I would hardly even call Ashe and Penelo's arrival 'late' to be honest. Both characters were introduced before they were made playable anyway.
I would hardly even call Ashe and Penelo's arrival 'late' to be honest. Both characters were introduced before they were made playable anyway.
The worst at this is those you get up to three party members in the Director's Cut of Star Ocean. You get characters on the last chapter of the game.
I usually use everyone no matter how late in the game, but there are some rpgs that have too many playable characters and in the case of Adventures of Horai High, the cat is not going to be used.
Although they both had plenty of issues, neither FFXII nor FFXIII had a problem with introducing characters too late. Ashe still arrives well before any of the actual main events of the story get gone, and she's on-par with the team when she arrives. And Fang arrives before Gran Pulse, which is where 80% of the game's content is anyway. Not to mention the whole Crystarium cap means that she's not actually too far behind the rest of the party.
But Fang has appeared in the story before, even if not as a party member. She interacts a bit with Snow and is mentioned by Vanille a lot. True, all the drama not related to Oerba happens before, but really, so what? Gang gets plent of focus (hehe) on Gran Pulse, which is why it's really not a problem that she appears later. And when it comes to gameplay, Sky is dead-on.
Exactly, all the important stuff happened and then Fang showed up. Looking forward to Snow's and Hope's inevitable confrontation was a big reason I kept playing XIII, Sazh's and Vanille's confrontation was perfect and in my current run I've come to appreciate Lightning's development.
And then there's Fang, who...um...doesn't really add anything to the story whatsoever. The rest of the team has co-character development so you can't really do one without the other. Snow's character without Hope would be entirely different for instance. Vanille's character though would be exactly the same without Fang because she spent far more time with Sazh.
Oh, come on. The aggressive lesbianing was worth it
I have to disagree. Fang's involvement in Vanille's story is critical to her feelings of guilt and shame. These feelings come to a head in Pulse and Vanille's eidolon awakening (side note: she gets hers so late).
She also becomes Ms. Exposition several times in Palumpolum and Pulse, and bonded with Lightning during that time. Heck, she even has an optional scene with Sazh discussing his role as a father (a character she hasn't really spent much time with too much).
She becomes even more important in Lightning Returns. Basically, while she isn't so much involved with the personal team dramas which basically made chapters 2-7, she propels the game along into the second act.
Chrono Cross is the worst for this, especially since there are characters you can't even get the first time around. And none of them have much of any character development at all to offset it. I always ended up using characters from earlier in, even after spending stupid amounts of time trying to get one specific character or another, just out of familiarity.
Depends on the game. Some games can bring characters in late and it works well, others cannot. A lot of it does depend on where they start out and how much you have invested in your other characters too. It does make me sad though when I really like a character and I don't get too much time with them because of this
It largely depends on how it's handled, specifically whether the late character has been introduced early in the plot and simply joins you late in the story (Magus from CT) and whether the game utilizes a time consuming customization system and how the game compensates for the tardy party member.
Basically if the latecomer shows up late in the story, then they will probably be ignored by the player who has more emotionally invested in the characters who have been around longer. The only way to get around this is by either having the character just have a truly demanding personality that is easy to flesh out and hard to ignore or to simply have the character introduced in the plot earlier so they can be fleshed out even though they haven't actually joined.
Game mechanics-wise, it depends on how complicated and time consuming building characters can be. One of the reasons why many of the story characters are trout upon by players in FFTactics for example is that they start off far behind the characters you've been building and while they can be pretty broken in their own right, some players don't really want to spend the time to build them up. It's why latecomers or "secret" characters tend to have simpler builds offset with better stats or abilities.
True beauty exists in things that last only for a moment.
Current Mood: And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe. Maybe this year will be better than the last. I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself. To hold on to these moments as they pass...