the absolute worst person to use as an example, and a damn Sonic the Hedgehog comic book is the worst possible comic to use. Obviously all of these characters are extremely derivative. They're just Knuckles with different hats on. He claims he owns "Evil Sonic," and even licensed a company to make a new comic about Scourge, because he claims Scourge is derivative of Evil Sonic, and therefore he owns it, but Evil Sonic isn't derivative of Sonic, so Sega doesn't own it. And then the guy who created Mammoth Mogul also claims to own him, even though he's a blatant ripoff of Vandal Savage. He shouldn't be sued by Archie, he should be sued by DC. None of this is like Jack Kirby wishing he got a cut of all the merch from the zillions of characters he created. It's more like if the guy who wrote the episode of The Incredible Hulk series from the '70s where he fights an evil red Hulk then tried to sue Marvel for later making a different Red Hulk, claiming that his red Hulk was a totally original character not at all derivative of the original Hulk, but this different Red Hulk was clearly a straight ripoff of his totally original character do not steal. >And again, what he claimed were his Knuckles OCs, unlike many Sonicfans and even you would tell so. Has anyone ever been far even as decided to do even go want to do look more like? >Except it was Flynn who scrapped that idea during reboot because he was a huge Sonamy faggot. It has nothing to do with the lawsuit. I don't believe you. Flynn is the one who started getting them back together, with the Sonic: Genesis arc in 2011, and just kept building it up further and further until the Super Genesis Wave in 2013, when the entire thing was dropped entirely. I've seen no evidence Flynn is a Sonamyfag whatsoever. Under his watch, Amy has shown less and less romantic interest in Sonic, and this began in the comics and then later filtered to the games and other media. He turned Amy into a "girlboss," again first in the comics, and now it's filtering to other media. Flynn kept Sally and the Freedom Fighters as main characters even after the Super Genesis Wave, when he could have de-emphasized them slowly over time, as the entire rest of his Archie run was slowly making that series more like the games. And when he wasn't allowed to use them anymore in IDW, he immediately got to work replacing them with new OCs. The Freedom Fighters just became The Resistance/Restoration, Nicole became Jewel, Sally became Lanolin, Snivley became Starline (yes he has elements of Finitivus, but basically just his teleporting. Really he's Snivley). Flynn clearly loves the Freedom Fighters and Sally. He's clearly the opposite of a Sonamyfag. Bean and Bark also became Rough and Tumble, because Sega said Bean and Bark are only allowed in Classic Stories. But it's notable that Bean and Bark were such clean slates, appearing only in an arcade fighting game with no character bios outside one Japanese magazine article from the '90s which lightly alludes to them being Sonic's friends. Flynn basically created their personalities from whole cloth, first for the fancomic that got him hired by Archie, and then he just continued using those same personalities once he got on the official comic. And now Rough and Tumble have very similar roles and personalities, just with an annoying rhyming gimmick. But clearly Flynn wishes he could use Bean and Bark, so I believe him when he mentions that particular "Sega mandate." >they even own Archie characters, the ones who weren't made by Penders and Karl of course. Not just them. Scott Fulop claims to own Mammoth Mogul and tries to sell stuff with the character. I'm sure Sega is much more confident about anything created by Flynn, especially after the Super Genesis Wave, though. >Even Scourge is a Sega character. Not according to Penders. He licensed a company to make a new Scourge comic, and it only got cancelled because the company immediately saw the terrible fan reception and realized they probably wouldn't actually make money. >Meaning, someone would pick up a character at their library and would use it if they want to. According to Flynn, and this is a case where I believe him, Sega doesn't want them used anymore. And while I personally would enjoy a comic where the entire history of the franchise is utilized and referenced, I can completely understand why Sega wants none of that shit referenced anymore. Ultimately these adaptations are mostly made to get fans of the primary media, the games, to buy other things, like comics or Netflix subscriptions. It makes more sense to keep things closer to the primary media, and not to tv shows that got cancelled 30 years ago, or comics that are only notorious memes on the internet because of how terrible many of them are. >The whole reason why we won't get other memorable characters is because how they would fit in the story and why they should when there's Shadow or Knuckles. Or make their own characters which is how IDW did. It's not what IDW did, it's what Flynn and Stanley did. They were creating tons of OCs in the post-Super Genesis Wave Archie comics too. But yes, you raise a good point that characters like Shadow and Knuckles don't get used nearly often enough. Instead, time is spent on these OCs, and it's bullshit. And yeah, as much as I was mad when Archie was focusing on the SatAM characters instead of guys like Knuckles or Shadow, I would prefer the SatAM characters over OCs clearly made to replace them. At least they have history. >He's the one who thought it was a good idea to write a scenario where Shadow is a cocky retard in the middle of a zombie invasion. He's the one who made Sonic into a pussy capeshitter, I think these are problems, but the Shadow thing was a single instance so that would be relatively easy to overlook. The Sonic thing is a bigger problem, I'd agree it's rather significant since he's the main character, but it's not as big a problem as Stanley's extreme focus on OCs. Almost all that Diamond Cutters nonsense was Stanley. Multiple years long arcs about a club of nothing but OCs, and then at the very end, Silver. Great fucking idea. But yeah, both are problems. >He came up with this "mandate" nonsense when he was at his peak at Archie. Some of the mandates are probably true, but I do agree with you strongly that I think they are overstated, not just by Flynn, but by fans who just make assumptions and excuses for him. >It's an bad excuse, he could had cleaned up her mess like how he did with Penders years ago. No, because Stanley is still currently writing at the same time as him. They switch between writing duties. And Stanley calls herself head writer now, as seemingly Flynn has been promoted to whatever role he has at Sega now, and writing the comics is a secondary thing for him. But he does clean up things a bit when he gets the chance. I'm certainly not giving Stanley the credit for all the Diamond Cutters being put on a bus.

>start a game, visual novel, or anything >wastes too much time explaining the lore instead introducing the characters >when it finished of telling the whole history, it starts the actual story >at this point, I'm bored and I don't care about meeting the characters Why doing that? Isn't supposed that the first moments is for hooking the players/readers to continuing instead boring them?

>>1761309 This is such a good point. It's possible to have an interesting prologue, I suppose, like how the Lord of the Rings movies begin with a prologue that I think does hook the audience, but on the other hand, you have things like anime, where the average anime fan says they'll watch a new one for multiple episodes, even if they aren't enjoying them, just because they know they might not be good at first. No, if something isn't good when it starts, it isn't good. Maybe it gets better later, but it needs to start well. But to bring it specifically to video games, I can't stand when games have extremely long intros with either no gameplay or practically no gameplay. I sit down to play a game only to find myself watching a sub-par movie, and by the time I'm finally allowed to play, if I'm not literally out of time to play, I probably don't want to anymore. I'm fucking sick of it. I'm not opposed to stories in games, but space that shit out. It's a game. The point is to play. Don't make me go too long without playing.

>>1761545 What did he mean by this?

>>1761309 >>1761545 lol just press the hecking skip button

>>1586638 I wish Sylvanas have never stopped bieng a High Elf

>>1677981 Why is BoF there? Even without lines Ryu was pretty charming as a character i fucking loved how you can just 1vs1 one of the big bads in BoFII,especially how it also recognizes Ryu achivement after beating it.

>>1761545 >you have things like anime, where the average anime fan says they'll watch a new one for multiple episodes, even if they aren't enjoying them, just because they know they might not be good at first. No, if something isn't good when it starts, it isn't good. yeah definitely. I followed that advice of watching 3 episodes before dropping a series for about 12 years. in that time, there were exactly 2 series where watching 2 more episodes after the first one resulted in completing a series that I liked, and I can't even remember the name of one of them for the VAST majority of the series that I watched over those years, if I didn't like the first episode, watching 2 more was just a waste of my time. the 3 episode rule was worthless for me

>>1761545 >>1769201 The 3 episode rule exists for the older ones that take a bit longer to establish the intro or do the fakeouts like Madoka. It doesn't particularly apply to the newer big budget productions because they wouldn't take the risk to pull stuff like that in the first place after anime production became a multi-company comittee thing. Hell it's only "3 episodes" because end of ep3 is when Madoka pulls the trigger.

>>1769201 >>1770207 I feel like half the reason the 3 episode rule exists is because of lucky star.

>>1586479 "It all was in the main protagonist's head"

>>1761027 I won't respond it all since I know for a fact that 70% of them are just shilling about him and pretending to be retarded. But I am going to make it clear. When I said about Flynn being a "Sonamy" fan, I really mean it. He has a questionable bias towards her. In the beginning of the issue, Amy is now the leader of the Restoration, whereas in the games, it was Knuckles. And I know you're counterargument, Knuckles' plan worked if it weren't for Infinite, which he is a wild card, even in the games tells you this. (plus, she's boring in one of these issues) And it isn't just IDW, even later in Archie, even before the reboot, Flynn would make few characters shit i.e Fiona, he attempted to kill off Sally 3 times, all while this is happening, Amy was a emotional supporter to Sonic, there's even a genuine Sonamy moment at some point. It isn't just because he is a fan of the shipping, but he said in some his podcast that he would consider removing the Freedom Fighters altogether because he genuinely believes that they're "outdated". And we all know the podcast in question, let's not be stupid here. But because of fan backlash that he prevented from killing off these characters; Artoine was supposed to die in pre-boot after he was blown up by Metal Sonic, the entire TV show casts was supposed to be wiped out at the beginning of the reboot. Don't come out of the clockwork and say that Flynn cares about Sonic, he only cares about the Japanese canon and only. Despite the fact that he also has a fetish towards Amy of all characters, and he made her out of character too. Sure, you don't always need her to be a annoying dipshit, but what he made her boring, she's just "sonic if he girl" now. And to add insult to injury, he wrote Sonic in IDW to be more like a tragic superhero with morals, when in reality he's really not, Sonic is not such character, he's not preaching heroism seriously. And it would be fine if the comic didn't based on the games. Yeah, "based on", because the IDW comics are not canon to the games, the pajeet employee was lying out of his ass when he said that. The text itself didn't just stated clear that it's different from the games' continuity. But the lord and savior by thy name of Ian Flynn said in his podcasts that they're BASED ON the games, specifically Sonic Forces. When xhitters will say that it's canon, most chances are, that they never read these issues to begin with. And the alleged "Sega Mandate" comes from a thread at bumbleking forums, and what it wrote here is as believable as your average cuckchan rage bait. It was just that, a fear mongering rumor that almost everyone at the Sonic community, even Flynn himself, pushed it as fact until recently, where the Sonic movies, Prime and Crossworlds was released. A mandate was made by developers so that third parties can enforce a union, to make it unified spiritually and directly. It's usually made for mainline titles, but spin-offs can imply it's own set of mandates as well. Open your ears out, EVERY, SINGLE, IP, has a mandate, every single one of them must has a mandate to follow. Even Mario despite what 4/v/ would tell you, and I assure you that all of them are as basic as "Sonic isn't red". It's there to not break character, or ruin world-building unless the developer decide to do so. (RWBY is very infamous for it for example) No mandate can state as such that you can't have characters have sad moments or have them in a awful situation, it's not there to tell a writer to not do something. The whole thing with Shadow in MVS was all Flynn's fault, he wrote a SCENARIO where Shadow is a fucking retard. It's his writing style since he had a different idea of this character, which Sega didn't approved. If you want to complain the current characterization, then blame Sega for it, but anything else written in this issue is all 100% his fault. I'll repeat, there's no such mandate that states that you can't create new characters, add characters from different medium, have this character get killed, such things. With the Archie comics it's one thing, because they were never taken place or connected to be the same as the games to begin with, not even what it's based on, the TV shows. Is It's own thing, for better and worse. With IDW, it states that it's a sequel to Sonic Forces, meaning that it must have some connections to the games despite it's not canon, that of itself is should follow the games' mandates. I swear you guys are like Paper Mario fans, making a boogeyman so that you wouldn't put your favorite creator under arrest for the things they actually done retarded. 4chan Paper Mario threads are VERY notorious for this, it gotten so bad that not even the /v/ermins over there are entertained by this anymore. Do not put Flynn, Stanley or even Taxman on a high pedestal as gods because they're not, they're as flawed as everyone else in this god forsaken planet. If you found them done something wrong, call them out for the bullshit they done, instead of targeting others and making strawman.

watching two sonic autists argue is genuinely fascinating to me It's like watching two philosophers debate each other's works.

>>1816047 I mean the Sonic franchise did get a renaissance after Forces.