Why do RPGs so often go to absolute tatters in the final act? This happens with WRPGs and JRPGs, across all genres, with no coherent explanation other than "the devs ran out of money lol". Is it genuinely just people running out of ideas and time?
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Yes, it's genuinely that they're all too ambitious and are forced to cinch off the ending as best as they can and hit the fricking deadline for once because the publisher needs to make money. Nearly all great RPGs suffer from this. Off the top of my head, Bioware said that their design document for Kotor is pretty much 100% identical to the released game so there's your exception I guess.
Is kotor the only complete rpg?
kotor's endgame is still a boring meat grinder. Most endgames lack polish, most players don't even see them so it's not worth the effort.
Money, ideas, and time are the main reasons but not the only ones.
Endings have less incentive to be good because less players will see the ending than any other part of the game and most will slog through a bad ending if they are already invested anyway. This will reflect on the amount of effort put in- you can even see it commonly in literature, film, and TV.
Endings are also more creatively restricted because they come too late to make major changes to the systems and story of the game. However, endings have higher expectations to be better than the content that came before them.
Most developers use up all of their best ideas about 3/4ths of the way through the game. By the time you reach that final quarter the only thing the devs can do is try their best with what they got, which is why so many games in every genre feels worse in the final hours. Another reason is that most people who play your game arent even going to get that far to worry about the game getting stale. You also made it that far so you might as well complete it which helps with that case. Crunch is also a reason why. Again, since most people wont finish your game it is better to just make the first 3/4ths of the game the best you can just spend the last quarter just wrapping shit up development wise. Final Fantasy is especially bad in this regard. Feels like the majority of the games have really rushed ending sections
Despite everything, i still think the second disc in xenogears was well done.
Since the story took a direction into the more "mystical" and "spiritual" side of the setting, with the revelations and all, it made somewhat sense that the narrative would get more "contemplative" if that makes sense.
And gears still had a bloody good ending.
I agree. The original plan of ending the game on a cliffhanger (ending with Disc 1) would have made the game complete shit.
Xenogears a shit
It's almost certainly too much content, not enough time.
>with no coherent explanation other than "the devs ran out of money lol".
But that's what happens
Never played this game never will now that it's worth more than my retirement plan
Emulation exists.
Emulation is the best way to play it anyway since you have easier access to hacks that reduce the pain (fast text hack for the slow text crawl, fast-forward for boring grinds, and save states for moronic platforming).
There are dozens of ways to play ps1 games for free like tonyhax or emulation
>fast-forward
Zoom zoom
how often does it happen in jrpgs? i know they exist but im struggling to think of any right now. golden age square generally nailed endings iirc.
>Why do RPGs so often go to absolute tatters in the final act?
RPGs? This is true for all media.
People find it difficult to end things in a satisfying manner.
It's hard enough to write a satisfying conclusion let alone have all the resources to produce one for a video game with a strict dev timetable
At least Xenogears got the writing part down even if the development side went to crap
This, at least XG bothered to fricking finish the story. Imagine if they devoted the amount of development they had up to that point evenly in disk 2, but it resulted in the game just ending on a cliffhanger
People don't have endings in mind.
Considering 90% of the player base couldn't comprehend the ending of Disco Elysium or act 3 in general, it's evident the literary aspect of some of these games comes with a skill ceiling the games themselves are not equipped to help the player with.
Not an example of good writing. Just developers that think they are.
>Baseless claim
t. Filtered
It's still hilarious that even twitter commies hated the ending because it didn't sate their revolutionary fantasies. I still remember that shit essay where someone likened DE to Kreia because the player was 'mocked' regardless of what political stance one chooses.
The game pretty clearly is most sympathetic to socialism. I don't know what some commies were expecting, a cheesy North Korean propaganda flick where our hero kills the imperialists and saves the day? Reminds me an anecdote I read where young fiction writers would submit stories to marx with "socialist" themes and he thought they were all terrible. I guess some people only want trite moralism. I'm gonna blame the YA industry for these lazy readers.
Glad I strayed away from YA as a kid.
In the case of DE and moralist responses, I'd also blame the personal impotence of some reviewers as well; wishing to imagine their way to revolution, only to rave and place expectations onto tinkerers to create the scaffolding of their mental furniture. Usually, I detest armchair psychology as criticism, but few higher minded gaming critics ever state their expectations of a game itself. It's actually dazzling to find when some hate the fact that a game doesn't bow over for picking the 'right path'. Socialist or not, you are judged for your positions--fairly and unfairly--regardless of what they are. This naturally should lead one to value their actual actions and lifestyle. That's something I think DE did well.
Haven't heard of that Marx anecdote. Sounds funny.
I haven't noticed this pattern. It took me ages to slog through to the end of Baldur's Gate 2, but that was just because I'd been playing the game for 90 hours or something and was ready the play something else. I don't think the end of the game is lower quality.
Suikoden games tended to have solid endings because so much of the narrative winds around the idea of collecting all the Stars.
2 and 3 in particular felt like complete games to me.
FFVI and CT also didn’t make any huge mistakes.
Part of the reason for it is that stories, even in literature, aren’t always setup to have the climax also be the conclusion. If you’re writing a story specifically to generate a sequel for which you don’t already have a narrative in mind; then generally you’re going to leave ends untied which obviously is going to hurt your ending.
Writing a good ending is hard, this is hardly exclusive to RPGs. Many books, movies and TV shows have shit endings as well.
the real answer is that most midwits have unrealistic expectations of what an ending should be and always imagine some grandiose undefined mess that no ending in fiction ever measures up to. When you get wiser and more experienced you learn to appreciate things for what they are, not for what you imagined they should be.
>and always imagine some grandiose undefined mess that no ending in fiction ever measures up to.
I don't know, super robot fans tend to be happy if the show either has a giant climatic battle or ends on a "what the frick is going on?!" note
that's not really a norm in the super robot genre, getter, ggg and ttgl are the exception not the rule
Wrong, the key is to just set hype thrusters to maximum and have a giant showdown in space. Literally name me a game that does this for the ending and fails.
It's called the Demonbane sequel
Kill la Kill did exactly this and fell completely flat
How do warpigs feel about the fact that Xenogears' ending, rushed and incomplete as it is, still mogs every single WRPG powerpoint presentation ending to hell and back?
because they're long games and people generally don't finish them, the best part is in the beginning. this hits larian insanely hard with their moronation of only polishing chapter 1 of their games with considerable thought and community feedback
in the case of Xenogears it wasn't money, it was time. back in the day games had a strict 2 year timeline to get games done and out.
Smart decision, though. 2 years were unlikely to have improved sales of the game to any substantial degree. Xenogears still got good reviews overall and there wasn't any specific criticism for the back half of the game (many reviewers probably didn't even reach disc 2 before publishing). And from my recollection, most of the word-of-mouth was positive, and criticism tended to focus on aspects not likely to have changed with more dev time.
In 2022, if you ask "what I am in for" people are going to spam you about disc 2 being unfinished and xenogears a shit. But in 1998, if you got negative feedback it would be more like "dunno man I got bored after the forest level/sewers level/etc-- the plot was making no sense I didn't like the main character and the text speed was painfully slow."
I want to believe that. But the last couple decades of Final Fantasy have shown the opposite isn't true either.
I think this is a case of Ludology vs Narratology.
Ideally an RPG is just a campaign. You know, a quest for the Holy Grail or something. It's nothing personal. In practice anyone could do it. It's just another task, like collecting wolf pelts or exterminating rats in a cellar.
You don't question a game's objective. But in a narrative, you do.
Why couldn't this quest giver NPC kill the rats himself? Why 10 wolf pelts? Why not 3? What are they using them for?
How deep does the rabbit hole go?
What is the limit of questions? In a game, the questions can't be asked by the player. They would have to be asked by some in-game character. A sage, a scientist, an oracle, someone with the insight to perceive the direction of events, and what lies at the extreme.
Take for example the episode of Doctor Who, Extremis. There is a secret book in the Vatican, and anyone who reads it commits suicide shortly after. Spoiler: it contains a method to verify that their reality is a virtual simulation. The simulation will be ending soon. A simulation made by aliens in a plot to take over the earth. The virtual doctor sends a message to the real doctor. To be continued in the next episode.
If this were a video game, the next episode would be compressed into the final dungeon. A coda. A tail.
A coda in a video game would be like a boss rush.
All the previous bosses show up.
You know how Alice in wonderland ends, she's being chased by everyone and everything she met along the way.
But a coda falls apart when the story was framed with stories within stories. Like having your life flash before your eyes, only it contains parts of someone else's life that was framed within your life, but you couldn't possibly have seen. It's fever dream logic.
I think that's the problem with Ultimecia's Castle in FF8, or the resurrected city of Hod in Tales of the Abyss.
It come from a place before, after, betwixt and between.
A world that never was. A world that hasn't been. A world within a memory within a dream within a story written in the margins
kh2 ends in the world that never was
Yes, the implication is that worlds can become heartless and nobodies too.
But they don't explore that. There's numerous mysteries regarding Org13 that were never answered until Kh3 came along some 15 years later. And we STILL don't know.
So Ansem, in the first game, wanted to open the door 2 darkness. And he did this. Sure, there was light on the other side that seemingly vaporized Ansem at first. But other than that, it was just literally the Dark World on the otherside.
Where did all that light go? What IS kingdom hearts?
Then Xemnas, in the second game, is doing the same thing. Only instead of opening a door in a heartless world, he's opening it in a nobody world - maybe. Maybe a void between? They don't really explain where or why they are there. It's confusing because in concept art they called it the "Dark City". And in the final battle it seems to be a kind of Penrose limbo that just looked like a city stretched across eternity.
Then in BBS and KH3 we get Xehanhort, and we piece together that Kingdom Hearts is just a collection of hearts. Get enough together, then Xehanhort can dive into the collective memory to a recreated world of Scala ad Caelum. Where he was essentially biding to achieve Time Compression like FF8, to return everything to "before". But this just raises more questions.
I think the problem with a "Zero Source world" or lost city, is that the style of narrative requires someone be in the know.
FF9 in the Crystal World, and Chrono Cross in Dinopolis both used a disembodied voice.
It's like. Who the frick are you? How the frick do you know this? Why the frick are you telling us this - because, sure, it's important context for the player but what consequence is it to the characters in the story?
It's like it's cracking the 4th wall.
well, in Chrono Cross it's the dragon god talking, no ?
Nope. Datamining reveals the voice was labeled "prisoner". And of course the whole Tera Tower thing went nowhere. Transforms for no reason. You can't go back to it. Although datamining reveals you might have been able to access it by flying. They obviously had more planned.
Wouldn't it be amazing if Chrono Cross and Xenogears covered 4 discs instead of 2?
i love Chrono cross the fact it could have been much better trully saddens me
I've come to accept that Chrono Cross is a "feeling" driven game rather than a "story" driven game.
>with no coherent explanation other than "the devs ran out of money lol".
I don't think you understand how big a restriction budget is in game development (any kind of collaborative media really). And you can even see in Xenogears areas that were clearly meant to be expanded. Like near the start of disc 2, the game narrates how Citan, Elly, and Emeralda go to a facility to do some shit and it's clear that this was supposed to be a playable dungeon that got cut for budget.
pic unrelated? Disk 2 is the best part of Xenogears. It drops all the filler and just goes 80% VN and 20% boss fights.
I want to see someone do an RPG that's basically just a VN with boss fights the whole way through just to see if it would turn out well.
You mean every rpg maker game ever?
Yes? That's why it fricking sucks moron
Developers tend to focus all their time and resources on the early parts of the game, because first impressions are everything. If Act 1 is good enough, then the players will have no reason to refund the game. The final act often times is actually the least relevant of the bunch, so devs just throw their hands up in the air and think of the fastest and most half-assed way to to wrap things up. Add to the fact that most players never actually reach the finale and you're realize why little effort gets put into it.
The other explanation is that game journalists and other chronic nonfinishers will never see it so it's a waste of money to work hard on it.
The only way to make good endings to stories is to write all the important plot points and beats, character storylines, themes and subplots in advance. That very nearly never happens in video games, comics, or in TV series (with the exclusion of miniseries, and about half of those are complete dogshit too), since for the most part all of those are written as they go along.
If you want stories with good endings, or just good stories overall, you'd be much better off reading a book or watching a movie. Or just laying in bed and imagining a girl sucking you off. I guarantee that one will have a good ending.
>That very nearly never happens in video games, comics, or in TV series
That isn't true at all. For sequels, maybe, for extra seasons of a tv show, maybe, but video games and movies are storyboarded long before they enter development.
Wrong
>Why do RPGs so often go to absolute tatters in the final act?
Lol pretty much every genre in every kind of media is more likely to have a shit ending than a good one. They're just a good tier of difficulty harder to write than the premise and body of a story.