Aaaaand there ya go misconstruing what i said again...
I would suggest you read the line again. I said, the most cliche trope in ecchi
next to self insert harem anime.
Umm... Okay? You're not really explaining yourself here. You brought it up first. That's still a connection, which is all I said - that I don't see how what I'm saying gets you to go there, even as cliches that are "next to" it - that's still connecting them. If you want to agree to disagree, I'm all for that, but I really do feel like I've been misunderstood here.
Like I said, i really don't have the patience to go over every point you misunderstood, especially now as it is getting late and I have a major head cold... Maybe some other time when I feel better, but for now I still think agreeing to disagree is the best approach since
you seem very adamant in purging all the darker elements of the series.
No no no-- I'm "adamant" in wanting the series survive and so I'm pointing towards what I believe are the most realistic and best possible methods for its continued survival, having seen how masses tend to react to series that try to go outside their comfort zones to too great an extent, which is honestly pretty basic business sense. I don't just mean in regards to series like Senran, though it's especially true of them, but pretty much
any game series. That's the attitude long lasting franchises just bring out of people. They want what they know. They're buying this because they expect what they know - and to be fair, I can't begrudge that. If it's part of a long lasting franchise, it should
be part of that franchise.
People don't like change, and thus, will buy what they're familiar with most. What's more, this series is an over the top hyper boob action series first and foremost, before writing even comes into play one way or the other.
Now, if we're talking about what I'd personally like to see it do for
me, that's probably actually a very different conversation (except the part about multiple stories, I do think that's a great idea), because my wants don't necessarily align with what I believe are the wants of the masses that are going to be this series' lifeblood or with what I think would prolong the series' lifespan, and I don't think I've been very clear about that, so I apologize.
And to clarify further, I'm not saying SV's writing style is necessarily a good alternative either as far as
my tastes are concerned - my main point of contention here isn't that SV is better than Burst, I'm actually not saying much about SV one way or the other because I have a bias towards character interaction over plot, which I feel SV did do a little more of over Burst, but knowing that's my bias, I try to stay out of SV specific conversations, if... that makes sense. If you notice, most of my talk about SV is just "well Burst wasn't great either."
With Burst, it's just that I don't feel Burst was really that good and it isn't something I think we should want to strive for either.
If anything, maybe we should ditch
both and try for
real balance now that they've got a hang of doing both a few times.
That is a barrier that cannot be dispersed. It shows you have a very different perspective of the series at large, one that we will most likely never see eye to eye on. And due to this, it is best if we do not try to.
Okay, um, while I'm now 100% certain there's been a misunderstanding here, it's probably best to just move on, so... forget what I just wrote, I guess, here's a cookie?
Honestly I find this part massively contradictory. The huge back and forth we've had over many threads now is about how you saw Burst and Versus plots mediocre at best and how critical you were of my liking of Burst's story. The biggest point of contention being the charactertization and here, you're saying that BECAUSE the SK fandom is mostly composed of otaku they don't give a damn for proper characterization. Just mix and match some tropes, give them sexy attires and don't mess the formula.
And that is awfully short sighted.
I wasn't just talking about otaku or this series, though I did mention them because they are a factor - all paying fans are. I'm talking about franchises. Look at the reception Sonic Boom's redesigns got, for one example targeting a
completely different demographic.
I also don't see how or why you're assuming people wouldn't care about characterization based on this. My point is that they
do care about characterization, but as someone selling a product, you have to recognize the risks in changing up that product too much from entry to entry. It's just that, the thing is, they care about characterization in a different way, and I think that's fairly understandable. Before it started being a facet of every form of Japanese media, "moe" was more of a thing for
adults for a very good reason, and even though "otaku bait" has taken over the world today, those reasons are still true, if not even more so now.
What I'm getting here is that you don't see SK as a series worth the time and effort to develop beyond mere otaku bait. And you're wrong.
The fanbase LIKES substance and a strong narrative on this series. The massive praise EV's story gets by fleshing out Gessen and Hebijo should be proof enough
The core problem here is that the fanbase is fractured.
WE care about a strong narrative as long is focused on the characters WE care about.
Mario and Pacman are bad exaples for your argument by the way. Pacman is a mere memory while Mario's vigency stems for him being crammed on every genre imaginable (and even then, is more of a custom at this point. Did people go in a frenzy for him being on Smash Bros or just because his absence just feels WRONG?)
Not at all. I'd say it already is worth more than "just" otaku bait, even purely based on Shinovi Versus alone, and Burst, despite my criticisms of it, made me think that even more. I do take some contention with the fact that there seems to be some major denial of just how big a factor the fanservice has been for its success, I won't deny that, but conversely, otaku bait comes out
all the time. The fact it warranted even an anime to promote SV means it's got something to keep it going. It's otaku bait, yes, but it's good, quality otaku bait at the very, very least.
That's fine - if EV has one, that's
fantastic. I'm not saying it can't have a strong narrative - I'm saying that video game narrative, strong or not, should try to stay self-contained if their goal is a large franchise so that sequels don't get to be too reliant on each other, as this will make the series very unwelcoming to newcomers, because they won't be able to understand what's going on or how a character they thought was one way has developed this way without doing research or playing games that might not be available anymore. Again, this isn't exclusive to otaku oriented games. It works for games that aren't intending to be big franchises or are on such a scale that they can offer half an hour of filling in the blanks or ones that have tie in anime reminding people every week what's going on, but I don't think SK is at that level yet - I'm talking Uncharted or MGS scale there, and from what I've seen of Uncharted, it kind of does the self-contained part too to an extent.
As for Pac and Mario, I think you're misunderstanding if you feel that way - and I wasn't the one who brought them up to begin with, if you'd note.
I have to ask if you have actually wrote a story before.
The structure you're presenting is filled with issues. The most obvious is that you're trying to cram content for at least two stories on one game with an awful, awful structure.
With no common thread linking the stories together, why the hell the audience should care for team 3's struggles? If the designs for team 1 are my favorite, why should I bother on read/play a story without them?
If every story is standalone, what is the point of putting development on minor sections that: could be ignored by/set after the main plot or being thrown out the window because the character in question isn't the focus?
For all that effort better just go the old school route and put the info on small text blocks on atract mode and call a day.
I've toying with the idea of writing a fiction with my favorite comic book characters (Red Hood and Arsenal) meeting the Hanzo and Crismon and having an adventure together. A premise is easy enough: RH and Arsenal are busting out crime empires and Hebijo's investor are their next target.
The issue comes with the developing of a narrative that naturally involves all the characters and allows for realtionships to bloom an develop. Mixing the heroes with the Crimson Squad is pretty easy since at its core they are pretty similar characters but adding the Hanzo in to the mix is way harder, there's also the power level issue. Is RH a better fighter than Homura? Is Arsenal a better scientist than Haruka? How can two regular guys face a team of five elite ninjas? and so on.
I'm just using fourteen main characters and the whole thing is actually giving me headache. I don't wanna imagine the nightmare it would be including Gessen and Hebijo too.
Point is, a succesfull narrative needs to get the audience invested with a driving story able to fit all of your ideas while also provide an spotlight for every character involved.
Yes, actually, I've been writing off and on since I was a kid. Not as much lately because the past few years have been incredibly, well, bad and not good for writing, but that's another matter. I have taken a lot of writing courses and looked a lot into video game design, though.
There's a problem with your analysis there - you're forgetting that this is a game. It's not a book you open and can only choose to read and then get to the end. It's filled with options. Maybe you'll never even touch the story mode and just play multiplayer. Many games before my suggestion offer alternate scenarios that change drastically based on your character. Hell, Burst does it when you combine Hanzo and Hebijo together.
So maybe they won't. Some people don't collect every Pokemon, some people don't go after every monster in Monster Hunter. Some people buy games and they sit in their backlogs forever. In VNs with branching paths, some people might never play beyond the route of the girl they like most. This is a core element of
video game design, and, and I mean no offense since I've dealt with that issue with writing before too, writing in video games shouldn't be looked at like it's just like a book. For one thing, experiences
will differ from player to player, but to offer less of one because some players might not choose to go after it all is not a wise decision at all. Furthermore, you're missing that the common thread is that, for one, they're all part of the same game. In itself, they are then intrinsically tied together. They are all part of one whole product. I'll continue more, though.
{This is a biggun}By playing Team 1's story first, you are introduced to Team 2 as friendly characters, Team 4 as antagonistic characters, and Team 5 as characters with some kind of knowledge of what's going on. The ending ties into supernatural elements and foreshadows that there's more to be learned, which a player would infer that they could find in another route of the game.
From there, you might be inclined to play any one of their stories. To make things more like a game proper, let's say 1-3 are the starting teams, 4-5 are unlocked after beating the three of those, and 6 after all five. This now gives the player objectives and goals to accomplish, which is a big part of game design to consider. Rather than offering all of them at once, now the player's options are much less daunting, but not only that, this can be used to benefit the player as well.
Returning to the example, by playing through 1, out of your initial options, only 2 was initially available, so maybe you'll be more inclined to go for them next. Alternatively, maybe you want to go to 3, as they're someone completely new. Either way, your curiosity will likely surely be whet for 4 and 5, so knowing they're unlockable, if nothing else, you now have the goal of unlocking their paths.
By playing 3's story, despite not having the most serious story compared to others, you still learn more about Team 5's history and origins (which I mistakenly wrote as 6 at the end of their first chapter), and you'll see more hints that Team 4 might not be as in control as they might appear in 1's story. Both of these things will be big later on.
2's story is there to provide balance to the game's largely more serious atmosphere, as this series is about balance, or so I've been told, and maybe could have these characters learning about the supernatural things without actually getting involved with Team 4 like in the other stories, so it provides education, so to speak, while still being unique in its own right. 5 might make some appearances here due to how they're involved in the supernatural part of the story, and 1 would naturally appear because they're friendly with 2. If you play this one first, you then have reason to be interested in 1 and 5 at the very least, as well as reason to be happy when 2 shows up in other stories, and you have some knowledge you might not have going into the other stories that you do by playing this one. We could also see more perspective on the 1 and 2 relationship, maybe taking a chapter to rewind and take place before the game's events, for example. This could be used to catch players up, if these are returning characters, or help establish an established relationship.
Once those are out of the way, we now have access to 4 and 5. By this point, if we've played through the first 3, we now have sufficient reason to play through either one.
In 4's story, we learn that there's been a lot going on behind the scenes, and the characters who we thought were villains are actually victims. By we players taking control of them, we allow them a moment of rebellion before the end, and by playing as them even when they're being controlled, we can feel the same struggle they feel, as now we've been forced to do something we may not want to as well. In 5's, this team could delve into what's really going on with 4 and they could represent the "out of the know" teams finding out the shock of 6 being behind things, perhaps by having 3 be the victims of 4 and 6 here. This is important because a player could pick either 4 or 5 first once they become available, and so making sure to convey both sides - 4's side and everyone else's - is important.
Then there's 6. At this point, you've now played through every story, seen all the trials and tribulations of these characters, and probably don't like that you're playing as the villains - which is an important thing to do with "dark" parts of games. It's said that with horror games, the most important part is to make players do things they don't want to do. Likewise, to see this through to the end, players will need to play as the very villains that they probably want to beat up most of all by this point. It both offers an option, as people are often drawn to villains, and it allows us to explore the last piece of the puzzle that makes up the game's story as a whole.
If you'd like, let's say we could assume 6 is the "true" story path. While I'm not necessarily a fan of that school of game design with games with multiple paths, we could still go there. After we see things from 6's perspective, maybe with 6 seemingly coming out victorious, the last chapter opens up. By this point, we've learned things about all of the teams, their motivations, what they know, and while not every team might know everything about the situation, we, the player, do.
The last chapter could play out with all the teams gathering together and pooling their power into one team to go off and fight. This could either be the "main" team, or the last cutscene could trail off with a "The ones who should go will be..." moment and turn to a character select. Then perhaps it could have you up against a monster of some kind, combining the frantic "survival mode" elements of the Daidouji/Rin battles in Burst with some of the series' monstrous bosses.
To top it off, we have the individual story modes complimenting all of this, which primarily offer character relationships forming, insight into characters, and things like that. Maybe SV's take on this concept wasn't the best, but I still stress that these can be used to add to the experience as a whole. No, they're not necessarily tied to the larger story that the story modes are all telling, but they're tied to the characters you meet throughout and that in itself is something that they add - it allows you to learn more about them, to get to know them better, and to form a relationship between them. Not like a waifu and husbando thing, but the relationship all consumers of fiction have with their medium of choice - these simply allow you to deepen those bonds, and I think that's fairly harmless. It's not like Persona's social links or a story-capable fighting game's arcade modes ever truly tie into the stories much, but you can bet they'll often add a lot to the characters they revolve around.
In essence, because games are more than just books or TV shows, you can create this kind of storytelling. It's something only games can do, and games can do so much more than that - they can do so much more than just a story that goes in a straight line. This is not really a novel concept - I've played fighting games that have a similar way to tell their stories, for example.
To bring up one specific example, while early BlazBlues went further and used time loops and such to really tie everything together in that it all happened sort of, the premise was still ultimately the same in that all the varying stories earlier in, while not necessarily matching up, provide the player with information in regards to the major story at hand as a whole, and in turn, tell them a whole story through pieces. It's something only video games can do, and yes, maybe we shouldn't jump right to 6 teams and 30 characters until SK's writers prove they can handle a smaller number, but to suggest that the concept can't work is, and I mean no offense, disrespectful to people who write for video games and even game designers, as these are decisions that take place on the gameplay level too.
Now for your situation, a lot of that is something primarily only inherent to a crossover (the power level stuff), and more than that, someone who, well, cares. That's not a bad thing, it's good to care, but in the case of a game where there's only one creator involved, rather than multiple ones or a fan trying to be true to multiple ones, they are "god," and so what they say goes. If Asuka needs to lose for the sake of the plot, for example, that's what's going to happen. Within a single series, power levels typically aren't given as much thought as some might have you believe.
Again, this gets back to how we're talking about a video game versus a novel. I have played through VNs, and I don't even play that many VNs, where ignoring the other paths means you are going to absolutely miss aspects of the story, from minor to major ones. In offering choice, game stories don't have to be told in a line. They can be told in pieces, in a zigzag, however you want - nothing I'm suggesting here is honestly that particularly new, it's been something games have had for years. Hell, quite a few Atlus games toe this line, though their routes start partway in rather than being something you select from the getgo.
My point is that video game development and video game stories can be told in ways you couldn't imagine just by thinking in terms of the straight lines books and movies offer. Have you ever played The Stanley Parable? It's not the same situation exactly, but I'd highly recommend at least looking up a playthrough if you're considering video game design or writing for a video game someday.
Also, if you don't mind me saying, good luck with your story!
About what? DxD? Absolutely! Mind, I'm going off the LNs, and the anime is barely even
into the meat of LNs and is now rushing through/ignoring huge, vital parts of them, but DxD is very well written once it gets going. If you're going off the anime, I apologize if I sound like one of those condescending "I know more than you hurr hurr" types, but trust me, the first two seasons are just a prologue for the good stuff.
Anyway, ummm. This has gotten... intense, huh? Maybe agreeing to disagree is best after all, but uhh. Hey, let's all hug and... stuff?
New criticism! Ayame isn't playable in EV! What's up with that?
I have no idea how you got to the conclusions you've reached in regards to what you think I'm saying here.
