What makes you quit games?

[ATenderLad]

Excessive and/or banal dialogue and plotting. As primarily an JRPG fan, this is frustrating and limiting. If not for dungeon crawlers, strategy RPGs, and roguelikes, I probably would have quit on the genre completely.

When I was younger, I could tolerate––albeit with extreme boredom––the bad dialogue/exposition most games I'd otherwise like are weighted down by, but I've hit a wall in recent years and have to find other stuff to play. I don't need thematic motivation to get back to gameplay––to me, the gameplay is the meaning of playing the game––plus most of these games are delivering plotting that is closer to the Saturday morning cartoons I watched as a kid than the kinds of books and writing I have any interest in as an adult.

Though the overall arc of a game narrative may be interesting, an ethos of storytelling "compression" on a moment-to-moment basis never really seemed to penetrate Japanese game development––like, how can we deliver the essential information in the fewest clicks and minutes for the player? Playing most JRPGS is like listening to someone go "Uhh...uhh..." for an interminable period, only, in the end, to tell you something totally uninteresting. Recently quit on Valkyrie Profile and Star Ocean 2 for this reason, and which felt disappointing, because I could tell there was much to like about those games.

I attribute much of the success of the Souls games to finding a way out of the bad story and bad exposition trap at the same time, delivering a more richly realized sense of "story" with zero wasted moments. The Mother series and SMT 1-3 are noble exceptions to the problem of plot-heavy RPGs by telling interesting stories that can only be told through the videogame medium (unlike most JRPGs, which feel like bad manga trapped in the body of a videogame).

Can't help but agree with a lot of that, in particular when I see endless fade-to-black transitions to in-game cutscenes for dialogue, it really starts to sap my will. I think it was the latest Star Ocean that really wore me down, pausing the game to deliver ornate, handcrafted *Nothing*. I never finish most Tales games for about the same reason.

Some of it's me, I'm sure. Everythings new to somebody, but the older you get, the less likely that person is *you*. You see the same character and conversation permutations long enough, it starts to take the smallest thing for you to switch to critique and comparison in your mind.

"I liked it better when it was Die Hard.", that sort of thing. I'm pretty good at meeting movies on their own terms and not being overly referential, but games ask for so much more of your time, and I've only got so much life left!

Another small nitpick? There's a style of writing that I most associate with Persona titles, where the characters need to work out, in dialogue, everything that's going on. They approach every situation with the same lengthy briefings, I assume in part because the games don't visually depict action beyond basic walking and talking. The rhythm makes it feel like every character is being written with the same "voice", in a way. (Forgive the vague description, high school was a billion years ago)

 

[vitad00d]

Agree on all points, and re: Persona––these games are some of the worst offenders of the problem of pure bloat that infects JRPG dialogue. I like the overarching plots, atmosphere, and gameplay of these games, but the dialogue is bizarre logorrhea that takes thousands of words and many wasted hours to communicate ideas that could be imparted much more briskly if compressed even somewhat. Modern Fire Emblem is for me unplayable for the same reason.

 

[Kyyo]

I just have a problem with old games. I ended up not beating FF7 because of it being dated for our times but I read the full story of the game (besides not personally seeing the scenes) and it's honestly one of the bests I've ever seen. I also dropped some more old FF titles because of this like FF Tactics, 4, 2, etc. I think I just can't enjoy games that released before the PS2 era because I grew up playing more modern games (Xbox 360, PS3, PC stuff, etc), but I absolutely love PS2 ones.