/vr/No.126352677 replies4 images0 reposts

/vr/ — I recently started playing Final Fantasy IV again for the fi

7 replies, 4 images

Anonymous06/15/26(Mon)02:51:26

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I recently started playing Final Fantasy IV again for the first time in a long while and it really feels like that in three hours more significant plot developments and events have occurred in that short span of time than a lot of modern games would do in 10 times that. There's been,
-A crisis of loyalty and conscience
-A tragic inciting event
-The loss of loved ones and regaining the will to fight
-Vengeance sworn
-A grand battle
-betrayal from your closest friend
-love triangle drama
-moral apotheosis
-heroic sacrifice of innocents
-a rescue of the love interest
IN THREE HOURS. And I'm not even rushing the game.

Anonymous06/15/26(Mon)06:01:51

>>12635267 (OP)
You can do a lot if you don't waste any time and get your characterization in two lines or less per scene

Anonymous06/15/26(Mon)06:54:22

>>12635465
That's kind of the thing though. I don't really think a lot of more long winded games do give more complex characterization. It usually still boils down to the same amount of information just with more roundabout and drawn out dialogue. Brevity IS the soul wit.

Anonymous06/15/26(Mon)11:54:30

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>>12635267 (OP)
Part of it is because FFIV is a great RPG and is considered a classic for a good reason.
The other part is Square assuming that their audience is bad at RPGs and that it would take the typical player three hours to get through the Mist Dungeon. (Definitely true when I was a kid, I sucked at RPGs back then.) So they paced the story based on the playing speed of a low-skill player.

Anonymous06/15/26(Mon)11:56:07

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>>12635267 (OP)
Yup, FF4 is just the best game ever made. There is more packed into this game than the average modern JRPG wishes it could have.

Anonymous06/15/26(Mon)13:05:44

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>>12635527
Yep. It was going downhill just a few years later with the effectively unlimited text available on a CD-ROM. But it got really bad when voice acting came along. Even the FF4 DS version drags a bit due to the cringe voice acting.

Anonymous06/15/26(Mon)13:09:33

Decompressed storytelling / Joss Whedon writing are to blame. At the tail end of the 90s and beyond this became the standard across all media.

Just look at how American comic books used to tell an entire complete story in under 30 pages every month, with character development, a three act plot, and an actual ending. Now you can barely get one conversation and fight scene in 24 pages and it takes 2 years to finish a single storyline.

Anonymous06/15/26(Mon)14:26:26

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>>12635827
I wasn't quite so slow but when I was younger I did like to just take more time to explore things. Even just fucking around once you got the air ship.

>>12636007
There really is something to be said about limitations breeding creativity. Voice acting was impressive at the time and I'm no Luddite against technological development but I feel like there is a case of less being more. The whole game won't take you very long to beat at all but every hour feels more impactful. A lot of longer games are only longer because they have so many cutscenes, it takes so long to have the actors read their lines that it's just padding. Then every action involves 100 different overly long animations and camera swoops and pans. You can't even so much swing a sword without it being overly animated. Is a game really 30 hours long if you spend 15 of those hours watching it rather than playing it? In the DS version you can't even really hurry up the dialogue.

>>12636021
>Just look at how American comic books
Brother, you're preaching to my choir. What a revoltin' development this is.