What you said about Mother 3 was that the art, music, and story were basically enough to make the game a classic. Everything else you usually rail on got thrown out the window (simplicity, boring gameplay, saving, gimmicks) and your primary defense seems to be that "Mother 3 is an outlier".
No, what I said was that "the plot and audiovisuals are a major part but they're not everything. I mean, if it had been a 50-hour game with craploads of filler it would have been awful, even if it had the best plot or audiovisuals ever seen in any game (which is why I'm also going to be talking a lot about the game's pacing.)" If it was actually boring to play (which it wasn't, relative to other games I've played in its genre) then the best art and music in the world wouldn't have saved it. Maybe they might have made it worth playing through once if it was short enough, but then there are a lot of games worth playing through once for things like that which aren't particularly great.
Railing on "saving" mainly applies to short action games, most specifically the new "modern" 2D kind which elect to effectively put savestates every 30 seconds and completely destroy most of the possible tension. Many of my favorite games have saving systems and would be completely ridiculous without them. Also, I don't really consider the rhythm system a "gimmick" since 1) regular battles would probably be a lot more boring without it and 2) JRPG devs have been experimenting with action-based input in battle since
Super Mario RPG (or even before? as far as I know that was the first, I think Paul is this forum's JRPG expert so maybe he knows more on that) and that was probably one of the most elegant variations on that concept I've seen yet.
I don't know how else I can explain this to you, man. I feel like I'm just repeating myself at this point. I'm going to try another approach, the time-tested food analogy (hi Gilbert!): just because your favorite food is, say, foie gras (hey look we're in old territory) doesn't mean that you're always in the mood for foie gras every time you want to eat something. Between main meals, you might just want to have some light snacks in order to refresh yourself a bit. It would be ridiculous to say that the snacks are equal in quality to the main meal (and in fact it might be downright insulting if you did), and it's not like most people with any semblance of taste (heh heh heh heh) would ever want to eat
only the snacks (whereas some people
might actually want to dedicate themselves to eating nothing but the foie gras, if it's really that awesome and they really like and savor it that much), but that doesn't mean they're awful; there are healthier/tastier snacks (the two things are the exact same thing here, before anyone tries to twist my words and start that god-awful "little young fatty boys need to eat their broccoli" analogy with "artgames" again) and less healthy/less tasty snacks (and obviously you'd want to always eat the healthiest/tastiest snacks possible, and definitely not the bad ones that make you throw up.) That's why we can still call both
Advance Wars and
Civilization great games, despite the former being a bag of Ruffles potato chips compared to the latter. That's also where genres like JRPGs have usually fit for me, as cute little diversions which I sometimes play between more more "wholesome" games if I'm in a certain mood (but that doesn't mean that the diversion is allowed to, well, suck of course, which is why I can only really say a small handful of them I've played are genuinely good games -- for most of them I just get a few hours in and then stop), and the same also applies for a lot of modern "cinematic" games. (I know some people also feel the same way about "artgames" and it's cool if you do, that in specific is not anything I've ever attacked.) But you've brought up a few valid points during the course of this thread which have made me seriously reconsider the rating I was going to give it at least, so thanks for that.
What exactly makes it an outlier other than the fact that you like it?
Err, does there have to be anything else...? It's not like anyone's aiming to impose an objective scientific standard on videogames or anything.
I see the truth in this, but the artsy games people aren't the only culprits. Saying "these people" is kind of a laugh, considering that you yourself are trying to elevate games to their own category of "high art" that's even higher than the rest (and therefore elevate your own taste and standing?).
I wouldn't feel any need to care at all if the artsy dudes hadn't come in first (despite all the stuff I've written about regarding this subject.) I don't need games to be elevated to "high art" in order to enjoy them like I've been doing all my life, but evidently some guys won't rest until they are and all their arguments for it revolve around trying to make games more "artistic" either by a) the same standards other artforms are judged as "artistic" or b) the same standards "modern art" is judged as artistic, aka putting the artist's "intentions" or "statement" in making a work above the actual value of the work itself (both processes which run contrary to how some of the greatest achievements in other artforms were created, but hey.) There's a dangerous connotation associated with the word "art," despite how people who don't understand how language works might protest ("just because we appropriated a separate label to describe this set of cars as blue doesn't mean that we're implying other cars are any less blue!"), and the main worry here (and one which I think is very reasonable) is that by setting a premium on so-called "artistic qualities" at all costs people are going to end up getting distracted trying to "chase the dragon" instead of focusing first and foremost on making great games and whatever "artistic aspirations"/making players cry second. But to resolve that you need to explain to people why great games
are artistic in a way completely orthogonal to all the so-called "juvenile" themes and "male power fantasies" (lol), and to do that you need to explain to people why these other definitions and conceptions of "art" aren't satisfactory in as much detail as possible, and to do that you also need to propose your own definition/criteria to substitute or else you're just left with a meaningless term which can apply to nothing and everything, etc. etc.
As for "elevating my own taste," that's not something I'm particularly concerned with in regards to the whole art debate. I follow my tastes and try new things to see if I enjoy them, everyone else does too, everyone's happy until one group starts to infringe on another. I don't think I actually have super high taste as far as games go, given how I'm still barely exposed to some entire genres (like fighting games.) And history shows that good taste always wins out in the long run anyway, it's only a question of how much time it takes to get there. So either way the future's looking bright in the end.
Most AAA feel like an imitation of everything: movie, music, novel, cinema, game, hardcore, simulation, open world, linear, rpg, action games, their own series.
Jack of all trades master of none.
Not just "AAA" bro, it's everybody. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for games to look to movies and novels for guidance (like how photographers and filmmakers looked to painting for guidance), let alone other games, but it's really shitty how game developers seem to have some kind of raging inferiority complex about other artforms (which probably feeds back into the whole "art" "cultural legitimacy" thing.)
p.s.
people like Icycalm and his "followers"
You don't have to go to that extreme, David caruso is a nice person
I lol'd
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