I think one point you're missing is that just because a game is slower paced, that doesn't mean it has bad pacing. Let's take Trails in the Sky FC for example which has really slow pacing. I don't think the game is badly paced just because it takes its time to establish the world, the characters and develop relationships between its characters because guess what? It actually TAKES TIME to get someone to be emotionally invested in a fictional world and its characters. If they were to rush through all the introductory stuff to get to the "good" parts then the "good" parts wouldn't be nearly as good if at all because by the point you'd get there you wouldn't really be invested in what's going because the game didn't give you any reason to be in the first place. Furthermore in some cases the slow pacing is the entire point. I mean look at simulation games like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing where the entire point is that it isn't filled to brim with action scenes and engaging storytelling that keeps you at the edge of your seat at all times, but instead you can just kick back and relax. TLDR: Slow pacing doesn't mean bad pacing and Trails is amazing
Agree with you completely. The pacing of Trails to Zero, how slow a burn that is, and how carefully and thoughtfully every piece is laid out, allows you time to get emotionally invested in Lloyd, Ellie, Tio and Randy's story. When Randy's family, the Red Constellation, shows up in Azure, and when you see how it torments him, it hits like a truck, and is way more impactful than it would have been if you weren't fully invested in Randy as a character. Similarly, the careful way everything is set up and placed in Sky FC is why the prologue of Sky SC hits so damn hard. When Estelle wakes up the next morning and finds Joshua gone, it tears your heart out, because we love and care about Estelle. It wouldn't hit nearly as hard if the first game hadn't spent so much time building Estelle and Joshua up.
Absolutely and completely agree. Sometimes games are not meant to be rushed through. The Trails series is not for the impatient and instant gratification type of players (sadly - There are a LOT of them these day's). Those that take their time and gather the bits and pieces of information, build up of relationships and get attached to the characters, however, can enjoy the grand pay off later in the game(s).
I find FC really cozy, tbh. Discovering Libern was a blast. Every second of its world and characters was interesting. The shitty part was when I could only play as Estelle and Josh, but story-world-characters carried the game in an awesome way. Then, I played SC and did not like it as much. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 weren't that great IMO. Chapter 3 was really neat again and it picked up again in chapter 5, but in retrospective... I didn't enjoy it as much. So far, my least favourite game in the series.
This video is just a lot of false equivalency. A game that's 50 hrs long and one that's 10 hrs are aiming for different kinds of experiences. The idea of "it gets good x hrs in" is something taken far too literally here. The actual meaning of the statement is to imply the payoff is worth the time taken to build up. Now obviously, that's an extremely subjective statement but then, so is pacing. What one finds entertaining or important in enhancing their overall experience may not even register for another. While I understand this video is wholly from your perspective, it still feels far too narrow in its conclusion. When talking about subjects like this, it's important to consider and try to understand the other perspective even if you don't agree with it. In conclusion, pacing does matter, but what constitutes good pacing is relative to the style and goal of the game and one should not confuse their preference for the latter to make a conclusion on the former.
Thank you for saying this, sir. This is why I disliked the video. I rarely dislike anything on youtube, but this creator has no ability to understand that there are people in this world with vastly different tastes to his own. I find the entire video to be myopic and self-centered. I, for example, am not a fan of survival horror games. I don't spend my time complaining about them, I know there is a type of person who loves them, and that I am not that person, so I just don't buy them or spend time on them. If you know an experience is not for you, why are you going out of your way to consume it?
@@MasterGundam-tv8vb I don't. No one should, slow paced games are not for everyone, but they are for someone, and those someones are the target audience. Take trails, as an example, Falcom can absolutely write a fast-paced story, just look at most Y's games, the slow pace of trails is a deliberate design choice. It's going to alienate most people, but Faclom knew there is a tiny minority that likes it that way, and no one else is competing for that tiny audience. That's how Falcom makes money, they found a tiny demographic that no one else was serving.
While I do agree with the sentiment "A game should be good the first few hours in", I think your confusing pacing with action and progression. While I do love sky sc more for its character development, I also loved the first game's opening sections as it was just living and discovering a detailed world before the big plot began. When I heard you say "50 hours of persona 5 was good and the other 70 was bad" there wasn't 70 hours of tutorials, there was 70 hours of social links and hanging out and that's half the reason I like persona games. Sure tutorials can be improved, but jrpgs can't have ninja gaiden tutorials because their systems are much more complex and uniqe than ninja gaidens and it would confuse the player more if they weren't given tutorials. If you think persona 5 and trails have too much filler, some others want more of that quality filler.
Honestly, I find the day-to-day content in Persona far more interesting than everything else. Mementos is unsufferable (same could be said about literally all of the battle content of P3), and the combat system is great, but not as much as SMT. What makes me play Persona over SMT is absolutely not the battle system, but the so-called "filler". I do think the reason I play JRPG is because of how the writers tend to write characters, worlds and so on. If I play a JRPG, I want to experience that, I want to dive deep into the story. Besides, if you had to build a JRPG that progress fast, without filler, without slow build-up, you'd just end with a 15-hour game that will probably be called "too short for what it's trying to tell".
For me the 70 hours of lame content was the combat. Sure it was fun at first but by the politician palace i got bored and started avoiding fights. For the entire rest of the game. Still managed to beat it albeit with a bit of difficulty only on the final fight. Really just brought the game down so much. Social stuff was the only interesting thing at that point.
@leonfire99 At this point, I feel like it's more of a Persona problem. Let me get this straight, I'm not saying that the battle content is easy, but not as interesting as it could be. The major I have with Persona combat compared to SMT, is that you have so many tools at your disposal that it's never difficult. In SMT, demons have the same tools you have, which makes combat far more interesting in my opinion.
Yeah. If we want to move away from the world of JRPGs for a moment, Disco Elysium is basically considered a modern classic and a masterpiece, and in that one you literally *have* to spend time fucking about in Martinaise and getting in all the townsfolks' business to advance the main plot. And it's great. It's genius. I think this mentality of wanting to "get to the good stuff now" is part of the problem with modern anime and JRPGs: they seem to make the writers wary of experimenting and writing more unique characters because they're afraid all the setup will bore players, so they immediately rush to what they think "the players" want and just use clichés as shorthand.
Hard disagree. I played 5 hours of Trails in the Sky and it was very dull, I was still waiting for the game to actually begin. According to Reddit, the plot doesn't actually start for like 10 more hours so I never went back to it.
You touch on a lot of important points, yet I can't help but feel like you overstate the importance of fast pacing in regards to action. You can have good pacing in games where you talk to people, explore, equip your gear, absorb the world etc. It doesn't have to be action/combat all the time. There are "slow burn" type games, with great pacing imo.
I absolutely do not agree with what you said about FF14. When people say that Shadowbringers is peak Final Fantasy, or that Endwalker MSQ is great, it's not because it's inherently great (even if it is), it's because it's always the sequel of the previous expansion. They're not independant stories put together in a game because it's an MMO. Sometimes, you, as a player, should learn to let go instead of blaming the game. Maybe you're just not into that game to begin with? If you think that Persona 5 is boring for 70 hours, why do you keep playing it? Thank God games are not always the same. Sometimes, I'm in the mood for a little turn-based RPG that won't take me more than 20 hours. Sometimes, I'm in the mood Persona and its calendar system. Besides, pacing is subjective. Yes, you can say that putting fetch quests doesn't add anything to the game. But some people will say that those fetch quests are important because they help feel immersed in the world. One example I have is my favorite quest from NieR Replicant: The Ballad of the Twins. It's a quest that can take hours to complete, where you sometimes have to exit and enter the same area and kill all the monsters just to drop the exact material you need. One might say it's unsufferable, and it is, kinda (it's the point of the game, so maybe it serves a grander purpose). But then, you finish the quest, and the rewards aren't that great? You literally, as the player, gain nothing for doing this. You just get to listen to one of the themes played and sung, in universe, by two characters. I spent 15 minutes listening to the song after finishing the quest. At this point, I came to the conclusion that fetch quests, side quests, are meant to serve the purpose of letting you stay in that world a little longer. If you don't like the game, the story or the universe enough to feel they are worthwhile, it's ok. But at the end of the day, pacing depends on how you, as a player, experience the game. How do you want to experience it? What are you searching for in the game? If a game doesn't get good until 50 hours, or if a series doesn't get good until the 4th installment, maybe it just wasn't made for you. It didn't give you what you were searching for, but it's not the game's fault for being boring, slow, or whatnot. Playing a game is like meeting a person. Sometimes, you meet someone and you become friends instantly. Sometimes, you have to learn more about them and change your viewpoint. Sometimes, you just hate them and no amount of effort will make you like them.
My general mindset on this is pretty much: 'If it doesn't get good until x amount of time in, then what you're really saying is that I need to first waste x amount of my time on doing something I don't like just to get to something I might potentially like, once I've passed that barrier with no guarantees. Why would I want that? That seems like an awfully big risk to take. What if I slog through the first several hours of the game because the fandom promised me it gets good after a while and once I get there, it's not good. Now I've just spent all that time doing something I didn't enjoy to get to a state in the game I STILL don't enjoy.' So yes, the start of a game needs to be engaging. It's important that it hooks you in and keeps you involved. At the very least, you should be curious to see how the game develops over time. If you're literally bored to tears 2 hours into a game, that game is not for you. That said, I've played quite a few of the games on this list and enjoyed most of them, but that's because I already know that slow burn, story and dialogue heavy games are exactly my cup of tea. I don't need fast paced action combat. I'm actually more inclined to stay away from games that promise fast paced non-stop action, because I know I don't like that kind of stuff. But that's me. Others might want exactly that. You know yourself. You know what you like. Don't listen to anyone who says: Nah, bro, it gets good after 15 hours. They don't know. It got good for them after that time. That doesn't mean shit for you. Listen to your own instincts. If they're telling you this game is shit, then stop playing it and go find one that isn't shit for you.
I don't disagree. The issue seems to be that there are some kind of slower paced, less high stakes narrations that are engaging... but not to some people. And those people seem to be the loudest voices in the discussion, who kinda set the narrative. So "the beginning is more tonally light and sets up the relationships between the characters and the world itself" seems to have been translated to "it gets good X hours in" in the online discourse. And of course there's also the confounding factor that *some* projects, especially if they're serialized and not from a super established author (like manga), really *do* get good a certain amount of time in because the author is learning and getting better as they write, so the early parts are a bit rough. But that is a unique feature of serialized media, like manga, tv series and the like. It's silly to apply it to self-contained stories like a video game or an anime.
XD Hey, for real though, I obssessed over BFM back then. I still have my old copy of it for PlayStation. That game is just fun fun. It's bright an colourful, but it has plenty of action, and with some puzzle solving mixed in. Plus, while the story may not be "immensely developed", that doesn't mean it's not still a delightful story. the characters are memorable and the world is whimsical, plus I liked the whole "five elements" motif the game played with.
This is why I'm such a fan of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. You have a small 5-10 minute opening segment on a boat, learn the gist of the controls... then you're set loose on an island with glorious, lightning fast combat. No 10-20 hours are required before things get fun.
Ys 8 is great, but starting with Ys Seven, Falcom definitely took a page out of their Trails catalog when it came to structuring these games. They started adding a lot more cutscenes, and "let's reunite at home base with our findings" every few hours. I think the Dana segments in Ys 8 and the prison segments in Ys 9 are my favorite parts of those games; they're more reminiscent of the Ark of Napishtim era, which I prefer.
@@RushHourWeekend , indeed. I like Y's VIII, but sometimes you can see the pacing is not so good. These "let's reunite at home base" was awful for me (sometimes you must go to the base, just to hear something from someone, and get back to the same location you was before. It doesn't make any sense!). That's why I prefer the Napishtim era, too.
Persona 5 doesn't even take nearly that long too get good though, sure the gameplay takes about 5 - 10 hours to really get going with the early tutorial stuff but if you think 70 hours of it wasn't enjoyable, then you just didn't like most of Persona 5 which isn't an issue for most fans who are usually invested in the plot around the start of the Kamoshida palace. Also Trails In The Sky Fc is just a layed back game that sets up and leads into a more epic saga later, while it's not for everyone, plenty of people like it, not really going to argue for that one like Persona 5 though because it really is slow even if I personally enjoy said slowness (not as much as the later content though tbf) not trying to be an asshole here but I don't think much of a real point is made in this video besides you seemingly not enjoying slower paced media that doesn't give instant gratification, i do think the idea about setting you're own pace in jrpgs is fair but not everything has to be short and replayable instead of long and not as replayable, like sure Chrono Trigger is a lot more replayable than P5 but one P5 playthrough gives me at least like 4+ Chrono Trigger playthroughs worth of content and i have never felt the need to replay Chrono Trigger more than once and im sure others agree. Nice video though, its well put together and it does talk about a relatively under discussed criticism point with certain jrpgs even if i do think you seemingly just don't like them from an extremely personal standpoint.
While I mostly agree, the problem is that most of the classic pre-FF7 JRPGs sold like crap in the West (mostly just the US), so the Japanese devs got the impression that Westerners prefer long setup and such, more so like in computer RPGs. I even remember Sakaguchi himself mention that they tailored some aspects of FF7 to what they thought Westerners would enjoy, because FF6 didn't do well in the US then - and they were kinda right, because FF7 is still one of the top sellers in the genre over here, almost 30 years later. The internet gives the people impression that Chrono Trigger was a massive hit in the US back in the 90s - it absolutely wasn't compared to Japan, despite how good it is. It's just the sad truth, but classic JRPGs are mostly cult classics, not commercial hits (in the West), and it's not just the most obvious ones like Dragon Quest. In fact, I'd argue that Final Fantasy is the odd one out among JRPGs in that regard.
I'd argue even Final Fantasy never sold much compared to action games. JRPGs are a niche genre - inside what may never stop seeming to be like a niche hobby. I mean, how many people even play video games compared to more braindead activities like watching TV?
@@asmodeus58XX To be fair, gaming is more profitable than film/music industry now, probably in no small part because of mobile gaming. So, the market could be 'potentially' bigger than ever. I do agree that JRPGs are a niche genre in itself, though. Except for super popular series like FF or DQ (the latter mostly in Japan) it will never be as popular as action games or even sports games on average. Heck, even action RPGs tend to do better than turn-based RPGs. Sure, there are exceptions, but they usually just prove the point.
Just because Azure is better than zero doesn't mean zero is bad. same for SC - what makes SC so good is that FC build it all up. It made you invested in the world. That's what SC builds on. FC is an JRPG that really takes its time to offer you exploration of a deep world with 'living' characters. I mean, most NPCs have their own little story arc. But it's all optional. You can easily finish FC and SC in 30-35 hours or so and you'll get great stories, characters and an amazing OST from both of them with the additional bonus of every subsequent game still building on what you have experienced. 'How the hell does it all relate' - well if you had played the previous 3 games totaling some 100 hours you might understand why Crossbell matters, why the political intricacies matter, why they're interesting and why those characters you meet matter as well. But also also, plenty of stuff happens on a smaller scale all the time in the Trails games. Every zone in FC has its own interesting story - and then all those stories tie together into a bigger story spanning two games which comes together in a span of 4 games which then comes together in a span of 10 games+. But every game has its own blocks within blocks that are all interesting.
I haven’t played much of Trails at all (only the first three hours of In The Sky 1 and then school snuck up on me) but I have played Persona 3,4,5, and 3R intensely. Although I do agree the start of P5 is a bit of a slog on repeat play throughs, the “50 hours of good 70 hours of slog” comment made me think “did we play different games?” Like I don’t think 5 is the best at pacing but 70 hours? Really? I mean I do like how in 3(R) and 4 three hours in the games go “Ight do what you do” but I don’t think 5 fumbles pacing THAT intensely where over half the game is boring. Maybe in the first six hours but it does give you freedom once you get Ann and the slow incremental build by giving you a bunch of little things overtime is what makes RPGs as a whole… RPGs. I feel like this guy just doesn’t like story games :/
I have to disagree with the sentiment of replayability. In my old ass experience, replaying even Chrono Trigger has its limits. If replaying a 25hr game is your cup of tea, that's fine and I hope you enjoy it. I can't do that anymore. This is coming from someone that, when I was much younger, I played and beat FF7 on PS1 over 17 times. I've also gotten most endings on Chrono Trigger back then on the SNES. So I have an idea of what wasting time replaying something feels like lol. However, I would never use bad replayability as a point of contention for an RPGs entertainment. I can enjoy the slow burn quite a lot with games like Persona 5 on first run, but I will not replay them simply because I'm older now and don't have that drive I used to. I honestly don't see a point in most cases. Persona games are generally about learning who the characters are, starting slow (i.e. from nothing) and working your way up. That formula hasn't changed and is what fans expect. I fully understand the want to be just let loose though, which is what some MMORPGs do for me, particularly FFXI. Action games are clear examples of that fulfillment, but they're not RPGs, so they can't really be compared. Action games have a flipped priority of gameplay first, then story or other elements. You play a typical single player RPG for the story ultimately, not its gameplay (or other elements). The gameplay is very important, but it always does come second to the story. The final verdict can be a bad game though, even if story is a 10/10, so a balance must be maintained. Going in with any other mindset of priority though is like playing blackjack and complaining it isn't poker. Regarding replayability, expecting additional playthroughs to hold up is like doing the same Escape Room a 2nd time. If you remember anything about the first time, you've already spoiled the experience for yourself.
As a person who agrees with this sentiment, worked as a planner in Japan, and prefer the orthodox jrpgs of the 90s that used to throw you into battles after the first cutscene(like the Sakaguchi-lead FFs, CT, BoF3 and 4 etc), I'll play devil's advocate here: It's conceivable that there's a certain type of design in which the slow buildup results in a larger pay-off when everything comes together later on than had you just given everything to the player from the start. However, most post ps1/ps2 era jrpgs are not that. They're meandering, needlessly restrictive, and the pay-offs aren't great enough to warrant the slow burn(for me, at the very least). Not to mention a lot of newer jrpgs have wide loops ie you spend like 30 minutes to an hour on event scenes, then hours of field/dungeon running, and loop back to lengthy event sequence. And often they've nothing except those two sides on offer. Meanwhile, you play original FFVI, VII, Suikoden or CT, you have tight loops, with short and snappy event scenes followed by short and snappy gameplay sections that mix in mini-games, puzzles etc. The latter keeps things interesting and prolongs your ability to deal with the length of the campaign, and the former gets tedious real quick.
Lots of great points. I definitely see the appeal of something like the Trails series; having 9 games worth of build-up before seeing close to a hundred characters unite in Reverie is certainly a one-of-a-kind experience. For some people that's justification enough to endure the slow-pacing of the introductory games.
All these classic styled JRPG's are amazing. Honestly, growing up that's exactly what I enjoyed most about those games, the grind through the story. It helped me immerse myself in a world that built upon itself gradually and without overwhelming or overstimulating me, and it gave me incentive to grow attached to the "normality" of their respective realities. Not only that, but once you finally get to that part where the game gets more serious and involved, the time you've spent building up in the game, experiencing their world through the characters, and exploring their respective realms, you really feel something deep down akin to genuine suffering when bad stuff starts happening or when the world falls into peril or when a character goes through a tribulation. Modern games have good stories, don't get me wrong, but they all have a tendency now to have gameplay that lasts far longer than the actual story does. Beat the story, and there isn't enough time to develop a genuine bond with the characters and their world. Beat the game, and you've basically just maxed out a bunch of stat tables and made numbers go BRRR until you can one shot anything.
I love Trails because it takes its time and sells you on the world. Yeah, it has an overarching plot, but what hooked me is that it’s a living breathing world where every character, even the NPCs, have stories to tell. The 100s of hours I’ve played in each game is beyond worth it because I can witness these characters grow and change throughout multiple games. Due to the length, it makes those relationships feel so genuine and real. I would never say, “oh, you just need to beat FC and SC will grip you.” If you’re not into that type of style, it’s not for you. Doesn’t make it bad. If every game was short and to the point, the industry would be incredibly dull and stagnant
I think I replied to someone else with this, but to give Trails some credit, it's a unique experience in that it tells this epic tale that spans a dozen interconnected games. Most series try to reboot the story after a set amount of games, or each game will be a standalone experience, but Trails has 9 games leading up to Reverie, and they're all relevant, which is pretty remarkable.
I agree. Something complainers don't mention about Trails series is that almost all those side quests (in the earlier games at least) are completely optional. The reason they are there is to offer players the option of a more immersive experience. if the player chooses to take up the offer and step off the main storyline to live in the setting for a bit, then that is an option they have. It doesn't make the game bad.
I think this is something that has a bit more nuance to it than "this part is slow, thus it is bad". I've played a lot of RPGs where it kind of ranges from fast to slow and I tend to enjoy one or the other depending on the execution. I've heard people say Trails of Cold Steel 1 is pretty slow for instance and while I can certainly see why, I also view it as the more engaging of the whole quadrilogy because something in that games writing and plot had me hooked to it like none of the others did outside of maybe Cold Steel 3. All of the games have their slow moments between important chapters but it's only in 2 and 4 where it actually bothered me despite those games not really doing all that much differently from the other two. Keep in mind, I consider myself a person who vastly prefers a faster paced RPG to a slow one, but those slow moments can be either good or bad depending on how it comes off to you.
In Shin Megami Tensei V you don't need to grind that often. I just dedicate to "grind" for specific things I think... Once! For the secret boss battle to get the secret ending, which is necessary because if you're not max level it's if not imposible at least very very difficult to achieve. Anyways, SMT series has never been about grinding but more about Strategy, make pacts with a variety of demons, and getting best available demon fusions to work for every specific challenge. I'm glad they're supposed to fix this on SMT V Vengeance. Now talking about the rest of the video, I can agree but it's not that terrible. Maybe rpgs aren't just your type of games. I don't have so much fun in action games because I feel i'm not doing anything in most of them. You can press the same button a lot of times and you win, in some hack n slash games I don't even notice and I already won. I prefer to have more control playing even if it's slow-paced. So all of this is just about personal preferences.
I didn't go into full detail in the video, but I played SMT V on hard mode because I played Nocturne on hard mode years ago and thought it was a decent challenge. Didn't really need to grind that much in Nocturne because, once you understood how powerful evasion was, you just used fog breath and sukukaja in every battle as your be-all-end-all answers. In SMT V, buffs and debuffs were heavily nerfed in comparison, and because the Etrian Odyssey director was put at the helm, every single boss had insane amounts of health. I really didn't see much of a choice to progress through hard mode outside of grinding. Sure, it's my fault for playing on hard, and I could always lower the difficulty, but difficulty balance goes outside the scope of this video. For now, I'll concede that SMT V's normal mode may not require much grinding to get through.
@@RushHourWeekend I did finish both games, playing on hard mode too, and your statements are totally right. I personally didn't grind in V that much but, as you say, bosses are just damage sponge (maybe because Etrian Odyssey director being implied too) I understand in some cases could have been needed, since the game is sadly level depending (which would change in V Vengeance as I said, according to Atlus) and I noticed this kind of games in-game experiences are different from player to player. Some people had problems with SMT IV battles for instance. Most of the people didn't. That blew my mind.
@@puzzle_boy As you said in this part Now talking about the rest of the video, I can agree but it's not that terrible. Maybe rpgs aren't just your type of games. I don't have so much fun in action games because I feel i'm not doing anything in most of them. You can press the same button a lot of times and you win, in some hack n slash games I don't even notice and I already won. I prefer to have more control playing even if it's slow-paced. So all of this is just about personal preferences. I felt the opposite I never felt the control you have for Turned-Based combat in Final Fantasy. But when Final Fantasy went Action Based combat I felt the control I liked. To me for TBC I did not like the waiting I felt bored. But as you said here. So all of this is just about personal preferences. This is mine
These are all valid points, but I feel like the criticism of FFXIV is a bit unfair. It doesn't take "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds" of hours for it to get good, or to even complete the story. ARR takes about 80-100 hours to complete and each of the current four (soon to be 5) expansions take between 40-50 hours to complete. So all told it could take 300 hours to complete, which I would call hundreds, not "hundreds and hundreds." More to the point, A Realm Reborn gets a lot of crap from people, but while it's rough around the edges nowadays, I appreciated it when I was new to the game a few years ago. Everyone told me how much it sucked, but they were talking from the context of having played later expansions. When ARR was all I had, I enjoyed it. Conversely, everyone told me how good Heavensward was, and I found it just okay. An improvement in some ways, but it really felt like a diversion for most of it from what I had been doing. There were still characters and stories from ARR I wanted to explore. But I digress. Point is, it doesn't take that long for FFXIV to get going, and where it "gets good" is a matter of opinion. PS - I'll also add that I loved both versions of Persona 5 end to end but I also had trouble getting into SMT5 mainly because it was 90% dungeon crawler and 10% story. The story of P5 made me push through the rough patches. I don't have that in SMT.
I loved Persona 5 but even i’ll admit that tutorial makes someone who immediately plays Persona 3 Reload like wow cutting the game from 120hrs to 55hrs is incredible
Games generally should be shorter and sweeter. Pacing is paramount to any experience in life. The thing is, this argument can be about 2 different kinds of pacing. With a JRPG like Persona 5, it does break a few rules about pacing, but that's largely intentional, because the game wants you to famously "take your time." Although certain aspects of JRPGs are grindy, although they almost always come with a set of training wheels, the journey usually carries momentum along with emotional weight, and that progression is usually worth it in the end, even if they do hold you hostage longer than I'd like them to. I had a talk with a friend of mine who usually just beats games once and never dives deeper into NG+, which is where a lot of games get good because of the progression system. This is actually an example of pacing done correctly. The game can still be fun and interesting all the way through, but there should be a point of climax where things go up a notch and stay there. The replayability is where you unlock the true game, the experience geared toward mastery.
Lots of great insights here. Most of my favorite RPGs are ones that get better on a repeat playthrough, like the Ys series. You can enjoy the story on a first playthrough, but the repeat run is when you'll put your skills to the test. The short length makes that second or third run more enticing because there's not much of a time commitment. Being forced to improve is what makes games so engaging; it's the reason why Dark Souls became a smash hit. Even pushing gameplay aside, RPGs can bring replayability to the table in other ways, like the multiple endings in Chrono Trigger, or the different routes in Tactics Ogre. Most longer jRPGs tend to not offer much incentive to replay the games aside from just enjoying the story, and at that point I think I'd rather watch a cutscene compilation on youtube and save myself from 30+ hours of stale gameplay.
@@RushHourWeekend Yeah, I prefer action games because they keep you playing the game instead of waiting for things to happen. My only exception would be Persona because those games are so chill and whatever sloth exists is kind of in service of reminding you that life is temporary and you can only do so much each day, making every decision an opportunity cost. The irony is we spend so much time playing a game instead of living, ha.
The problem with rpg is that there is two games. Either you are here for the combat, then there is no grind. Or you are here for the story and oh boy you will not be happy.
I am a fan of FFXIII (in general, I don't love everything about it), and I agree that it spends far too much time holding the player's hand. The slow pacing of the gameplay systems/tutorials is by far the game's biggest flaw, much more so than linearity or annoying/unlikable characters. The first 25 hours or so should have been cut back to about 10 - 15 at most. Having 4 chapters were you only have 2 characters in the party (Lightning + Hope or Sazh + Vanelle) was too much. Should have been 1 chapter for each group. The combat doesn't really shine until you have a full party with at least 2-3 paradigms each. They held this back until Chapter 9. Chapter 9!! Because of this issue, I have a save file right before the boss fight near the end of chapter 2 (right before the characters are all branded as L'cie). This skips the whole first 2 chapters where you don't even have access to the crystarium progression system yet. I also think starting there makes the story better too, as suddenly all these characters are thrown together from out of nowhere and you don't know who they are or how they got there. You don't know why Hope and Lighting hate Snow, you don't know why Lightning or Sazh are there, etc. Then BOOM! Your characters are suddenly thrown into a boss fight and you see a cutscene of Snow and Serah in the fireworks show and you "get it". The game already has an "in media res" opening, but imo they started at the wrong time/place lol. Get the characters branded as L'cie asap, then use flashbacks and dialogue to explain how they all got into that situation later.
Arcade game design is timeless. Things like scoring are what make certain games so enjoyable to replay. There's a reason why people replay games like Bayonetta and The Wonderful 101 dozens of times over.
No, i mean it's a great design with ton of merits as a art but there's plenty of others type of design who work just as good. Replay value is nice and i'm one who reguarly replay games i've already beat even dozen of time but as i grew up i learn that replay value don't really add that much to the overall quality of a game and is heavily tied to lot of subjective factors. Without even mention that it exist ton of amazing masterpiece who have zero replay value and yet still leave an eternal mark on you for the rest of your life even if you beat it only once.
Agreed pacing is a huge deal. Many RPG's have a slow start where there's too much story and it takes awhile for anything interesting to start happening. A lot of games need to have an exciting start that interests you immediately upon you beginning the game.
Not just the story, the gameplay needs to be better at the start too. You usually have to wait 5+ hours just to get the basic mechanics introduced, and combat is often not actually fun until 10+ hours in.
Here's the thing about trails: world-building and pacing are inverse quantities, as pacing slows down, you can add more world building and vice versa. World building also has a point of diminishing returns. It's the reason why when you read the Harry Potter books, or you read Lord of the Rings, or you read Game of Thrones, most of the details of how the world works are not explained. They don't need to be, and doing so would just slow down the pacing. There is a point past which additional world building details just cause reader to check out. However, there is a small minority of the human population who doesn't experience the diminishing returns of world building, they always want more. You can't build a globally recognized fantasy series catering to us, there aren't enough of us to support it. You can, however, build an extremely successful JPRG series catering to us, and because literally no one else caters to us, Trails fans become extremely devote because Trails is the only series that ever bothers to reach out to us and give us what we're looking for. Do we really need to know how many children were killed in Ravennus village during the hundred days war? Do we really need to know the immigration policies of people coming into Crossbell through Tangram Gate? Do we really need to know how many armored divisions are in the Erebonian army and the organizational structure of the Railway Military Police? No, not really. It does absolutely slow the pacing. What trails fans love is that not only are all of those things completely consistent all throughout the series (the details all fit together perfectly and are mutually supported) but (and this is the important part) they all make complete logical sense. None of it is random, it's all been so well thought out and so well put together and so much pain and effort was put into planning all of it that you look at it and just marvel. It's not something anyone else is doing or, to the best of my knowledge, has ever tried to do. There is a tiny, tiny audience for that, it's not something a company that is always chasing profits would ever commit to. Falcom only can because despite being a publicly traded company, the company's founder is still the majority share holder. The appeal of Trails, for fans of trails, is how completely and utterly immersive the experience is. Crossbell isn't just a city, I've explored every nook and cranny of it, I know which are the best restaurants in town and what they specialize in, I know where to go to buy a new suit if I need it, I know where to go to get a drink after hours, and I know who I call if my washing machine breaks down, amongst many, many other things. That there are so many details, and that they all fit seamlessly together is what makes Crossbell immersive and lived-in. You can't create a city as alive and as bustling as Crossbell if you want a fast pace. Falcom could get away with doing so much less, and the games would sell better if they did. It's why when the call went out in Trails into Reverie to liberate Crossbell and take back our home, I put every other form of entertainment I had on hold to do it.
Most lengthy games, like Persona are fine, it's the pacing of games like the trails series that drives me nuts. Especially in the Cold Steel quadrilogy, all the good stuff happens right at the end and it ends on a cliff hanger.
@@RicochetForce Nah you can't, I prefer the daily life sections much more than the dungeon crawling because it's immersive to me. I don't get why people don't get this but you need slow sections to make the player care about the world they're inhabiting. People already complain about base game Haru being terrible because of no screen time and here you are wanting 50 hours to be chopped off the game. Same for Trails, I am 100% sure I wouldn't care about Crossbell getting raided if I didn't spend a whole game there slowly immersing myself into the game and learning about all the NPCs that inhabit it. Some games need this slower pacing to make the world seem worthwhile and really if you need action or something cool every few minutes, you shouldn't be playing JRPGs because the goal has always been to allow you to live in a world different from your own. Slow pacing isn't bad and is almost a necessity for some JRPGs.
I think what put me off grinding was when I stopped playing og Xenoblade 1 in it's last half because I found myself watching the rest of the cutscenes on youtube, while grinding to beat the next boss. Though I agree it comes down to personal preference and bs-tolerance, I can't agree with people saying it's a non-issue or that RPGs are only for people who love grinding. Most people will love a game more if it has less/no grinding. Just imagine if Chrono Trigger added 10 hrs of mandatory filler combat. Yes some might still like it, but it wouldn't even reach top 5 or 10 anymore. The problem is not leveling up, the problem has always been devs padding/stalling the game by forcing the player do nothing but uninteresting chores.
persona's tutorial isn't long at all, each mechanic is introduced in 1 or 2 fights. it just has a lot of talking in it because persona has a lot of talking everywhere. cause it's half life sim. that's completely different from FF13, where the game actually takes 100 fights to introduce each base mechanic and it takes 20 hours. THAT is a terrible tutorial. at least you got the basics, MMO levelling is a pandering snoozefest and mandatory grinding is, in fact, bad. you'll get there.
Exactly in the first Dungeon you get everything you need to know about battles and you can fuse personas you dont need anything else the guns are not that useful. FF XIII is horrible I can not play that game without cheats ,that opens the crystarium for all characters and gives every character their Summon. I mean we get Odin at the beginning, but we have to wait for Hope and Vanille to their summons 5-8 hours before endgame. I seriously don't know what they thought ,when they made that game.
There is definitely a lot of tutorialization in modern games and it can really be too handholdy - but the solution is NOT to just “give you all of the gameplay mechanics up front”. It is REALLY easy to overwhelm a player with too many tutorials at the beginning without giving them time to actually practice using what they’ve taught before moving onto the next part. You NEED to have some clever onboarding strategies for your game, that’s part of pacing.
what is sounds more like is not that these games have pacing issues, it's more that you just wanna play the game and not worry about the story. Which is fine... but that's not a pacing issue that's just wanting something more action and progression based. RPGs are meant to have simplistic game systems and have tutorials in the first few hours of the game to teach the players how to play their game, there's nothing wrong with that, cause the difference in RPGs then something like an FPS, not every RPG plays the same, yes they might have similar things like turn based combat or action based combat but they all have different systems and mechanics that work alot different then another RPG. FPS games, if you've played one you've played them all, horror games if you played one played them all. RPGs all have different things they have to teach the players cause they're gonna be on a 50+ hour journey and teaching the players nothing will make them quit 2 or 3 hours in. Elder Scrolls and the new fallout games do this exact thing and it's why alot of JRPG fans just get through the beginning and just quit right there cause they don't know what the hell they're suppose to do, no sense of direction, no understanding of how to do things. So yes the games require you to sit there for a few hours teaching how to play the game cause if they don't you're gonna lose alot of people that way.
slow pacing isn't the same as bad pacing and pacing isn't the same as length. A game being long shouldn't automatically make it boring. RPGs aren't about the instant gratification and fun that a platformer would give, they are more about providing an emotional attachment to the long term progression of your characters.
There is a difference between pacing and exposition. Not all games are supposed to instantly gratify you every second and full throttle you through the entire experience. This is especially the case for JRPGs in general. With Trails, the pacing is by design. It's the value for those who enjoy large interconnected worlds, known as epics. There are 12 games for the series so far, and every detail takes place on a continental scale. It would be terrible if they crammed it all into 2-3 games just so your pacing preferences could be met. Trails is for the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, One Piece, and Dune fans. Trails is not for anyone with a short attention span. It is for those who want to dive deep into a living breathing world to get completely lost in. FinalFantasy is fast food. Trails is fine dining. You're meant to consume it at a controlled pace. Percentage of time speant is an oversimplified take and a one dimensional metric to base your argument in. Just play what you like and move on.
This video is kind of interesting and I actually think there's a bit of discussion to be had with this topic especially when it comes to filler in modern games in general. However, I felt like a big part of this video misconstrues slow pacing for filler. As someone who struggled at first to finish Trails in the Sky FC, I acknowledge the game can be slow but I also don't think the game is bad because of its pace. I wouldn't really call it filler either. I think a really good example of filler is the dungeons in FF7 Remake where some sections blatantly repeat. I think the Trails in the Sky games that come after FC only work because FC existed. FF14 has a slow pace. In fact I would agree that A Realm Reborn is not really enthralling to get through on your first play, especially before they removed most of the quests between 2.0 and Heavensward. But it feels like a strawman to imply the game only gets good at the newest expansions. While getting to the latest expansions does take 100's of hours, I don't think that's an inherent flaw especially since the expansions are enjoyable as you play through them(they are generally praised) and the newest expansions are continuations of the story. You can't really start a story at its climax and the latest expansions really only work because of what came before them. This video does have some good points though. As someone who played and enjoyed FFXIII, I would agree that the game's tutorial is bad(albeit for entirely different reasons than stated in the video). I think you're right when you present the idea that a longer game is not inherently better but the problem comes in when you imply that faster pacing is better pacing. Its like comparing an apple to an orange. While someone may prefer one of over the other, it doesn't mean any of them is objectively better. I think you prefer quicker, faster paced games and that's okay but it doesn't mean slower games are inherently flawed either.
I guess someone needs to see the Tales franchise. Most games just set the hero on the journey with a reason to fight, 3-4 hours long max (kudos for Tales of the Abyss for getting to the action in barely an hour). That is, except for the franchise's most revered entry, ironically. In Vesperia, every freaking town, the party disbands and Yuri must talk to every member. Over. And over. And over.
I am actually replaying ffxiii right now, mostly for nostalgia reasons, plus art direction and soundtrack is phenomenal but I’m 20 hrs in and maaaaan the battles get mundane. Just pushing through to grand pulse 😅 I will say now that I’m older and am trying to follow the story more I do have more appreciation for the story.
My main issue with Trails is its dialogue. My biggest frustrations came about when we would be getting a mission briefing or whatever, every single character had to get their input in. Most of the time it was just each character giving their own variation of “I agree” and it became nauseating. It’s not just that the game is text-heavy. It’s bloated by sooo much unnecessary text that completely demolish the pacing and enjoyment for me.
That was exactly my issue with P5. Before every mission, 10 people had to tell me what the mission would be. After the mission, 10 people would tell me how the mission went. P3 and P4 are some of my most beloved games but I had to force myself through P5.
That is the appeal of the series and that is why it persist in maintaining that. these are just the type of game that specific people will like depending on their taste. It is a game that if it was recommended to you, people will telll you to "talk to all NPC" type of game. Basically some games you come in with a prebuilt expectation, like if youare never the tyep to play that "heavy dialogued game" then don't play trails. Cause you probably would have heard already that it have dialogues amounting to worrd count longer than even some novels.
@@Snzn18 "Longer than some novels" is an understatement. Averaging out their lengths, five of the games is more text than all twelve books of Wheel of Time!
I find it annoying that people tell me that I dont like rpg because I complain about padded worldbuilding and slow burn story. I love Yggdra Union, Gungnir, Etrian Odyssey, Monster Hunter series(if you consider that one) or any rpg that are aware that some players replay games. What scares me is that Monster Hunter Wilds would want to make it turn into an "immersive storytelling game". I hope it doesnt ruin the phasing.
I'm with you there. I love MH, and it's my favorite series of all time. I am a bit concerned with the direction of Wilds, but we'll see. Hopefully it stays true to its roots ✊🏼
The original sentiment for "It gets good after 20 hours" is a critique against MMOs since your play time is literally dictated by a paywall. That's why FF14 tried to cut down it's main game progress bloat so that you weren't wasting more subscription time trying to get to the good part. Single player single-purchase games can do whatever they want. It's specifically just MMOs that fall victim to this criticism and it's not a subjective problem either. It's objectively bad to have an MMO experience dragged out. Your single subscription should be enough to get you to the end of the game at the very least. Single player games don't have that as an objective issue it's primarily subjective at that point.
It works for FF13 specifically because the average player was too dumb to figure out how the combat system worked so they make sure to give you ample time to use each individual character and learn their strengths and weaknesses while exploring their characters and progressing the story. Most FF13 players especially in the west did not play more than a handful of hours of the game before dropping it for being too hard. FF13 is also 3 games, not one game, so in the total runtime you are only spending about 10% of playtime in a "tutorial" which is actually not a tutorial at all.
I'd argue that XIII's combat wasn't really that hard. It just didn't offer that much variety to keep players engaged to it. And while the story is linear due it being chase sequence, any chase sequence going for over 25 hours starts to lose their sense of tension eventually.
This topic is far too nuanced to explain what I think without it turning into a wall of text. You make good points, and I also agree that arcade style design is kind of a lost art at this point, since pretty much all AAA games shoot for slower paced games, with more focus on story and that take longer to beat. The thing is, there should be space for all kinds of games but I digress. The best example you used to me is persona 5. I want to say the game is good, I had a lot of fun at times, but mostly i've been pretty bored out of my mind with extremely wordy tutorials and conversations repeating te same informatiion 5 times. They really hit you over the head with the story part, as if they don't trust the players to pick up on subtext and nuances. The video kinda makes it feel like you're criticizing most games that hdon't have super fast pacing. While i'm pretty sure you don't actually mean that, it is the vibe of the video, but like you said, talking about pacing is complicated to say the least. I'll just say that I can enjoy all types of games, the super slower paced story heavy ones with lots of character interactions and the more arcade style super fast paced and everything in between. But just because it's a slower paced rpg doesn't mean the game is excused from criticism on it's pacing, but honestly I feel like western games do this much worse. The newer god of war games, I find them to be insuferable because of the glacial pacing.
I think Persona 5 is the perfect example of a game that doesn't respect the player's time or intelligence. This isn't even an issue of trusting the player to understand subtext. In the first hour of the game you're shown a cutscene of Kamoshida picking up Anne in his car, and immediately after they leave you meet Ryuji, who says the person in that car was a pervy teacher named Kamoshida, and the game shows a flashback of what just transpired not 30 seconds ago because it assumes you have severe short-term memory loss. Little time wasting moments like this compound over time and drag the experience out. It's exhausting sitting through so much repetitive dialogue across a hundred hours, and watching scenes where six or seven characters huddle together and take turns chiming in with short phrases like "yeah, let's do this," just to provide this veneer of importance for every party member. And for people that enjoy these experiences, fair enough. There's nothing wrong with having preferences towards certain forms of storytelling. We all have our own definitions for what constitutes good pacing, which is what makes discussions about this subject so fascinating.
@@RushHourWeekend I agree with pretty much the whole comment. I think it's interesting most ppl doesn't seem to mind these pacing issues in games but the same things in a movie would be considered unforgivable. Yeah they're different medias but still, both have a focus on telling an andio visual story. Not to mention persona has no camera work at all, characters just stand there doing stock animations.
Ultimately most of this comes down to a matter of opinion. I understand that a lot of people don't like to read mountains and mountains lf text, but there sre plenty of people that, much like a good book, would love to sit down and read about the intricacies of the world in said RPG. I disagree with the notion that a gane that takes its time setting things up or that every gave needs to come out the gate guns blazing. Not every game needs to be nade with everyone in mind. Thats how you get the 3D open world cookie chtter games of the western gaming industry. Its better to know what the core audience wants and know where and when to compromise for what story you want to tell. Now if the writers are just wasting time with mostly repetitive filler dialogue where characters are repeating each other constantly, thats a different issue.
Bro i'm someone who played smt 5 on hard mode and I only had to grind ONCE maybe twice in the entire game and said grinding sessions were like 20 minutes max. Sure the bosses are hard but I very rarely felt like I ever had to grind. More that I just had to actually play around the bosses attacks with different team comps and strategies. Tbf I was doing a ton of exploration during my playthrough but I was also playing on hard so it probably evens out. Maybe your Idea of grinding is exploring the world but if that's the case i have no idea why you are play smt 5.
I’ve never had issues with tutorial sections in games, only one game ever made me want to quit from the tutorial section and that was kingdom hearts 2 that intro was wayyyyyy to long
@@RicochetForce and many games like Trails in the sky did that for several people. Just because the game doesn't start with conspiracies, bombastic action doesn't mean it's not gripping. The world building can be gripping for so many people and it's why they play and series like Trails,Persona do that really well
As a huge fans of RPG who mostly play old games and like text heavy games like persona or Trails, my limit is 5 hours. Because most games already finished their introduction/prolog during that time. If I'm still not hooked, I'm out. I'm nearly out on Ni no Kuni because they handhold too much that my patience ran thin, and flat out thrown DQ4 & DQ5 because the chapter per character system annoy me (im a huge fan of DQ, have played all except 4,5,10)
You literally said why for DQ4 so whatever (Even if it's such a a small section of the game) but what's your issue with DQ5 if you liked the others? sure it has a chapter system but it's not a chapter per character thing like DQ4 it's just split into 3 sections that provide an interesting story telling method of actually going through stages of the protagonists life instead of just being one adventure that takes like an in story month or whatever.
@@projectmessiah I don't know, unlike DQ4 where I know which part I hate, I just dislike DQ5 story. I don't have concrete reason. I've tried several times but always end up abandoned it
@@projectmessiah mine is 3,7 & 8. really love DQ9's party costumization but it has weak story, and DQ11 if they don't mess it up with act 3. Also love DQM2 Coby's Journey
I can understand that if you're a gameplay only kind of guy, you would find the talking and dialogue parts to be pretty dreadful, but in some RPG's, that is simply supposed to be part of the experience. In Persona, hanging out with NPC's is like half the point of the game because increased social links give you various gameplay advantages and unlockables. The tutorial is too long though, on that I can agree, but the rest of the game is how it's supposed to be. Final Fantasy 13 on the other hand is boring because there's no variety at all in the gameplay. It's just a corridor full of combat encounters from start to finish. No matter what kind of game it would be, sitting through the same gameplay loop for longer than 10 hours simply gets boring. I don't mind a really long game as long as it has variety, but FF13 simply doesn't give you anything else besides walk forward + combat.
The irony of p5 being in thumbnail for this topic because it's actually pretty late in the game that it becomes a slog to get through. Morgana maybe not from a story perspective is the worst as much as I hate him, it's actually from a gameplay perspective that morgana late in the game becomes a horrible experience.
I'm many hours into p5 and I'm still wondering when it gets good, I'm only being patient with it because a friend said I should play it. It's not very interesting so far.
@@Aberusugi How far are you in? If you made it past the first or second dungeon and didnt like it, you're never going to like it. That basically is the game, that is what you'll be doing. IMO it gets repetitive and not as good from there. I finsihed it because the first two dungeons blew me away but I still had trouble finding the energy to finish the game.
>Sky gets good in the second game tfw I love Sky FC and preffer it over SC cause Sky SC first half is mostly just okayish and sorta repetitive. SC is the game I've liked the least so far. Azure > Zero > the 3rd > FC > SC. Zero and Azure are (almost) perfect for me, those two were a blast since minute zero. The characters, their motivations, the world and its status quo... I mean, the main theme is super clear since even the prologue. And that theme is transpired through every aspect of the game. It's genious. Zero isn't about presenting you something "fun" as if you were a child asking for explosions, it presents you something valuable from a writing and world building point of view. No game has made me care for every single NPC as Zero and Azure do. That game made its whole setting feel alive, and the player part of it. It isn't filler because it presents something necessary for its story to be good. If you remove it you have a hole there. And if you change it for something explosive or "stupidly fun" you're messing with its tone and escalation of the conflicts. Anyway, on "characters standing and plot not moving on". You know, that's not how writing works. Writing deals with themes, messages, settings. It is only filler if those interaction convey nothing meaningful for characterization of thematical build up or world building. A good plot isn't just a bunch of twists and fun stuff, a good plot has also to convey something. Because stories aren't only entertaining bunch of words and scenes, they are vehicular tools for ideas and emotions. Uncharted 2 is a fun game with good pacing, sure. Uncharted 3 too, but not that much. But while Uncharted 2 core themes are kinda whatever to me, I vibe with Uncharted 3 idea of found family with Nath and Sully. I don't consider it a great game since beyond that it is not super great story, but it is okay. However, I could write a whole paper explaining why Trails from Zero and Azure inspired me in my life.
This is why I stick to my arcade games. They're 30-60 minutes long and are fun instantly with years more longevity than most RPGs. DoDonPachi is fun the moment your ship drops after 4 seconds of setup. And it stays fun until you die or win. There's a blog I follow by Lilura1 that covers classic cRPGs for PC like the real Fallout games and Jagged Alliance. She spits *venom* at modern RPG's that waste your time. Because yes, even RPG's should be fun immediately and be dense with player driven, mechanically interesting gameplay. Fuck the dislike ratio and the cope in the comments. This is fire, bro. Also *WAS THAT DANGUN FEVERON MUSIC?*
Dangun Feveron is one of my favorite Cave soundtracks, even if I think the game itself is one of Cave's weaker titles. Not too big a fan of Psikyo-style shmups.
@@RushHourWeekend I used to draw ships a lot and Dangun, next to the original DoDonPachi, was my main inspiration. I love Cave's machine design. It's not my favorite game, but I like it's frenetic nature.
A game doesn't need to reveal everything it has to offer right away, but restricting features until you make it over a dozen hours in means less time spent experiencing the combat at it's full potential.
Dear youtubers, please refrain from showing footage of advanced/secret content of games (and other media as well) unless you intend to specifically talk about said content, always with a spoiler alert. If you just want to illustrate your videos, use scenes from the opening or the early areas of a game, there is no need to show late game stuff...
That's BS. Trails in the sky isn't just world building. Slow pacing is a requirement to introduce correctly the characters and the wolrd building. If you find this part boring and therefore not good, that's on you. Some games do a better job at introducing effectivly all that sure but that doesn't mean slow pacing is an issue. One the plot start going crazy, slow pacing isn't a good idea. But at the very beggining, fast pacing can lead to half cooked worldbuiling and character establishment. This can be interesting and entertaining but certainly not engaging. Want and exemple ? Look no further than Honkai Star Rail. Slow pacing doesn't equal bad pacing. Slow pacing doesn't make the game automaticly boring. Plus a shit ton of people say a game/movie/tv show/anime is boring but do a sh*t job at explaining why, yourself included. Is it because nothing interesting happen ? You can't expect high stakes in the story 2 hours in, espacially in a journey of self discovery like trails in the sky because that would completly shift the tone of the game. High stakes should come from a long build up through forshadowing, they get higher and higher as the game progresses and our protag are growing. If the writters pull these high stakes out of their *ss without build up, how am i supposed to be engaged in the story ? It doesn't matter if it makes the story "interesting" or "entertaining", i don't believe this is a cohesive wolrd in the first place. High stakes need to be earned. Next up, there is no such thing as sky fc being more focus on character interaction and sky sc share the same story structure as the first game until chapter 6 when side quest are pretty much gone. That doesn't make what's come before bad: the quality of the wirtting is excellent, character interaction are meannigful and sometime very funny, the wolrdbulding is consistent, there's mysteries that keep the player engaged the all way through; i'm not saying trails doesn't have pacing issue but to the point of being a deal breaker ? No, again that's on you. Also, what makes a side quest boring to you ? Because in trails in the sky, estelle and joshua are bracer and the bracer's job is to help people in need. These side quest are justified by the main characters doing it as a job (in other trails games too) AND they're supposed to grow doing those so these "boring" side quest are important. The "fun" you're searching for isn't some games are after. Games try to acomplish different thing and you not having fun doesn't mean that the game isn't good. I enjoy slow paced story based games for what what they are and ot what they aren't. Ys origin is one of my favorite games of all time but the game doesn't have the same qualities as trails games. In ys games the writting isn't the first thing that i'm looking for. "Try to view in from another perspective here". Have you tried to change your mindset and ask yourself if they're a point to these "boring" side quest and slow pacing ? In some games like the trails series there is a point. I get why you don't enjoy your time with text heavy jrpgs and i also think that games like P5 are lacking in this area. That being said, slow pacing have a purpose and this purpose is not to entertain that's for sure but i want to be entertained, i'll just watch a block buster movie, i'll not play a jrpg because their story are enjoyable for very different reasons. What most people fail to understand is that they're a difference between a game that's hard to enjoy because of the "slow burn" an a bad game. But well i can't say for everyone where to draw the line with how much time do you need to put in a game to see if it's good. The thing is learning to appreciate a game is something that most players nowadays don't take the time to do. Did i ever said trails in the sky became good at some point ? f*ck no. It's consistenly good most of the time, beggining included. A pay-off being worth it or not is a subjective matter but if you're too worried about games being disapointing having pacing issues or not, well yes games are just entertainment. For me it isn't.
i think you should play any of fromsoftware games. they don't hold your hand, you can literally be naked, and no need to grind as long as you are master the mechanic. lol or game like dishonored. tbh, don't play typical jrpg. they mostly have "social life" aspect, and grind. i used to enjoy game like that, but work life taking over, and only have 2-3 hours gaming time, and the only rpg that i can play and having a good short time daily are fromsoftware games.
I'm guessing you're talking about modern FromSoft, from Demon's Souls onward, because I've played their games from the PS2 and Xbox era and they were... of varying quality, ha. But yeah, their modern games are generally structured well. I think Demon's Souls is probably their best work.
@@RushHourWeekend or maybe, you should play octopath traveler. very similar mechanic with bravery default, if you more of turn based rpg kind of player. i don't really play old fromsoftware game, cause back then is too hard for my young self LOL. bloodborne, elden ring, and sekiro is what i played. never like dark souls cause the combat was too slow for my liking.
thats why I like shorter rpg with good pacing like the SaGa series or the mega man rpgs they are fun since the beginning and you have a bunch of options to be engaged even if you get even more stuff later on
I agree with you. I nearly dropped persona 5. But bruh trails from zero was a masterpiece on his own 😅 And don't complain about sky fc if you didn't play it
You're disregarding that as story driven games, RPGs are entitled to want to set up and have a slow burn. Just like a movie or a book, a game can be slow if it's pertinent, to the story it wants to tell. That is also fun and entertaining too, to immerse oneself in the world and only then interract with it, and you are bored with that, that's really a matter of taste. Now you could argue that some games still fail to convince the player that a slow start is necessary, in which case it would be a fault of the game.
Xenoblade 1 leads with a captivating story almost right away. It does have a slow start, but the characters are almost immediately likeable, and after you're two hours deep you've got a dramatic event and motivation to embark on this grand journey. The narrative setup is very strong, but it's a shame that it takes hours for the combat system to open up. Xenoblade 2 is a textbook example of "gets good 20 hours in." I don't think it's until you reach Chapter 4 that it finally takes off.
I recently went back to play FF13 again, and I only managed to make it about 10 hours in before calling it quits. One of the worst things about FF13's beginning is that there is almost no progression. You only get like one or two weapon upgrades in the first several hours, and during that time, you haven't even unlocked the crystal system. So you're just doing boring battle after boring battle to progress a story that starts off extremely slow, and to top it all off, at the beginning of the game the characters all range from bland to annoying There is no story hook, no character hook, and no gameplay hook. I remember liking FF13 a lot when it first came out, but coming back to it now makes me realize how bad it really was
I think JRPGs can learn one thing from western rpgs. Most get you into the general gameplay loop within the first 20 minutes. A lot of newer titles are over tutorialized and bloated with dialogue and filler side content.
I actually think most JRPGs have mediocre replayability regardless of "length" and only a few actually go above and beyond to make it worthwhile. From my perspective, it's either a mechanic that requires multiple playthroughs to experience, like Chrono Trigger's multiple endings or Cross's branch points and party recruitment, or it's just engaging combat/gameplay that has its own merit outside of the context of the rest of the game. As a huge fan of the Trails series, even the fan-favorite Trails to Azure is one that I find myself unlikely to replay in the future. However, the much more controversial Trails of Cold Steel arc, even the first one, is something I've already started going back to despite not having played all of them yet. Sky FC and Cold Steel 1 have similar structures in terms of how the plot unfolds, and CS1 is much longer than Sky FC, so many fans find its length to be offputting. However, he hour-to-hour gameplay is what makes the world of difference to me. In CS1, you're never stuck doing monster quests with a party of 2 characters, its QoL is leagues above (key difference is fast travel but there are many reasons), and the combat is much more dynamic due to different balancing and new mechanics. I love CS1 for many reasons, but its combat is so much fun, in fact, that it alone is enough to make me look back fondly on the game and want to revisit it, despite its flaws. Meanwhile, thank goodness all Trails games have turbo mode on Steam, but Sky FC and SC are walking simulators at times.
Jrpgs are hardbuilt to "tell a story"first and foremost. So the main experience is experiencing the story together with the gameplay. Which is why not all Jrpgs have the best value when it comes to "replayablity". There is areason why Games that have Great replayability are the ones where you can disregard story content
I also jumped into FFXIV when A realm reborn first came out. I wasn't a huge fan of the MMO combat and quest design, but I stuck through it to the end. Story was decent, but I wasn't willing to keep paying a monthly subscription for a game I felt was just "OK". Now the idea of spending hundreds of hours of "decent" gameplay to get to all the good story content in the expansions is just too daunting. I haven't gone back to FFXIV since ARR. But if there was an offline, single player, 20 -50 hour version of FFXIV I would probably give it a try at some point.
If Square somehow defied the laws of reality and managed to compress the entire FF14 saga into a single, 50-hour-long single player game, trimming out the 400 hours of filler, it'd be something really special.
The following expansion is widely regarded as the point in which FF14 gains traction story wise, but ARR is pretty important plot wise, some of the stuff introduced in it's MSQ ends up being the focal point of the plot several expansions down the line and the Quest design has improved a lot over the years becoming less tedious and fetch quest heavy like 2.0
10 to 15 hours in trails 1, it feels like the beginning acts of grandia 1 and dragon warrior 7...except, in trails they start right off the bat fighting monsters and doing missions(supposedly threatening), but they still bicker like kids 😮💨 If not even that can get your characters to develop interestingly...i'm not waiting 30 hours in for the climax to waltz in...
@@Snzn18 played grandia and dw 7? There's bickering there...until crisis hits, andcircunstances pushed them into maturity and hard choices so ...maybe i was expecting character development and strife?
@@serphence8566 Yeah, but there are no SERIOUS crises in Sky until towards the end. That's the point. You watch them LEARN how to grow more mature through their interactions with the civilians and non-civilians of Liberl. They can't just get pushed into maturity because they don't know HOW until they learn. That's where all the senior bracers throughout the game fit in, to help guide them along that path of growth and discovery. That's the whole appeal of the series. To watch them gradually gain the confidence, knowledge, and wisdom necessary to be able to carry out that growth.
The awnser is simple jrpg's arent for you. There are games for everyone but not every game is for everyone. Yes the older one gets the less time one had and I understand that. I haven't ff7r because of alot of extra stuff that feels like filler. It almost feels like you want everything to go fast but in alot of rpgs that is not the case. It did happend to one and people were pissed, that was Xenogears disc 2.
Final Fantasy XIII really has a complex battle system. Try to kill the super bosses! It's not a game that you encourages you to spamm the same skill. Every skill has a function that is needed for the whole game, it's not just one especific situation that you experience once or twice.
@@edgelessspace7180 Games don't need filler at all. Everything in the game should have a purpose. A fetch quest to pad time and a fetch quest to get you to go to a remote area so you can learn about the world are two different things. One is killing 150 boars in the pen five feet from you for 10 silver and the other is you being sent to Nebel Valley to explore a side area so you can familiarize yourself with the terrain so that later on, when you're rescuing hostages from sky pirates, you know exactly where you are in relation to Bose, the hub city the chapter the fetch quest takes place. One is filler, one isn't. You can't make a painting good by just throwing in some lines in random places unless the point of the artpiece is literally the random arrangements of the lines. Every stroke of the brush must be deliberate and have purpose. Filler is not good. The only reason filler exists in anime is to allow the manga time to finish the chapter or arc or whatever. Different scenarios.
I enjoy making videos about these subjects. I think I might come across as someone that doesn't like RPGs, but I wouldn't play so many of them if that were the case.
@@RushHourWeekend no, I get you. You do come across as passionate but you're pointing out the things that detract from the fun. Some people can tolerate these things and that's fine, but I suspect we'd all be happier if the experience was more lean.
I like to give games a fair chance, and I won't know if I like a game or not until I play it. Some people assume that I don't enjoy jrpgs and therefore shouldn't play them, but I showed several examples of jrpgs that I like in this video (Chrono Trigger, Vagrant Story), and I've made other videos highlighting some of my favorite games, which happen to be jrpgs.
"Some games are too long to be replayed" This is why I stopped playing Royal, OG P5 took me 80 hrs of only doing SOME of the content (no max every link BS) and I just put game on Easy at the very last dungeon cause enemies were too tanky/strong despite me being the same level as them etc. FF to Royal, I put game on Easy at Futaba's Palace because I WAS going for every link max but then they also made dungeons longer (some I couldn't do in a single day like OG), obv the additional content of Kasumi, more social hangouts like Darts and so on. I got to Shido's Palace and stopped playing, haven't picked it up again. I get into RPGs because of the story/world and combat, that doesn't mean I want a 50+ hr base game though. Games should only be 30+ if you do side content Rebirth also ruined the pacing with the stupid af minigames and I ain't replaying that, Remake is far better for replayability since not as much fluff (I also mostly dislike OW games)
tl;dr whining hurry up and let me play already - Rush Hour Each game is different dude shocking I know. Also comparing an actual RPG to an action RPG? Seriously? And other genre's? Seriously? Plus Brave Fencer Musashi dude? Made back in the PSX days... where Squaresoft was pushing titles out here and there experimenting with their games some hit or miss smh. I can only imagine if this was much longer holy shiet.
All I hear is a lot of whining that you're not patient enough to beat a game that's well written and has proper setup for it's series' storyline (Trails in particular) which is the game's/series main draw while the combat is also great and entertaining from the first run onwards (also unlike one of your major complaints Trails barely has tutorials outside the first 5 hours or so and rarely introduces a new system to the game after that...hell it lets you use you're characters' ultimate moves within the first couple hours while 90% of all other games won't until about 15 hours or more in (and that'd be for their lowest level of ultimate moves...Tales for example with Mystic artes). If Trails tried to cut the first game you'd just be creating tons of issues of trying to explain character relationships (as in how the main cast even met), world lore, etc and would likely wind up fucking the pacing by making it far too fast (what are you gonna do make Estelle and Joshua meet all their party members in 1 or 2 chapters, have the final fight/conflict of Sky 1 occur 1/3rd of the way through the game, and try to go from there? It wouldn't work narratively plain and simple and as far as combat goes the game teaches you everything pretty much instantly outside of 1 new mechanic added in Sky 2 which is taught in the prologue chapter of said game)...throw in the fact Sky 1 and 2 were originally going to be 1 whole game to begin with but that wound up being too big for the PSP to handle and even the digital copy of Sky 2 needs 2 separate app icons due to how long the game is so 3 total if you count Sky 1 should show you the scale of the game whcih would be far too much lore and stuff to downsize without creating tons of plot holes or just making the story quality outright shit (which would've killed the games as a well built mutli game story that's connect to each other was and is the series main draw)...it'd be just as dumb as cutting all of Merry, Pippin, and Gandalf's PoV sections (as well as anyone not Sam/Frodo/Aragorn) out of the Lord of the Rings so that the focus could be on Frodo and Sam on one side and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli on the other which will leave tons of unanswered questions when Merry/Pippin/Gandalf show up in front of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli after being missing for so long and just managing to have the key plot point needed (person or item) that leads to their victory, the same applies to Sky 1: quite a few plot points lead into plot points in part 2 especially the finale's portions but also the plot points in each individual region of Sky 1 also plays into plot points in said regions of part 2 as well. And as for replaying lengthy games is boring...that's your opinion fine but doesn't apply to other people (probably the majority of jrpg players), hell I've played Tales of Symphonia (my favorite game of all time) 15+ times and have enjoyed it each run with my first one lasting about 80 hours and most other runs about as much time (maybe 10 to 20 hours less)...same for Ys 8 (which is a 50 to 80 plus hour game depending on how much side content you do or if you're like me and crazy enough to go back and check all npc dialogues after every major story event/progression in Falcom games as Falcom's writers change the dialogue at least 3 to 4 times for each in game day (usually for morning, noon, afternoon, and night/sometimes before and after a quest) which I will admit adds in about a good 30 plus extra hours just going around to every npc in the game to see if they get updated to see how the state of the world is in the eyes of the various characters (playable, major npc, regular npc, villains, etc), granted that's my choice and something not everyone else needs to do...if you don't do that or the side quests most Trails games can be beaten within 30 to 40 hours max, same with Tales and a lot of other series you were bitching about...the only real valid complaint in terms of side content you had that is made mandatory would be for the Persona series as you are forced to do some random activity 2 or 3 times a day to progress each in game day and you need to complete all days in a month for about 8 in game months so ya that was extra fluff that wasn't needed I will admit that...FFVIIR Rebirths many minigames and tutorials would also apply I guess as they shove too many into the main story)). Also don't kid yourself with why jrpgs of the SNES era were short. It wasn't due to there being some desire to make them that short it was just due to technical limitations as the systems memory/the game formats at the time couldn't handle games that were too long. Hell the moment FF7 (OG) was made the amount of time and stuff increased exponentially over SE's other projects at the time (Chrono Trigger and others) likely due to the PS's discs allowing them to make larger games. it's also probably why most rpg maker style games are short: the engine or whatever they're using for memory has a limit to how many screens can be put into a game as I've never seen a game made from rpg maker longer than about 25 hours (if it was capable of making a long game on it someone would've done it by now...my guess is the program is prone to memory leaks and the like more so than other game formats). Are some shorter games good? Yeah, they're especially good when waiting in between 2 large games you're playing when you've nothing else going on then but at the same time some of these shorter games have 1 key issue that don't really make up for the time investment argument you're making: a good chunk of the shorter games made by A to AAA devs all sell the games at full $60 (or nowadays even $70) price tags which quite frankly are far too pricey for what little you do get in said games (Valkyria Elysium for instance went for $60 on release if I'm right and even Star Ocean 2 R did or at lowest $50 if not 60 which is still too high for a nearly 25 year old game...hell Tales of Symphonia, a 20 year old game by now, was also too high with it's recent remaster at $40 and it as I mentioned above is about ~70 hours long and was, imo, no longer worth more than $20 as that's what Steam has had it at for the last few years before its release). Hell the whole time argument is a fairly poor argument as unless you buy a game and intend to sell it as soon as possible after beating it you pretty much have all the time in the world (as long as your console/PC that it's on/disc works on works anyway and even then you could probably just find an emulator for the game nowadays for the older console games...only other scenario would be if you're mortally ill I guess) to play and finish it (I take multiple months for most games nowadays and I'm fine with it (granted I'm usually playing mutliple at the same time with different games on different days...even the 'short' games (20 hours or so) I have some going on that are 1 to 2 months at the moment)...there's no real need to rush these games tbh).
This is one of those comments I wish I could take a red pen to. There's a lot of run on sentences here-- your points are literally lost in this giant wall of text. 😬
@therealjaystone2344 Ok I'll make an addendum. The only time you would probably grind is when you preparing to fight the superboss at the end of the game, which I think is understandable. I never had to grind once when I played the rest of the game. If you think you need to grind, change your party setup.
@@LordlyWeebNo thats not true you also need to grind for some bosses. Especialy for casual players ,some bosses can be hard to beat I mean I like that about SMT games,but on your first playthrough you don't know what some bosses do and which elements they use ,if you happen to level up certain Demons that are weak against that boss attacks ,than you need to fuse another Demon and maybe even level them up. That you need to grind for Super bosses is nothing new , as someone who love the play FFX the grind for Dark Aeons is nothing compared to SMT V.
@doriansz3130 That's obviously not true because when I played SMT V for the first time, I didn't grind a single time before I fought the superboss. You don't need to grind. I didn't grind in Nocturne or SMT 4 either.
@@LordlyWeeb Just because you finished the game without grinding it doesn't mean everybody did 🤦 I also always start action games on hard mode,that doesn't mean ,that everyone can do that.
Chrono Trigger has the best pacing of any JRPG still today, no massive tutorial. FF7 Rebirth has the worst pacing I've ever seen by contrast, has a crap ton of tutorials and totally pointless filler every step of the way.
In short your an instant gratification person. Rpgs aren't built for that mind set its more of a build up, delayed gratification genre. Have fun 100% of the time the game is only a few minutes to few hours Versus fun built up over time expanded through 20+ hours. This is why you give the examples of being dropped into a middle of the mob and you fight it out. I would just recommend you play action fighter games or survival games. Like cod or any other 15-30 minute rounds a game type of games. Instead of ranting about rpgs maybe you need to just find the genre that fits your mindset.
While I did argue a similar point in my own comment I think this is a bit of harsh standpoint to take, he obviously likes jrpgs and names plenty in the video, not every jrpg is a build up game and telling someone to go play a different genre just because they don't like a common trope within a lot of it's games is a bit silly.
@@projectmessiah I mean he was a bit harsh, but "if he loves JRPG", then the video should already have the notion that "some JRPG" focuses more on the story than balancing it out like the video suggest. Jrpg series built reputation and niches and fanbases because they offer "different things and does things distinctly for their own brand".
RPGs don't all have these pacing problems. Chrono Trigger and FFVI are good right from the start, FFVII has a great opening and gives you new combat options quickly, and Western RPGs like Elder Scrolls and Fallout give you freedom to explore almost immediately. There's no reason that modern RPGs need to be so slow.
@@Basileus127 Some of us enjoy them slow, man. Taking the time to establish the world's setting, some backstories and (dare I ask) some not cardboard NPCs can make a world of difference in the payoff at the end, even without fast-paced story progression. Doing that well while keeping the player's attention is what makes a good writer!
@@Snzn18 I get where your coming from and the video could of been more clear but I think its just bad faith to assume he was impliying almost all jrpgs are like that
Nah, One Piece is relatively enjoyable from the start, gets good around Arlong Park which is about 30 episodes in then falls of hard after Water 7 which ends around 250 then has up and down arcs that at least as far as I've watched just don't reach it's early heights from Water 7.
I think one point you're missing is that just because a game is slower paced, that doesn't mean it has bad pacing. Let's take Trails in the Sky FC for example which has really slow pacing. I don't think the game is badly paced just because it takes its time to establish the world, the characters and develop relationships between its characters because guess what? It actually TAKES TIME to get someone to be emotionally invested in a fictional world and its characters. If they were to rush through all the introductory stuff to get to the "good" parts then the "good" parts wouldn't be nearly as good if at all because by the point you'd get there you wouldn't really be invested in what's going because the game didn't give you any reason to be in the first place. Furthermore in some cases the slow pacing is the entire point. I mean look at simulation games like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing where the entire point is that it isn't filled to brim with action scenes and engaging storytelling that keeps you at the edge of your seat at all times, but instead you can just kick back and relax.
TLDR: Slow pacing doesn't mean bad pacing and Trails is amazing
Agree with you completely. The pacing of Trails to Zero, how slow a burn that is, and how carefully and thoughtfully every piece is laid out, allows you time to get emotionally invested in Lloyd, Ellie, Tio and Randy's story.
When Randy's family, the Red Constellation, shows up in Azure, and when you see how it torments him, it hits like a truck, and is way more impactful than it would have been if you weren't fully invested in Randy as a character. Similarly, the careful way everything is set up and placed in Sky FC is why the prologue of Sky SC hits so damn hard. When Estelle wakes up the next morning and finds Joshua gone, it tears your heart out, because we love and care about Estelle. It wouldn't hit nearly as hard if the first game hadn't spent so much time building Estelle and Joshua up.
Absolutely and completely agree. Sometimes games are not meant to be rushed through. The Trails series is not for the impatient and instant gratification type of players (sadly - There are a LOT of them these day's). Those that take their time and gather the bits and pieces of information, build up of relationships and get attached to the characters, however, can enjoy the grand pay off later in the game(s).
I find FC really cozy, tbh. Discovering Libern was a blast. Every second of its world and characters was interesting. The shitty part was when I could only play as Estelle and Josh, but story-world-characters carried the game in an awesome way. Then, I played SC and did not like it as much. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 weren't that great IMO. Chapter 3 was really neat again and it picked up again in chapter 5, but in retrospective... I didn't enjoy it as much. So far, my least favourite game in the series.
Comparing a length of a RPG vs regular games is like comparing a season of a tv show vs movie
This video is just a lot of false equivalency. A game that's 50 hrs long and one that's 10 hrs are aiming for different kinds of experiences. The idea of "it gets good x hrs in" is something taken far too literally here. The actual meaning of the statement is to imply the payoff is worth the time taken to build up. Now obviously, that's an extremely subjective statement but then, so is pacing.
What one finds entertaining or important in enhancing their overall experience may not even register for another. While I understand this video is wholly from your perspective, it still feels far too narrow in its conclusion. When talking about subjects like this, it's important to consider and try to understand the other perspective even if you don't agree with it.
In conclusion, pacing does matter, but what constitutes good pacing is relative to the style and goal of the game and one should not confuse their preference for the latter to make a conclusion on the former.
Thank you for saying this, sir. This is why I disliked the video. I rarely dislike anything on youtube, but this creator has no ability to understand that there are people in this world with vastly different tastes to his own. I find the entire video to be myopic and self-centered. I, for example, am not a fan of survival horror games. I don't spend my time complaining about them, I know there is a type of person who loves them, and that I am not that person, so I just don't buy them or spend time on them. If you know an experience is not for you, why are you going out of your way to consume it?
@@SuperSupersoda if you a fan of great storytelling why would you play something that you don’t enjoy and waste your time and money 😂
@@MasterGundam-tv8vb I don't. No one should, slow paced games are not for everyone, but they are for someone, and those someones are the target audience. Take trails, as an example, Falcom can absolutely write a fast-paced story, just look at most Y's games, the slow pace of trails is a deliberate design choice. It's going to alienate most people, but Faclom knew there is a tiny minority that likes it that way, and no one else is competing for that tiny audience. That's how Falcom makes money, they found a tiny demographic that no one else was serving.
While I do agree with the sentiment "A game should be good the first few hours in", I think your confusing pacing with action and progression. While I do love sky sc more for its character development, I also loved the first game's opening sections as it was just living and discovering a detailed world before the big plot began. When I heard you say "50 hours of persona 5 was good and the other 70 was bad" there wasn't 70 hours of tutorials, there was 70 hours of social links and hanging out and that's half the reason I like persona games. Sure tutorials can be improved, but jrpgs can't have ninja gaiden tutorials because their systems are much more complex and uniqe than ninja gaidens and it would confuse the player more if they weren't given tutorials. If you think persona 5 and trails have too much filler, some others want more of that quality filler.
Honestly, I find the day-to-day content in Persona far more interesting than everything else. Mementos is unsufferable (same could be said about literally all of the battle content of P3), and the combat system is great, but not as much as SMT. What makes me play Persona over SMT is absolutely not the battle system, but the so-called "filler". I do think the reason I play JRPG is because of how the writers tend to write characters, worlds and so on. If I play a JRPG, I want to experience that, I want to dive deep into the story. Besides, if you had to build a JRPG that progress fast, without filler, without slow build-up, you'd just end with a 15-hour game that will probably be called "too short for what it's trying to tell".
For me the 70 hours of lame content was the combat. Sure it was fun at first but by the politician palace i got bored and started avoiding fights. For the entire rest of the game. Still managed to beat it albeit with a bit of difficulty only on the final fight. Really just brought the game down so much. Social stuff was the only interesting thing at that point.
@leonfire99 At this point, I feel like it's more of a Persona problem. Let me get this straight, I'm not saying that the battle content is easy, but not as interesting as it could be. The major I have with Persona combat compared to SMT, is that you have so many tools at your disposal that it's never difficult. In SMT, demons have the same tools you have, which makes combat far more interesting in my opinion.
Yeah. If we want to move away from the world of JRPGs for a moment, Disco Elysium is basically considered a modern classic and a masterpiece, and in that one you literally *have* to spend time fucking about in Martinaise and getting in all the townsfolks' business to advance the main plot. And it's great. It's genius.
I think this mentality of wanting to "get to the good stuff now" is part of the problem with modern anime and JRPGs: they seem to make the writers wary of experimenting and writing more unique characters because they're afraid all the setup will bore players, so they immediately rush to what they think "the players" want and just use clichés as shorthand.
@@antonioscendrategattico2302 lets not ignore that disco elysium didnt require 20hours to move the plot
Trails in the Sky doesn't "get good."
it *is* good.
This guy gets it.
It depends on the person I love the legend of heroes games in order for me to have fun the game needs to have a good story
Hard disagree. I played 5 hours of Trails in the Sky and it was very dull, I was still waiting for the game to actually begin. According to Reddit, the plot doesn't actually start for like 10 more hours so I never went back to it.
@@Basileus127 Whoever wrote that in Reddit, is bad at the game, if it took 10 hours to get to the good parts of the plot.
@@Basileus127it’s dull cus you’re supposed to lock in on the town style vibes and character development.
You touch on a lot of important points, yet I can't help but feel like you overstate the importance of fast pacing in regards to action. You can have good pacing in games where you talk to people, explore, equip your gear, absorb the world etc. It doesn't have to be action/combat all the time. There are "slow burn" type games, with great pacing imo.
I absolutely do not agree with what you said about FF14. When people say that Shadowbringers is peak Final Fantasy, or that Endwalker MSQ is great, it's not because it's inherently great (even if it is), it's because it's always the sequel of the previous expansion. They're not independant stories put together in a game because it's an MMO. Sometimes, you, as a player, should learn to let go instead of blaming the game. Maybe you're just not into that game to begin with? If you think that Persona 5 is boring for 70 hours, why do you keep playing it? Thank God games are not always the same. Sometimes, I'm in the mood for a little turn-based RPG that won't take me more than 20 hours. Sometimes, I'm in the mood Persona and its calendar system.
Besides, pacing is subjective. Yes, you can say that putting fetch quests doesn't add anything to the game. But some people will say that those fetch quests are important because they help feel immersed in the world. One example I have is my favorite quest from NieR Replicant: The Ballad of the Twins. It's a quest that can take hours to complete, where you sometimes have to exit and enter the same area and kill all the monsters just to drop the exact material you need. One might say it's unsufferable, and it is, kinda (it's the point of the game, so maybe it serves a grander purpose). But then, you finish the quest, and the rewards aren't that great? You literally, as the player, gain nothing for doing this. You just get to listen to one of the themes played and sung, in universe, by two characters. I spent 15 minutes listening to the song after finishing the quest. At this point, I came to the conclusion that fetch quests, side quests, are meant to serve the purpose of letting you stay in that world a little longer. If you don't like the game, the story or the universe enough to feel they are worthwhile, it's ok. But at the end of the day, pacing depends on how you, as a player, experience the game. How do you want to experience it? What are you searching for in the game?
If a game doesn't get good until 50 hours, or if a series doesn't get good until the 4th installment, maybe it just wasn't made for you. It didn't give you what you were searching for, but it's not the game's fault for being boring, slow, or whatnot. Playing a game is like meeting a person. Sometimes, you meet someone and you become friends instantly. Sometimes, you have to learn more about them and change your viewpoint. Sometimes, you just hate them and no amount of effort will make you like them.
I agree with this take.
I actually enjoyed every second of persona 5 and be thankful that it has a tutorial unlike smt or older persona games
They all have tutorials, wtf are you on about. Persona 4 starts slower than 5 did.
My general mindset on this is pretty much: 'If it doesn't get good until x amount of time in, then what you're really saying is that I need to first waste x amount of my time on doing something I don't like just to get to something I might potentially like, once I've passed that barrier with no guarantees. Why would I want that? That seems like an awfully big risk to take. What if I slog through the first several hours of the game because the fandom promised me it gets good after a while and once I get there, it's not good. Now I've just spent all that time doing something I didn't enjoy to get to a state in the game I STILL don't enjoy.'
So yes, the start of a game needs to be engaging. It's important that it hooks you in and keeps you involved. At the very least, you should be curious to see how the game develops over time. If you're literally bored to tears 2 hours into a game, that game is not for you.
That said, I've played quite a few of the games on this list and enjoyed most of them, but that's because I already know that slow burn, story and dialogue heavy games are exactly my cup of tea. I don't need fast paced action combat. I'm actually more inclined to stay away from games that promise fast paced non-stop action, because I know I don't like that kind of stuff. But that's me. Others might want exactly that. You know yourself. You know what you like. Don't listen to anyone who says: Nah, bro, it gets good after 15 hours. They don't know. It got good for them after that time. That doesn't mean shit for you. Listen to your own instincts. If they're telling you this game is shit, then stop playing it and go find one that isn't shit for you.
I don't disagree. The issue seems to be that there are some kind of slower paced, less high stakes narrations that are engaging... but not to some people. And those people seem to be the loudest voices in the discussion, who kinda set the narrative. So "the beginning is more tonally light and sets up the relationships between the characters and the world itself" seems to have been translated to "it gets good X hours in" in the online discourse.
And of course there's also the confounding factor that *some* projects, especially if they're serialized and not from a super established author (like manga), really *do* get good a certain amount of time in because the author is learning and getting better as they write, so the early parts are a bit rough. But that is a unique feature of serialized media, like manga, tv series and the like. It's silly to apply it to self-contained stories like a video game or an anime.
Another great video, but keep giving Brave Fencer Musashi a chance. It gets good 15 hours in (it’s 15 hours long).
XD
Hey, for real though, I obssessed over BFM back then. I still have my old copy of it for PlayStation. That game is just fun fun. It's bright an colourful, but it has plenty of action, and with some puzzle solving mixed in. Plus, while the story may not be "immensely developed", that doesn't mean it's not still a delightful story. the characters are memorable and the world is whimsical, plus I liked the whole "five elements" motif the game played with.
@@duraeusentenuLet alone everything being food themed
Brave fencer musashi is fucking awesome all the way through (except for the steam tower scene) - not sure what this video is in about bringing BFM up
This is why I'm such a fan of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. You have a small 5-10 minute opening segment on a boat, learn the gist of the controls... then you're set loose on an island with glorious, lightning fast combat. No 10-20 hours are required before things get fun.
Ys 8 is great, but starting with Ys Seven, Falcom definitely took a page out of their Trails catalog when it came to structuring these games. They started adding a lot more cutscenes, and "let's reunite at home base with our findings" every few hours. I think the Dana segments in Ys 8 and the prison segments in Ys 9 are my favorite parts of those games; they're more reminiscent of the Ark of Napishtim era, which I prefer.
@@RushHourWeekend , indeed. I like Y's VIII, but sometimes you can see the pacing is not so good. These "let's reunite at home base" was awful for me (sometimes you must go to the base, just to hear something from someone, and get back to the same location you was before. It doesn't make any sense!). That's why I prefer the Napishtim era, too.
Persona 5 doesn't even take nearly that long too get good though, sure the gameplay takes about 5 - 10 hours to really get going with the early tutorial stuff but if you think 70 hours of it wasn't enjoyable, then you just didn't like most of Persona 5 which isn't an issue for most fans who are usually invested in the plot around the start of the Kamoshida palace. Also Trails In The Sky Fc is just a layed back game that sets up and leads into a more epic saga later, while it's not for everyone, plenty of people like it, not really going to argue for that one like Persona 5 though because it really is slow even if I personally enjoy said slowness (not as much as the later content though tbf) not trying to be an asshole here but I don't think much of a real point is made in this video besides you seemingly not enjoying slower paced media that doesn't give instant gratification, i do think the idea about setting you're own pace in jrpgs is fair but not everything has to be short and replayable instead of long and not as replayable, like sure Chrono Trigger is a lot more replayable than P5 but one P5 playthrough gives me at least like 4+ Chrono Trigger playthroughs worth of content and i have never felt the need to replay Chrono Trigger more than once and im sure others agree. Nice video though, its well put together and it does talk about a relatively under discussed criticism point with certain jrpgs even if i do think you seemingly just don't like them from an extremely personal standpoint.
While I mostly agree, the problem is that most of the classic pre-FF7 JRPGs sold like crap in the West (mostly just the US), so the Japanese devs got the impression that Westerners prefer long setup and such, more so like in computer RPGs. I even remember Sakaguchi himself mention that they tailored some aspects of FF7 to what they thought Westerners would enjoy, because FF6 didn't do well in the US then - and they were kinda right, because FF7 is still one of the top sellers in the genre over here, almost 30 years later. The internet gives the people impression that Chrono Trigger was a massive hit in the US back in the 90s - it absolutely wasn't compared to Japan, despite how good it is. It's just the sad truth, but classic JRPGs are mostly cult classics, not commercial hits (in the West), and it's not just the most obvious ones like Dragon Quest. In fact, I'd argue that Final Fantasy is the odd one out among JRPGs in that regard.
I'd argue even Final Fantasy never sold much compared to action games. JRPGs are a niche genre - inside what may never stop seeming to be like a niche hobby. I mean, how many people even play video games compared to more braindead activities like watching TV?
@@asmodeus58XX To be fair, gaming is more profitable than film/music industry now, probably in no small part because of mobile gaming. So, the market could be 'potentially' bigger than ever. I do agree that JRPGs are a niche genre in itself, though. Except for super popular series like FF or DQ (the latter mostly in Japan) it will never be as popular as action games or even sports games on average. Heck, even action RPGs tend to do better than turn-based RPGs. Sure, there are exceptions, but they usually just prove the point.
Just because Azure is better than zero doesn't mean zero is bad. same for SC - what makes SC so good is that FC build it all up. It made you invested in the world. That's what SC builds on. FC is an JRPG that really takes its time to offer you exploration of a deep world with 'living' characters. I mean, most NPCs have their own little story arc. But it's all optional. You can easily finish FC and SC in 30-35 hours or so and you'll get great stories, characters and an amazing OST from both of them with the additional bonus of every subsequent game still building on what you have experienced.
'How the hell does it all relate' - well if you had played the previous 3 games totaling some 100 hours you might understand why Crossbell matters, why the political intricacies matter, why they're interesting and why those characters you meet matter as well. But also also, plenty of stuff happens on a smaller scale all the time in the Trails games. Every zone in FC has its own interesting story - and then all those stories tie together into a bigger story spanning two games which comes together in a span of 4 games which then comes together in a span of 10 games+. But every game has its own blocks within blocks that are all interesting.
I love the persona and legend of heroes series an the long length is part of it it just helps me get more immersed in the world
I haven’t played much of Trails at all (only the first three hours of In The Sky 1 and then school snuck up on me) but I have played Persona 3,4,5, and 3R intensely.
Although I do agree the start of P5 is a bit of a slog on repeat play throughs, the “50 hours of good 70 hours of slog” comment made me think “did we play different games?”
Like I don’t think 5 is the best at pacing but 70 hours? Really? I mean I do like how in 3(R) and 4 three hours in the games go “Ight do what you do” but I don’t think 5 fumbles pacing THAT intensely where over half the game is boring. Maybe in the first six hours but it does give you freedom once you get Ann and the slow incremental build by giving you a bunch of little things overtime is what makes RPGs as a whole… RPGs. I feel like this guy just doesn’t like story games :/
I have to disagree with the sentiment of replayability. In my old ass experience, replaying even Chrono Trigger has its limits. If replaying a 25hr game is your cup of tea, that's fine and I hope you enjoy it. I can't do that anymore. This is coming from someone that, when I was much younger, I played and beat FF7 on PS1 over 17 times. I've also gotten most endings on Chrono Trigger back then on the SNES. So I have an idea of what wasting time replaying something feels like lol. However, I would never use bad replayability as a point of contention for an RPGs entertainment.
I can enjoy the slow burn quite a lot with games like Persona 5 on first run, but I will not replay them simply because I'm older now and don't have that drive I used to. I honestly don't see a point in most cases. Persona games are generally about learning who the characters are, starting slow (i.e. from nothing) and working your way up. That formula hasn't changed and is what fans expect. I fully understand the want to be just let loose though, which is what some MMORPGs do for me, particularly FFXI.
Action games are clear examples of that fulfillment, but they're not RPGs, so they can't really be compared. Action games have a flipped priority of gameplay first, then story or other elements. You play a typical single player RPG for the story ultimately, not its gameplay (or other elements). The gameplay is very important, but it always does come second to the story. The final verdict can be a bad game though, even if story is a 10/10, so a balance must be maintained.
Going in with any other mindset of priority though is like playing blackjack and complaining it isn't poker. Regarding replayability, expecting additional playthroughs to hold up is like doing the same Escape Room a 2nd time. If you remember anything about the first time, you've already spoiled the experience for yourself.
This video is as drawn out as the games you hate 17 minute video rehashing the same point 😬
As a person who agrees with this sentiment, worked as a planner in Japan, and prefer the orthodox jrpgs of the 90s that used to throw you into battles after the first cutscene(like the Sakaguchi-lead FFs, CT, BoF3 and 4 etc), I'll play devil's advocate here:
It's conceivable that there's a certain type of design in which the slow buildup results in a larger pay-off when everything comes together later on than had you just given everything to the player from the start.
However, most post ps1/ps2 era jrpgs are not that. They're meandering, needlessly restrictive, and the pay-offs aren't great enough to warrant the slow burn(for me, at the very least).
Not to mention a lot of newer jrpgs have wide loops ie you spend like 30 minutes to an hour on event scenes, then hours of field/dungeon running, and loop back to lengthy event sequence. And often they've nothing except those two sides on offer.
Meanwhile, you play original FFVI, VII, Suikoden or CT, you have tight loops, with short and snappy event scenes followed by short and snappy gameplay sections that mix in mini-games, puzzles etc.
The latter keeps things interesting and prolongs your ability to deal with the length of the campaign, and the former gets tedious real quick.
Lots of great points. I definitely see the appeal of something like the Trails series; having 9 games worth of build-up before seeing close to a hundred characters unite in Reverie is certainly a one-of-a-kind experience. For some people that's justification enough to endure the slow-pacing of the introductory games.
This is why I love wild arms 3. In the first hour, your introduced to your main cast, the combat, and your let off the leash to follow the story.
All these classic styled JRPG's are amazing. Honestly, growing up that's exactly what I enjoyed most about those games, the grind through the story. It helped me immerse myself in a world that built upon itself gradually and without overwhelming or overstimulating me, and it gave me incentive to grow attached to the "normality" of their respective realities. Not only that, but once you finally get to that part where the game gets more serious and involved, the time you've spent building up in the game, experiencing their world through the characters, and exploring their respective realms, you really feel something deep down akin to genuine suffering when bad stuff starts happening or when the world falls into peril or when a character goes through a tribulation. Modern games have good stories, don't get me wrong, but they all have a tendency now to have gameplay that lasts far longer than the actual story does. Beat the story, and there isn't enough time to develop a genuine bond with the characters and their world. Beat the game, and you've basically just maxed out a bunch of stat tables and made numbers go BRRR until you can one shot anything.
I love Trails because it takes its time and sells you on the world. Yeah, it has an overarching plot, but what hooked me is that it’s a living breathing world where every character, even the NPCs, have stories to tell. The 100s of hours I’ve played in each game is beyond worth it because I can witness these characters grow and change throughout multiple games. Due to the length, it makes those relationships feel so genuine and real. I would never say, “oh, you just need to beat FC and SC will grip you.” If you’re not into that type of style, it’s not for you. Doesn’t make it bad. If every game was short and to the point, the industry would be incredibly dull and stagnant
I think I replied to someone else with this, but to give Trails some credit, it's a unique experience in that it tells this epic tale that spans a dozen interconnected games. Most series try to reboot the story after a set amount of games, or each game will be a standalone experience, but Trails has 9 games leading up to Reverie, and they're all relevant, which is pretty remarkable.
I agree. Something complainers don't mention about Trails series is that almost all those side quests (in the earlier games at least) are completely optional. The reason they are there is to offer players the option of a more immersive experience. if the player chooses to take up the offer and step off the main storyline to live in the setting for a bit, then that is an option they have. It doesn't make the game bad.
I think this is something that has a bit more nuance to it than "this part is slow, thus it is bad". I've played a lot of RPGs where it kind of ranges from fast to slow and I tend to enjoy one or the other depending on the execution. I've heard people say Trails of Cold Steel 1 is pretty slow for instance and while I can certainly see why, I also view it as the more engaging of the whole quadrilogy because something in that games writing and plot had me hooked to it like none of the others did outside of maybe Cold Steel 3. All of the games have their slow moments between important chapters but it's only in 2 and 4 where it actually bothered me despite those games not really doing all that much differently from the other two.
Keep in mind, I consider myself a person who vastly prefers a faster paced RPG to a slow one, but those slow moments can be either good or bad depending on how it comes off to you.
In Shin Megami Tensei V you don't need to grind that often. I just dedicate to "grind" for specific things I think... Once! For the secret boss battle to get the secret ending, which is necessary because if you're not max level it's if not imposible at least very very difficult to achieve.
Anyways, SMT series has never been about grinding but more about Strategy, make pacts with a variety of demons, and getting best available demon fusions to work for every specific challenge. I'm glad they're supposed to fix this on SMT V Vengeance.
Now talking about the rest of the video, I can agree but it's not that terrible. Maybe rpgs aren't just your type of games.
I don't have so much fun in action games because I feel i'm not doing anything in most of them. You can press the same button a lot of times and you win, in some hack n slash games I don't even notice and I already won. I prefer to have more control playing even if it's slow-paced. So all of this is just about personal preferences.
I didn't go into full detail in the video, but I played SMT V on hard mode because I played Nocturne on hard mode years ago and thought it was a decent challenge. Didn't really need to grind that much in Nocturne because, once you understood how powerful evasion was, you just used fog breath and sukukaja in every battle as your be-all-end-all answers.
In SMT V, buffs and debuffs were heavily nerfed in comparison, and because the Etrian Odyssey director was put at the helm, every single boss had insane amounts of health. I really didn't see much of a choice to progress through hard mode outside of grinding. Sure, it's my fault for playing on hard, and I could always lower the difficulty, but difficulty balance goes outside the scope of this video. For now, I'll concede that SMT V's normal mode may not require much grinding to get through.
@@RushHourWeekend I did finish both games, playing on hard mode too, and your statements are totally right. I personally didn't grind in V that much but, as you say, bosses are just damage sponge (maybe because Etrian Odyssey director being implied too) I understand in some cases could have been needed, since the game is sadly level depending (which would change in V Vengeance as I said, according to Atlus) and I noticed this kind of games in-game experiences are different from player to player. Some people had problems with SMT IV battles for instance. Most of the people didn't. That blew my mind.
@@puzzle_boy
As you said in this part
Now talking about the rest of the video, I can agree but it's not that terrible. Maybe rpgs aren't just your type of games.
I don't have so much fun in action games because I feel i'm not doing anything in most of them. You can press the same button a lot of times and you win, in some hack n slash games I don't even notice and I already won. I prefer to have more control playing even if it's slow-paced. So all of this is just about personal preferences.
I felt the opposite I never felt the control you have for Turned-Based combat in Final Fantasy. But when Final Fantasy went Action Based combat I felt the control I liked. To me for TBC I did not like the waiting I felt bored.
But as you said here.
So all of this is just about personal preferences.
This is mine
These are all valid points, but I feel like the criticism of FFXIV is a bit unfair. It doesn't take "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds" of hours for it to get good, or to even complete the story. ARR takes about 80-100 hours to complete and each of the current four (soon to be 5) expansions take between 40-50 hours to complete. So all told it could take 300 hours to complete, which I would call hundreds, not "hundreds and hundreds."
More to the point, A Realm Reborn gets a lot of crap from people, but while it's rough around the edges nowadays, I appreciated it when I was new to the game a few years ago. Everyone told me how much it sucked, but they were talking from the context of having played later expansions. When ARR was all I had, I enjoyed it. Conversely, everyone told me how good Heavensward was, and I found it just okay. An improvement in some ways, but it really felt like a diversion for most of it from what I had been doing. There were still characters and stories from ARR I wanted to explore.
But I digress. Point is, it doesn't take that long for FFXIV to get going, and where it "gets good" is a matter of opinion.
PS - I'll also add that I loved both versions of Persona 5 end to end but I also had trouble getting into SMT5 mainly because it was 90% dungeon crawler and 10% story. The story of P5 made me push through the rough patches. I don't have that in SMT.
I loved Persona 5 but even i’ll admit that tutorial makes someone who immediately plays Persona 3 Reload like wow cutting the game from 120hrs to 55hrs is incredible
Games generally should be shorter and sweeter. Pacing is paramount to any experience in life. The thing is, this argument can be about 2 different kinds of pacing. With a JRPG like Persona 5, it does break a few rules about pacing, but that's largely intentional, because the game wants you to famously "take your time." Although certain aspects of JRPGs are grindy, although they almost always come with a set of training wheels, the journey usually carries momentum along with emotional weight, and that progression is usually worth it in the end, even if they do hold you hostage longer than I'd like them to.
I had a talk with a friend of mine who usually just beats games once and never dives deeper into NG+, which is where a lot of games get good because of the progression system. This is actually an example of pacing done correctly. The game can still be fun and interesting all the way through, but there should be a point of climax where things go up a notch and stay there. The replayability is where you unlock the true game, the experience geared toward mastery.
Lots of great insights here. Most of my favorite RPGs are ones that get better on a repeat playthrough, like the Ys series. You can enjoy the story on a first playthrough, but the repeat run is when you'll put your skills to the test. The short length makes that second or third run more enticing because there's not much of a time commitment. Being forced to improve is what makes games so engaging; it's the reason why Dark Souls became a smash hit.
Even pushing gameplay aside, RPGs can bring replayability to the table in other ways, like the multiple endings in Chrono Trigger, or the different routes in Tactics Ogre. Most longer jRPGs tend to not offer much incentive to replay the games aside from just enjoying the story, and at that point I think I'd rather watch a cutscene compilation on youtube and save myself from 30+ hours of stale gameplay.
@@RushHourWeekend Yeah, I prefer action games because they keep you playing the game instead of waiting for things to happen. My only exception would be Persona because those games are so chill and whatever sloth exists is kind of in service of reminding you that life is temporary and you can only do so much each day, making every decision an opportunity cost. The irony is we spend so much time playing a game instead of living, ha.
The problem with rpg is that there is two games. Either you are here for the combat, then there is no grind. Or you are here for the story and oh boy you will not be happy.
I am a fan of FFXIII (in general, I don't love everything about it), and I agree that it spends far too much time holding the player's hand. The slow pacing of the gameplay systems/tutorials is by far the game's biggest flaw, much more so than linearity or annoying/unlikable characters. The first 25 hours or so should have been cut back to about 10 - 15 at most. Having 4 chapters were you only have 2 characters in the party (Lightning + Hope or Sazh + Vanelle) was too much. Should have been 1 chapter for each group.
The combat doesn't really shine until you have a full party with at least 2-3 paradigms each. They held this back until Chapter 9. Chapter 9!!
Because of this issue, I have a save file right before the boss fight near the end of chapter 2 (right before the characters are all branded as L'cie). This skips the whole first 2 chapters where you don't even have access to the crystarium progression system yet.
I also think starting there makes the story better too, as suddenly all these characters are thrown together from out of nowhere and you don't know who they are or how they got there. You don't know why Hope and Lighting hate Snow, you don't know why Lightning or Sazh are there, etc.
Then BOOM! Your characters are suddenly thrown into a boss fight and you see a cutscene of Snow and Serah in the fireworks show and you "get it".
The game already has an "in media res" opening, but imo they started at the wrong time/place lol.
Get the characters branded as L'cie asap, then use flashbacks and dialogue to explain how they all got into that situation later.
arcade design is just better for videogames, yet it's a lost art. Good video
Arcade game design is timeless. Things like scoring are what make certain games so enjoyable to replay. There's a reason why people replay games like Bayonetta and The Wonderful 101 dozens of times over.
No, i mean it's a great design with ton of merits as a art but there's plenty of others type of design who work just as good. Replay value is nice and i'm one who reguarly replay games i've already beat even dozen of time but as i grew up i learn that replay value don't really add that much to the overall quality of a game and is heavily tied to lot of subjective factors. Without even mention that it exist ton of amazing masterpiece who have zero replay value and yet still leave an eternal mark on you for the rest of your life even if you beat it only once.
Yeah arcades are indeed underrated.
Agreed pacing is a huge deal. Many RPG's have a slow start where there's too much story and it takes awhile for anything interesting to start happening. A lot of games need to have an exciting start that interests you immediately upon you beginning the game.
Not just the story, the gameplay needs to be better at the start too. You usually have to wait 5+ hours just to get the basic mechanics introduced, and combat is often not actually fun until 10+ hours in.
Here's the thing about trails: world-building and pacing are inverse quantities, as pacing slows down, you can add more world building and vice versa. World building also has a point of diminishing returns. It's the reason why when you read the Harry Potter books, or you read Lord of the Rings, or you read Game of Thrones, most of the details of how the world works are not explained. They don't need to be, and doing so would just slow down the pacing. There is a point past which additional world building details just cause reader to check out.
However, there is a small minority of the human population who doesn't experience the diminishing returns of world building, they always want more. You can't build a globally recognized fantasy series catering to us, there aren't enough of us to support it. You can, however, build an extremely successful JPRG series catering to us, and because literally no one else caters to us, Trails fans become extremely devote because Trails is the only series that ever bothers to reach out to us and give us what we're looking for.
Do we really need to know how many children were killed in Ravennus village during the hundred days war? Do we really need to know the immigration policies of people coming into Crossbell through Tangram Gate? Do we really need to know how many armored divisions are in the Erebonian army and the organizational structure of the Railway Military Police? No, not really. It does absolutely slow the pacing.
What trails fans love is that not only are all of those things completely consistent all throughout the series (the details all fit together perfectly and are mutually supported) but (and this is the important part) they all make complete logical sense. None of it is random, it's all been so well thought out and so well put together and so much pain and effort was put into planning all of it that you look at it and just marvel. It's not something anyone else is doing or, to the best of my knowledge, has ever tried to do. There is a tiny, tiny audience for that, it's not something a company that is always chasing profits would ever commit to. Falcom only can because despite being a publicly traded company, the company's founder is still the majority share holder.
The appeal of Trails, for fans of trails, is how completely and utterly immersive the experience is. Crossbell isn't just a city, I've explored every nook and cranny of it, I know which are the best restaurants in town and what they specialize in, I know where to go to buy a new suit if I need it, I know where to go to get a drink after hours, and I know who I call if my washing machine breaks down, amongst many, many other things. That there are so many details, and that they all fit seamlessly together is what makes Crossbell immersive and lived-in.
You can't create a city as alive and as bustling as Crossbell if you want a fast pace. Falcom could get away with doing so much less, and the games would sell better if they did.
It's why when the call went out in Trails into Reverie to liberate Crossbell and take back our home, I put every other form of entertainment I had on hold to do it.
Most lengthy games, like Persona are fine, it's the pacing of games like the trails series that drives me nuts. Especially in the Cold Steel quadrilogy, all the good stuff happens right at the end and it ends on a cliff hanger.
@@RicochetForce Nah you can't, I prefer the daily life sections much more than the dungeon crawling because it's immersive to me. I don't get why people don't get this but you need slow sections to make the player care about the world they're inhabiting. People already complain about base game Haru being terrible because of no screen time and here you are wanting 50 hours to be chopped off the game. Same for Trails, I am 100% sure I wouldn't care about Crossbell getting raided if I didn't spend a whole game there slowly immersing myself into the game and learning about all the NPCs that inhabit it. Some games need this slower pacing to make the world seem worthwhile and really if you need action or something cool every few minutes, you shouldn't be playing JRPGs because the goal has always been to allow you to live in a world different from your own. Slow pacing isn't bad and is almost a necessity for some JRPGs.
I must say, I appreciate the time stamps.
It used to be 10 hours in the PS1 days, that was unreasonable then.
I think what put me off grinding was when I stopped playing og Xenoblade 1 in it's last half because I found myself watching the rest of the cutscenes on youtube, while grinding to beat the next boss.
Though I agree it comes down to personal preference and bs-tolerance, I can't agree with people saying it's a non-issue or that RPGs are only for people who love grinding. Most people will love a game more if it has less/no grinding. Just imagine if Chrono Trigger added 10 hrs of mandatory filler combat. Yes some might still like it, but it wouldn't even reach top 5 or 10 anymore.
The problem is not leveling up, the problem has always been devs padding/stalling the game by forcing the player do nothing but uninteresting chores.
persona's tutorial isn't long at all, each mechanic is introduced in 1 or 2 fights. it just has a lot of talking in it because persona has a lot of talking everywhere. cause it's half life sim.
that's completely different from FF13, where the game actually takes 100 fights to introduce each base mechanic and it takes 20 hours. THAT is a terrible tutorial.
at least you got the basics, MMO levelling is a pandering snoozefest and mandatory grinding is, in fact, bad. you'll get there.
Exactly in the first Dungeon you get everything you need to know about battles and you can fuse personas you dont need anything else the guns are not that useful.
FF XIII is horrible I can not play that game without cheats ,that opens the crystarium for all characters and gives every character their Summon.
I mean we get Odin at the beginning, but we have to wait for Hope and Vanille to their summons 5-8 hours before endgame.
I seriously don't know what they thought ,when they made that game.
There is definitely a lot of tutorialization in modern games and it can really be too handholdy - but the solution is NOT to just “give you all of the gameplay mechanics up front”.
It is REALLY easy to overwhelm a player with too many tutorials at the beginning without giving them time to actually practice using what they’ve taught before moving onto the next part. You NEED to have some clever onboarding strategies for your game, that’s part of pacing.
what is sounds more like is not that these games have pacing issues, it's more that you just wanna play the game and not worry about the story. Which is fine... but that's not a pacing issue that's just wanting something more action and progression based. RPGs are meant to have simplistic game systems and have tutorials in the first few hours of the game to teach the players how to play their game, there's nothing wrong with that, cause the difference in RPGs then something like an FPS, not every RPG plays the same, yes they might have similar things like turn based combat or action based combat but they all have different systems and mechanics that work alot different then another RPG. FPS games, if you've played one you've played them all, horror games if you played one played them all. RPGs all have different things they have to teach the players cause they're gonna be on a 50+ hour journey and teaching the players nothing will make them quit 2 or 3 hours in. Elder Scrolls and the new fallout games do this exact thing and it's why alot of JRPG fans just get through the beginning and just quit right there cause they don't know what the hell they're suppose to do, no sense of direction, no understanding of how to do things. So yes the games require you to sit there for a few hours teaching how to play the game cause if they don't you're gonna lose alot of people that way.
slow pacing isn't the same as bad pacing and pacing isn't the same as length.
A game being long shouldn't automatically make it boring.
RPGs aren't about the instant gratification and fun that a platformer would give, they are more about providing an emotional attachment to the long term progression of your characters.
There is a difference between pacing and exposition.
Not all games are supposed to instantly gratify you every second and full throttle you through the entire experience. This is especially the case for JRPGs in general.
With Trails, the pacing is by design. It's the value for those who enjoy large interconnected worlds, known as epics. There are 12 games for the series so far, and every detail takes place on a continental scale. It would be terrible if they crammed it all into 2-3 games just so your pacing preferences could be met.
Trails is for the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, One Piece, and Dune fans.
Trails is not for anyone with a short attention span. It is for those who want to dive deep into a living breathing world to get completely lost in.
FinalFantasy is fast food. Trails is fine dining. You're meant to consume it at a controlled pace.
Percentage of time speant is an oversimplified take and a one dimensional metric to base your argument in.
Just play what you like and move on.
This video is kind of interesting and I actually think there's a bit of discussion to be had with this topic especially when it comes to filler in modern games in general.
However, I felt like a big part of this video misconstrues slow pacing for filler. As someone who struggled at first to finish Trails in the Sky FC, I acknowledge the game can be slow but I also don't think the game is bad because of its pace. I wouldn't really call it filler either. I think a really good example of filler is the dungeons in FF7 Remake where some sections blatantly repeat. I think the Trails in the Sky games that come after FC only work because FC existed.
FF14 has a slow pace. In fact I would agree that A Realm Reborn is not really enthralling to get through on your first play, especially before they removed most of the quests between 2.0 and Heavensward. But it feels like a strawman to imply the game only gets good at the newest expansions. While getting to the latest expansions does take 100's of hours, I don't think that's an inherent flaw especially since the expansions are enjoyable as you play through them(they are generally praised) and the newest expansions are continuations of the story. You can't really start a story at its climax and the latest expansions really only work because of what came before them.
This video does have some good points though. As someone who played and enjoyed FFXIII, I would agree that the game's tutorial is bad(albeit for entirely different reasons than stated in the video). I think you're right when you present the idea that a longer game is not inherently better but the problem comes in when you imply that faster pacing is better pacing. Its like comparing an apple to an orange. While someone may prefer one of over the other, it doesn't mean any of them is objectively better. I think you prefer quicker, faster paced games and that's okay but it doesn't mean slower games are inherently flawed either.
I guess someone needs to see the Tales franchise. Most games just set the hero on the journey with a reason to fight, 3-4 hours long max (kudos for Tales of the Abyss for getting to the action in barely an hour). That is, except for the franchise's most revered entry, ironically. In Vesperia, every freaking town, the party disbands and Yuri must talk to every member. Over. And over. And over.
I am actually replaying ffxiii right now, mostly for nostalgia reasons, plus art direction and soundtrack is phenomenal but I’m 20 hrs in and maaaaan the battles get mundane. Just pushing through to grand pulse 😅 I will say now that I’m older and am trying to follow the story more I do have more appreciation for the story.
My main issue with Trails is its dialogue. My biggest frustrations came about when we would be getting a mission briefing or whatever, every single character had to get their input in. Most of the time it was just each character giving their own variation of “I agree” and it became nauseating.
It’s not just that the game is text-heavy. It’s bloated by sooo much unnecessary text that completely demolish the pacing and enjoyment for me.
That's definitely a common trope in jrpgs with large parties, where characters stand around in circle, taking turns throwing in their two cents.
You talking about Coldsteel specifically? I wouldn't really say that is much of an issue until those games.
That was exactly my issue with P5. Before every mission, 10 people had to tell me what the mission would be. After the mission, 10 people would tell me how the mission went. P3 and P4 are some of my most beloved games but I had to force myself through P5.
That is the appeal of the series and that is why it persist in maintaining that. these are just the type of game that specific people will like depending on their taste. It is a game that if it was recommended to you, people will telll you to "talk to all NPC" type of game. Basically some games you come in with a prebuilt expectation, like if youare never the tyep to play that "heavy dialogued game" then don't play trails. Cause you probably would have heard already that it have dialogues amounting to worrd count longer than even some novels.
@@Snzn18 "Longer than some novels" is an understatement.
Averaging out their lengths, five of the games is more text than all twelve books of Wheel of Time!
I find it annoying that people tell me that I dont like rpg because I complain about padded worldbuilding and slow burn story. I love Yggdra Union, Gungnir, Etrian Odyssey, Monster Hunter series(if you consider that one) or any rpg that are aware that some players replay games.
What scares me is that Monster Hunter Wilds would want to make it turn into an "immersive storytelling game". I hope it doesnt ruin the phasing.
I'm with you there. I love MH, and it's my favorite series of all time. I am a bit concerned with the direction of Wilds, but we'll see. Hopefully it stays true to its roots ✊🏼
For the most part, JRPG are the equivalent of novels with combat gameplay, and you're better suited to action game or racing game
The original sentiment for "It gets good after 20 hours" is a critique against MMOs since your play time is literally dictated by a paywall. That's why FF14 tried to cut down it's main game progress bloat so that you weren't wasting more subscription time trying to get to the good part.
Single player single-purchase games can do whatever they want. It's specifically just MMOs that fall victim to this criticism and it's not a subjective problem either. It's objectively bad to have an MMO experience dragged out. Your single subscription should be enough to get you to the end of the game at the very least. Single player games don't have that as an objective issue it's primarily subjective at that point.
This is not a modern thing. JRPGS being 40+ hours long has been around since the 90s. Its like the main thing people like about JRPGS.
It works for FF13 specifically because the average player was too dumb to figure out how the combat system worked so they make sure to give you ample time to use each individual character and learn their strengths and weaknesses while exploring their characters and progressing the story.
Most FF13 players especially in the west did not play more than a handful of hours of the game before dropping it for being too hard.
FF13 is also 3 games, not one game, so in the total runtime you are only spending about 10% of playtime in a "tutorial" which is actually not a tutorial at all.
I'd argue that XIII's combat wasn't really that hard. It just didn't offer that much variety to keep players engaged to it. And while the story is linear due it being chase sequence, any chase sequence going for over 25 hours starts to lose their sense of tension eventually.
This topic is far too nuanced to explain what I think without it turning into a wall of text. You make good points, and I also agree that arcade style design is kind of a lost art at this point, since pretty much all AAA games shoot for slower paced games, with more focus on story and that take longer to beat. The thing is, there should be space for all kinds of games but I digress.
The best example you used to me is persona 5. I want to say the game is good, I had a lot of fun at times, but mostly i've been pretty bored out of my mind with extremely wordy tutorials and conversations repeating te same informatiion 5 times. They really hit you over the head with the story part, as if they don't trust the players to pick up on subtext and nuances.
The video kinda makes it feel like you're criticizing most games that hdon't have super fast pacing. While i'm pretty sure you don't actually mean that, it is the vibe of the video, but like you said, talking about pacing is complicated to say the least.
I'll just say that I can enjoy all types of games, the super slower paced story heavy ones with lots of character interactions and the more arcade style super fast paced and everything in between. But just because it's a slower paced rpg doesn't mean the game is excused from criticism on it's pacing, but honestly I feel like western games do this much worse. The newer god of war games, I find them to be insuferable because of the glacial pacing.
I think Persona 5 is the perfect example of a game that doesn't respect the player's time or intelligence. This isn't even an issue of trusting the player to understand subtext. In the first hour of the game you're shown a cutscene of Kamoshida picking up Anne in his car, and immediately after they leave you meet Ryuji, who says the person in that car was a pervy teacher named Kamoshida, and the game shows a flashback of what just transpired not 30 seconds ago because it assumes you have severe short-term memory loss.
Little time wasting moments like this compound over time and drag the experience out. It's exhausting sitting through so much repetitive dialogue across a hundred hours, and watching scenes where six or seven characters huddle together and take turns chiming in with short phrases like "yeah, let's do this," just to provide this veneer of importance for every party member.
And for people that enjoy these experiences, fair enough. There's nothing wrong with having preferences towards certain forms of storytelling. We all have our own definitions for what constitutes good pacing, which is what makes discussions about this subject so fascinating.
@@RushHourWeekend I agree with pretty much the whole comment.
I think it's interesting most ppl doesn't seem to mind these pacing issues in games but the same things in a movie would be considered unforgivable. Yeah they're different medias but still, both have a focus on telling an andio visual story. Not to mention persona has no camera work at all, characters just stand there doing stock animations.
Ultimately most of this comes down to a matter of opinion. I understand that a lot of people don't like to read mountains and mountains lf text, but there sre plenty of people that, much like a good book, would love to sit down and read about the intricacies of the world in said RPG. I disagree with the notion that a gane that takes its time setting things up or that every gave needs to come out the gate guns blazing. Not every game needs to be nade with everyone in mind. Thats how you get the 3D open world cookie chtter games of the western gaming industry. Its better to know what the core audience wants and know where and when to compromise for what story you want to tell. Now if the writers are just wasting time with mostly repetitive filler dialogue where characters are repeating each other constantly, thats a different issue.
Bro i'm someone who played smt 5 on hard mode and I only had to grind ONCE maybe twice in the entire game and said grinding sessions were like 20 minutes max. Sure the bosses are hard but I very rarely felt like I ever had to grind. More that I just had to actually play around the bosses attacks with different team comps and strategies. Tbf I was doing a ton of exploration during my playthrough but I was also playing on hard so it probably evens out. Maybe your Idea of grinding is exploring the world but if that's the case i have no idea why you are play smt 5.
Ff13 is arguably paced well all the way through.
I’ve never had issues with tutorial sections in games, only one game ever made me want to quit from the tutorial section and that was kingdom hearts 2 that intro was wayyyyyy to long
Dude you missed out one of the BEST jrpg if you haven't play Kingdom Hearts 2!
Basically, he suffers from low attention span.
@@RicochetForce and many games like Trails in the sky did that for several people. Just because the game doesn't start with conspiracies, bombastic action doesn't mean it's not gripping. The world building can be gripping for so many people and it's why they play and series like Trails,Persona do that really well
As a huge fans of RPG who mostly play old games and like text heavy games like persona or Trails, my limit is 5 hours. Because most games already finished their introduction/prolog during that time.
If I'm still not hooked, I'm out.
I'm nearly out on Ni no Kuni because they handhold too much that my patience ran thin, and flat out thrown DQ4 & DQ5 because the chapter per character system annoy me (im a huge fan of DQ, have played all except 4,5,10)
You literally said why for DQ4 so whatever (Even if it's such a a small section of the game) but what's your issue with DQ5 if you liked the others? sure it has a chapter system but it's not a chapter per character thing like DQ4 it's just split into 3 sections that provide an interesting story telling method of actually going through stages of the protagonists life instead of just being one adventure that takes like an in story month or whatever.
@@projectmessiah I don't know, unlike DQ4 where I know which part I hate, I just dislike DQ5 story. I don't have concrete reason. I've tried several times but always end up abandoned it
@@wildanbaxtli6913 Fair, Dragon Quest V is easily my favorite Dragon Quest but I'm not going to argue.
@@projectmessiah mine is 3,7 & 8. really love DQ9's party costumization but it has weak story, and DQ11 if they don't mess it up with act 3.
Also love DQM2 Coby's Journey
@@wildanbaxtli6913 My favorite is probably 3 from those, love them all though
I can understand that if you're a gameplay only kind of guy, you would find the talking and dialogue parts to be pretty dreadful, but in some RPG's, that is simply supposed to be part of the experience. In Persona, hanging out with NPC's is like half the point of the game because increased social links give you various gameplay advantages and unlockables. The tutorial is too long though, on that I can agree, but the rest of the game is how it's supposed to be.
Final Fantasy 13 on the other hand is boring because there's no variety at all in the gameplay. It's just a corridor full of combat encounters from start to finish. No matter what kind of game it would be, sitting through the same gameplay loop for longer than 10 hours simply gets boring. I don't mind a really long game as long as it has variety, but FF13 simply doesn't give you anything else besides walk forward + combat.
Gameplay density is just questionable in a game like Persoba
The irony of p5 being in thumbnail for this topic because it's actually pretty late in the game that it becomes a slog to get through. Morgana maybe not from a story perspective is the worst as much as I hate him, it's actually from a gameplay perspective that morgana late in the game becomes a horrible experience.
Persona 5 has pacing issues all over the place, but yes, the entire Morgana/Haru arc is definitely something you've gotta force yourself through.
I'm many hours into p5 and I'm still wondering when it gets good, I'm only being patient with it because a friend said I should play it. It's not very interesting so far.
@@Aberusugi
How far are you in?
If you made it past the first or second dungeon and didnt like it, you're never going to like it. That basically is the game, that is what you'll be doing. IMO it gets repetitive and not as good from there. I finsihed it because the first two dungeons blew me away but I still had trouble finding the energy to finish the game.
>Sky gets good in the second game
tfw I love Sky FC and preffer it over SC cause Sky SC first half is mostly just okayish and sorta repetitive. SC is the game I've liked the least so far. Azure > Zero > the 3rd > FC > SC. Zero and Azure are (almost) perfect for me, those two were a blast since minute zero. The characters, their motivations, the world and its status quo... I mean, the main theme is super clear since even the prologue. And that theme is transpired through every aspect of the game. It's genious. Zero isn't about presenting you something "fun" as if you were a child asking for explosions, it presents you something valuable from a writing and world building point of view. No game has made me care for every single NPC as Zero and Azure do. That game made its whole setting feel alive, and the player part of it. It isn't filler because it presents something necessary for its story to be good. If you remove it you have a hole there. And if you change it for something explosive or "stupidly fun" you're messing with its tone and escalation of the conflicts.
Anyway, on "characters standing and plot not moving on". You know, that's not how writing works. Writing deals with themes, messages, settings. It is only filler if those interaction convey nothing meaningful for characterization of thematical build up or world building. A good plot isn't just a bunch of twists and fun stuff, a good plot has also to convey something. Because stories aren't only entertaining bunch of words and scenes, they are vehicular tools for ideas and emotions. Uncharted 2 is a fun game with good pacing, sure. Uncharted 3 too, but not that much. But while Uncharted 2 core themes are kinda whatever to me, I vibe with Uncharted 3 idea of found family with Nath and Sully. I don't consider it a great game since beyond that it is not super great story, but it is okay. However, I could write a whole paper explaining why Trails from Zero and Azure inspired me in my life.
This is why I stick to my arcade games. They're 30-60 minutes long and are fun instantly with years more longevity than most RPGs. DoDonPachi is fun the moment your ship drops after 4 seconds of setup. And it stays fun until you die or win.
There's a blog I follow by Lilura1 that covers classic cRPGs for PC like the real Fallout games and Jagged Alliance. She spits *venom* at modern RPG's that waste your time. Because yes, even RPG's should be fun immediately and be dense with player driven, mechanically interesting gameplay.
Fuck the dislike ratio and the cope in the comments. This is fire, bro.
Also *WAS THAT DANGUN FEVERON MUSIC?*
Dangun Feveron is one of my favorite Cave soundtracks, even if I think the game itself is one of Cave's weaker titles. Not too big a fan of Psikyo-style shmups.
@@RushHourWeekend I used to draw ships a lot and Dangun, next to the original DoDonPachi, was my main inspiration. I love Cave's machine design. It's not my favorite game, but I like it's frenetic nature.
I don't think a game needs to play all it's cards in the first 5 minutes of gameplay
A game doesn't need to reveal everything it has to offer right away, but restricting features until you make it over a dozen hours in means less time spent experiencing the combat at it's full potential.
Dear youtubers, please refrain from showing footage of advanced/secret content of games (and other media as well) unless you intend to specifically talk about said content, always with a spoiler alert. If you just want to illustrate your videos, use scenes from the opening or the early areas of a game, there is no need to show late game stuff...
That's BS. Trails in the sky isn't just world building. Slow pacing is a requirement to introduce correctly the characters and the wolrd building. If you find this part boring and therefore not good, that's on you.
Some games do a better job at introducing effectivly all that sure but that doesn't mean slow pacing is an issue. One the plot start going crazy, slow pacing isn't a good idea. But at the very beggining, fast pacing can lead to half cooked worldbuiling and character establishment. This can be interesting and entertaining but certainly not engaging.
Want and exemple ? Look no further than Honkai Star Rail.
Slow pacing doesn't equal bad pacing. Slow pacing doesn't make the game automaticly boring. Plus a shit ton of people say a game/movie/tv show/anime is boring but do a sh*t job at explaining why, yourself included.
Is it because nothing interesting happen ?
You can't expect high stakes in the story 2 hours in, espacially in a journey of self discovery like trails in the sky because that would completly shift the tone of the game. High stakes should come from a long build up through forshadowing, they get higher and higher as the game progresses and our protag are growing. If the writters pull these high stakes out of their *ss without build up, how am i supposed to be engaged in the story ? It doesn't matter if it makes the story "interesting" or "entertaining", i don't believe this is a cohesive wolrd in the first place.
High stakes need to be earned.
Next up, there is no such thing as sky fc being more focus on character interaction and sky sc share the same story structure as the first game until chapter 6 when side quest are pretty much gone. That doesn't make what's come before bad: the quality of the wirtting is excellent, character interaction are meannigful and sometime very funny, the wolrdbulding is consistent, there's mysteries that keep the player engaged the all way through; i'm not saying trails doesn't have pacing issue but to the point of being a deal breaker ? No, again that's on you.
Also, what makes a side quest boring to you ?
Because in trails in the sky, estelle and joshua are bracer and the bracer's job is to help people in need. These side quest are justified by the main characters doing it as a job (in other trails games too) AND they're supposed to grow doing those so these "boring" side quest are important.
The "fun" you're searching for isn't some games are after. Games try to acomplish different thing and you not having fun doesn't mean that the game isn't good. I enjoy slow paced story based games for what what they are and ot what they aren't. Ys origin is one of my favorite games of all time but the game doesn't have the same qualities as trails games. In ys games the writting isn't the first thing that i'm looking for.
"Try to view in from another perspective here". Have you tried to change your mindset and ask yourself if they're a point to these "boring" side quest and slow pacing ? In some games like the trails series there is a point.
I get why you don't enjoy your time with text heavy jrpgs and i also think that games like P5 are lacking in this area. That being said, slow pacing have a purpose and this purpose is not to entertain that's for sure but i want to be entertained, i'll just watch a block buster movie, i'll not play a jrpg because their story are enjoyable for very different reasons.
What most people fail to understand is that they're a difference between a game that's hard to enjoy because of the "slow burn" an a bad game. But well i can't say for everyone where to draw the line with how much time do you need to put in a game to see if it's good. The thing is learning to appreciate a game is something that most players nowadays don't take the time to do.
Did i ever said trails in the sky became good at some point ? f*ck no. It's consistenly good most of the time, beggining included.
A pay-off being worth it or not is a subjective matter but if you're too worried about games being disapointing having pacing issues or not, well yes games are just entertainment. For me it isn't.
10:10 where is this bgm from, sounds soo familiar but I can't remember.
Pretty sure it's trails but I might be wrong
Bravely Default. All the songs used are listed at the end of the video
@@Galladiator42Thanx bro.
>Channel name is Rush Hour
>this video
Hmmm
i think you should play any of fromsoftware games. they don't hold your hand, you can literally be naked, and no need to grind as long as you are master the mechanic. lol or game like dishonored. tbh, don't play typical jrpg. they mostly have "social life" aspect, and grind. i used to enjoy game like that, but work life taking over, and only have 2-3 hours gaming time, and the only rpg that i can play and having a good short time daily are fromsoftware games.
I'm guessing you're talking about modern FromSoft, from Demon's Souls onward, because I've played their games from the PS2 and Xbox era and they were... of varying quality, ha. But yeah, their modern games are generally structured well. I think Demon's Souls is probably their best work.
@@RushHourWeekend or maybe, you should play octopath traveler. very similar mechanic with bravery default, if you more of turn based rpg kind of player. i don't really play old fromsoftware game, cause back then is too hard for my young self LOL. bloodborne, elden ring, and sekiro is what i played. never like dark souls cause the combat was too slow for my liking.
thats why I like shorter rpg with good pacing like the SaGa series or the mega man rpgs they are fun since the beginning and you have a bunch of options to be engaged even if you get even more stuff later on
Persona is a bad example because it’s held up by the story and characters as the Persona series has always been partially a VN.
I agree with you. I nearly dropped persona 5. But bruh trails from zero was a masterpiece on his own 😅
And don't complain about sky fc if you didn't play it
You're disregarding that as story driven games, RPGs are entitled to want to set up and have a slow burn. Just like a movie or a book, a game can be slow if it's pertinent, to the story it wants to tell. That is also fun and entertaining too, to immerse oneself in the world and only then interract with it, and you are bored with that, that's really a matter of taste. Now you could argue that some games still fail to convince the player that a slow start is necessary, in which case it would be a fault of the game.
Xenoblade 1 & 2, but then they get reallly good
Xenoblade 1 leads with a captivating story almost right away. It does have a slow start, but the characters are almost immediately likeable, and after you're two hours deep you've got a dramatic event and motivation to embark on this grand journey. The narrative setup is very strong, but it's a shame that it takes hours for the combat system to open up.
Xenoblade 2 is a textbook example of "gets good 20 hours in." I don't think it's until you reach Chapter 4 that it finally takes off.
I can never get into a persona for this exact reason every time I start it gets boring real quick
I recently went back to play FF13 again, and I only managed to make it about 10 hours in before calling it quits. One of the worst things about FF13's beginning is that there is almost no progression. You only get like one or two weapon upgrades in the first several hours, and during that time, you haven't even unlocked the crystal system. So you're just doing boring battle after boring battle to progress a story that starts off extremely slow, and to top it all off, at the beginning of the game the characters all range from bland to annoying
There is no story hook, no character hook, and no gameplay hook. I remember liking FF13 a lot when it first came out, but coming back to it now makes me realize how bad it really was
If you genuinely don't think the Hope-Snow revenge plot that drives the first 10 hours of the game is gripping you are smoking straight rock
The whole video fell apart the moment he mentioned Trails in the Sky.
I think JRPGs can learn one thing from western rpgs. Most get you into the general gameplay loop within the first 20 minutes. A lot of newer titles are over tutorialized and bloated with dialogue and filler side content.
I actually think most JRPGs have mediocre replayability regardless of "length" and only a few actually go above and beyond to make it worthwhile. From my perspective, it's either a mechanic that requires multiple playthroughs to experience, like Chrono Trigger's multiple endings or Cross's branch points and party recruitment, or it's just engaging combat/gameplay that has its own merit outside of the context of the rest of the game. As a huge fan of the Trails series, even the fan-favorite Trails to Azure is one that I find myself unlikely to replay in the future. However, the much more controversial Trails of Cold Steel arc, even the first one, is something I've already started going back to despite not having played all of them yet. Sky FC and Cold Steel 1 have similar structures in terms of how the plot unfolds, and CS1 is much longer than Sky FC, so many fans find its length to be offputting. However, he hour-to-hour gameplay is what makes the world of difference to me. In CS1, you're never stuck doing monster quests with a party of 2 characters, its QoL is leagues above (key difference is fast travel but there are many reasons), and the combat is much more dynamic due to different balancing and new mechanics. I love CS1 for many reasons, but its combat is so much fun, in fact, that it alone is enough to make me look back fondly on the game and want to revisit it, despite its flaws. Meanwhile, thank goodness all Trails games have turbo mode on Steam, but Sky FC and SC are walking simulators at times.
Jrpgs are hardbuilt to "tell a story"first and foremost. So the main experience is experiencing the story together with the gameplay. Which is why not all Jrpgs have the best value when it comes to "replayablity". There is areason why Games that have Great replayability are the ones where you can disregard story content
I also jumped into FFXIV when A realm reborn first came out. I wasn't a huge fan of the MMO combat and quest design, but I stuck through it to the end.
Story was decent, but I wasn't willing to keep paying a monthly subscription for a game I felt was just "OK".
Now the idea of spending hundreds of hours of "decent" gameplay to get to all the good story content in the expansions is just too daunting. I haven't gone back to FFXIV since ARR.
But if there was an offline, single player, 20 -50 hour version of FFXIV I would probably give it a try at some point.
If Square somehow defied the laws of reality and managed to compress the entire FF14 saga into a single, 50-hour-long single player game, trimming out the 400 hours of filler, it'd be something really special.
The following expansion is widely regarded as the point in which FF14 gains traction story wise, but ARR is pretty important plot wise, some of the stuff introduced in it's MSQ ends up being the focal point of the plot several expansions down the line and the Quest design has improved a lot over the years becoming less tedious and fetch quest heavy like 2.0
10 to 15 hours in trails 1, it feels like the beginning acts of grandia 1 and dragon warrior 7...except, in trails they start right off the bat fighting monsters and doing missions(supposedly threatening), but they still bicker like kids 😮💨
If not even that can get your characters to develop interestingly...i'm not waiting 30 hours in for the climax to waltz in...
"they bicker like kids" The main characters are kids. I don't why you expect them to not act like one??
@@Snzn18 played grandia and dw 7? There's bickering there...until crisis hits, andcircunstances pushed them into maturity and hard choices so ...maybe i was expecting character development and strife?
@@serphence8566 Yeah, but there are no SERIOUS crises in Sky until towards the end. That's the point. You watch them LEARN how to grow more mature through their interactions with the civilians and non-civilians of Liberl. They can't just get pushed into maturity because they don't know HOW until they learn. That's where all the senior bracers throughout the game fit in, to help guide them along that path of growth and discovery.
That's the whole appeal of the series. To watch them gradually gain the confidence, knowledge, and wisdom necessary to be able to carry out that growth.
@@denofpigs2575 Yes. Thanks for being honest. I figured it was like that a few hours in.
Maybe its not just made for you, people love them for a reason
When you are getting older and have less time to play games, you'll understand
@@therealjaystone2344 i 26 and a teacher i love big games like this
The awnser is simple jrpg's arent for you.
There are games for everyone but not every game is for everyone.
Yes the older one gets the less time one had and I understand that. I haven't ff7r because of alot of extra stuff that feels like filler.
It almost feels like you want everything to go fast but in alot of rpgs that is not the case.
It did happend to one and people were pissed, that was Xenogears disc 2.
shit take just dont play rpgs if you cant sit through a 2-3 hours intro and cant stand the grind pretty easy solution
Trails is good.
Final Fantasy XIII really has a complex battle system. Try to kill the super bosses! It's not a game that you encourages you to spamm the same skill. Every skill has a function that is needed for the whole game, it's not just one especific situation that you experience once or twice.
Maybe you should stop playing JRPG's then.
“games don’t need filler” wait till this guy watches anime
@@edgelessspace7180 Games don't need filler at all. Everything in the game should have a purpose. A fetch quest to pad time and a fetch quest to get you to go to a remote area so you can learn about the world are two different things. One is killing 150 boars in the pen five feet from you for 10 silver and the other is you being sent to Nebel Valley to explore a side area so you can familiarize yourself with the terrain so that later on, when you're rescuing hostages from sky pirates, you know exactly where you are in relation to Bose, the hub city the chapter the fetch quest takes place. One is filler, one isn't.
You can't make a painting good by just throwing in some lines in random places unless the point of the artpiece is literally the random arrangements of the lines. Every stroke of the brush must be deliberate and have purpose. Filler is not good.
The only reason filler exists in anime is to allow the manga time to finish the chapter or arc or whatever. Different scenarios.
I've been enjoying your videos the past few days. It's nice to hear someone talking about the inconvenient truths that others try to dance round.
I enjoy making videos about these subjects. I think I might come across as someone that doesn't like RPGs, but I wouldn't play so many of them if that were the case.
@@RushHourWeekend no, I get you. You do come across as passionate but you're pointing out the things that detract from the fun. Some people can tolerate these things and that's fine, but I suspect we'd all be happier if the experience was more lean.
Maybe... you should prioritize games that YOU really enjoy, those games are not meant to people like you, is that simple,
I like to give games a fair chance, and I won't know if I like a game or not until I play it. Some people assume that I don't enjoy jrpgs and therefore shouldn't play them, but I showed several examples of jrpgs that I like in this video (Chrono Trigger, Vagrant Story), and I've made other videos highlighting some of my favorite games, which happen to be jrpgs.
This excuse works fine only for FFXIII. The game gets real good after 3 to 4 hours of the game.
For me, a good game with really bad pacing is Xenogears
Trails fans need to stop seeking validation from casuals. This was never meant for them.
"Some games are too long to be replayed" This is why I stopped playing Royal, OG P5 took me 80 hrs of only doing SOME of the content (no max every link BS) and I just put game on Easy at the very last dungeon cause enemies were too tanky/strong despite me being the same level as them etc. FF to Royal, I put game on Easy at Futaba's Palace because I WAS going for every link max but then they also made dungeons longer (some I couldn't do in a single day like OG), obv the additional content of Kasumi, more social hangouts like Darts and so on. I got to Shido's Palace and stopped playing, haven't picked it up again. I get into RPGs because of the story/world and combat, that doesn't mean I want a 50+ hr base game though. Games should only be 30+ if you do side content
Rebirth also ruined the pacing with the stupid af minigames and I ain't replaying that, Remake is far better for replayability since not as much fluff (I also mostly dislike OW games)
tl;dr whining hurry up and let me play already - Rush Hour
Each game is different dude shocking I know. Also comparing an actual RPG to an action RPG? Seriously? And other genre's? Seriously? Plus Brave Fencer Musashi dude? Made back in the PSX days... where Squaresoft was pushing titles out here and there experimenting with their games some hit or miss smh. I can only imagine if this was much longer holy shiet.
All I hear is a lot of whining that you're not patient enough to beat a game that's well written and has proper setup for it's series' storyline (Trails in particular) which is the game's/series main draw while the combat is also great and entertaining from the first run onwards (also unlike one of your major complaints Trails barely has tutorials outside the first 5 hours or so and rarely introduces a new system to the game after that...hell it lets you use you're characters' ultimate moves within the first couple hours while 90% of all other games won't until about 15 hours or more in (and that'd be for their lowest level of ultimate moves...Tales for example with Mystic artes). If Trails tried to cut the first game you'd just be creating tons of issues of trying to explain character relationships (as in how the main cast even met), world lore, etc and would likely wind up fucking the pacing by making it far too fast (what are you gonna do make Estelle and Joshua meet all their party members in 1 or 2 chapters, have the final fight/conflict of Sky 1 occur 1/3rd of the way through the game, and try to go from there? It wouldn't work narratively plain and simple and as far as combat goes the game teaches you everything pretty much instantly outside of 1 new mechanic added in Sky 2 which is taught in the prologue chapter of said game)...throw in the fact Sky 1 and 2 were originally going to be 1 whole game to begin with but that wound up being too big for the PSP to handle and even the digital copy of Sky 2 needs 2 separate app icons due to how long the game is so 3 total if you count Sky 1 should show you the scale of the game whcih would be far too much lore and stuff to downsize without creating tons of plot holes or just making the story quality outright shit (which would've killed the games as a well built mutli game story that's connect to each other was and is the series main draw)...it'd be just as dumb as cutting all of Merry, Pippin, and Gandalf's PoV sections (as well as anyone not Sam/Frodo/Aragorn) out of the Lord of the Rings so that the focus could be on Frodo and Sam on one side and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli on the other which will leave tons of unanswered questions when Merry/Pippin/Gandalf show up in front of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli after being missing for so long and just managing to have the key plot point needed (person or item) that leads to their victory, the same applies to Sky 1: quite a few plot points lead into plot points in part 2 especially the finale's portions but also the plot points in each individual region of Sky 1 also plays into plot points in said regions of part 2 as well.
And as for replaying lengthy games is boring...that's your opinion fine but doesn't apply to other people (probably the majority of jrpg players), hell I've played Tales of Symphonia (my favorite game of all time) 15+ times and have enjoyed it each run with my first one lasting about 80 hours and most other runs about as much time (maybe 10 to 20 hours less)...same for Ys 8 (which is a 50 to 80 plus hour game depending on how much side content you do or if you're like me and crazy enough to go back and check all npc dialogues after every major story event/progression in Falcom games as Falcom's writers change the dialogue at least 3 to 4 times for each in game day (usually for morning, noon, afternoon, and night/sometimes before and after a quest) which I will admit adds in about a good 30 plus extra hours just going around to every npc in the game to see if they get updated to see how the state of the world is in the eyes of the various characters (playable, major npc, regular npc, villains, etc), granted that's my choice and something not everyone else needs to do...if you don't do that or the side quests most Trails games can be beaten within 30 to 40 hours max, same with Tales and a lot of other series you were bitching about...the only real valid complaint in terms of side content you had that is made mandatory would be for the Persona series as you are forced to do some random activity 2 or 3 times a day to progress each in game day and you need to complete all days in a month for about 8 in game months so ya that was extra fluff that wasn't needed I will admit that...FFVIIR Rebirths many minigames and tutorials would also apply I guess as they shove too many into the main story)).
Also don't kid yourself with why jrpgs of the SNES era were short. It wasn't due to there being some desire to make them that short it was just due to technical limitations as the systems memory/the game formats at the time couldn't handle games that were too long. Hell the moment FF7 (OG) was made the amount of time and stuff increased exponentially over SE's other projects at the time (Chrono Trigger and others) likely due to the PS's discs allowing them to make larger games. it's also probably why most rpg maker style games are short: the engine or whatever they're using for memory has a limit to how many screens can be put into a game as I've never seen a game made from rpg maker longer than about 25 hours (if it was capable of making a long game on it someone would've done it by now...my guess is the program is prone to memory leaks and the like more so than other game formats).
Are some shorter games good? Yeah, they're especially good when waiting in between 2 large games you're playing when you've nothing else going on then but at the same time some of these shorter games have 1 key issue that don't really make up for the time investment argument you're making: a good chunk of the shorter games made by A to AAA devs all sell the games at full $60 (or nowadays even $70) price tags which quite frankly are far too pricey for what little you do get in said games (Valkyria Elysium for instance went for $60 on release if I'm right and even Star Ocean 2 R did or at lowest $50 if not 60 which is still too high for a nearly 25 year old game...hell Tales of Symphonia, a 20 year old game by now, was also too high with it's recent remaster at $40 and it as I mentioned above is about ~70 hours long and was, imo, no longer worth more than $20 as that's what Steam has had it at for the last few years before its release). Hell the whole time argument is a fairly poor argument as unless you buy a game and intend to sell it as soon as possible after beating it you pretty much have all the time in the world (as long as your console/PC that it's on/disc works on works anyway and even then you could probably just find an emulator for the game nowadays for the older console games...only other scenario would be if you're mortally ill I guess) to play and finish it (I take multiple months for most games nowadays and I'm fine with it (granted I'm usually playing mutliple at the same time with different games on different days...even the 'short' games (20 hours or so) I have some going on that are 1 to 2 months at the moment)...there's no real need to rush these games tbh).
This comment gets good 20 hours in
This is one of those comments I wish I could take a red pen to. There's a lot of run on sentences here-- your points are literally lost in this giant wall of text. 😬
You don't need to grind in SMT V
If you don't have the DLC, then yes
@therealjaystone2344 Ok I'll make an addendum. The only time you would probably grind is when you preparing to fight the superboss at the end of the game, which I think is understandable.
I never had to grind once when I played the rest of the game. If you think you need to grind, change your party setup.
@@LordlyWeebNo thats not true you also need to grind for some bosses.
Especialy for casual players ,some bosses can be hard to beat
I mean I like that about SMT games,but on your first playthrough you don't know what some bosses do and which elements they use ,if you happen to level up certain Demons that are weak against that boss attacks ,than you need to fuse another Demon and maybe even level them up.
That you need to grind for Super bosses is nothing new , as someone who love the play FFX the grind for Dark Aeons is nothing compared to SMT V.
@doriansz3130 That's obviously not true because when I played SMT V for the first time, I didn't grind a single time before I fought the superboss. You don't need to grind. I didn't grind in Nocturne or SMT 4 either.
@@LordlyWeeb Just because you finished the game without grinding it doesn't mean everybody did 🤦
I also always start action games on hard mode,that doesn't mean ,that everyone can do that.
Chrono Trigger has the best pacing of any JRPG still today, no massive tutorial. FF7 Rebirth has the worst pacing I've ever seen by contrast, has a crap ton of tutorials and totally pointless filler every step of the way.
also dont read fantsy books.
In short your an instant gratification person. Rpgs aren't built for that mind set its more of a build up, delayed gratification genre. Have fun 100% of the time the game is only a few minutes to few hours Versus fun built up over time expanded through 20+ hours. This is why you give the examples of being dropped into a middle of the mob and you fight it out. I would just recommend you play action fighter games or survival games. Like cod or any other 15-30 minute rounds a game type of games. Instead of ranting about rpgs maybe you need to just find the genre that fits your mindset.
While I did argue a similar point in my own comment I think this is a bit of harsh standpoint to take, he obviously likes jrpgs and names plenty in the video, not every jrpg is a build up game and telling someone to go play a different genre just because they don't like a common trope within a lot of it's games is a bit silly.
@@projectmessiah I mean he was a bit harsh, but "if he loves JRPG", then the video should already have the notion that "some JRPG" focuses more on the story than balancing it out like the video suggest. Jrpg series built reputation and niches and fanbases because they offer "different things and does things distinctly for their own brand".
RPGs don't all have these pacing problems. Chrono Trigger and FFVI are good right from the start, FFVII has a great opening and gives you new combat options quickly, and Western RPGs like Elder Scrolls and Fallout give you freedom to explore almost immediately. There's no reason that modern RPGs need to be so slow.
@@Basileus127 Some of us enjoy them slow, man. Taking the time to establish the world's setting, some backstories and (dare I ask) some not cardboard NPCs can make a world of difference in the payoff at the end, even without fast-paced story progression.
Doing that well while keeping the player's attention is what makes a good writer!
@@Snzn18 I get where your coming from and the video could of been more clear but I think its just bad faith to assume he was impliying almost all jrpgs are like that
FF13 is good from the start. The gameplay opening up isn't the goal to strive to
if you don't like leveling in RPGs, then dont play RPGs.
Yup pretty much agree its how I feel about One piece "trust me Bro it get gud at episode 200+"
Nah, One Piece is relatively enjoyable from the start, gets good around Arlong Park which is about 30 episodes in then falls of hard after Water 7 which ends around 250 then has up and down arcs that at least as far as I've watched just don't reach it's early heights from Water 7.
You ever heard of One Pace? It's a blessing for anime enjoyers.
And even with that, manga >>>>>