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Nov. 3rd, 2010 03:49 pmWow, no one who's actually played farther say anything, of course, but... EO3 just made me intensely mistrustful of the organization giving me my orders/missions/etc. without a single word being spoken. In-dungeon gameplay alone! No cutscene, no descriptions, nothing. I was able to get the "waaait a minute, is this mission bullshit?" feeling from nothing more than the B4F boss' behavior--the movement pattern of the black FOE representing the boss before I engaged it, and the kind of moves it used in battle once I did.
Of course, I've always been a huge fan of the series' surprisingly effective minimalistic storytelling. All three games start out with nothing more than "you're a guildmaster or something, I don't know, roll a bunch of blank characters and go explore this dungeon" and it somehow works. The first game suddenly introduced a plot on around the third stratum and had a huge, epic, and (I thought) downright shocking reveal, but even before that, the other major plot twist was that there actually was one.
EO2 wasn't nearly as crazy in that regard, but it was deceptively good at getting you to play along and care about things that are... inferred, at best. There are semi-recurring "characters" in the game who almost completely do not exist--nothing visible on the map or first-person view, no sprite accompanying the text, nothing at all except near-Dinosaur Comics levels of Show-Don't-Tell violation ("Suddenly you see that one baby monster... you know, the one we sort of implied that you saved from a different monster when you beat that one a couple missions ago?") Even though there is actually no gameplay difference whatsoever (you beat the boss, read a bit of text, and get an awesome weapon, the only difference is what that text says) the game actually kills off one of these pseudo-characters if you beat a certain boss without a Survivalist in your party, and I was... really sad about that. You wouldn't think the game could make a Player Punch out of a character whose very existence is about on the same level as Professor Science, but... it does.
EO3 started out with someone asking if you were going to sign up in your own guild and personally lead your men into battle, or if you were going to sit on the sidelines and just order them around or something. That was actually a purely rhetorical question given for literally no reason other than flavor. There is no way to signify a personal character even if you wanted to. It is only brought up as possible suggestions for how you want to self-roleplay as you play the game--you can pretend one of the characters in your party is you, or you can pretend that you're sitting back in the guild hall and they all just answer to you or something. It does get you thinking, though--what is your relationship to your own party, aside from the role of player (navigating all the menus and making all the decisions?) If you're a non-combatant, how did you come across all these other capable adventurers and why do they listen to you? If you're actually in your own party somewhere, which one are you? Are you the Prince who is obviously the leader because everyone else is healed just by basking in your awesomeness, or are you the non-combatant Farmer who is good at exploring and making money but needs real adventurers to protect him? (That's even assuming you have a Prince and/or Farmer in your party, which you certainly don't have to!) Who are you in this game, anyway? They ask you that just to get you thinking, and then let you take it from there.
I don't know how, but somehow, it really is good at reviving people's dead imaginations. (Note: that comic was for EO1. EO2 and 3 do let you quicksave and walk sideways.) You should hear the story of my Ronin, Dark Hunter, Hexer, second Medic, and Troubadour from the first two games sometime--through absolutely nothing at all but my own perceptions (if I roll a character, use him/her for a bit, then ultimately decide to use someone else, I imagine some sort of disappointment or bitterness from the rejected adventurer, etc.) I have come up with a whole saga for that party with enough emotions and betrayal that I could practically write EO fanfiction at this point if I wanted to. After they sort of broke up, I ended up using the Ronin, Dark Hunter, and Hexer in the new EO2 party. I eventually came to a passage that you could only get through if you had a Medic in your party, so I had to temporarily put that Medic back in just to escort him just so he could get me through that spot just so I could explore. I actually genuinely thought "well, this is going to be awkward" when the Medic had to reunite with three of his former colleagues for this, then thought "wait, I'm going insane."
Oh, by the way, I changed my mind a bit about how I want my party to develop once I get the ability to subclass. I'm now thinking of keeping Rachael in the front row and learning Fist Mastery after all (no skills for it, she'll just use the Fight command when she's not healing, but... ten points in Fist Mastery so she can be a decent source of Crush damage, at least.) Because someone has to be in the back row with Jonas (you can't have four in front and one in back, sorry,) and because most of Julian's buffs aren't dependent on his stats (level 10 Attack Order makes the target do 45% more damage, period, it doesn't matter whether it was cast by a master wizard or a dumb fighter) and he was pretty happy with just being a Prince with maybe one or two quick cheap prerequisite-free skills to steal from some other class without actually getting too deeply into it, I may actually turn him into a Ninja/Prince, put him in the back, and max his Ninja Class Skill (which would make all his skills cost 9 TP less and let his Fight command do full melee damage from the back row.) The Class Skill would be the only Ninja thing he'd know; he would otherwise ignore the Ninja skills and focus the Prince buffs. But hey, I was looking for a casual subclass (before this, I had him subbing Wildling just for two quick prerequisite-free five-point enemy debuffs) and this cheapens his skills (which can be expensive when maxed) and solves the "I have three front-line melee fighters and one Arbalist whose entire strategy is going to revolve around Front Mortar, what do I do D:" problem. So, it is now projected to look like this:
Mo/Pr, Ho/Wi, Ar/Fa (putting Simone on the top right due to Knighthood bug)
===
Ni/Pr, Ni/Fa
Of course, I've always been a huge fan of the series' surprisingly effective minimalistic storytelling. All three games start out with nothing more than "you're a guildmaster or something, I don't know, roll a bunch of blank characters and go explore this dungeon" and it somehow works. The first game suddenly introduced a plot on around the third stratum and had a huge, epic, and (I thought) downright shocking reveal, but even before that, the other major plot twist was that there actually was one.
EO2 wasn't nearly as crazy in that regard, but it was deceptively good at getting you to play along and care about things that are... inferred, at best. There are semi-recurring "characters" in the game who almost completely do not exist--nothing visible on the map or first-person view, no sprite accompanying the text, nothing at all except near-Dinosaur Comics levels of Show-Don't-Tell violation ("Suddenly you see that one baby monster... you know, the one we sort of implied that you saved from a different monster when you beat that one a couple missions ago?") Even though there is actually no gameplay difference whatsoever (you beat the boss, read a bit of text, and get an awesome weapon, the only difference is what that text says) the game actually kills off one of these pseudo-characters if you beat a certain boss without a Survivalist in your party, and I was... really sad about that. You wouldn't think the game could make a Player Punch out of a character whose very existence is about on the same level as Professor Science, but... it does.
EO3 started out with someone asking if you were going to sign up in your own guild and personally lead your men into battle, or if you were going to sit on the sidelines and just order them around or something. That was actually a purely rhetorical question given for literally no reason other than flavor. There is no way to signify a personal character even if you wanted to. It is only brought up as possible suggestions for how you want to self-roleplay as you play the game--you can pretend one of the characters in your party is you, or you can pretend that you're sitting back in the guild hall and they all just answer to you or something. It does get you thinking, though--what is your relationship to your own party, aside from the role of player (navigating all the menus and making all the decisions?) If you're a non-combatant, how did you come across all these other capable adventurers and why do they listen to you? If you're actually in your own party somewhere, which one are you? Are you the Prince who is obviously the leader because everyone else is healed just by basking in your awesomeness, or are you the non-combatant Farmer who is good at exploring and making money but needs real adventurers to protect him? (That's even assuming you have a Prince and/or Farmer in your party, which you certainly don't have to!) Who are you in this game, anyway? They ask you that just to get you thinking, and then let you take it from there.
I don't know how, but somehow, it really is good at reviving people's dead imaginations. (Note: that comic was for EO1. EO2 and 3 do let you quicksave and walk sideways.) You should hear the story of my Ronin, Dark Hunter, Hexer, second Medic, and Troubadour from the first two games sometime--through absolutely nothing at all but my own perceptions (if I roll a character, use him/her for a bit, then ultimately decide to use someone else, I imagine some sort of disappointment or bitterness from the rejected adventurer, etc.) I have come up with a whole saga for that party with enough emotions and betrayal that I could practically write EO fanfiction at this point if I wanted to. After they sort of broke up, I ended up using the Ronin, Dark Hunter, and Hexer in the new EO2 party. I eventually came to a passage that you could only get through if you had a Medic in your party, so I had to temporarily put that Medic back in just to escort him just so he could get me through that spot just so I could explore. I actually genuinely thought "well, this is going to be awkward" when the Medic had to reunite with three of his former colleagues for this, then thought "wait, I'm going insane."
Oh, by the way, I changed my mind a bit about how I want my party to develop once I get the ability to subclass. I'm now thinking of keeping Rachael in the front row and learning Fist Mastery after all (no skills for it, she'll just use the Fight command when she's not healing, but... ten points in Fist Mastery so she can be a decent source of Crush damage, at least.) Because someone has to be in the back row with Jonas (you can't have four in front and one in back, sorry,) and because most of Julian's buffs aren't dependent on his stats (level 10 Attack Order makes the target do 45% more damage, period, it doesn't matter whether it was cast by a master wizard or a dumb fighter) and he was pretty happy with just being a Prince with maybe one or two quick cheap prerequisite-free skills to steal from some other class without actually getting too deeply into it, I may actually turn him into a Ninja/Prince, put him in the back, and max his Ninja Class Skill (which would make all his skills cost 9 TP less and let his Fight command do full melee damage from the back row.) The Class Skill would be the only Ninja thing he'd know; he would otherwise ignore the Ninja skills and focus the Prince buffs. But hey, I was looking for a casual subclass (before this, I had him subbing Wildling just for two quick prerequisite-free five-point enemy debuffs) and this cheapens his skills (which can be expensive when maxed) and solves the "I have three front-line melee fighters and one Arbalist whose entire strategy is going to revolve around Front Mortar, what do I do D:" problem. So, it is now projected to look like this:
Mo/Pr, Ho/Wi, Ar/Fa (putting Simone on the top right due to Knighthood bug)
===
Ni/Pr, Ni/Fa