GameSided Roundtable: What Gaming Genre Just Isn’t For You?
Martin Benn
My games of choice have always been rather short for the most part. If it reaches above 20 hour play times I likely haven’t finished it. I’m sure you can see where this is going, the JRPG is the genre I most admire, but hardly take place in. Even for games like Skyrim and Fallout, a game that last 50+ hours I need it to be dripping with meaningful parts to the story. I don’t much like side quests and all of that.
Interactivity is at the soul of every game. It’s what separates itself from being a film. Moving around an analog stick as a story is told at you is frustrating to me, no matter if I’m playing an Indie title or the literal Citizen Kane in video game form.
The only big, expansive RPGs I’ve finished in recent history are in the final fantasy series (FFX/XIII). XIII was rather tedious up to a certain point before I finally let the reigns go and let you just play through. And even the ending was an extended affair. I liked the second one better and I still haven’t finished it just because it’s so long. I’ve had Skyrim glitch on me one too many times and the combat stuff is frustrating if you’re not sniping with arrows from far away.
All of this is to say, I have great respect for RPGs. If it’s a streamlined, everything counts affair like say Mass Effect Trilogy (120 hours total put in) or Final Fantasy X (not actually much more than 50 hours if you know it well or have a guide) I can usually play it. But the wandering western and some JRPGs with expansive storylines, tons of side missions, I really have to be into it and for the most part, I just can’t after a while.
Daniel George
Fighting games have my respect, and I’ll likely try to put the time into getting better, so I’ll talk about another genre of games that I just can’t get into right now; gameplay-minimal games. Whether they have an intrinsic story made plain to the gamer at hand (Gone Home, Dear Esther), or if they are more of an emotional/psycholigcally-bending tale (Flower, Journey), I just can’t bring myself to appreciate them.
The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us don’t really qualify under this category, as they do have investigative, combat and player choice to act as a counterbalance to the deep narrative. It’s great to see that video games are starting to take more innovative and intellectually-engaging depths when it comes to crafting a story for its characters, but too often do creators forget the basic facets of what makes a video game what it is.
Interactivity is at the soul of every game. It’s what separates itself from being a film. Moving around an analog stick as a story is told at you is frustrating to me, no matter if I’m playing an Indie title or the literal Citizen Kane in video game form. Even though I can appreciate the quality of the tales being provided to the consumer, the FMV era died for a reason; let’s not rebirth it under a new name.
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