What do you consider to be the Five Worst Written RPGs?
Let's see the flip side and see which plots or worlds just left you cold. Bad characters? Too many plotholes, just a crummy lore and world? Which games make you wince just thinking about their stories. I bet this will actually be a little harder for many of you.
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...
Well, FFXIII barely makes any sense, even if you study the datalogs, plus the villains are the worst I've ever seen in a video game. And that stupid terminology gets thrown in your face since the beginning with no one explaining anything. So what IS a fal'Cie, as all of them look completely different? Why is it spelled so weird? What's the Cie mean? I mean, there's l'Cie, fal'Cie and Cie'th - the way it's spelt you'd think there's something to it, right? Hell if I know what it is, and I've read all the datalogs.
Dirge of Cerberus tries to be a dark, gothic game, by introducing color-coded villains with silly accents, and a single cameo by the other party members just to fill a Cloud quota. And God, is Lucrecia a smurfing idiot or what? The data for my dissertation - which, FYI, is crucial to the world's survival - is basically just this one fairy tale or some trout.
Crisis Core has Mary Sues and dumb retcons galore, with the occasional wink to the fanbase. Crisis Core has no shame.
Okay, FFX is not as bad as the other ones, but the use of the "toxin", whatever the hell it is, is pretty egregious. Oh, we need to gat those characters from Macalania to Bikanel - let's have Sin fart on them. Yeah, that'll work.
Revenant Wings. The primary antagonist is a bunny girl in a suit of armor (OMG spoilers) who is pissed that her boyfriend was killed in a world so she decides to kill everyone. Oh, but wait. The real bad guy is actually her dad who enslaved an entire race and became a god-like being. We must band together to kill God and show him that we make our own fates! Oh wow, this is a Motomu Toriyama game? Who could've known!
It's kinda sad how all these are FF. Persona 1 almost made the list, though, so there's that at least.
How many ways can I say this...
1. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time
2. Star Ocean 3
3. That Star Ocean between 2 and 4
It is absolutely mind-boggling how bad the writing is. The infamous twist is not the problem,not even slightly. The problem is that it comes out of nowhere. Before it, you had spent several hours fighting a war on a cliche fantasy planet. You worked very hard, going through many awful dungeons and meeting many bad characters all in order to complete this magic superweapon. THEN ALIENS SHOW UP BECAUSE THIS IS GODDAM SPACE GAME. Only these aliens then vanish and now you're fighting space angels. Only they were actually Space Norton Antivirus. Now you go to another dimension because the universe is an MMO. And then you kill the CEO of Squaresoft but he deletes your game universe only your universe continues to exist because......................................
Oh and did I mention that along the way on the boring cliche fantasy planet you meet a random clone of your girlfriend who is dying for soap opera disease? Why? WHO smurfING KNOWS. This subplot doesn't do anything or go anywhere.
Ya know, the world you were stranded on is heavily religious. Could be interesting seeing how they deal with the fact their god and faith is all a lie.
.....NAHHHHH! Like I said, that be interesting. We can't have that.
Final Fantasy VIII has two, maybe three, characters in its cast of dozens that get any meaningful development. Every playable character is fundamentally the same so in essence Irvine, Zell, Selphie and Quistis bring absolutely nothing to the game in terms of either combat or story. Speaking of which, the plot is absolute nonsense full of badly thought out "military strategies", time travel for no reason, and absolute garbage worldbuilding.
Xenosaga II is terrible for any number of reasons, which is bound to happen when you hijack a series away from its main writers and try to make it "cool" The game gave more attention to Juli Mizrahi than Shion and KOS-MOS! It left so many things unexplained that they just had to yank god knows how many answers out of their asses for Episode III.
That's all I got for now. Wait, that is 5.
I'll name FFVIII for relying on one of the worst plot twists in history.
FFXIII for every reason Fynn mentioned.
Hell, Crisis Core same as the above.
KOTOR because all of really had going for it was the plot twist and I saw that coming from the very beginning of the game.
Fallout 3 I'll give a mention as well. The entire game is fairly poorly written. But things like Broken Steel are so badly written and filed with massive potholes that it's hard not to smash my head against the keyboard.
If youre including bad Japanese to English translations I cite Final Fantasy 4, barely understood the plot thanks to it.
Grandia 2 has its low points ("Lollipop Lane kid, lollipop lane" and the ending where Elena says her Ryudo and Milenna are joined by the earth or some crap)
Odin Sphere over complicated its dialogue by splitting it into 6 separate scripts (plus alternate ending scripts). The makers kind of lost track of the story at times and it didn't mesh well.
As much as I love the first Grandia for other reasons, they had Justin randomly saying "Bogus" alot which kind of smacked of too much effort
The first Shadow Hearts game had a continuity issue saying Koudelka (aka Halley's mother) was dead when she wasn't. Also the whole pervy acupuncture guy was a bit erm.....pushing it.......a lot
On the whole I dont hate the writing in the RPGs ive played. Most i cite as having low points is all.
Here is my list.
5: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. It was just very basic and really wasn't deep or made you think at all
4: Mass Effect. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I really struggled to finish this game and it put a distaste in my mouth for the series as a whole.
3: Secret of Mana. Here I really don't know what it is about this game, I've tried to play it numourus times and I just can't. It stinks Like Mass Effect It just doesn't do it for me.
4: Tecmo Secret of the Stars: I may try to replay it at some point, but I remember not being very impressed with it when I was younger. It was a one and done.
5: FF XIII. It was just an awful game from the beginning to the end. If I was SE I would have never released it and fired everyone who was on the team that put the SE name on it.
In defense of VIII, yes the plot twist was cliche as hell but I feel like most people judge it too harshly, I mean...it was the 90's, watch most TV shows and anime from the 90's and most of the time you're going to be able to guess what happens next but back then while it may still be cliche back then, it would not have been as big of a cliche compared to now, I mean the orphanage thing was cheesy but I'm pretty sure no one who played VIII for the first time was gonna guess that the GF's caused amnesia and they all knew each other (minus Rinoa). I also liked the dream sequences and playing as Laguna, I don't think many guessed that he was gonna be Squall's future dad. Okay I'm getting off track.
1. Star ocean: until the end of time: So many anime tropes, and that little girl "kaaaay" "kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay" *bangs head against wall* At least the battle system was pretty good.
2. FFXIII: I like the premise of the L'cies having a focus in which they have to carry out and selflessly turning into crystals but I felt like the game told you more what was happening rather than showing you what was happening. To actually get some kind of grasp an understanding of this game, you have to read all those info files in-game and that feels lazy to me.
3. FFX-2/Will audio drama: They butchered Yuna's character, she became Rikku 2.0 and the audio drama *spoilers* split Tidus and Yuna up! Please tell me the audio drama isn't canon...
4. All the KH spin-offs: Too many things are going on in this spin-offs. KH2 was already kind of convoluted but honestly there is many things happening in this game I'm not even looking forward to KH3 because of all the back-story I'll need to look up to make sense of it all.
5. FFXII: Why wasn't Balthier and Fran the main couple? Why was Vaan the main protagonist?(okay I know why, but if you're going to switch around the main character can you make sure he's not a dingus?). While XIII had too many cut-scenes, I felt like XII didn't have enough. Gameplay was still awesome though.
6. Omega quintet: I'm about 20hrs in and I dislike every character in this game, world-building has no depth at all, and the main heroine is so annoying I mute the volume whenever she talks...and she talks...a lot.
That depends on if I want to talk about just logic or any facette of writing being so bad that I cannot enjoy it at all. The ultimate winner is Kingdom Hearts but I still love it for what I win from it.
I actually hate it more because the GF amnesia thing could have been used so much better than it was. It could have been a brilliant mind smurf and instead we got "everyone lived in an orphanage together and forgot and this information is largely irrelevant aside from making you sympathize with Edia in the laziest way possible."Originally Posted by Rin Heartilly
I also think it could have been implemented better, wasn't VIII being created along with IX and X around the same time but released at different times? I have a feeling that could be the reason for some of the lazy cliches present, because VIII wasn't the sole/primary focus of the writers time during development.I actually hate it more because the GF amnesia thing could have been used so much better than it was. It could have been a brilliant mind smurf and instead we got "everyone lived in an orphanage together and forgot and this information is largely irrelevant aside from making you sympathize with Edia in the laziest way possible."
However, I am truly thankful they left Rinoa out of the childhood gang. If it had the cliche of Rinoa remembering "omg I just realized the Squall and I played together as kids, we're destined to be together" thing I see in so many jrpgs (I'm looking at you Tails), I would not be defending the orphanage cliche at all. But yeah it was a lazy way for Edea to get sympathy points.
Go play Persona 2: Innocent Sin if you want to see the FFVIII plot twist done well
I don't specifically remember anything about that but there are many development teams at Square and different people wrote FFVIII and IX at least. It's unlikely it had anything to do with it. I'd guess it probably has more to do with Yoshinori Kitase writing it. The man just isn't good to be honest. Sadly he's had prominent roles on enough classics (though I suspect he was carried to some extent by co-directors which let those games be classics) that he's basically in charge these days and will likely never disappear.
Final Fantasy X still offends me with the ridiculous turns it takes in its plot, and Titus's personality in general
Star Ocean 4 still offends me with how badly Edge emotes, and when I bring this up people seem to think I'm arguing that he should have been more emotionless. On the contrary, I believe the intention of the writing was fine, showing emotion is fine. How he did it was terrible though, and I'll always believe any amateur character writer could have done a million times better
I kinda want to say Infinite Undiscovery, but I barely played any of that game, the beginning was so atrocious I took it back, knowing I wouldn't be able to enjoy it. And amusingly enough, years later, my girlfriend gave it a try, and I told her what happened to me in a vague manner so as to prepare her but not sully her first impressions and invariably she ended up having the same impression, and also took it back lol And god I hope that game got better, but we'll never know. It's probably unfair for me to put it on my list like this, but the writers chose to have a terrible intro the game, its their own fault
I'm having trouble thinking of other games that I gave up on just because of the writing. Two Worlds and Gothic (4? I forget which one I played. It was on 360) spring to mind, but half their problem wasn't just the writing, it was also terribly delivered by incompetent voice actors, and jank as hell controls and UI systems among other things. But I guess those will do
...In your opinion. I thought it worked fine and It's still the best video game I've played in my lifetime. FFVIII is such a love/hate game with many people.I actually hate it more because the GF amnesia thing could have been used so much better than it was. It could have been a brilliant mind smurf and instead we got "everyone lived in an orphanage together and forgot and this information is largely irrelevant aside from making you sympathize with Edia in the laziest way possible."
1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th - Final Fantasy XIII
Str8 Pimpin'
You need to play more JRPGs if you think FFXIII was that bad.
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