Big explosions or simple cowboys?

Not familiar enough with Bleach to make any assumptions about it. I saw an entire shelf dedicated to the series at Best Buy and decided I wasn't going to bother watching it. Like I said, I prefer anime that doesn't require me to spend an entire paycheck on DvDs in order to see the whole series.

And in my opinion the "popular" anime are the ones more likely to be bat-**** stupid. No offense to anyone who likes them, but any show where the entire plot seems to consist of "this guy fights people because that's what he does" doesn't get rated very highly by me.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

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God-damnit I hate my mind sometimes.
*wander off mumbling 'ohgodtherats!'*

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I wouldn't say so much the effect powers have on the environment as the effect powers have, period. I don't know why nukes were designed to be almost entirely effectless, but the comparison with Self Destruct is a solid one. Self Destruct is better in every fashion, at least in terms of showmanship. Consider the following:

Self Destruct starts with what sounds to me like an alarm and steam shooting from the character's joints, does a pose, and then erupts into an animated fireball with screen shake and nice effects. Inferno, by comparison, does one wave of Blazing Aura with some screen shake and that's it. Lame! At this point, something as simple as Explosive Arrow is more impressive than Inferno, at least in visual effect. In fact...

Think back to when you've played with a Fire Blaster. You and your team wade into a huge spawn and start hacking at it, when suddenly all enemies drop dead. Immediately someone asks "What happened?" Because you don't know. There was fire, sure, but with a Fire Blaster around, there's always fire. How was that different? Oh, his entire endurance bar is gone. Of course! He must have nuked! Let me ask the following question, then: Why do I have to look at a Blaster's endurance bar to know that he has used his nuke? Should I not have been able to tell from the glorious, amazing effect his nuke had? Because it didn't have a glorious, amazing effect. It has barely any effect at all. Sure, enemies died, but it felt like they all suddenly developed heart attacks and dropped dead.

When someone fires Explosive Arrow, you know it. When someone uses Lightning Rod, you know it. When someone uses Inferno? "Wait, what just happened?" It's very strong as an attack, but very weak as an effect. Hell, Blackheart from Marvel Super Heroes had a better-looking inferno with his standard attacks, the one that opens a hole in a ground and shoots a pillar of flame. In fact, Captain Commando's Captain Corridor (stupid name, but whatever) looks more amazing to me than Nova does, and amusingly enough, a lot like what Luminary's nova looks like in that Top Cow comic book where the girls take Dominatix to Pocket D.

To be honest, in a lot of instances, I wouldn't want to so much as touch animations at all. Definitely don't want to turn everything in the ballet the gritty fans hate, believe me. But the game seriously lacks in the visual effects department. And I don't mean Bloom and Ambient Occlusion and Dynamic Lights. I mean simple effects produced by powers. So many of them could be so much more exciting if they had better sounds and better visuals. Hell, just look at that video I made for a better Full Auto sound effect that people seemed to like at the time and notice how much of a difference that makes.

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I guess that just reaffirms my affinity for big explosions. I will freely admit that when a movie or show deovles into just continuous streams of big explosions and nothing more, it becomes boring. The old Dragonball Z proved that to a fault. However, I also know that a show punctuated by big explosions and culminating in big explosions can be very, very entertaining, ironically, as the remastered Dragonball Kai proves pretty clearly, ostensibly by trimming most of the unnecessary filler booms.

I realise that some people feel this covers up for bad storytelling by throwing eyecandy at the viewer and hoping he's entertained in the most basic way. And with a lot of recent movies, I would actually agree that that is the case, Transformers being a fairly appropriate example. But at the same, when I watch a movie about super people and it ends on a low note with the bad guy causing his own destruction or being tricked out of victory, I feel cheated out of a climax. In a way, I WANT the bad guy to get as close as he can to victory, such that right at the end, he can be at his full strength and STILL be defeated clean as a whistle. Not cheated, not tricked, defeated fair and square. This is what makes me sit up and take notice. This is what makes me fully cheer on a character. This is what pulls me into the experience. And believe me - for someone as jaded on general fiction as I am, that is saying A LOT.

Conversely, endings like Fallout's alternative one where you unlock a door, hack a computer and set the vault to self destruct, never even facing against the final boss cheese me off to no end. Yeah, it makes sense, yeah it's cool it's there as an option, but man... How unsatisfying is it to skip what cold be the most exciting fight in the entire story?

Now that I think about it, this actually reflects on how I play not just this game, but any game - for the fights more than anything else. When people want to ghost, I complain. When people want to speed-run, I grumble. When people quit out of a mission while a fight is still going and whine for me to get out, too, I refuse. I will leave when the fight is done, or I will leave in a body bag. Any game I truly enjoy, I enjoy because it gives me the confidence to look for fights. I don't want to avoid the danger and complete the objective. I want to take the danger head on, walk through it and THEN achieve the objective. If I need to take out a specific boss, I'll just take out everybody, safe in the knowledge that the boss will be one of the guys I killed.

This, to me, is what makes a good story - a complicated build up leading up to a very simple, very impressive final confrontation. Which is interesting to finally put into words...

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

To each his own, I guess. Personally, that's my most favourite kind of story.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Ok then I'll try and elucidate:

Get Carter (Sir Michael Caine's version) Jack Carter is one scary ****. He's a real hard man in every sense of the word - he's ruthless, merciless and he doesn't need flashy special effects to show how truly dangerous he is. Even stark bollock naked with a shotgun he's intimidating and he shows several times how amoral he is. He's out for revenge and nothing's going to stop him and the only way to stop him is from a VERY long way away but in that time he's ruined several lives and careers. He's very mortal, but one of the last people you'd ever want to cross - and delivers one of the best lines in movie history: "You're a big man but you're out of shape. For me it's a full time job, now sit down and behave." Deadly in a curiously patronising way.

Die Hard places much higher emphasis on the effects - and despite the bad guys being smarter than your average movie goon, you know the outcome in the end, the good guy's going to save the day - and even his war cry is a rip-off of a classic celluloid cowboy - and of course there's the big flash bangs and the action but the gritty realism isn't there.

In a superhero/comicbook context I'll state it this way: Daredevil over the Fantastic Four for the same reasons: DD is much lower key, and is street-level superheroing - Hells Kitchen is the backdrop compared to the universe-spanning stories of the Fantastic Four, with Galactus and the N-Zone and the like, but I guess I can empathise with Matt Murdock bashing heads more than I can with Reed Richards whipping up a "transmodulating reverse parallel frequency device designed to open a breach between our dimension and the N-Zone and send the [insert alien threat here] back through it."

Both styles have their place I happily admit. One of the unsung Marvel epics of recent years was the Annihilation saga: I really enjoyed that and yet it seemed to slip under so many radars despite reinvigorating so many Marvel B-list heroes careers.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy big, over the top, crazy fights. But if the story isn't there, I just can't get into it. I've never been able to get into Dragonball or Naruto, mostly because the plot just seems paper thin to me, and once you hit about season 3 they stop even trying to justify why these two people are fighting. Just seems more like lots of action and explosions for the sake of action and explosions. I can enjoy that in an hour and a half movie occasionally, but 30-40 HOURS of it? No thanks.

One of my favorite anime series ever is Gungrave, it has some awesome fights towards the end of it, but the first 12-13 episodes are all story driven with very little action.

I guess I just like there to be a reason for a giant explosion, rather than an explosion just to make the audience go "WHOA!".

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Naruto has actually been going downhill pretty much since the first fight with Gaara, and I think the writer just lost his edge. The Shippuuden series looks like it was supposed to revitalise the anime, but by this point it's operating on a shoestring budget with a story so embarrassing I don't even want to talk about it. At this point, the non-canon movies are far superior to the series because they both have decent animations budget and they look like they're written by people who aren't suffering from writer's block several years running.

Dragonball Z is a particular offender in most people's minds for a simple reason - it's padded as hell. As I heard it, the anime kept running ahead of the manga, and they had to pad it out with pointless closeups, additional attacks, pointless filler arcs and just general dragging of feet, which makes it drone on and on and ON! The Dragonball Kai remastering has trimmed all of that, and actually dispensed with most of the big explosions, amusingly enough. They're down to one or two per episode, and usually plot-relevant explosions, to boot. As I heard it, it's down from the original 276 episodes to what's planned to be less than 100, so you can see how much they've trimmed.

All of that is to say that, yes, in general I agree with you that fights for the sake of fights with no plot to them are boring. That's why I never got into Pokemon - the whole show just felt pointless. However, I'm still willing to accept the allusion of a plot if it leads to big explosions nevertheless. Many of the Dragonball Kai fights, for instance, have paper thin excuses. "We want to know where Son Goku is and we'll beat you until you tell us." "OK, let's go to that island over there and beat each other up until a plot point develops." Basically, the entire show is a sequence of events which prevent Son Goku from fighting, so others have to hold out and die until he arrives, gets beaten up some and eventually triumphs. Repeat around four time (once for Vegeta, once for Freeze, once for Cell and I assume once for Buu). And you know what? That's good enough for me. I just love the way the good guys' eyes light up when the cavalry arrives, and I love the shock on the bad guy's faces when he powers up (within 10-15 seconds in Kai). Yeah, it's basic and uninspired, but it works for what it is. I enjoy the purity of action unburdened with politics and intrigue.

On the flip side, I really despise "story driven" stories as such, because this usually translates into people talking at each other for hours. I nearly flipped my **** when I tried to sit through all of the philosophical garbage of Ghost in the Shell 2. There's a half-hour scene in a cold room between one man and one woman debating the ethics of what it means to be alive and if a machine can ever be alive. It was supposed to be deep and dramatic, but it just about put me to sleep.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that my favourite stories are objective-driven in the same way games up. "This" must be done. How do we do it? Oh, we need to find "that" out and do "this other thing." OK, let's go do those. Oh, we can't because of "other things." I prefer stories driven by people doing things, with ethics, morality, philosophy and so forth used to justify and explain the actions, rather than stories driven by inaction and contemplation. And that's not to say I don't like contemplation, but you can still contemplate in a goal-oriented manner, depending on how it's written. By far the BIGGEST problem with anime isn't catgirls or brainless action. It's contemplating your naval for about 24 episodes, then something happens in the next two, then you proceed to contemplate your naval for another season. I fully regret watching Divergence Eve (DO NOT see it) for this precise reason.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Check out some of the series' I mentioned in my first post on the subject of anime, if you haven't already. I'll repeat em if you don't feel like digging through the rest of the thread.

Trinity Blood, Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, and a few others I neglected to mention the first time: Samurai 7, Basilisk, Fate Stay/Night, and the very short anime adaptation of Devil May Cry was actually pretty good (they got the same guy to voice Dante that did his voice in all the games, so there's no disconnect between the games and the series)

All of them, for the most part, are a balance between story-driven and action. There's no half hour dialogues, and there is SOME kind of action sequence in just about every episode. Gungrave is a weird blend, they do the same kind of balance, but it seems to be on an episode by episode basis. Some episodes will be mostly story, while others are mostly action. Also of note, Gungrave was based on a shooter-style video game that came out a couple years before the show.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Will do when time permits, but for the moment, I'm mostly focusing on Dragonball Kai as it releases, since I never got far in the original DBZ.

I gotta' say, though, the Cowboy Bebop movie I saw that one time was terrible, even if I'm sure it's not a good representation of the actual series. I'm pretty sure it ended with a mile-long monologue about butterfiles and the meaning of life.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I had in mind for Nova. I'd really love it if it looked more like that

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That's actually something I've been meaning to comment on, as it's a decision I had to make a LONG time ago. Once upon a time back in 2004, I made a collection of "natural human" characters (or rather, one concept I kept remaking) that I was trying to make something decent out of. Thing is, I'd never gotten above level 20 at the time, so I didn't know much of anything of what I'll be facing later on. All I'd seen was thugs and occasionally cultists.

Then I brought the titular Samuel Tow to 50 and started looking for a new character to play. At the time, I had Crash, the latest incarnation of my "natural human" concept. When I sat down and tried to imagine what she'd be doing at level 50, however... I realised that I could never work with such a concept. At level 50, we fight giant robots, space aliens with plasma rifles, giant monsters and actual super villains. For Samuel Tow, taking out a Zeus or even a Kronos Titan solo wasn't much of a stretch as I'd written him. He's basically a cheat mode super (hence why I try to avoid using him in stories if I can) and it made sense he'd be able to cap one of these things single-handedly without much effort.

For Crash, though, it just didn't make any sense. Originally, she was just a rugged martial artist, but simple skilled martial artists don't punch through tank armour, don't jump 50 feet straight up and don't survive missile swarms to the face. I mean, you can invent some kind of chi defence and mystical super strength miracle excuse, but then you stop being a natural human as such and go into over superheroics anyway. So I retconned her into a Battle Angel Alita inspired super strong, indestructible cyborg for whom it WOULD make sense to jump 50 feet straight up to the top of a Kronos Titan and then proceed to punch straight through its armour and pierce its internal power system for massive damage.

I really don't think the game leaves much room for "natural human" concepts, not considering what we fight at level 50. Again - Indiana Jones does not brawl a War Walker to death. He usually runs away from these. It'd be like him trying to stop that iconic boulder with his bare hands. I know this is just my opinion and other people have made and will make natural humans, but for me, the entire game's power level is just too high for humans who are simply very tough or highly skilled. You need actual super powers to survive as we do in this game.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This is where someone would bring up Batman and them be reminded by someone else that Batman uses a lot of gadgets to deal with superpowered types.

Well, we do have traps & devices.

In comic terms, I would assume the "natural" hero would take down a Warwalker through either devices or through actions beyond the game such as the ever famous "jump on the robot, punch through access panel and tear out wires until something breaks" maneuver. In a game where we accept that we "arrest" criminals by setting them on fire or irradiating them (or "save" an office building with multiple applications of fires, floods, ice & earthquakes), I think we can make allowances in the other direction. Sadly, unlike potentially making new DP animations, making "jump on robot and tear out hydraulics" animations isn't especially practical but I don't think that's cause to dismiss the origin.

While I don't want to discuss Batman (not a big comic book fan in general, if it weren't clear by now), I want to point something out - I tend to not pretend that my characters don't kill if it looks like they do. I don't know why that is, maybe I just grew up with violent cartoons or what have you, but I've never had the kind of aversion for killing your enemies as most people here seem to. I mean, sure, wanton murder and destruction are pretty anti-heroic, I will admit, but if I write for a guy whose primary weapons are a katana and a pair of pistols... Well, I won't do the mental gymnastics to try and explain how he's really not killing them. He is.

But I don't want to start up a discussion about that, or indeed about Batman. That's how I see things, that's all. But the point is - the game really can't account for anything but "stand and fight" tactics. You fight a Kronos titan by facing it down and hitting it until it drops sideways. I realise I could re-imagine this as my character finding a weakness and disabling it, as climbing it or even as something more extreme, such as luring it into a trap where it falls through the ground and into mine shaft or some such. I could, but... When I can't SEE it, it's just beyond my willingness to want to bother. As such, I simply never write characters who would HAVE to resort to something like this. I'm not averse to playing such characters, as that's basically what the Prince of Persia is (one of my favourite games series of all time), but in this game, I somehow keep straying back to characters who COULD fight as the game depicts them as fighting.

In my head, I will always exaggerate the effect powers have, such as Inferno not having an effect that you can barely frikkin' see, but rather producing the kind of towering fireball that would catch your attention on the other side of a big city and make you go "Holy ****!" But that's still taking what a power IS and amplifying it. Making characters that the game forces to do things that their concept says they shouldn't be is an instant buzzkill for me, so I simply don't make those. I'm not sure which came first - the game limitation or the preference, but I realise now that that's what my tastes demand these days, anyway - characters who COULD take down a Kronos Titan single-handedly.

I guess what I'm trying to say is a re-tread of what I said before - over the years, I've grown to prefer the kind of super-powered characters who can take care of themselves against almost any threat with pretty amazing levels of power and sometimes explosions. You can take that as a partial explanation why, I guess.

Besides, I just enjoy the discussion so far just on its face

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I don't see where assuming you're sword slashing hydraulics or tearing out wires is a different "amplification" than imaging giant towering infernos that don't exist but that's just me. Just as the game says you're kicking the robot in the toe, it also says you're shooting little poofs of fire. I wouldn't assume you're luring things into mine shafts but I think there's a middle ground between that and "stand in one spot and mechanically punch it in the knee until it's dead". But if you don't enjoy imagining that, I guess there's no harm done since you can always play more fantastic origins.

It's really a personal thing. I could go on explaining where I draw the line, but it really isn't a very interesting read. My solution has been, as you put it, to simply play more fantastic origins, and it's worked to my benefit. Turns out that's what I like most of all anyway, and if it took a game FORCING me to embrace it for me to realise that, then oh well

And I really don't want to take away from anybody else's fun. Your characters, your call, none of my business. Long as it works for you, I'm all the happier for it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Your taste is good and you should feel good. Look into Baccano.

I've agreed with a lot of different people through this discussion, so I'm not even going to try quoting all of the relevant bits. Long story short, it's not necessarily so much about flash as about making sense--the big charge-up time for Energy Transfer, I'm okay with, but the three seconds of bouncing and juggling guns like some kind of jester on crack that most Dual Pistols attacks have annoys the crap out of me. It's probably the only set I'll never play because of aesthetics. My favorite sets tend to be the straightforward ones, animation-wise--Claws, stone melee, katana, and archery are all up there.

Big, flashy attacks are cool... but they should also be used sparingly. If the paladin holds their sword in the air, spends a few seconds calling down blessings on it before it starts to glow, and then slashes it down on their enemy so hard that the pavement cracks... while striking down the final boss... that's pretty cool. If they do it every time they hit a minion, it's dumb as hell. Ideally for me, the long animating/super-flashy attacks would only really be used for tier 9s and other suitably dramatic powers. Alternatively, the flashy animations would occur about one in ten times a power was used.

Personally, all my natural characters shoot guns anyway