ZeroAX wrote:Jmustang1968 wrote:excellent storytelling involves telling more with less, but that is hardly JRPG game's forte right?
Huh? Seriously? I don't know how you define telling a story, but I disagree. It's not a story in the sense of what we would more accurately call a "plot": who did what to whom and when and where and what happened next. It's in the way the colors progress as you move through the game, the way even as an adult, running into warmech in Final Fantasy makes you jump. It's in the way advancing to a new part of the map is dramatic: Yuji Horii, Dragon Warrior's creator, is especially proud of his map designs, you can tell he spent hours trying to figure out where each little pixelized mountain should go. He also plays through the games again and again during development, and one legend has him yelling at a programmer because the doors opened too fast. It's like who's ever going to notice something like that? But if you've ever had the chance to listen to a master storyteller, you'll know that it's all in the details and the placement of even the tiniest, superficially most meaningless words. Actually, I think that Japanese in general can impart that sense of story or tale even to shoot 'em ups with no dialogue.