Just read on MaxConsole that Square Enix has confirmed that FF XIII will have 10 hours of cutscenes. 10 hours!
I just don't get it personally. We've recently touched on Kojima just briefly, but it's obviously a Japanese thing to do in gaming....like cosplay (j/k). What's the draw of having a 40 hour game and 10 hours of cutscenes? At least the "movie" vs actually playing the game part ratio is better than MGS4.
Is it vanity? Do the characters really have that much to say? Is it laziness? Bringing up Bioware again they have very few cutscenes in their games. You learn the story of the game and characters through dialogs that you at least partially control.
Playing through Blue Dragon was a very rewarding experience and I'm not sure what the final count of cutscene time was, but I'd be lying if I said they didn't have the tendency to drrrraaaaaaaagggggggggggg.
Thoughts? Is it even justifiable to have this much movie time in a game?
P.S. For our resident Kojima lovers I'm not bashing and I truly marvel at the guy. Just trying to wrap my head around the reasons for the lengthy movies.
P.P.S. As much as I hate quoting Cliffy B. (Gears of War fame) for anything I really feel he had a very valid point about cutscenese when referring to MGS4. He basically said, "When you start watching a cutscene, you stop playing a game."
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If they can keep my interest, power to them. But if someone came to me and said "hey, sit and watch this 10 hour movie, it'll be great", I'd tell them to screw off. No way, no way in the world could 10 hours of dialogue and talking about some ending of the world could hold my interest.
ReplyDeleteI think this is an old-school, dying trend. I've touched on this is so many posts, I feel like I should just do some research and write a discourse on the whole thing - games are not movies! They share many similar qualities to films, but the way they communicate the plot, characters, and the way they develop are intrinsically different than film. If I could strike one word from the vocabulary of game reviewers/designers, it would be cinematic. Not because it's an inappropriate adjective, but because it creates a standard (a false one, I might add) that the closer to a film a game can be, the better it is.
I love well told game stories that embrace their "game-ness". Half Life, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Braid... These games are far from perfect, and all are very different in style and design, but they all embrace certain gameplay elements and weave them into their stories. If cutscenes exist, they compliment the gameplay. If gameplay is the only thing present, then the narrative is woven into it.
More importantly, they all require the player to meet the game halfway for the story to continue. Cut scenes can have a place in the game industry, but what does that say about your game if the most entertaining part is the little reward of a video? I'm only playing your game so I can watch your cute movie? And it's 11 hours!? Goodness...
I like that quote from Cliff B. So true.
ReplyDeleteThis has been on my mind recently, not only because it's been mentioned on this blog, but because I am playing thru Bayonetta. The game is awesome (great combat, environments, level designs are unique, epic boss battles, etc.) but it's also littered with cutscenes and they really get on my nerves. Maybe it's just that the gameplay in Bayonetta is so fast and intense that I hate getting interrupted by cutscenes.
I don't remember having a problem with them in other games. Like I've already said before, I rather enjoy the cinematics in the Halo games, and Ninja Gaiden is another game with cutscenes that didn't bother me. After thinking about it for a moment, I know WHY these don't bother me (as opposed to the ones in Bayonetta).
First, in the Halo games, those cutscenes really flow with the narrative and actually MAKE SENSE. In Bayonetta, all the cutscenes up to a certain point (about 1/3 of the way through, probably) seem completely random and have no rhyme or reason. They finally SORT OF start to make sense after that point.
Second, in the Ninja Gaiden games, they have cutscenes, but they're not super lengthy. When I think back on playing both of those games, I remember the intense action, NOT a forever-long cutscene. Even the ones in Bayonetta aren't too long but even they get on my nerves. I can't imagine sitting through MGS4, where 50% of the game is a cutscene.
In summary, I'm not opposed to cutscenes, but for one to work for me, it has to actually make sense and it can't be so long that it feels like you're taken out of the action and then when the game designer decides to plop YOU back in the game you're not surprised or wondering where you are or what you were doing or what just happened.
I thought about this some more after my initial post. I thought of a specific type of cinematic that I enjoy.
ReplyDeleteI'll just go ahead and call it the "Boss-Kill-Cutscene." Pretty self-explanatory. Usually short and sweet, these happen after you kill a boss in a game and then it cuts to a cinematic to show the kill in all of its glory. The Resident Evil series is pretty consistent in doing this (usually ending with the protagonist shooting a rocket into the baddie, haha). It also happens in the Ninja Gaiden games. One that always stuck with me was when you kill Zedonius, "Ruler of Flame" in NG2. It cuts to Ryu slicing him up and saying, "Righteous flames will cleanse the Earth of your kind." Really cheesy, but awesome! Similarly, at the end of RE5, you shoot a rocket from a helicopter into a guy that's already standing in lava. "Suck on this, Wesker." Haha. Just awesome. In Bayonetta, you fight this huge boss with an angel face (literally, the stereotypical angel baby face) and at the end you summon a huge fist and PUNCH it in the FACE. Awesome!
Speaking of Resident Evil, I think Resident Evil 4 uses cutscenes REALLY well.
To piggyback on Lead Salad I would fully agree that cinematics are awesome when used in the ways he describes.
ReplyDeleteTo this day my all time favorite cinematic is at the end of Ninja Gaiden/Ninja Gaiden Black. You fall seemingly forever until you land in a field of flowers and there's a giant angel statue in the field. The statue begins to move and fire erupts out of the ground. Ryu plants his feet firmly in the ground and yells (in a totally badass voice btw) some asian words and spins in a circle and tears out a piece of the earth to float on. He squares himself up for the fight and lowers his center of gravity. Then I yell, "let's get it on!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXmi-5LosMA&feature=PlayList&p=7B25A2A29F012137&index=11
ReplyDeleteThere it is. Nevermind whatever hell sword that kid is using in the battle and he's probably on Ninja Dog difficulty. This game is really hard.
This will probably go over the heads of most of the bloggers here, but the Prof. Layton series (NDS) had some pretty awesome cutscenes. Real gentle, soft animation style, very reminiscent of a beautiful french film, The Triplets of Belleville. The cut scenes in this DS puzzler were just enough to keep the story driving forward, but incredibly well done at the same time. Puzzle gameplay is probably pretty hard to use for narrative anyway... In any case, they were good enough to justify an animated film in Japan.
ReplyDeleteRemember that those 10 hours of cutscenes will be spread out over 100+ hrs of gaming... Including my automatic leveling up technique (stolen from gamefaqs.com), I had 140 or so hours into FFXII when I finally beat the boss. Take away all the leveling, I still put in 70 or 80 into it of doing all the main story plus side quests and what not... If XIII is the same length as XII, you'll play 8 to 10 hours and you'll get an hour of cutscenes. That's not bad at all.
ReplyDeleteBut going from 10% to 50% of a game as cutscenes and then it's different... I'll go watch a movie, thanks.
I'm still not convinced. 100+ hours of gaming, in the same game, doing the same thing over and over again, is almost missing the point just as much, I think.
ReplyDeleteBut I also hate fishing, so maybe it's just my patience level.
100 hrs is nothing.... give me 150hrs like Oblivion did without any real cutscenes... then you have a game.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm with Juniper and Brjahu. I can play the hell out of a game and if there's more to explore in the world I'll play that thing for however long it takes. Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3 and now Dragon Age. I just finished my first "main quest" in Dragon Age and am already at almost 20 hours. I love this game.
ReplyDelete